It's all there in Green Day's "International Superhits". Goodness me, what do they teach them in these schools?

I want to be the minority
I dont need your authority
Down with the (im)moral majority
cause I want to be the minority

Stepped out of the line
Like a sheep runs from the herd
Marching out of time
To my own beat now
The only way I know

One light, one mind
Flashing in the dark
Blinded by the silence of a thousand broken hearts

Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores

It will give entirely the wrong impression if I *don’t* put up a Palin post of my own. For I am so very pleased, that whatever happens from one moment to the next, I can instantly cheer myself up by reminding myself who the Republican vice-presidential nominee is. I intend, of course, to keep chiming in rationally and analytically on Marco’s blog and Lexifab’s blog. But here, I am afraid I intend to give way to foolish emoting.

Since I heard the news, on one of the great motorways of south-east Queensland, I have had Vachel Lindsay’s poem ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’ running through my head. I don’t think I am the only one, either.

(If you can’t think offhand who Vachel Lindsay was, he wrote ‘The Congo’, some of the less politically-incorrect bits of which you will have heard chanted by the lads in ‘Dead Poets’ Society’ as they galumph through the forest beating a drum in the dead of night.)

I know I just posted a quote- with which I entirely agree- about the folly and evil of submerging oneself in the collective, but what I am going to do now amounts to giving voice to my tribal identity. One of my tribal identities, anyway. This is no identity as philosophically coherent as a Catholic identity or a small-government identity, but almost entirely a 'young-Western-state-of-wide-open-spaces' identity. What I am going to do is put up big slabs of the first, cheerful, triumphalist, part of Vachel Lindsay’s poem, and it will be obvious which words need to be replaced to bring it up to date. Here goes!

‘In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, relenting, repenting millions,
There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about,
And knock your old blue devils out.’

[Three may scan as well as one…]

‘There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle.
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle.
There were real lines drawn,
Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska’s cry went eastward against the dour and old,
The mean and cold.’

[Huzzah!]

‘Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah,- sharp was their song.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young, the longhorn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.

These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
The gossamers and whimsies,
The monkeyshines and didoes
Rank and strange
Of the canyons and the range,
The ultimate fantastics
Of the far western slope,
And of prairie schooner children
Born beneath the stars,
Beneath falling snows,
Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there,
Except a Kansas prayer,
With the Indian raid a howling through the air.

And all these in their helpless days
By the dour East oppressed
Mean paternalism
Making their mistakes for them,
Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast
Seemed a giant spiders’ nest.’

[Easy enough to replace Mark with Joe!]

‘And these children with their sons
At last rode through the cactus,
A cliff of mighty cowboys
On the lope,
With gun and rope.
And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,
And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall
Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
The bard and the prophet of them all.
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
Blotting out sun and moon,
A sign on high.

Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,
The scalawags made moan,
Afraid to fight.’

[Loud, loud is the moaning of the scalawags! I can’t think of anything for ‘mountain lion’ that scans at all well, alas, alack.]

‘Defying aristocracy,
With every bridle gone,
Ridding the world of the low down mean,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,’

[Bidding the eagles of the West fly on! Bidding the eagles of the West fly on!

Of course, it may still all end in tears:]

‘Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The blue bells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas,
By the Pittsburg alleys.
Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.’

Emoting over. Normal service resumes.

Time enough to verb

I was browsing through 'Teach Yourself Swahili' this morning, and felt inspired to dig out my folder on Tsiolkovskian to have another go at making up the verb, and what do I find in the back of one of the lesser notebooks in the folder but this poem-like object, thought long-lost many years ago:

When I went to Fairfield
I did not seek my doom.
I did not hunt for goblin gold
or seek to follow fairy feet
through the dewy gloom.

When I went to Fairfield
I sought a cask of red;
I sought to buy a carton cold
and some Australian sparkling wine.
Home I went instead.

When I came to Fairfield,
to buy some liquor there,
it made my blood run cold to see
The door beneath the tavern sign
was shuttered, dark and bare.

Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

7.7.7

‘From far across the ocean you can hear the sound of thunder.
I listen closely but I hear no evil.
Just the sound of cities crashing as they fall into the ocean…’

- 'Hear No Evil', Hunters and Collectors


Happy 37^th birthday to Sandor! And happy 100^th birthday, wherever you are, to Robert Heinlein!

