MARGA Man

1.
Nancy Pelosi recently said, "With Trump, all roads lead to Putin." Before Trump took office, it was unthinkable that anyone would seriously say such a thing about a U.S. president. The statement is, however, spot-on.

I am not a journalist; I'm a senior citizen with an overworked staff of one. The following list, illustrative of Trump's bromance with the brutal dictator is probably incomplete. It is astounding nevertheless.

1. Trump denied that Russia was involved with election tampering simply because Putin told him so. Even though the Department of Justice and the C.I.A. came to an incontrovertible conclusion that Russia was the culprit. "I don't know why it should be Russia," he infamously said.

2. Trump wanted Russia to be readmitted to the G10 group, which had canceled its membership after Putin annexed Crimea.

3. Trump's disastrous order to leave Syria played right into Russia's hands. Russia is now a major player in the Middle East.

4. Trump has accepted the refuted conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, which interfered in the last presidential election. This ridiculous theory originated in Russia. The brilliant Fiona Hill, a specialist on Ukraine and Russia, referred to this conspiracy theory, during a recent congressional impeachment inquiry, as a "fictional narrative." She continued, "I would ask you that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests."

5. Trump is now about to be impeached for directing the president of Ukraine to investigate Trump's political foe and to get at the bottom of the conspiracy mentioned in the fourth point above. (One can, of course, neither get to the bottom or the top of hot air.)

The list is undoubtedly incomplete. Thanks to Trump, Russia is now more powerful and the United States more weak. (I leave it up to the politically astute reader to compile her own list of our county's decline under the current administration.)

"Make America Great Again?" Those MAGA hats should read, "MaRGA,"  "Make Russia Great Again," for this is what Trump is doing. Yes, we've elected MaRGA Man. God help us.

2.
As a rule of thumb, the opposite of what Trump asserts is true. His "fake news" is real news; his assertion that "he is the least racist person" indicates his animus towards blacks and browns. This quintessential egotist's insults, once you know the code, actually refer to him. Thus his assertion that Nancy Pelosi is incompetent, or "crazy as a bedbug," can be translated as a confession of his own incompetence; his claim that the impeachment inquiry is a 'hoax' thus refers to the hoax of his defense, etc.

What an inveterate liar! All politicians stretch the truth, but never in the history of the presidency has asserting the opposite of what a commander in chief says been a rough way of getting at the truth. How has it come to this?

I have for a long time asserted that the entertainment industry is at the very least partially responsible for the lack of political knowledge and involvement among a large section of U.S. citizens. I remember seeing street interviews on YouTube. Many didn't know who won the Civil War, (!), not to mention when it was fought, etc. They all knew about Beyoncé's latest hit, however. This ignorance is not good for our democracy. A vibrant democracy requires that citizens make efforts to keep informed, exercise critical thinking, and get involved.

Trump's presidency has been called a reality TV show, a continuation of his popular show, "The Apprentice." There is a lot of truth to this, but one needs to consider Trump's involvement with professional wrestling to get a keener insight into the nature of his base. 

Trump sponsored Wrestlemania, the WWE's (World Wrestling Entertainment's) yearly wrestling event, for several years in the past. He also appeared many times at televised wrestling events. 

WWE is "entertainment," admittedly staged matches, admittedly fake. On one occasion, Trump got into a (fake) argument with the billionaire owner of WWE, McMahon. Trump body-slammed McMahon and strutted away. On another occasion, they decided to stage a proxy match to determine the victor of a pseudo-conflict between them. The loser would have his head shaved on the air. The wrestler representing McMahon lost (of course) and Trump proceeded to shave the guy's head. (McMahon apparently loves to perform these pseudo-masochistic events to entertain the crowd). The spectators went wild.

You get the idea. Most of the audience probably knew that the whole thing had been staged, but they let themselves be (almost viscerally) entertained.  Just like in the movies--One knows from the outset that, say, "The Exorcist" is fiction, but that doesn't mean that the spectator can't get caught up in the show. One sweats, one's heart beats faster, etc., even though the spectator knows that it is "only a movie."

