“. . . but perfect love casts out fear . . .” (1 John 4:18)

Antonio Zanchi, The Good Samaritan, 1680

I assume I understand some important concepts of the Bible―at least in a general sense―even if I don’t believe them. I grew up as the son of a Baptist minister and attended Baptist Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, and even a “nominally” Baptist University. For a semester I attended a Methodist seminary. They asked me to withdraw because I’m gay (that was 1968, and I don’t know why I was in seminary anyway).

About 30 or 40 years ago, I began seriously thinking about what I hear when others, Christians, speak of Bible basis for their faith/belief. Some theological constructs have such a tenuous relationship to anything I know about the Bible that it’s easy to dismiss them out of hand. The Rapture. Dispensationalism. The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. A prohibition on abortion.

I don’t have any trouble with literal beliefs in ideas from the Bible that are obviously meant as mythology. If someone has to believe God created the universe in six days in order to navigate their life on this earth, that’s fine.

All of those nit-picky little “beliefs” are immaterial to me. My relationship with the Bible is only a little more personal than my relationship to Beowulf, Siegfried, and Odysseus. If anyone wants to believe in “The Clear-Eyed Athena,” that’s fine with me, just don’t expect me to join in any sacrifices in an old stone building in Athens.

The ideas I wonder about even in my apparent apostasy are less based in “factual” details that someone might or might not believe, than in what seem to me to be the “big ideas” in the Bible. Some of those “big ideas” I do believe in.

For example, the concept “love” in the Bible. Here are some Bible verses about “love” I remember. I had to look up exact citations, but I remembered all of these verbatim (not exactly―I found the NRSV translation to replace the King James language I memorized as a Baptist kid).

• Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. (1 John 4:7-8)
• So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4:16)
• There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4:18)
• By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness (Galatians 5:22)
• If you love me, you will keep my commandments. (John 14:15)
• He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

From the news:

[On FOX News Cruz] listened as Crowder outlined “four winning issues for Republicans. . . . Islam, now, is a winning issue: calling it out for what it is.” Cruz nodded vigorously and responded, “Yep.”
___That’s what’s really going on. Cruz isn’t agonizing over the mechanics of vetting refugees. He’s exploiting anti-Muslim anger and sucking up to the Christian right. And he’s doing it while wearing his own disguise: principled leader. (Saletan, William. “Ted Cruz’s Sophisticated Bigotry: This is how you bash Muslims while pretending to be principled.” Slate. Nov. 24, 2015.)

And again:

[Cruz appeared] On Fox News, the day after the attacks on Paris. If there are Syrian Muslims who are really being persecuted, he said, they should be sent to “majority-Muslim countries.” Then he reset his eyebrows, which had been angled in a peak of concern, as if he had something pious to say. And he did: “On the other hand,” he added, “Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them.”
(Davidson, Amy. “Ted Cruz’s Religious Test for Syrian Refugees.” The New Yorker. November 16, 2015).

Finally:

Cruz is ramping up his South Carolina efforts. . . . On Monday, he visited one of his two campaign headquarters in the state . . . He quoted Scripture and prayed with a woman on the phone as Vonnie Gleason, a volunteer in her 50s, looked on with tears in her eyes.
___“His words are so much from the heart,” Gleason said. “He was praying with her like she was his best friend.”
___That ability to connect with Christians gives Cruz “a real good chance, because of all the conservative Christians here,” said Linda McCarthy of Greenville. (Glueck, Katie. Politico. 12/09/15.)

I do not mean to accuse Ted Cruz of anything. I don’t know the man. I’ve never heard him say, “I hate Muslims” or “I hate gays.” However, these positions he has taken are clearly not congruent with

• There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4:18)
• By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness (Galatians 5:22).

Ted Cruz is rising in the polls for the Republican nomination for President, seemingly poised to give Donald Trump, who has said blatantly hateful things about women, Hispanics, and Muslims, a run for his money. I do not mean to denounce Cruz or Trump (although it probably seems that I am). I’m pretty sure I could have found such items for every candidate.

I merely want to ask a question.

In order to feel secure in a society presumably based on Christian and/or liberal democratic principles, must we forego treating non-Christians and/or those who are not already steeped in liberal democratic principles with the “love” that seems to be at the core of the Christian tradition?

Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), The Good Samaritan

“. . . How to find my soul a home. . .” (Maya Angelou)

Yesterday I was hoping to come across a poem or an essay or a witty saying someone else wrote to quote as my idea for the day, so I could forget this nonsense of trying say what I need to say. (I began this writing yesterday, but I realized only this morning that I already knew the words I was looking for).

I live (we all live) in conundrums. Riddles that cannot be solved. Sometimes the riddle can be solved with a play on words. Sometimes not. Here’s my conundrum for yesterday.

If Ann and I had remained married and she had not died, today would have been our 47th wedding anniversary. We were divorced shortly after our 8th anniversary, and Ann died in 2002. I am grateful we did not divorce from our relationship, only from our marriage. In my bedroom I use the bureau she and I bought together at an antique store 45 years ago. From where I sit at my computer, I can see a box of her family’s photographs on a shelf of my roll-top desk. The desk belonged to my partner Jerry who died a year after Ann, and who had become great friends with Ann—I carried a slight resentment for a long time that in 1997 when she came to visit us in Dallas, they went off to see Titanic together while I was at choir rehearsal.