I like the way Heinlein was game enough to build The Green Hills of Earth around a bit of Kiplingesque poetry.

We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

I have just made, as far as I know, the first ever translation of this verse into Australian, which goes like this:

Earth! Earth! Earth! Oi! Oi! Oi!

I tried making a Gysin/Burroughs-style cut-up of Friday once. And I have managed to successfully forget the twist at the end of The Puppet Masters at least twice. But I admit that overall my grasp of Heinlein’s oeuvre is not what it could be. As his books get longer and longer and the characters spend more and more time talking about what they are going to do instead of doing it (Number of the Beast, what is that book all about? It is like a faculty meeting that just goes on and on and on) I grow less and less likely to finish them.

And I am ashamed to say that I have never read Starship Troopers. I have seen the movie, which I understand is something like saying to a fan of the original Thirtysomething Mutant Ninja Turtles comics that I’ve eaten the TMNT breakfast cereal. I did like the movie. I think I have written somewhere on this blog that it is the first great movie of the 21st century. In the director’s commentary on my DVD the director- a Dutch guy who has not been decapitated- is quite adamant that he didn’t set out to glorify miltarism. I think he is being a bit disingenuous. It doesn’t matter what he set out to do. His movie offers a very sympathetic and attractive portrait of a militaristic society. Salman Rushdie says The Satanic Verses was never intended to blaspheme Islam. Eugene Terreblanche says the logo of the AWB wasn’t intended to be reminiscent of the Nazi flag. My 2003 NaNoWriMo novel wasn’t supposed to be pro-euthanasia. But once you create something, you are not just responsible for the reading you intended it to have, but for any other obvious readings it might have. What you intended is neither here nor there. Works of art are like wandering livstock.

Unfortunately, Mr Verhoeven does not seem to be one of us ‘Earth! Earth! Earth! Oi! Oi! Oi!’ types. He is that sad thing, a self-loathing human. On my DVD he argues, apparently sincerely, for moral equivalence between Mormons and the murderous insect hordes:

The screen shows ‘before’ pictures of a shiny Mormon settlement with a golden
angel on top, then ‘after’ shots with lots of dismembered corpses scattered
about.

Federal Announcer: Mormon extremists disregarded Federal warnings
and established Fort Joe Smith, deep inside the Arachnid quarantine zone. Too
late they realised that Dantana had already been settled by other colonists-
Arachnids.

Paul Verhoeven: The rest of the scene is very interesting …
What it says, of course, in this scene, was that the war was not started by the
bugs. Like that is a very interesting political situation because in politics in
general, especially in American politics, there is a tendency to take a part of
history but not acknowledge what happened before.

See, we humans started it by constructing settlements. Boo, hiss. Bad humans.
Silly Mr Verhoeven! The bugs don’t hate us for what we do, they hate us for what we are. A race without a hivemind is like a body without a head, a shambling zombie horror lurching about erratically. Humans are the antithesis to bugdom. Our very virtues are abominable vices to them. Our decadent individualism revulses them. Our pasty mucilaginous flesh, daubed pathetically over our flimsy endoskeletons, makes them want to vomit up gouts of insectoid phlegm. They get queasy just thinking about us. Eugh, so do I. Must… destroy… humans.

No! That way lies madness.

Earth! Earth! Earth! Oi! Oi! Oi!

C is for Chesterton

Since I first came across the essays of Gilbert Keith Chesterton I have thought of them as a good sanity test. If I read some of the essays and find that I pretty much agree with everything Chesterton is saying, I know I am pretty much sane. But if the same essays disagree with me, it is a pretty fair bet that anything I read will irritate me and I am less sane than not. This is true even if Chesterton is writing about the wrongheadedness of vegetarianism, or the folly of letting women vote: if I am sane, I will see that most of what he says makes perfect sense and he has just gone astray on one or two teensy points of emphasis which have led him to the wrong conclusion.

I came to Chesterton fairly late in life, long after I had read everything C. S. Lewis wrote, and was pleasantly surprised to find that everything I had liked in Lewis’s nonfiction was there in Chesterton’s nonfiction. But there was a lot more of Chesterton’s nonfiction, meaning it could keep me entertained for longer; and it was Catholic, meaning it was more congenial to me in a thousand small ways.