Although many Trump supporters really do think he is the best man for the job, others,  I think, are a lot like the crowd attending a WWE event. They want to be fooled, they want to be driven wild. Whether what they witness is truthful or not doesn't matter at all. They cheer, they hoot; they are entertained. They forget themselves awhile; they also forget truth, decency and their responsibility as citizens. This is why you can't reason with them. Tell a movie fan that the mother of Rosemary's Baby is just an actress and they reply, "We know that. We want to suspend judgement. We want to be entertained."

Suspending judgement in politics, however. is very problematic. It therefore makes no sense arguing with Trump's fanatic base.We must concentrate instead on continuing to tell the truth as we see it, and to work on such things as voter registration.

Trump has been body-slamming Uncle Sam, as it were, since he took office. If he continues to flip him about after 2020, Uncle Sam might never recover. This is our country! We must vote MaRGA Man out of office--before it's too late.

A Desultory Diary, Episode 8

On November 3rd, we had our annual family gathering. In addition, my good friend and I attempted to entertain, flute and piano, followed by Indian food and lively discussions. All had a good time.

This year I decided to do something different. I went to the piano and played a chromatic scale from the lowest A to the next to highest B flat. This comprises 74 individual notes. Why did I do that? I asked. Nobody knew. So I gave a further hint--one nobody would understand, but this gave me an excuse to play a lovely little piece. First I played the melody. Nobody recognized it. Then I sang it in the original German. Then I translated it, and explained why I played it.

It's a beautiful song about aging. Where did all the time go? Soon it's time to depart. It is not at all minor-key Schubertian, but a 
major-key folk song. Here is a version of it which I obtained from YouTube. It is sung by the famous Austrian actor Hans Moser and a soprano. No need to listen to the whole thing, although I recommend that you do.

The song occurs near the end of a famous Austrian play, Der Bauer als Millionär, or "The Millionaire Farmer."

A simple, catchy melody from the nineteenth century, seemingly designed to create an Ohrwurm, an ear worm, in the listener. Sentimental? You betcha. It is also very effective, possibly the best song about the sudden realization that one has grown old. In the play, a character named Wurzel has been living a high life for some time. Suddenly Youth (Jealousy and Age, etc, also appear in the play, a baroque-ish Austrian classic, and sings the song. Just before she sings, in some productions at least, a puff of smoke appears and when it fades, we see Wurzel transformed from a youngish man into an old man. This sudden transformation is very effective theater. It might help older folks recall the moment they first realized that the border between youth and age has been inexorably crossed. Where has all the time gone?

I will conflate the several stanzas into one translation:

Hey, Little Guy,
Hey, Little Guy,
Time and you are passing by;
Today brilliantly shines the sun,
Soon, at last, the day is done;
Hey, Little Guy, Hey, little Guy,
It is time to say good-bye.

We all know that entropy is relentless; however, one needs to be old to really feel it.

The point I was trying to make with the chromatic scale is that for the old there are not many notes left, and the ones that are left do not have the power and resonance of those around the middle of the piano. I was trying to impress on all--the majority of us are 
seniors--that we have to make music with what remains in our power. It is not impossible, even probable, that we can make happier music with these notes than we did in the past, when the world was too much with us. I've been reading about successful older adults; they make do with what they have, not what they've lost, and are, mostly, happier. My message was therefore not a morbid one; it was a (basically) joyous, albeit realistic one. When you're old, said a ninety-year old woman, you have to make yourself happy.  All it takes are visits from Wisdom and Love, who readily respond to our invitations, so much more instructive than the visits of Jealousy and Anger, which appear in the play and continue to plague the young.

That's the message I tried to convey to my older guests.  It bombed. After this, I played a few classical pieces on the piano. That bombed as well.

No matter--Life goes on. Happily!

A Desultory Diary, Episode 7, Québec

October 11-13, 2019

As we sailed down the St. Lawrence Seaway on the morning of October 11th, the surrounding hills afforded a  view of foliage in full splendor--finally! What a captivating non-presidential orange stimulated the cones of our retinas, almost immediately resulting in a mind replete with delight and serenity. Finally!

We had a good time on board. We were quite active: nightly dancing (to a so-so band), yoga, line dancing, zumba and lots of walking as well. Contrary to the norm, we tend to lose a bit of weight on a cruise and this one was no exception--only a few pounds, though.

The food was adequate, if not delicious. Since we are vegetarians--or, more correctly, pescatarians--choices were limited, but still relatively abundant. We enjoyed high tea every afternoon as well.