I am NOT a pack rat or a hoarder. (People with addictive personalities do not know how to sort—a little known secret about us drunks.) Even when I figure out how to sort out all the stuff in my place (I won’t say the stuff I own, simply the stuff that’s here) so that when I die my nieces and nephew won’t have to bring in a backhoe to clean the place out, I will still most likely have my little collections. A rosary Ann gave me when we were Anglo Catholics, four buttons and a broach of her grandmother’s, a pair of rings we bought for each other and a Jerusalem cross all made with jade, a Canadian $5 bill I brought home in my pocket from her funeral, her mother’s watch, a gold chain with a St. Christopher’s medal I gave her, and her wedding ring (I don’t have my own)—a tiny part of my collection. Does anyone want a cloisonné butterfly?

So yesterday we would have been married 47 years.

Apparently one way I try to hold onto the people I love is to hold onto things they owned. This is not so unusual, of course (see Tim O’Brien’s, “The Things they Carried” for a moving expression of the way “things” are important to memory).

Things

As usual, my memory of one part of my life is entrée to writing about another. A couple of days ago a friend took me to dinner to propose an enormous writing project for us to work on. It has to do with memory, with our collective memory with a large community of mutual friends and acquaintances. It will be difficult and lengthy. It will entail a range of feeling and experience I almost certainly cannot express. It will involve thinking and writing about people whose lives we need to hold in the dual reality of the present and of memory. We do not have “the things they owned” to hold onto. We have only our mutual experience, both in the present and in the past.

Yesterday the poet Maya Angelou died.

When I read about her death, I posted my favorite of her poems on Facebook:

“Alone,” by Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014)

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

I am grateful to Maya Angelou for her many expressions of truth over the years, and for broadening my (our) understanding of the beauty of language and the importance of “essaying” what we think and feel.

This morning I realized what I was trying to say yesterday—to say about Ann, about Jerry, about my friends and a possible writing project, to say about my life so far and about the time I have left—Maya Angelou has already said. What I long to know is

How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone.

Maya Angelou uses Biblical imagery. The Gospel of John records Jesus saying, “whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.” And the Gospel of Luke records his saying, “Which of you is a father whose son will ask him for bread and would hand him a stone.”

Bread and water are not “things.”

I don’t know if Maya Angelou thought of herself as a Christian. It doesn’t matter. She understood that finding “water that is not thirsty” and “bread [that] is not a stone” requires understanding

That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Happy Anniversary, Ann. And thank you to Maya Angelou, and Jerry, and YOU— everyone who has helped me to understand I cannot “make it out here alone.”

Even a country can’t make it out here alone

“There are trout that die of old age and their white beards flow to the sea” (Richard Brautigan)

Who remembers Trout Fishing in America? That kinky out-of-step-with-the-normal book that helped shape the thinking of a couple of generations of American wannabe drop-outs. It was published in 1967, the year I graduated from college. Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) was one of the “Beat Generation” writers.

I read Trout Fishing when I was working in the 1972 George McGovern Presidential campaign. Our Campaign Guru from the East, gave it to me. The same way he gave me “Manassas,” the new (1972) album by Stephen Stills. (He said as he handed it to me—and this I remember exactly—“Don’t you listen to any music at all?”) All of this to make sure the McGovern Campaign in San Bernardino County, CA, was staffed by people who knew what was going on in the world (and to lighten his load a bit by finding me something to talk about besides Bach, Karl Barth, and Beverly Sills). He also arranged for a group of us to see Harold and Maude on a night off.

Poor Al. He not only worked with me 14 hours a day 7 days a week, but he rented a room in my house.

I wonder why I remember Trout Fishing in America. I recently came across a reference to the novel and had to look it up to find one of the sections I have carried around in my memory all these years, the chapter “Trout Death by Port Wine.” Probably because when I read it I was perilously close to dying by, not port wine, but some other “strong drink,” as my father would have said. I couldn’t quote it exactly, but for years I’ve remembered the sentence, “It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine” (a snippet of the chapter is printed below to give you a flavor of the writing).

For some time I’ve been keeping an eye out for poems about friendship. Probably because I’d like to write a poem about friendship that doesn’t sound like a Hallmark card. I have nothing against Hallmark cards, but I would hope my poetry—if I knew how to write any—would be of a different variety. You know, post-postmodern, not rhyming, maybe not even sentences that make sense, but sounding beautiful with a sudden and unexpected profundity or sweet image at the end (that’s my description, not one garnered from a graduate seminar in wacky literature or anything like that).

That’s also something of a description of my personal writing, I think. Wandering around discussing some memory or current state of my affairs or the world’s, not making a whole lot of sense, and then suddenly at the end I get to the point (sometimes out of the blue), and I understand it whether anyone else does or not.

Back to Richard Brautigan. He was a tormented soul. Bipolar with a vengeance, or so all the biographical sketches say. A drunk (or was it heroin addict?). He shot himself in the head, and his body wasn’t found until it had pretty much decomposed—he was living off in the woods somewhere so he could go trout fishing. A tormented soul, as I said. I remember being aware a few years back (more than a few) that he had died. That was pre-Google, so I couldn’t research him easily, but I knew about the bullet to the head—sort of like Hemingway.

This is a cheery little piece, isn’t it? (Funny thing about writing. I wouldn’t dare to write about someone shooting himself in the head—I’ve said that about enough times now—when I am depressed myself. It would be too hard, too close to home.)

But I’m quite serene and unstressed this morning. I ought to be. This is my third day without a job—retired, remember.