I find there are two surefire ways of cheering myself up, should I feel depressed about one thing or another. One is to listen to Monty Python’s Galaxy Song, of course. Should that fail, the thing that is sure to cure me is reading Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. And THAT will settle the Manichees!

Like Asimov and Borges, Chesterton invetned a new genre, but I am not as fond of any of the ‘spiritual picaresque’ novels as I am of I, Robot or The Quixote of Pierre Menard. However: they do have poetry!

YOU will find me drinking rum,
Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian.
You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

So I cleared the inn of wine,
And I tried to climb the sign,
And I tried to hail the constable as “Marion.”
But he said I couldn’t speak,
And he bowled me to the Beak
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.

Oh, I knew a Doctor Gluck,
And his nose it had a hook,
And his attitudes were anything but Aryan;
So I gave him all the pork
That I had, upon a fork;
Because I am myself a Vegetarian.

I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a Vegetarian.

No more the milk of cows
Shall pollute my private house
Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian;
I will stick to port and sherry,
For they are so very, very
So very, very, very Vegetarian.

Unaccountably, this song from the Flying Inn is often anthologised without the third verse. In other places, equally unaccountably, people quote this verse to demonstrate that Chesterton was anti-semitic, ignoring the fact that it is in a song sung by a character in a novel. Equally, if I am allowed- which of course I am, being the Master of my Blog and the Captain of my, er, Blog- to go off on a sudden tangent, I have just read an essay taking Tolkien to task for the quality of his poetry in the Lord of the Rings. Some of it is embarassingly bad, says the essayist: someone ought to tell him. (This essay was written in the 50s, when Tolkien was still alive) Of course some of it is embarassingly bad! A lot of it is meant to be stuff people made up on the spot to amuse themselves, or popular songs, or, in at least one instance, poetry made up by someone who is not as good a poet as he thinks he is. Given this, it is not embarassingly bad, but embarassingly good. Pippin and Merry’s little song of leavetaking is meant to be the sort of doggerel two adolescents might come up with; Bilbo’s song about Earendil is meant to be over-elaborate and over-alliterative and not really terribly good; Tom Bombadil’s verses are meant to be- well, God only knows. I have no idea what the point of Tom Bombadil was. When I get to heaven, that is one of things I intend to make inquiries about.

If you are going to say that all poetry in a novel has to be ‘good’ poetry, than you are being the nastiest sort of elitist. (Well, technically not ‘the’ nastiest sort, since there are those ‘exterminate the underclass’ sort of elitists). These are the same sort of people who have made us all too embarassed to sing in public, with their cursed idea that singing is the sort of thing you ought not to do unless you can do it well: that it is a sort of peculiar stunt to be graded and found fault with, like platform diving, rather than an essential part of our human heritage that everyone can and ought to do.

All of this is wandering very far off topic, except that I am sure Chesterton would agree with me...


Finally, we also have Chesterton to thank for one of the finest ‘Who am I?’’s never used on ‘Sale of the Century’:

Tony Barber: This dystopian novel, written by a middle-class Englishman in the first half of the 20th century, takes place in London in the year 1984…

Dr Clam: *buzzer sounds*

Tony Barber: Dr Clam?

Dr Clam: The Napoleon of Notting Hill?

Tony Barber: Correct.

B is for Borges

And Belloc, or Benchley.

There are just too many people whose names start with B. But, since it was Jorge Luis Borges I thought of writing about first, before I decided to make this a series, I will stick with him.
I thought of him twice when I was writing about ‘The God Delusion’.

The first time was when I was writing about the tendency of matter and energy to become more randomly distributed in our universe as it goes along, which means it was more organised at the beginning than it has been since. I was going to say this was hardly less peculiar than Borges’ library universe consisting of an infinite lattice of hexagonal rooms filled with books.
I decided not to make this analogy, because it would be (1) kind of pretentious and (2) kind of obscure and (3) kind of over the top, since the infinite lattice of hexagonal rooms full of books really is, I suppose, quite a lot more peculiar than our universe.

The second time was when I was writing about the sort of morality that Dawkins believes in, and the logical outcome of his ‘misfire’ theory of morality. People like me, I think I said, would be driven to rebel against a morality that was nothing more than a ‘blessed, precious accident’. I was pretty sure that this was what the narrator of Borges’ Deutsches Requiem was doing, and was going to quote it.