It was good to transfer to land, though, which was accomplished without a hitch.

The center of the city of Québec is a citadel; it is surrounded by suburbs. It is very picturesque, and very touristy as well. Everyone who lives here speaks French, but English is widespread as well, especially among merchants.

We, of course, visited the cathedral. It was destroyed by the British at least once, and destroyed by fire at least once as well. The present, apparently accurate reconstruction took place in the 1920's The interior is impressive, but the baldachin-like gold plated structure with Jesus as malek ha-olam (king of the universe) was a bit much. It disturbs the view as one approaches the altar from the west. I think, aesthetically at least, the cathedral would look better without it.

We visited the iconic Château Frontenac at the very top; this is where Churchill and others met to plan for D Day.
Other than shopping, there is not much to do. We asked at the tourist center if there was any music  going on. No. There was apparently jazz to be heard at various pubs, however. We had pizza on our last evening at one of those pubs--The blues singer/guitarist seemed to me to be a bit amateurish, but everyone seemed to love it.

The next day we visited the fine arts museum La Musée Nacional des Beaux Arts de Québec. It is located in the suburbs, a little over a mile from our hotel. We took a taxi there and walked back.

The art was mostly local, derivative, and dull. Shlocky religious scenes; mere illustrations of dogma, without the genius of a Raphael or Leonardo that transformed that dogma into something profoundly human. 

One piece attracted my attention. A small painting in a vitrine. True, it reminds one of Paul Klee's work and was painted around the same time as Klee's were. The title is "Une moitié du monde rit de l'autre côté," ("One half of the world laughs at the other half), by Jean Dallaire.

Can one imagine a better illustration of current polarization? Each character is smug. Each is a know-it-all who looks inward; they don't seem to really see each other. One thinks he's handsome, the other thinks she's beautiful. They are, as the viewer can tell, mere caricatures of humans whose ugliness is apparent to all onlookers, but not to themselves. At least that's the way that I see it.

This is what we become when we divide the world into us and them, into I and those people; this is what happens when we forget that others are no different from ourselves.

The next day we had an uneventful flight back to Baltimore, having enjoyed a delightful twelve days and ready to face the future with serenity and verve.

A Desultory Diary, Episode 6, The Speech I Never Delivered

1.

Many years ago, when I was a twenty-something, my mentor in poetry, José Garcia Villa, gave me a copy of one of his verse collections. The dedication was amusing: "A Poetry Collection Without an Introduction--Thank Heaven!"

Tonight a bunch of friends, Nirmala and me will gather to celebrate those of us who have had an October birthday. On October 9, I began my seventy-fifth year. I imagined myself giving a speech, but decided against it. Instead, I decided to write an essay for you, dear readers; at least you have the opportunity to click me--temporarily, I hope--into oblivion.

Well, I thought, maybe I will say--that is, write--a few words about growing old, which, I admit, is not all that good, but not all that bad either. Perhaps I have a few words of wisdom to impart? You be the judges. My target audience is not only the chorus of the elderly, but also to younger soloists who have not yet found their voice.

Nearly a century ago, the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote the following sublime lines about old age:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

for every tatter in its mortal dress.

                                                         (from Sailing to Byzantium)

Immortal, profoundly wise lines.  Yeats very accurately depicts the muscle wasting--what we physicians call sarcopenia--that begins around forty and increases rapidly after the age of sixty-five. A tattered coat upon a stick--it's as if there is no there there anymore. One becomes a scarecrow, a puppet lying on a shelf, easily ignored. A paltry thing because society treats an aged man as wrinkled packaging that once contained something  worth looking into.

How should an old person react to being ignored, while enduring the difficulties and pangs associated with general diminution? Some of us become cranky, crotchety, sometimes very angry. Here is an excerpt of another great poem, this time by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Certainly an option, but not, I think, a particular sage one. Buddha, for instance, the quintessential sage, thought anger to be a very negative emotion; associated with a keen (and, eventually, keening) sense of self, it is to be avoided, always. (There is no righteous anger in Buddhism). Raging in old age is unseemly. (If Lear had been a wise old man at the beginning of the play, he wouldn't have raged at the end).

One of the cardinal virtues of old age is acceptance. This includes acceptance of the self, acceptance of the world as it is, etc. (This doesn't mean that one should not work to make the world better--but to do this without rage, is better yet).