Really, four plus 27

And in my retirement (is that a weird thing to say, or what?) I’ve been thinking a great deal about friendship. I had a big retirement party last Saturday, and 31 of my closest friends (that’s not a joke or hyperbole but the honest truth) showed up to eat and talk and sing (seven songs from the ‘50s with me at the Steinway grand) and give me more hugs than I’d had total in the six months previous. Most of them knew only four or five of the others, but I knew everyone. With every person there I have shared a moment at one time or another when one of us managed to do just what was needed for the other—with some of them, that moment of giving/receiving has been reciprocal time after time.

So I’ve been hoping to find (or—not likely—write) the perfect poem about friendship. Then I remembered it’s been only a couple of months since I wrote about one of my favorite friendship poems, “Your Catfish Friend,” by (who else?) Richard Brautigan.

Louisianans and Texans like to think they have a special right to catfish. Perhaps they do, at least for eating. But I remember the catfish people snared from the North Platte River when I was a kid in Western Nebraska. I don’t remember that we ate them, but we knew what they were. Pretty nasty sorts of things.

I need to remember Brautigan’s poem as I think about friendship. It’s sad to think he perhaps didn’t understand it himself, or perhaps, living in the woods alone he didn’t have enough people around him to throw a party and get 31 times oodles of hugs.

But the idea that a friend can drive lonely thoughts from my mind even (or perhaps especially) when I don’t know my friend is near and/or thinking about me is a stunning idea. Even a friend I might not think capable of such thoughts, One of those ideas that keeps me sane and safe.

“Your Catfish Friend” Richard Brautigan (1935 – 1984)

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, “It’s beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,”
I’d love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”

TROUT DEATH BY PORT WINE
It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination.

It was reality.

An eleven-inch rainbow trout was killed. Its life taken forever from the waters of the earth, by giving it a drink of port wine.

It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine.

It is all right for a trout to have its neck broken by a fisherman and then to be tossed into the creel or for a trout to die from a fungus that crawls like sugar-colored ants over its body until the trout is in death’s sugarbowl.

It is all right for a trout to be trapped in a pool that dries up in the late summer or to be caught in the talons of a bird or the claws of an animal.

Yes, it is even all right for a trout to be killed by pollution, to die in a river of suffocating human excrement.

There are trout that die of old age and their white beards flow to the sea.

All these things are in the natural order of death, but for a trout to die from a drink of port wine, that is another thing.

No mention of it in “The treatyse of fysshynge wyth an angle,” in the Boke of St. Albans, published 1496. No mention of it in Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream, by H. C. Cutcliffe, published in 1910. No mention of it in Truth Is Stranger than Fishin’, by Beatrice Cook, published in 1955. No mention of it. . .

“He who kisses the joy as it flies. . .” (William Blake)

Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking

Richard Chase, one of the preeminent American folklorists (how he would have disliked that kind of description of himself), owned a copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence. It was an early edition with the plates colored by an unknown hand. It was one of his prized possessions. I’m not being grandiose when I say there was a time (many, many years ago) I would visit him so I could look at that wondrous book.

This is not a “name-dropping” exercise. Several people who are likely to read this post knew Chase as well; we knew him as “Uncle Dick” before we had any idea of his importance to American culture. I own his copy of William Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time, one of the 20^th-century reprints, not valuable except that it has Uncle Dick’s notations. One of my favorite memories of Uncle Dick is walking with him, naked, at midnight one full-moon night into the surf on the beach at La Jolla while he recited Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” The next day I decided the least I could do to keep that memory alive was to memorize the section

Yes, when the stars glisten’d,
All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop’d stake,
Down almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.

He call’d on his mate,
He pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know.
Yes my brother I know,
The rest might not, but I have treasur’d every note,
For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the
shadows,
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds
and sights after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen’d long and long.

Listen’d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,
Following you my brother.

I can’t recite it these days, but always, when I think of that night, I remember I’m basically an illiterate “bull-in-the-china-closet.” I have known true education, elegance, and kindness.

One of William Blake’s visions of eternity

Uncle Dick also explained to me his understanding of the poetry of William Blake. He served, Uncle Dick said, as the antidote to the Age of Enlightenment swirling around him. His poetry exists in the heart rather than in the mind. Newtonian physics and reason were fine for solving the world’s physical problems, but they were useless for understanding the human heart.

That is obviously my “spin” on Uncle Dick’s guidance and the way I remember it 40 years later. Whatever it was, in fact, that Uncle Dick said to me, what I took from it was that the life of the mind I was embarking on by going back to graduate school would serve me well only so far. Much of my life I have forgotten his wisdom.

I have not, however, forgotten the poetry of William Blake. Such wild, such odd, such emotional stuff. I came across this short poem the other day.

“Eternity,” by William Blake (1757 – 1827)

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy

He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise

Last night I said to a group of friends that, as I retire, I realize I am in the process of giving up perhaps the most joyful activity of my life—working with young students. At the same time I’m giving up one of the most odious of tasks—the paperwork and institutional nonsense that weighs down the academic world.

I have nothing profound or academic or, most likely, even interesting to say about Blake’s poem except that I hope, I trust, I can kiss the joy as it flies and begin living in the sunrise. Whatever that may be. Even, perhaps, another way to experience my joy.

Sunrise at Port Orford, Oregon

“. . . I kept busy being lonely. This took up the bulk of my time. . . “ (Marilyn Krysl)

All you need is love.

