August 28: "Nine Horses," Birthday Wish, QAnon Shaman

I promised you something silly tonight because my last few posts have been a little heavy.  So let me talk about what I want for my birthday this year after Billy Collins tells us about his birthday present . . .

Nine Horses

by: Billy Collins

For my birthday, 

my wife gave me nine horse heads, 

ghostly photographs on squares of black marble, 

nine squares set in one large square, 

a thing so heavy that the artist himself 

volunteered to hang it 

from a wood beam against a white stone wall. 

Pale heads of horses in profile 

as if a flashcube had caught them walking in the night. 

Pale horse heads 

that overlook my reading chair, 

the eyes so hollow they must be weeping, 

the mouths so agape they could be dead— 

the photographer standing over them 

on a floor of straw, his black car parked by the stable door. 

Nine white horses, 

or one horse the camera has multiplied by nine. 

It hardly matters, such sadness is gathered here

in their long white faces 

so far from the pasture and the cube of sugar— 

the face of St. Bartholomew, the face of St. Agnes, 

Odd team of horses, 

pulling nothing, 

look down on these daily proceedings. 

Look down upon this table and these glasses, 

the furled napkins,

the evening wedding of the knife and fork. 

Look down like a nine-headed god 

and give us a sign of your displeasure 

or your gentle forbearance 

so that we may rejoice in the error of our ways. 

Look down on this ring 

of candles flickering under your pale heads. 

Let your suffering eyes 

and your anonymous deaths 

be the bridle that keeps us from straying from each other 

be the cinch that fastens us to the belly of each day 

as it gallops away, hooves sparking into the night.

I have a neighbor down the street who has been flying Trump flags and displaying Trump signs since 2016.  He just recently added some Trump/Vance merchandise to his collection.  That's eight years, folks.  Eight years of seeing that name every morning and every night--through the pandemic, January 6th insurrection, entire Biden administration, and all the convictions the Felon in Chief has collected so far.  

My birthday wish is pretty simple:  I want my neighborhood Trump Super Store to shut down.  I'm tired of being reminded all the time of the misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and ignorance that exists in the world.  

I know that it doesn't matter what the outcome of this year's election is--I'm stuck with the QAnon Shaman living down the street.  It's an infection that just isn't going to go away.

But Saint Marty can dream, can't he?

February 4-5: Waters Purified, Dark Period, Striking a Match

Merton waxing eloquent on his return to France, the land of his birth:

How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality--how did it happen that, from all this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine's City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of St. Anselm, St. Bernard's sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas' Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus?

How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campuses of American universities?

When I went to France, in 1925, returning to the land of my birth, I was also returning to the fountains of the intellectual and spiritual life of the world to which I belonged.  I was returning to the spring of natural waters, if you will, but waters purified and cleaned by grace with such powerful effect that even the corruption and decadence of the French society of our day has never been able to poison them entirely, or reduce them once again to their original barbarian corruption.

Merton's point--or wonder--is valid.  It seems that, at the darkest moments in history, from the most violent or corrupt of times, spring some of the most enduring works of art.  Merton's list bears that out.  More recently, think of Allen Ginsberg's Howl during the Vietnam War in America.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward at the height of Soviet oppression, Anne Frank's diary scribbled during the Holocaust.  It seems that, when the human race is at its worst, artists and poets and writers rise to their very best.

I know that, at times of struggle in my life, I have turned to my work as a means of consolation.  Writing helps me make sense of the senseless, find beauty in ugliness.  The impulse to put pen to journal pages is, for me, an act of hope.  It's sort of like striking a match in a dark room.  Suddenly, all that is important and true shines for a few brief seconds.  Those matches have to be lit.  The light has to shine.  If it doesn't, we're all sort of doomed by the brutality of the world.

In my country, I'm living through a pretty dark period.  Nationalism is running rampant.  Compassion and humanity and charity are in short supply.  Racism, homophobia, xenophobia are on the rise.  Families are being torn apart, literally and metaphorically.  I find it difficult right now to strike any kind of match, shed any kind of light, because the darkness is so deep and entrenched.  It has brought out the very worst in everybody.