Acceptance is only one of the cardinal virtues of age, however. For the most important one, we return to Yeats: "Soul must clap its hands and sing and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress." Wisdom has its violins that can sing over sorrow until the very end. What does this mean?

2.

I have completed seventy-four years, albeit with some chronic diseases rather easily managed, so far; nothing very serious yet. In other words, I've been lucky. Exercising regularly, eating properly, keeping the mind active, etc. undoubtedly have something to do with it; nevertheless, luck has had something to do with it as well. 

One of the difficulties I've had is poor eyesight. I decided it was finally time to start reading large-print books. I went to the local library and was directed to the large-print section, which, indeed, was not very extensive. I took the first one off the shelf, a book about the old old: "Happiness is a Choice You Make, lessons from a year among he oldest old," by John Leland.

The book is not the pollyannic pap one might expect from the title. The oldest old in the book have serious problems, losses in a full array of forms, but they all had decided to make the best of it. An adage from Marcus Aurelius comes to mind: One is chained to the chariot of fate. The choice is whether to stand up and run with the horses or lie down and be dragged. 

Making the best of it means that the elderly souls described in the book had decided to clap and sing, with varying degrees of success, keeping rhythm, despite vicissitudes, to the melodies of life, including one of the darkest ones: "Where are you now, my sweet friend/Everyone I know goes away in the end." Not one of the oldest old chooses any longer to "criticize the turtle for not being something else"--they accept themselves, and others, shells and all. Some clap louder and better than others; all souls of the group, however, sing.

Leland recounts that gerontologists have come up with a new classification: the oldest old, those eight-five and older. I ran with this concept and extrapolated it to include those over sixty-five but less than eighty-five: Sixty-five to seventy became for me old-age childhood; those seventy to seventy-five became old-age youths; the period from seventy-five to eighty-five became old middle age.

A geezer like me, therefore, hasn't even reached old middle-age yet!Therefore, as my soul keeps singing to me: I'm still a kid. A new and beautiful way to look at old age. One is as old as one claps.

This is not a universal view. Younger people, who are the majority, sometimes look down on minorities, especially those who use a cane. A good example is the case of a psychologist--who later sadly and unwisely committed suicide--who devised a system to determine how many "good years" one has left, by subtracting one's current age from sixty-five. Life, for him, ended at sixty-five. By doing this calculation, I, over sixty-five at the time I wrote the poem that will follow, had become "a negative toddler." The rage of a "negative toddler" is the subject of a poem I wrote a few years ago. Life ends at sixty-five--indeed!

What Did That Self-Help Guru Say?

“Simply subtract your age from 65

and that’s how many good years you have left.”

That makes mine fewer than minus three!

Once vim is reduced to a negative toddler,

is it O.K. to sit and forget half your French?

It is not.  Instead, before I’m minus four,

I shall sing and descant upon love

in a language I as yet don’t understand.

Perhaps I’ll send him a postcard from Kandahar;

perhaps I’ll send him an elephant tusk

made out of marzipan

by a lovely, crazy German living in Irkutsk;

he apparently thinks old age is the time

to stare like a cow while a fly

navigates a bulbous nose.  Should I rage?

No, rages are unseemly after minus three;

having outgrown my terrible minus twos

I’m ready for a raucous minus youth,

and if I find a tarantula in La Descubierta,

I promise I won’t send him a fanged memento mori

in a silver candy box, crawling on blue cheese.

3.

Well, here's the section during which I give advice and reveal what is most important in life, at least in my opinion.

Research has shown that what is most important are relationships. (You are invited to listen to the appropriate TED talk on YouTube). Many younger people think that fame and money are the essentials. Money is certainly important, but if it is pursued as the primary purpose of life, one inevitably fails.

In the iconic statue of Nataraja, a famous mudra, a symbolic hand gesture, is depicted: the abayam mudra, do not fear:

That's what the older among us have to offer the younger: struggle for your place in the world, but realize that there is another more important place, the place where wisdom and love reign, and not Mr. Get-a-little-more and you'll be-a-little more. This might take time, but one need to start making place for these noble guests, beginning in youth.

I think this "no fear" or, at least "reduced fear" mantra constitutes one of the chief evolutionary purpose of old age. Many species, especially insects and fish, die after mating. Human beings are different. They need elders to show younger humans how to live. This is indeed consistent with survival of the species.