Most people (I refuse to read a student essay that begins “most people”—how do you know? I ask snippily) who know the Sanskrit word “sutra” know it as half the title of the Kama Sutra, the Hindu sex manual. Most people who know of the Kama Sutra have never read it.

Most Americans—even the most sexually liberated—would be shocked by the Kama Sutra.

A sutra is simply an instruction manual.

I only this moment ordered Marilyn Krysl’s award-winning collection of short stories, Dinner with Osama. A friend told me they are (charming? hilarious? wistful? sad?) stories about how crazy Americans have been since September 11, 2001. From the title, I’d guess it’s about how Osama bin Laden looms (alive or now dead) in the background at dinner every day.

If he didn’t, Edward Snowden would not be a household name. The United States would not have the blot on our world-wide reputation for fairness and the rule of law known as Guantanamo. And five decent Americans from the Holy Land Foundation would not be in prison for life. This last is not directly related, but the events of September 11, 2011, provided the George W. Bush administration the cover they needed to make accusations of connections between this charity and “terrorism” that were proven in a process of refusing the accused their right as American citizens to confront their accusers. Oh, and the most elaborate scheme of the fabrication of “evidence” since the Rosenbergs.

Do you see what happens when you begin an essay “most people? You end up writing about stuff that was not even on your mental radar (I love sophomoric metaphors) when you began.

Marilyn Krysl wrote a poem named “Sutra.” The more inclusive meaning of “sutra” is simply a writing with strand of loosely connected thought that holds it together (what goes on in my mind is so loosely connected there’s not so much as a strand to hold them together—obvious from this writing so far).

“Sutra,” by Marilyn Krysl
Looking back now, I see
I was dispassionate too often,
dismissing the robin as common,
and now can’t remember what
robin song sounds like. I hoarded
my days, as though to keep them
safe from depletion, and meantime
I kept busy being lonely. This
took up the bulk of my time,
and I did not speak to strangers
because they might be boring,
and there were those I feared

would ask me for money. I was
clumsy around the confident,
and the well bred, standing on
their parapets, enthralled me,
but when one approached, I
fled. I also feared the street’s
down and outs, anxious lest
they look at me closely, and
afraid I would see their misery.

Our favorite dinner guest. Still.

A few days ago I gave “My Last Lecture” to my classes at Southern Methodist University (I’ll be shamelessly egocentric and tell you it’s on Youtube). I told my students that the most important “bliss” that I follow is simply loving other people.

Of course, this is an extremely complicated and dangerous idea. I do love. I think I have—and indulge—a capacity for loving acquaintances and strangers—almost anyone I meet–that is pretty highly evolved. I have no idea if it’s more or less than anyone else’s, but I know I derive my greatest pleasure and satisfaction from simply liking people—I suppose I should be careful about saying I “love” everyone because that’s such a maudlin, clichéd, and meaningless word. Besides, I can love you without liking you.

I suppose I should be a little more precise and say I make it my business to try to practice (and feel) the Greek concept of philos, you know—at least those who went to Baptist summer camp in the 60s do—one of the three kinds of “love” in the Bible (or in Aristotle and Plato). that is, love of other people. I don’t know. I’m making no pretense of any kind of scholarly or philological disputation here. I just like the idea of “Phila(philos)delphia,” the city of “brotherly love.” All you need is love.

So if I love everybody, why I am I lonely so much of the time?

Another (not related, but of exactly the same order of magnitude) question. If we are so secure and safe from Osama bin Laden, why does it take William Snowden to show us that we are 100% insecure and completely unsafe in our persons?

An entire city dedicated to love.

“. . . the fire of the sun has tricked you blind. . .”

A friend with whom I agree probably 90% of the time on matters of art (especially theater), politics, philosophy, self-care, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, posted on Facebook the trailer for documentary film, The Brainwashing of my Dad, which is in production to be released August, 2014.

His posting will stretch our friendship almost to the breaking point.

The film, it appears, describes what happened to my mother. My dad, too, in a minor way. Mom listened to Rush Limbaugh daily for the last few years of her life (until Alzheimer’s). She changed from being basically non-political to being a somewhat rabid conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy being the liberal left out to destroy the country.

My parents came to visit Jerry and me in Dallas. How Mom could listen to Rush regularly and think nothing of coming to my home and sleeping in the bed I shared with my partner while he and I slept together in the next room still boggles my mind. This was the late ‘90s before same-sex marriage was legal anywhere, and Rush was ranting and raving about the “gay agenda” that was destroying society as we knew it.

Of course, he was also ranting and raving about the incipient salvation of the world when that philandering liberal stooge, Bill Clinton, was no longer President, and a true patriot like—well, we weren’t sure yet which Republican it might be—would be President and things would settle back into the paths God intended America to take.

While my parents were with us, I came home from class to discover Rush’s voice blaring through the apartment. I turned the radio off and

The liberal media? Huh?

announced that I would not allow that lie-based trash in my home. Sometime later I was in my parents’ home in California when my dad announced (for reasons I don’t remember because I never watched it) that he would not allow CBS’s lie-based show “60 Minutes” in his home. It was part of the “liberal media” that had almost succeeded in brainwashing America.

America brainwashed by liberals?

That is such an absurd concept I don’t know how to think about it, much less write about it. Americans—especially Rush Limbaugh’s devotees—have no clue what a liberal takeover of this country would look like. I feel an urgent need to explain. That’s why my friend’s Facebook posting is going to stretch our friendship almost to the breaking point.

