September 13: "White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field," Version of Death, Negative Capability

Mary Oliver's metaphor for death . . . 

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

by:  Mary Oliver

Coming down

out of the freezing sky

with its depths of light,

like an angel,

or a buddha with wings,

it was beautiful

and accurate,

striking the snow and whatever was there

with a force that left the imprint

of the tips of its wings--

five feet apart--and the grabbing

thrust of its feet,

and the indentation of what had been running

through the white valleys

of the snow--

and then it rose, gracefully,

and flew back to the frozen marshes,

to lurk there,

like a little lighthouse,

in the blue shadows--

so I thought:

maybe death

isn't darkness, after all,

but so much light

wrapping itself around us--

as soft as feathers--

that we are instantly weary

of looking and looking, and shut our eyes,

not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river

that is without the least dapple or shadow--

that is nothing but light--scalding, aortal light--

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones.

Death is a thief that comes in the night.  The Grim Reaper.  We kick the bucket.  Give up the ghost.  Slip away.  Cash in our chips.  We do no go gentle into that good night.  (Thank you, Dylan Thomas.)  We go belly up.  Buy the farm.

And now Mary Oliver gives us this:  death is a white owl, full of so much light, soft as feathers.

Oliver's version of death is the opposite of the Grim Reaper.  Instead of a dark thresher of souls, the owl is an angel, a buddha with wings. diving out of a freezing sky to claim and carry us away to a river of aortal light where "we are washed and washed / out of our bones."

I find this image of death comforting.  Beautiful even.  Certainly, owls have gained a certain reputation in popular culture as creatures associated with darkness--anything gothic, filled with ghosts or vampires or witchcraft.  The owl in Oliver's poem is less avenging angel and more Hedwig from Harry Potter:  a deliverer of important messages, harbinger of good (or bad) news.

Not to worry, faithful disciples.  Nobody in my life has died.  I've received no horrible news today.  (I also haven't received a phone call from the mechanics working on my car, so this may change.)  And, as far as I know, my health is good.

All of that could change very quickly.  The one thing that all versions of death have in common:  surprise.  Nobody knows when death is going to appear, hence the thief in the night, the owl diving out of the heavens.  None of use knows when our numbers will be up (another popular death metaphor).

At the beginning of the week, all my loved ones were safe and upright, taking oxygen into their lungs, hearts pumping like furnaces beneath their ribs.  It's now Wednesday.  My car is at the garage, possibly suffering from some fatal illness, and everyone in my life is still safe and upright.  But perhaps the white owl is circling over the car dealership right now, waiting to swoop down and carry my car to the river of light.  (It's a Subaru Impreza, so it's possible.)

Metaphors are ways for humans to comprehend the incomprehensible--things like suffering, grief, life, death, life after death, and Donald Trump supporters.  So, it's not surprising that so many incarnations of death exist.  They help us live in a state of negative capability.  We don't have to have all the answers.  Instead, we embrace the mystery, let it exist and give thanks for it.

My car may be toast (another death metaphor), or it may not be.  Like Schrodinger's cat, it is both alive and dead.  Fixable and terminal.  

Until Saint Marty hears otherwise, the white owl can stay in the marshes, washing someone or something else out of its bones.

December 12: Mortality, Anointing of the Sick, "Extreme Unction"

Last night's trip to the hospital has got me thinking about mortality again.  How my father never seemed like he was prone to the aches and scourges of everyday people.  I've seen him cut his hand open on a piece of sheet metal, duct tape the wound close, and then continue working.

Last weekend, our parish priest stopped by my dad's house for a visit.  Near the end, Father Larry asked my dad if he wanted to be anointed.  My dad agreed, so Father Larry brought out his oils and performed a ritual that used to be called extreme unction.  It is now referred to as anointing of the sick.

When I was a kid, if you received this sacrament, it meant that you were on your way out.  It was reserved for the nearly dead and dying.  It was also called last rites.  Now, however, it's performed as a ritual of healing.

Of course, having grown up with the idea of last rites, it's difficult to shake the image of the Grim Reaper knocking on the door as the priest administers the oils.

It may not surprise you to know that Saint Marty once wrote a poem on the subject.

Extreme Unction

by:  Martin Achatz


Swaddled by AIDS in hospital bed.
Unlimbed by bombs in Afghanistan.
Unhinged by helix in mind.
Stunned by stroke, macheted by Hutu.
Unbreasted by cancer, unvoiced by dictator.
Addicted by birth, unmemoried by age.
Jack Kennedy at Parkland Memorial,
wide-eyed on the stretcher,
Jackie staring into his wrecked face.
Twenty six at Sandy Hook,
taken on a sunny December morning
just before Christmas break.
My father sits with them all,

The wounded, ruined, helpless,
waits for the priest’s  prayer and oil.
To the man in black, he whispers,
This is for my wife, accepts it,
carries it home on his foreheard,
cupped in his palms, like winter
run-off.  He gives it to my mother,
pours it over her feet, legs, hands, head.
He hopes she will jump out of her chair
and start cooking him liver and onions
the way she did when they were first
married, standing in front of the stove,
singing a Doris Day song, hair wrapped
in a blue kerchief, hips swaying,
looking as if she will live forever.

Please vote for me:

Voting for 2017-2019 Poet Laureate of the U. P.  

October 26: Pact with the Devil, Daughter and Halloween, Boring Teenager

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to.  It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound.  The terms are clear:  if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man.  The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death.  The world came into being with the signing of the contract.  A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  A poet says, "The force that thought the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age."  This is what we know.  The rest is gravy.