There is nothing sadder than a young person without a strong ego; there is nothing sadder than an old man who has been unable to transcend it. (A tragic example, not only for him, but for us and the rest of the world, is our needy, catastrophic current president).

What is wise behavior? Acting from the realization that everything, including everyone, is connected. This way of life is a great way to overcome egotistical, petty thoughts. An even better one is putting 'love your neighbor as yourself' into action. These two ways are actually a single path.

We are creatures of Earth and must obey her laws. How do we do that? The following metaphor contains, I think, the secret of life:

Each one of us is a satellite revolving, whether we like it or not, around a brilliant sun. We must revolve, but it is our decision whether or not to rotate, to revolve around our own axis. If you choose not to; if you choose to spend your life always facing the void like the dark side of the moon, that is your choice. If you choose to keep moving, however, you will certainly become well acquainted with the night, but will also know that day follows night: you will also spend a good portion of your life basking in the sun while choosing life. Choose life.

A Desultory Diary, Episode 5, Yom Kippur at Sea

October 9, 2019, Onboard Queen Mary 2

This year my birthday falls on the most solemn day of the year, Yom Kippur. No connection, of course!

I attended Yom Kippur services onboard. The rabbi was a large man, a retired rabbi from Oklahoma. The most riveting part of the service was a recording of a female cantor singing the Kol Nidre with piano accompaniment. It was extraordinarily beautiful and transported me to another dimension where difficulties might still exist but are subsumed into a world of vigorous faith.

All those prayers addressed to malek ha-olam, the king of the universe, were more problematic, however, at least for me.The King of the Universe has absconded like an absent father in Sandtown. So many absent fathers! That's why I have no problem having Him designated the King of the Universe and not the Queen. If God, who apparently controls the universe, is mythologically designated male, He remains an absentee Lord whose laws are easily ignored--we do it all the time. But try to ignore the mythologically designated female aspect, the Goddess of our great womb Earth, and you get in trouble right away. You can flout to a considerable degree the love-your-neighbor stuff and prosper, at least for a while; try to ignore, say, gravity by jumping out the window and the King won't lift a finger to save you. Earth's laws, some of them marvelous, some of them dangerous, are contravened at considerable risk. The stars are indeed splendid, but so are the glories of the Earth, the advantage of which is our being in direct contact with Her. 

My friend told me her synagogue has removed all male references to You-(don't)-Know-Who. (Part of a misguided she-too movement, I think.) Progress?

The rabbi said we should do what is right without any hope for reward. Exactly, or almost exactly, what Hindus teach. It is not easy. Some dissidents, say, in China, do the right thing and get their reward: solitary confinement, or worse. Sometimes doing the right thing results in everything external going wrong. It is not easy and sometimes demands great heroism. Thank God for such people! Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, was safe in America but returned to Germany to bravely fight fascism. His reward was an execution by beheading shortly before the war's end. Need I repeat it--doing the right thing without hope for reward is sometimes extremely difficult. We are, for good and for bad, creatures of Earth.

The rabbi's sermon was good, if not very profound. He praised a man who took care of this wife for fifteen years. When asked how he could have done all this--she had Alzheimer's--he simply said, "You do what you have to do." The second example of this behavior was a clerk in a store who apparently did what he had to do as well. The third example was a woman in the Israeli army who had to serve on Rosh ha'Shannah. She was determined to hear the sound of the shofar after she got off from duty.. Eventually, two persons accommodated her, long after the New Year's services were over. They did what they had to do as well. 

The service was over 6:30. The rabbi warned us not to leave for dinner at 6, since this was the most solemn day of the year. If you intend to fast or feast afterwards, well, that was up to you. No one dared leave early.

I'm glad I went. The prayers, which have been intoned for centuries--and, I hope, of centuries to come--were beautiful, honed down to the essence like a bonsai oak. I might not believe in You the same way that the congregants did, but, malek ha-olam, I heard.