I have enough imponderables in my old age. What will happen to me the moment I die? for one small matter. Anyone my age who is wasting his or her time thinking that government is in the hands of either the liberals who are destroying society or the far-right who want to destroy it is simply a coward. That is, all of that political nonsense is a way to avoid the absolute non-political essence of thinking about one’s life. Neither Rush Limbaugh nor Al Sharpton can help me or anyone else face the final moment of truth—the moment of death.

Thinking with any kind of emotional intensity about politics is a smokescreen to hide the real issues of one’s life: what happens when I die? Is living alone an unnatural state or the best way to ponder the mysteries of life? Do I need to be in love to feel complete (how much are human beings like apes, elephants, and dolphins)? How can I be sure I have achieved the right balance of taking care of myself and working to care for the poor, homeless, and hungry? Does it matter if I leave no “worldly goods” to anyone, if I use up every penny I have? Does it matter how I use up whatever I have? Does it matter if I’m contentious or nice? What’s the use?

“Exquisite Politics,” by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton

The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,
maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,
maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.
Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.
Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth
of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,
anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.
I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,
resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric
languages. I sat on Alice’s mushroom in Central Park,
smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor’s mansion.

Someday I won’t politic anymore, my big heart will stop
loving America and I’ll leave her as easy as a marriage,
splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage
before the other side yells: Wow! America,
Vespucci’s first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.

“Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth of a king. . . America, Vespucci’s first name and home of the free and the brave.” How free am I?

It seems to me right here, right now, sitting alone, recovering from a horrendous week-long cold for which I received not one single hug or delivery of chicken soup (I’m not feeling sorry for myself—simply stating the truth about aloneness most people don’t know yet, but will someday) that we Americans have been brainwashed—one and all—into a trance, a coma, in which we truly believe we are (living in) the land of the free and the home of the brave, that if we believe we are right strongly enough and argue strenuously enough, we will leave this life “as easy as a marriage, splitting our assets.”

And I say, with Daniel Mark Epstein that “The fire of the sun has tricked [us] blind.”

Epstein. I hope I look that good when I’m that old. Oh, yeah, I am that old.

“Heading Home,” by Daniel Mark Epstein

I watched the miles, I saw my life go by,
A drumbeat of bare trees and frozen ponds,
Forlorn stations, ruined factories.
I must have dozed, my head against the glass.
Women I dreamed I would have died for once
Mourned me in a dream. South by southwest
Our train cleaved the horizon, pushed the sun
Toward somebody else’s sunrise, while
Heaven and earth denied my day was done,
Painting a fantastic continent
Of cumulus and ether, air and mist,
Real as any land to a waking man.
A wall of purple hills sloped to the shore
In fluted cliffs; cloud archipelagos
Edged with golden beaches jeweled a sea
Bluer than our sky. Had I missed my stop?
Now was I on my way out of this world,
Alone on the express to Elysium,
Lotus trees, the lost woman of my dreams?

Shadows deepened and the speeding train
Rolled on into twilight. Slowly then
I came to myself, cold, woke to the thought:
This is how it must be at the end of the line.
You cannot tell the water from the sky,
Mourners from the dead, or clouds from land.
The fire of the sun has tricked you blind,
And earth, air and water join in one.

“. . . if my bubbles be too small for you, Blow bigger then your own. . . “

Yesterday’s newscasts included notice that the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez had died. He was 87.

He was but 18 years older than I. That’s on my mind because I’ve been talking to advisers about how to use the pittance I have put away for retirement, and I hope that, if I live to be 87, my money doesn’t end before I do. I’m sure his didn’t.

I distinctly remember Dean Anne Minton of Bunker Hill Community College telling me I MUST read Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. I tried. The closest I ever came to finishing it was meeting Edith Grossman, the translator, at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas a couple of years later when I was a graduate student there and took a course in translation

The copy I tried to read disappeared from my library at the great book giveaway I had a couple of years ago. As a faculty member at SMU, I can get an online copy. I will see if I can finish reading it.

This has been a week of much contemplation of what my life might have been. So many accomplishments such as reading Love in the Time of Cholera have simply slipped through my fingers that I am grieved by what I have not done. I know, I know, everyone my age experiences that discomfiture. If one does not have regrets, one is probably living in some sort of la-la-land.

I am not a concert organist (although I have given concerts), I have not written the great American novel (although I have two unfinished on 3 ½ inch floppy disks I can’t open), I am not a poet (although there’s plenty of what might be some stretch of imagination be called poetry on this computer), I am retiring not from a full professorship but from a 15-year fulltime lectureship, and in these golden years I am going to have to go looking for the gold to support myself..

There’s a whole lot of coulda shoulda woulda mighta in my life. Of course, if I had the ability to do any of those things, I probably would have, so I have no need to complain. I simply don’t have the brains or talent to have accomplished any more than I have.

That’s not true. I’m pretty sure. Or is it? I’m confused. I’m unsure. I don’t know. My scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and the SAT and the GRE all indicated that I would be more than marginally successful. I do have a PhD after all (proof of only one thing—the ability and willingness to jump through more hoops than the average citizen).