This passage reeks of Halloween darkness.  I am especially fond of the blind man Time and his great dog Death.  Talk about a pair made for a horror movie.  Picture them, an eyeless Grim Reaper leading a huge werewolf of a hound.  If that isn't enough to send a shiver down your spine, then you are probably near to shuffling off this mortal coil already.  As Dillard says, the great pact of life is that we all eventually have to encounter the blind man and his pet.

Halloween is fast approaching, and I was informed last night that my fifteen-year-old daughter does not want to get a costume or go trick-or-treating.  She simply wants to walk around with her little brother while he raids the neighborhood.  The news kind of took me by surprise because, up until yesterday, my daughter was shopping for costume pieces online.  When my wife told me that she didn't want to dress up for All Hallow's Eve, I was very supportive.  I believe my exact words were, "So, she's going to be a boring teenager."

Yes, I understand that my daughter is asserting her independence, trying to figure out the world and her place in it.  Being a teenager is scary business, without having to dress up and carve pumpkins.  But I can't help feeling a little sad.  My daughter was always a Halloween nut.  Loved planning out her ensemble for October 31.  Designing pumpkin faces.  Now, another little bit of her childhood has gone for a walk with the blind man and his dog.

Halloween just isn't going to be the same.  I thought I had at least a couple more years of trick-or-treating left with my daughter.  I suppose that I should be happy that she still wants to walk around with her little brother as he hits the neighbors' houses.  There's still enough of the Great Pumpkin in her to do that.  And maybe she'll change her mind before next Monday night.

If not, Saint Marty's jack-o'-lantern will be burning a little less brightly come the last night of October.

May 9: Mouthful of Blood, Mouse, Traps

I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again.  Just think:  in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.  I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone.  We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam.  We are escapees.  We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouthful of blood.

Dillard does not paint a very comforting picture--our planet as an altar for blood sacrifice.  She is right of course.  Earth is the only planet in the solar system where death exists.  Every minute of every day.  Mars does not have Ebola.  Jupiter never suffered a flu epidemic.  Saturn has no documented cases of breast cancer on its surface.  Our little blue marble is fatally unique.

I am not going to bore you with some poetic reflection on death.  That's not my goal tonight.  I want to write about one of my greatest fears tonight, and it's not the Grim Reaper.  Granted, the Angel of Death does make my top ten list.  However, it is not number one.  That spot would be reserved for a much larger phobia:  rodents.

My two Constant Readers know of my irrational loathing of our furry, disease-carrying friends.  I have made no attempt to hide it.  Last night, my wife heard something small and cunning in our bedroom, gnawing in the wall.  In the past, I may have completely freaked,  Covered the floors of my house with glue traps, mousetraps, rat poison.  Instead, I have been a little more Obama-esque in my attack:  strategic strikes.  I have placed three traps in three separate rooms.  I'm hoping that tomorrow morning, I will have caught the little hairy terrorists in my home.

So, Death will be paying a visit tonight, hopefully.  Dead mouse,  Happy Saint Marty.

August 20: Busy Day, Busy Work, "Carol" Dip Monday

It is going to be a busy day.  Usually, the first thing I do in the morning is check my e-mails.  Then, I browse through a few blogs I follow on a fairly consistent basis.  I check out the news on Google to see if the world has ended or I've been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (those two occurrences are not mutually exclusive, by the way).  Then I type my morning post for Saint Marty.

This morning, I started my busy work first.  I filled out some forms, did some e-mail business for my wife, and printed out some information I need to complete my syllabus for the fall semester.  That was just in the first half hour of being on task.  After this post, I have tons more busy work to complete. 

There's a worship meeting tonight at church, and since I'm the chair of that committee, I suppose I should get an agenda done and type up the minutes of the last meeting.  As I just indicated, I also plan on completing a major portion of my syllabus for Intro to Film today, everything but the semester schedule.  The schedule's the hardest part, and I still haven't decided in what order I'm going to show the films I've selected for the class.  I know I'm starting with Charlie Chaplin's City Lights and ending with It's A Wonderful Life.  Aside from that, I'm kind of up in the air, although I'm pretty sure Citizen Kane is going to be film number two.

Whew.  That's a lot of crap to get done.  If it doesn't seem like a lot of crap, take my word for it:  it is.  Making up a syllabus gives me a great deal of anxiety.  It's like planning out my life for the rest of the calendar year.  I'm locking down my days and weeks and months.  That kind of commitment is a little difficult for me.  However, I always place a little caveat in all of my syllabi.  In front of the term "Semester Schedule," I place these words "VERY TENTATIVE."  Note the use of capitalization and boldface and italics.  I figure that addition buys me some breathing room, in case I want to change anything.

Well, it is Monday, and that means it's once again time for a Carol dip.  I've been thinking and thinking about a possible question for the great book of Dickens.  I'm not sure the following question qualifies as earth-shattering or important or even interesting, but it's what's on my mind at the moment:

Will my Intro to Film classes go well this semester?

And the answer from the Ghosts of Christmas and Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge and company is:

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched hand.  When he roused himself from his thoughtful quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes were looking at him keenly.  It made him shudder, and feel very cold.

Yeesh.  That's not very encouraging at all.  Nothing like the Grim Reaper to put a chill in the air.  Guess I better really put some thought into that syllabus.

Saint Marty has some serious work to do today.

This is encouraging only if you're Ingmar Bergman