The night ended with small talk during dinner and dancing thereafter. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

A Desultory Diary, Episode 4, At Sea

October 7, 2019

From dining on them with the aesthetic deliberation of a gourmet to merely snacking on them like a couch potato, words have been the comfort food of my mind for as long as I can remember. The happy transition from carrying around a teddy bear to carrying around a book took place almost seven decades ago; happily there is as yet no inclination to reverting to carrying around a stuffed animal again, this time  while roaming the confines of a nursing home; at least for now. Well, here I was aboard Queen Mary 2 without a book; I thought I had packed one, but apparently hadn't. After briefly getting lost again on this huge ship, we finally arrived at the library on deck 8, on which a funny-sad incident occurred.

I wanted to get a book in a different language. I noticed that a guide to the colored-coded sections was posted: a black patch for non-fiction, a yellow one for thrillers, etc., and, finally, a white one for books in other languages than English. I approached the librarian, a dark-skinned black man in his 40s, with a shaven head gleaming in the light like a harvest moon. "Where is the white section?" I asked him. His puzzled expression seemed to convey, "O God, here comes another one. How long do I have to go until I can retire?" "I beg your pardon," he said out loud. In all innocence I repeated the  question, "Where is the white section?" "What do you mean by the white section, Sir?" he asked, with more than a hint of annoyance.  "The section with books in foreign languages" I replied. He pointed down the corridor. "See that white woman there? Follow her." 

The selection of books was quite limited. I finally chose, "2084: La Fin du Monde, by Boahem Sansal, which received Le Grand Prix du Roman de l'Acadédeme Française, 2015. It is a dystopian novel which takes place in a fanatically religious community in which everyone must submit and not think. The book is a combination of Orwellian nightmare and a (deadly serious) parody of Islamic fundamentalism. The epigraph of the novel is noteworthy. I will provide it in the original French along with my translation:

La religion fait peut-être aimer Dieu, mais rien n'est plus fort qu'elle pour faire détester l'homme et  haír l'humanité. (Religion can, perhaps, make one love God, but nothing is stronger then it to make one detest human beings and to hate humanity.)

This quote reminds me of one by the physicist Steven Weinberg which I discussed in a previous essay: "With or without religion,  good people can behave well and bad people can do evil--but for good people to do evil--that takes religion."

Both quotes, I think, miss the mark. Religion perhaps can make one love God? What about Martin Luther King. St. Francis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others? Their faith certainly made them better people. Religion can certainly add a considerable dose of fanaticism to politics, but so can politics without religion, e.g Stalin, Hitler and Mao. The practice of politics has been flawed throughout history; it's not surprising, given the state of humanity, that the practice of religion has been deficient as well. It all comes down to love and wisdom, the still small voice within, which we all heed with varying degrees of success. It is the betrayal of religion and politics by religion and politics that is the problem.

Eight persons, four couples, including Nirmala and me, ate at a common table every night during the cruise. 

As everyone who reads my blog regularly must know by now, politics and religion, subjects one is not supposed to bring up in polite company, are among my favorite subjects.  I shouldn't have broached these topics, but I did. First night: I discovered that the other six were all Trump supporters; end of discussion. Next night: they turned out to be fundamentalist Christians as well. One young couple from Indiana grew irate--at least the man did--when I stated, politely but with conviction, that I found it impossible for an educated person to deny the validity of evolution. I was told that it is "only a theory." I explained what the scientific definition of theory is. I told them that the mechanics of gravity is also constitute a theory. Would they like to demonstrate its invalidity by jumping out a window? I also denied that the gospels, written by committed Christ-centered persons long after the death of Jesus, wee accurate historical records. The husband grew even more irate and said I was dead wrong. I countered that he believed both that 2 and 2 equals 4 and that Jesus was literally the Son of God; if chance had had its way and they had been born in Mecca, however, they would still believe that 2 and 2 equals 4, yet deny that Jesus was divine, but a prophet and a man, and that the Koran was an infallible  message to Mohammad directly from Allah via the angel Gabriel. Obviously, 2 and 2 equals 4 must represent a qualitatively different form of knowledge. No, he replied, the Muslims and the Jews are just plain wrong. 

His wife, a Marine, was kinder and more polite. I told them not to worry if they ever came to doubt what they believed so ardently now: a life of love and wisdom will always be possible, and that's all that matters. After all, Jesus himself indicated that he, unlike rabbits who have hutches. was virtually homeless. I tried my best not to sound self-righteous, since, God knows, I have no reason to be. 