It’s no secret—or great discovery on my part—that hardly anyone who is 69 has no regrets. For example, I assume what is intended when PBS announces at the end of programs supported by the Carnegie Foundation, established by Andre Carnegie to do “real and permanent good,” that we’re supposed to think, “Isn’t that wonderful. He used all of his money to do Good and he can’t have any regrets.” It’s easy to give all of your money to do Good. Even you and I can do that with our pittances. His money is doing Good because in life he was a ruthless “robber baron” bastard for whom we should have little respect. Carnegie was able to assuage his conscience from “regrets” by thinking at the time of his death that his “Good” would live after him. I don’t mean that to be harshly judgmental, but a morality tale.

I’ve known a few people who lived to be 69 or 70 who seemed to have no regrets. I’m not going to make a catalog of them here. They were (are) all people for whom I have the highest regard, not for what they have done, but, more often, for what they have not done.

They are people who have managed not “To praise the very thing that [they deplore]” (E.A. Robinson). I could write a sentimental tribute to poverty, obedience, love, kindness, and so on. But I don’t need to. Anyone who reads this can fill in those blanks.

I’m not even going to write a sermonette about humility and graciousness and caring-for-one’s-fellow-man. I don’t need to do that, either. Except for a few people who are so far gone in self-centeredness they hardly seem to live on the same planet as the rest of us, we all give lip service to the sentiment expressed in the Bible, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8, NRSV). Would anyone who reads anything I write say they are against justice, kindness, and humility? I don’t want to associate with such a person.

Real and Permanent Good?

I don’t know what I might have done with my life if I had not been an active alcoholic until I was 46, or if I didn’t have lots of other quirky obsessions that take up my time. Or if I didn’t have two little oddities in the way my brain works (not my mind—it has many more than two). Or if I were not simply lazy at the core. That’s probably why I didn’t read Love in the Time of Cholera when Anne gave it to me. Pure laziness, or obsessing about some other dumb thing.

No one else I know will admit to me that they can simply sit for an hour and do nothing—not watch TV, not play electronic games, not read, not—not anything. I can. Because I’m lazy?

What those people whom I respect can (could) do was to do nothing creatively and with a purpose. Somehow those people have (or had) a quality of simply being.

I’m not even sure what I mean by that.

“Dear Friends,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Dear friends, reproach me not for what I do,
Nor counsel me, nor pity me; nor say
That I am wearing half my life away
For bubble-work that only fools pursue.
And if my bubbles be too small for you,
Blow bigger then your own: the games we play
To fill the frittered minutes of a day,
Good glasses are to read the spirit through.  

And whoso reads may get him some shrewd skill;
And some unprofitable scorn resign,
To praise the very thing that he deplores;
So, friends (dear friends), remember, if you will,
The shame I win for singing is all mine,
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours.

“. . . Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”

A very thin place.

Seeing the natural world and understanding how it fits together (either as the random result of the Big Bang or as the handiwork of a god) and having the experience of “otherness” or “oneness,” or of the “numinous,” or of “eternity,” or some such mystical comprehension is not my style. My mystical experiences are infrequent, and they are often (like so those of so many other people) dependent on nature or the cosmos or some such grandiosity. I write about them fairly often—sometimes even in public—and when I do, they are usually tied in with some experience of nature. Most often they are connected somehow to my being at the edge of the ocean.

(The hyperlinks to other of my writings more or less on the subject are not for my reader, but for me to have them all together. That may be annoying to anyone trying to read this, but I have to do it.)

The natural world and I have a “come here/stay away” relationship. I have had some remarkable experiences in nature.

The truth is, I have to admit, that my obsession with talking about “mystical” or “religious” or “spiritual” experiences is something of a smokescreen for my inability to believe in God. One might ask how I can write all of this stuff more-or-less about God (at least the numinous or inexplicable) and say I don’t believe in God.

Two daily “meditations” arrive in my e-mail. I subscribed to them, hoping they would help me focus my thinking for the day. One is hardly ever helpful. The other occasionally presents an idea that arrests my attention.

One of those came today.

There is in me something mysterious that nothing is able to grasp, something that no thought or feeling can help me know. It appears only when I am not caught in the web of my thoughts and emotions. It is the unknown, which cannot be grasped with what I know. (Jeanne Matignon de Salzman, 1889 – 1990)

Madame de Salzman, I found in Wikipedia (don’t tell my students), was a musician, a dancer, and a disciple of G. I. Gurdjieff. All I know of him is that he was an “influential spiritual teacher.” Forty years ago when I was in graduate school trying to find my way in the world and rejecting almost everything anyone said, an older man with whom I had just had a “fling” gave me a copy of Gurdjieff’s most famous book, Meetings with Remarkable Men, and I promptly gave to a library book sale. I have come across mention of Gurdjieff many times since then but have never bothered to investigate his work.

Can this be a thin place?

Many times throughout my life someone—a plethora of someones—has presented me with a book, with an idea, with a “retreat,” with a spiritual course of some sort to help me on my—my what? my spiritual quest? Is that what I’m writing about? The most helpful notion I’ve received was years ago when Sue Mansfield, rest in peace, from the church I still consider my “home church,” Christ Church (Episcopal) in Ontario, CA, said, “You don’t have to believe; you just have to believe that we believe.”

If my Holy Week cold is less obtrusive tonight than it is right now, I will attend the Maundy Thursday Service at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal) Church, of which I am a member. For about two years I have not been to a service except those for which I have substituted at the organ. I’m not 100% certain why I will attend tonight, except that some inner voice is telling me I need to. It’s a lovely service with foot-washing and stripping of the altar in preparation for Good Friday. I like the name—Maundy Thursday. It’s one of those churchy mysteries—Maundy is probably from the Latin mandatum, “commandment” from the injunction Jesus gave at his “last supper,” the new commandment that they love one another.