Yet, I think it's important to keep writing, painting, playing music, creating.  It's how we're going to get through these Dark Ages in the United States of America.  Maybe, 40 or 50 years from now, some diary is going to be published.  It will have been written by an adolescent Central American girl being held in an internment camp somewhere in my country at this very moment.  It will be about her longing for her missing parents.  About the teenage boy in the internment camp with her, how she longs to kiss his lips.  The randoms acts of kindness she may witness during her days, things that give her hope and sustain her will to survive.  That diary will be a testament to the indomitable spirit of a human being in the face of inhumanity.  It will be beautiful and heartbreaking.

Saint Marty just struck another match in the darkness.

March 10: Isms and Phobias, Natasha Trethewey, "South"

America has a lot of problems right now.  Racism.  Sexism.  Homophobia.  Xenophobia.  Islamophobia.  There are so many -isms and -phobias running rampant in my country that it depresses me, but we can't get around it.

Of course, the United States was built on the land and backs of oppressed people.  Native Americans.  African Americans.  Chinese Americans.  Mexican Americans.  That's a part of our history.  Can't get around that, either.

Saint Marty isn't a big fan of Gone With the Wind, either.

South

by:  Natasha Trethewey

          Homo sapiens is the only species          to suffer psychological exile.
                  —E. O. Wilson

I returned to a stand of pines,

                            bone-thin phalanx

 

flanking the roadside, tangle

                            of understory—a dialectic of dark

 

and light—and magnolias blossoming

                            like afterthought: each flower

 

a surrender, white flags draped

                            among the branches. I returned

 

to land’s end, the swath of coast

                            clear cut and buried in sand:

 

mangrove, live oak, gulfweed

                            razed and replaced by thin palms—

 

palmettos—symbols of victory

                            or defiance, over and over

 

marking this vanquished land. I returned

                            to a field of cotton, hallowed ground—

 

as slave legend goes—each boll

                            holding the ghosts of generations:

 

those who measured their days

                            by the heft of sacks and lengths

 

of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants

                            still sewn into our clothes.

 

I returned to a country battlefield

                            where colored troops fought and died—

 

Port Hudson where their bodies swelled

                            and blackened beneath the sun—unburied

 

until earth’s green sheet pulled over them,

                            unmarked by any headstones.

 

Where the roads, buildings, and monuments

                            are named to honor the Confederacy,

 

where that old flag still hangs, I return

                            to Mississippi, state that made a crime

 

of me—mulatto, half-breed—native

                            in my native land, this place they’ll bury me.

November 30: Whatever For, Sandy Hook, Lesson in Faith

The question from agnosticism is, Who turned on the lights?  The question from faith is, Whatever for? . . .

That's a pretty big distinction Dillard makes.  Who? or Why?  I guess, as a person of faith, I have to go with the second:  Why were the lights turned on in the first place?  I've never really thought about faith like that before.  Of course, I've always had questions about God, but I've never doubted His existence (well, maybe once or twice as a teenager).  My big questions were things like "Why does God allow things like the Holocaust to happen?" and "Why do people have to suffer horrible diseases like cancer and AIDS?" and "Why does God allow people to put coconut in candy bars?"

I don't have any answers to any of those big questions, any more than Dillard does.  Terrible things happen every day.  Things without rhyme or reason.  I can't imagine that the Creator had a hand in Columbine or Sandy Hook.  The world is a really broken place.  God didn't break it.  Human beings did.  We break it every day through hatred and racism and xenophobia and homophobia and Islamophobia and any other kind of phobia you can name.

I have diabetes.  My wife suffers from bipolar disorder.  My life has been touched by a whole bunch of addictions--alcohol, prescription drugs, pornography, sex, food.  God didn't put those things in my life because he was testing me.  I'm not Job.  Sure, I could tear my clothes, throw ashes on my head, and shake my fist at the heavens.  I could go all Old Testament.  But that's not where God is, either.

God comes into the picture in how I react to the challenges in my life.  Do I lose hope and faith?  Turn my back on God when it feels like He's turned His back on me?  That's the easy thing to do, I think.  The big ole middle finger to the Master of the Universe.  Anger is simple and, in a strange way, satisfying.