I shouldn't have said all this, although I was respectful throughout; I think I was a bit nervous, because I did't know what to say. It was either an attempt at friendly polemics or eating dinner in silence while everyone else talked about the glories of the Second Amendment. I want to make clear that the young couple, as well as everyone else, were fine people, albeit with views very different from mine. 

Facts, facts, facts! Pastor Gradgrind is apparently still doing very well in Indiana--yet going beyond facts is essential if one is to have a vigorous inner life; going beyond facts is also the exclusive domain of poetry, in the broadest sense of that word.

The problem with poetry is that in its visible, outer form it remains largely unread, while in its more important invisible, inner form, it remains wildly and spitefully unpracticed.  If you doubt this, read a newspaper, or do what is most difficult of all, look into your own heart. 

Inside wormholes into outside. The invisible rises to the visible; consciousness is a Möbius strip! 

And, after all this, a final metaphor:

Each one of us is a satellite revolving, whether we like it or not, around a brilliant sun. We must revolve, but it is our decision whether or not to rotate, to revolve around our own axis. If you choose not to; if you choose to spend your life always facing the void like the dark side of the moon, that is your choice. If you rotate, however, you will certainly be well acquainted with the night, but will also know that day follows night: you will also spend a good portion of your time basking in the light while choosing life.  Choose life.

A Desultory Diary, Episode 3

October 5, 2019

A motto for our second day aboard Queen Mary 2: Don't just do something, sit there.

We attended a show at The Britannia Theatre last night, featuring a doo-wop group named The Four Flashbacks. Most of us onboard remember, I think, when the songs sung were new, which means that we are, well,  old. The Flashbacks were good; not exactly my cup of tea but a winsome brew nevertheless, with just the right amount of sugar.

Today we're off on a tour of colonial Providence R.I.,  The weather is good.

Providence, we're told, has more colonial buildings than any other place in America. They are, as one would expect, centrally located; they are also beautifully preserved. 

What distinguished the colony of Rhode Island was that its founder, Roger Williams,  permitted those of all faiths, (that is, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews) to practice their religions freely. (For the Puritans, religious liberty meant that one was indeed free--to be a Puritan). The question of Islam, not to mention that of the as yet almost unheard of faiths of Hinduism and Buddhism, apparently never arose).

We saw a fine synagogue:

Jews must have welcomed the opportunity to stand proudly on the island of their faith in a hostile sea, which was still the spiritual geography of most of the West at that time. 

We also saw a very large Quaker Meeting House:

The Quakers, always fine businessmen, excelled, alas! in the slave trade.  Around 1740 they decided that to be a Quaker and to be involved in slavery was a dismal oxymoron. They came to this decision late when one considers the cosmic law of loving one's neighbor, which had been around for centuries, but not so horribly horribly late as in the Southern states. After the decision to eschew the slave trade, many left the community and continued the abomination of selling human beings. The large Meeting House was subsequently no longer filled with Quakers on First Day meetings, and was soon sold.

Roger Williams permitted everyone to practice their specific religion, which everyone apparently did, at least for a while. Only since the nineteenth century did the zeitgeist permit the good citizens of Rhode Island and elsewhere to believe in the Nobodaddy of the current age. (That's as close as I'll ever get to sounding like a Christian evangelical!)

The fault lies in both fundamentalism and in atheism; the fault lies in prose; the solution lies in poetry.

"O my Luve is like a red, red rose," wrote Robert Burns ecstatically. This is poetry. A fundamentalist interpretation of this would assert that since my love is really a rose, she therefore must have aphids and thorns. 

Once it was possible to believe, without denying reason, that God ruled the external universe. Science and the Enlightenment have since taught us that the universe is absolutely indifferent to human needs. (I express this fact with the statement, "There is no smiley face beyond Arcturus").

The dualist creation myth asserts that God created the universe out of nothing; the true creation myth is that something arises from deep within ourselves. Fundamentalism since the Enlightenment, has been losing ground and will continue to do so. The ground, however, is still there. 

The answer to the eternal question cannot be answered with prose. The prose answer--that everything is connected, as science teaches, and that we must practice love for our neighbor, is as far as prose goes, which is very far indeed. It is a prose poem.

Is it sad that so many of us live lives of distraction, following the progress of mechanical butterflies in ever expanding gyres? Yes, but real butterflies surround us as well, delighting all those who are able to see.

End of sermon. Time for high tea.