I’ve never been able to bring together in my mind those words and the experience I had on the beach near Port Orford, Oregon, a few years back.

As I walked in the edge of the ocean, the ocean began to extend itself out to the horizon. I know, I know, you will say that it already did. That’s what oceans do. But the ocean unfolded itself, rolled itself back as I watched. The undulation of the surf was exactly the necessary disruption of the view. The motion was not, as surf had always seemed before, an unending series of discreet waves crashing offshore a few yards and the foamy edges washing up around my ankles. The ocean was all one. . .

Something about the ocean that day, something about the box work formations of Wind Cave in South Dakota, something about the service for Maundy Thursday at St. Michael (at any church that “performs” that liturgy with a certain “style”) is a “thin place” for me.

A thin place is anywhere our hearts are opened. They are places where the boundary between the two levels becomes very soft, porous, permeable. Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts and we behold (the “ahaah of The Divine”)….all around us and in us (Borg, Marcus. The Heart of Christianity. New York: HarperOne, 2004). I didn’t discover Borg’s language on my own. My friend Lee suggested I read Borg.

I’m not certain, but I think what I struggle with is the thin places. Daily.

The thinnest place for me

There is in me something mysterious that nothing is able to grasp.

I don’t know about God. I don’t accept the theological/religious language I will hear tonight and on Sunday. But I know the space between me and that something mysterious will be very, very thin—as it has been on the beach in Oregon and deep under ground in South Dakota. And the space is thinnest when I love. Someone. Anyone, I think.

“A Noiseless Patient Spider,” by Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

“. . . Before that dread apocalypse of soul.”

I may have decided in the past few days (a decision that sneaked up on me) the only way to happiness is to be a recluse. Wandering around bumping into all of you folks is too complicated. The moment I decide so-and-so is likeable enough and generous enough of spirit to trust with intimate details of my life, I discover they really don’t want to be bothered.

“. . . as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, . . “

And, truth be known, I don’t want to bother with theirs. I want companionship, perhaps even love and sex, but I know what a bother all of that is and how much autonomy any two people have to forfeit for a modicum of closeness.

We all, I am convinced, have the same freakish intuition that whatever pleasure we obtain from being with others—especially with those who try to project their relational willingness with charm and honesty even though we know it’s a ruse—is both vaporous and dangerous.  The danger is not only psychological and/or spiritual. It’s actually physical, too. We can’t get through 24 hours without running into someone literally, making some kind of unintentional physical contact, at best bothersome and at worst (I hear it happens) deadly (especially with cars).

As Ogden Nash observed, “One would be in less danger from the wiles of the stranger if one’s own kin and kith were more fun to be with.” All sorts and conditions of men people manage to invade my space without regard for my feelings. And I theirs.

I used to pray for “all sorts and conditions of men; that thou wouldest be pleased to make thy ways known unto them” (“Prayers and Thanksgivings.” Book of Common Prayer Online). I think it’s probably still a good idea to pray, if one prays at all, for all sorts and conditions of men people (the 1928 Prayer Book, published 37 years before Helen Gurley Brown took over Cosmopolitan and made the business of relationships absolutelly impossible).

But while people (I’m sure) want to invade my space, I have been known to do idiotic things when I’ve wanted to drag someone into my space—if not my life. I want my dirty socks on the floor in that pile, thank you—and I don’t give a damn if disorder like that makes your skin crawl (but I’ll pick them up for you). And I do wish you’d realize the noise generated by the stuff you watch incessantly on your big-screen TV is driving me to distraction (but, by all means, watch that football game if you like).

I’m tired of this (almost constant) sensation that you and you and you are ripping me apart and taking whatever it is of me you want without so much as a “by your leave.” Or worse, ignoring me altogether.

If a student had written all the above and I were grading it, I’d write devastating (amusing although the student would not get the joke) remarks about “voice” and “style.” Stilted and inauthentic.  I’d tell her to be direct and honest. “Hey, all you people who want me to think you love—or even like—me, stop mucking up my world for no reason. Stop invading my space and giving me nothing in return.” If that’s what the student meant.

I can’t figure out how to say what I need to say—mostly to tell myself—about the distress relationships cause me. I can’t figure out how to write about that unassuaged pain and at the same time give some indication I realize we’re all in the same boat—AND none of us can figure out how to say so. It is an absolute necessity of human existence. This pain of relatedness.

My opening sentence is not quite true. “I may have decided in the past few days (a decision that sneaked up on me) the only way to be happy is to be a recluse.”

The only way to happiness?

Anyone who knows me knows I clearly do not believe that reclusivity (I know, it’s not in the Oxford Dictionary yet, but it will be!) would make me happy. But it couldn’t be more difficult than the uncomfortable and (more often than not) isolational patterns of my life as it is now.

Back in the day, we sophisticated moderns learned to reject almost-out-of-hand the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). She was a religio/ philosophical lightweight of a Romantic Victorian poet whose work scarcely deserved serious study. Where I learned her sonnet, “The Soul’s Expression,” I have no idea.

“The Soul’s Expression,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And only answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.

This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,—as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

“This song of soul I struggle to outbear,” and I “struggle to. . .utter all myself into the air.” But, like Browning, I know that if I did, my self would be shattered as lightning and thunder shatter the clouds that produce them.