The hard thing to do is to try to find God in the middle of a shitty situation.  That's where faith is really put to the test.  One of my sisters hasn't stepped foot in a church since my other sister's funeral in August, 2015.  She's that pissed.  Of course, she doesn't see that she's also absolutely miserable.  Happiness is always out of her reach.

This afternoon, I found out that I will be teaching two courses next semester at the university.  That news after a couple months of profound anxiety.  Plus, the classes are pretty good.  Ones that I've taught recently.  Now, at the end of this whole period of worry, I'm sitting in my office at the university, thinking to myself, "What a waste of time all that hand wringing was!"  I know that, if I had just laid my problem at God's feet, I would have saved myself a whole lot of misery.

Saint Marty was given a lesson in faith today.

Even Adam had questions

November 8: Teeth or Belly, Muskrat, Night of the Election

His jaw was underslung, his black eyes close set and glistening, his small ears pointed and furred.  I will have to try and see if he can cock them.  I could see the water-slicked long hairs of his coat, which gathered in rich brown strands that emphasized the smooth contours of his body, and which parted to reveal the paler, softer hair like rabbit fur underneath.  Despite his closeness, I never saw his teeth or belly.

No, Annie Dillard is not describing the current Republican nominee for President of the United States in the above passage.  She is describing a muskrat, although I can understand the confusion.  (My apologies to muskrats everywhere.)

I have just returned from casting my ballot for Hillary Clinton.  My polling place is an elementary school gymnasium.  The parking lot was overflowing, and I had to wait in line for close to 25 minutes in order to vote.  Every person present was as serious as a stroke.  There were senior citizens, eighteen-year-olds, construction workers, teachers, business people, and me. All there to make a choice.  Either Xenophobia and homophobia and Islamophobia and every other phobia you can name.  Or rationality and reason and understanding and kindness.

I have to teach this evening.  Composition.  My students are all very young.  I'm certain, for most of them, this will be the first presidential election in which they can vote.  I'm thinking of taking a class poll.  The results would be unscientific and inconclusive, but I am interested in which way these millennials are leaning.  My guess is that most them probably didn't even cast a ballot.  Myself?  I haven't missed voting in a presidential election since I came of age.

So, good disciples, on this night of the election, Saint Marty gives thanks for the freedom to vote and the freedom to speak my mind.

My apologies to trolls everywhere , too

June 25: A Monster, Smaug, Xenophobia

Either this world, my mother, is a monster., or I myself am a freak.

It's a simple statement that Dillard makes.  She has been meditating on death and evolution.  The world is full of examples of animals, insects, plants, and fish that spawn and devour, live and kill.  Our Monster Mother is ruthless in her ability to care for her children.  The strong overcome.  The weak perish and are devoured.  Dillard sees some cruelty in this process.  But cruelty is a human invention.

Survival is a difficult thing.  I think most people will agree with me on this.  In the United States (as in the rest of the world), a privileged few do not have to worry about clothing and shelter and food and warmth on a daily basis.  They see something they like or want, and they acquire it.  For the rest of us, it is not that simple.  If we need a new car, we don't fix a hole in the ceiling.  If we need to pay the water bill, we push off buying groceries for a few days.  Vacations are things you save up for (sometimes for years).  That's the way it is.

I'm not complaining.  These are simple facts.  My two Constant Readers will agree with me.  However, the fact that so few people control the majority of the wealth and resources of this world is sort of an abomination.  Picture Donald Trump sitting on a pile of gold in the bowels of a mountain, like Smaug, protecting it from all us hobbits and dwarfs.

Nothing will change this situation, despite Bernie Sanders' call for political revolution in the United States.  The issue for the upcoming presidential in the United States is whether we want to put Smaug in charge of the whole country.  The recent Brexit vote in the United Kingdom does not bode well for us in U. S.  It seems that xenophobia and exclusion are the current political flavor of the day.

I would like to think that the world will not have to endure a President Smaug.  However, we in the Shire know that the dragon is stirring in the heart of Lonely Mountain.

Saint Marty may have to get on a boat to Rivendell (or at least Disney World)  come the November election.

This is really funny if you know The Lord of the Rings