“With stammering lips and insufficient sound /I strive and struggle to deliver right/ That music of my nature,” but I know it’s impossible. I can’t communicate the impossibility of not feeling alone. My soul’s expression is as futile as Browning’s. I have no idea what her soul needed to express. I abscond with her words because I don’t have an expression of my own.

Professor M_____ at the University of Redlands 50 years ago said, in Shakespeare class, all poetry is about “kissin’ or killin’.” I think even with family, friends, and—God forbid—a lover, if I managed to “utter all myself into the air,” I would “perish there.” The struggle to stay connected, for me, is all there is. Struggle. Because at all times I feel so unfathomably alone. Even in the midst of friendship and love.

Not a religio/ philosophical lightweight of a Romantic Victorian poet

“Whisper’d of peace, and truth, and friendliness . . .”

Wildness is all.

On Sunday evening last I began watching Downton Abbey on PBS TV.  The network plays the episode from the previous week before they show the episode for the evening so people like me who miss an episode can catch up with the serialized story. The story is an “upstairs—downstairs” story following the lives of an aristocratic family in a splendid English manor house and their servants, the “downstairs” crew.

In the episode two weeks ago, the young man who is part of the aristocratic family only because he married into it and who has given up his true calling to be an Irish revolutionary—even though his wife has died—has a one-night affair with one of the downstairs girls.

I watched last week’s episode for a few minutes, until the scene where the maid confronts the young would-be gentleman to make him promise that, if she is pregnant, he will marry her. This is headed a few weeks down the line to disaster. She’ll seduce a male servant and get pregnant and then ruin the young gentleman’s life by insisting he is the father of her child and must marry her. DNA paternity testing is a long way off, so he’s her ticket out of the basement.

It’s too predictable and emotionally fraught for me. I turned off the TV.

I tell people I don’t watch shows like Downton Abbey or movies, or serialized TV stories (such as Modern Family) because I expect watching such shows to be like going to a movie at a theater—that is, a social event, not a solitary one.

That’s, if not a lie, at least a bending of the truth. TV series, movies, operas, plays and the like are not, for me, escapist. I experience them too realistically—get too emotionally involved in them—to tackle them by myself. I am too uncomfortable with the life of my own feelings to put myself into a situation where I will absorb others’ feelings, participate in others’ emotional life, even vicariously. My anger, fear, pain, joy passion, love, shame, and guilt are too strong to take on someone else’s—even fictionally—by myself (the reduction of feelings to eight primary ones comes from Pia Mellody—you can Google her and find hundreds of references).

All of this may be my attempt to intellectualize experiences that are basically emotional, an attempt to figure out something mentally that can’t be analyzed.

So I’ll leave it there. Background, perhaps not even relevant, to what I really mean to say.

My guess is that a universal desire among homo sapiens is for friendship. It would be nice if a friend were also a lover, but friendship is first.

Where upstairs does not meet downstairs.

When I’m watching Downton Abbey, I want to share, to speak, to express my experience with someone. When I go to the symphony, I want to tell someone who might, because he or she has had the experience too, understand how the last movement of the Brahms First Symphony affected me.

That desire to talk about the effect of “art” or even “melodrama” or “comedy” on the life of my feelings (which may or may not be, depending on whom you ask, reality) is translated into a desire to talk about the life of the feelings that emanate from me, not from something I’ve seen, heard, or read outside myself. I know that’s problematic for my ability to have relationships. No one wants to hear about the depression I can do nothing about. One should pay a therapist of some sort to talk to about those things, not bother other human beings with them. No one wants to hear about the pain in my shoulder. One should tell that to the physical therapist.

Or one should simply carry those feelings unexpressed. Neither father, mother, sister, brother, lover, best friend, nor casual acquaintance should be subjected to one’s descriptions of how one feels. It’s safest to have feelings vicariously as “art.”

I have my favorite escapisms. “Parker’s Back,” “Cathedral,” any story by Alice Munroe, The Brahms First Symphony, the Bach Great Eighteen Chorales, Big Bang Theory, Criminal Minds (on which I have finally overdosed), Winter’s Bone, Chinatown, O Brother Where Art Thou. Those begin the list. Don’t ask me why.

But it’s as difficult for me to add to that list of emotionally charged creations as it is to learn to trust someone with my own feelings, my real reactions to my real life (or what I perceive to be my real life).

Keats. He understood.

The older I get, the more important expressing my feelings (about almost anything/everything) becomes. I wish I were a poet or composer so I could create art that expresses at least the shapes of my feelings. But I’m not, so I’ll have to do it here. Or gush them forth unfiltered to those I love, unsuspecting as they are. And run the risk of driving them away.

The poet John Keats understood all of this. His favorite flower was the musk-rose, the wild rose. Until a friend gave him a bouquet of cultivated roses.

“To a Friend who sent me some Roses,” by John Keats

As late I rambled in the happy fields,
What time the sky-lark shakes the tremulous dew
From his lush clover covert;—when anew
Adventurous knights take up their dinted shields:
I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields,
A fresh-blown musk-rose; ’twas the first that threw
Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew
As is the wand that queen Titania wields.
And, as I feasted on its fragrancy,
I thought the garden-rose it far excell’d:
But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me
My sense with their deliciousness was spell’d:
Soft voices had they, that with tender plea
Whisper’d of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquell’d.