But, I was surprised when I reread it that it doesn’t mention Darwin or ‘survival of the fittest’ at all. The social darwinism reading of the story is something I brought with me from my more scientific background. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid reading, of course.

I like Borges' baroque stuff best, the overwritten things he later repented of. I like all the unclassifiable stories of his: the essays about nonexistent historical events, or imaginary heresies, or things like 'Funes the Memorious' that are science fiction without any science in them.

It was dead easy for me to pick a favourite Asimov novel. But I cannot possibly pick a favourite Borges story, because they are all so different. It is the sum of all those very different parts that is splendid. I would need a whole bunch of them.

I find that I do have a favourite Borges poem, and this is it:

Juan, I, 14

No será menos un enigma esta hoja
que las de Mis libros sagrados
ni aquellas otras que repiten
las bocas ignorantes,
creyéndolas de un hombre, no espejos
oscuros del Espíritu.
Yo que soy el Es, el Fue y el Será
vuelvo a condescender al lenguaje,
que es tiempo sucesivo y emblema.

Quien juega con un niño juega con
algo cercano y misterioso;
yo quise jugar con Mis hijos.
Estuve entre ellos con asombro y ternura.
Por obra de una magia
nací curiosamente de un vientre.
Viví hechizado, encarcelado en un cuerpo
y en la humildad de un alma.
Conocí la memoria,
esa moneda que no es nunca las misma.
Conocí la esperanza y el temor,
esos dos rostros del incierto futuro.
Conocí la vigilia, el sueño, los sueños,
la ignorancia, la carne,
los torpes laberintos de la razón,
la amistad de los hombres,
la misteriosa devoción de los perros.
Fui amado, comprendido, alabado y
pendí de una cruz.
Bebí la copa hasta las heces.
Vi por Mis ojos lo que
nunca habia visto:
la noche y sus estrellas.
Conocí lo pulido, lo
arenoso, lo desparejo, lo áspero,
el sabor de la miel y de las manzana,
el agua en la garganta de la sed,
el peso de un metal en la palma,
la voz humana, el rumor de unos pasos sobre la hierba,
el olor de la lluvia en Galilea,
el alto grito de los pájaros.
Conocí tambien la amargura.
He encomendado esta escritura a un hombre cualquiera;
no será nunca lo que quiero decir,
no dejará de ser su reflejo.
Desde Mi eternidad caen estos signos.
Que otro, no el que es ahora su amanuense,
escriba el poema.
Mañana seré un tigre entre los tigres
y predicaré Mi ley a su selva,
o un gran árbol en Asia.
A veces pienso con nostalgia
en el olor de esa carpintería.

Doc2.doc

Dave has been up north! And I have been ferreting through my very disorganised documents looking for a version of something which no longer seems to exist, or only existed in a dream (curses!), and while so doing have found this poem-like-fragment which is about up north. Circa 1997, I think.

Two Mile Creek #2

Where I live nothing has a name
the rivers have no names
the mountains have no names
There is a place where the sea sticks in
There is a place where the coast sticks out
There is an island
and none of them have names

Where I live nothing has a name
we call a lot of things by the names of long-dead
paste-coloured millionaires
Not one of whom ever saw them
Or would have cared enough to notice them
if they had

We call the things where we live by the names of
slave traders
carpetbaggers
cattle raiders
any number of people who wanted to get rich quick
murderers
thieves
and the very occasional saint

Some things we only give numbers

Nobody knows the name of anything where I live
Even when we remember the things we made them give us
And worry about whether they will ever forgive us
Nobody remembers that even they don’t remember
the name of anything

Because nine times out of ten they are dead

Or else we have taken their fathers
and beat them for calling things by their names
until they only knew how to use our words
and play our game

So no one knows the story
Of how so and so came to that mountain there
and did something there for some reason
So that it was called the mountain where
so and so did something for some reason
And instead it is called by the name of the
man who once gave a hundred pounds to another
man who once saw it on the morning of
September 16th, 1864

The Moral Contextualist

Some deeds are black. And some are white.
But most of them are grey.
So we must talk about them in a quantitative way.
It is fine to follow. As it is fine to feel.
For we must believe in something, and believing, we must wheel
To defend what we believe in with a fine fanatic zeal.
But we must also measure. And we must also think.

Some things are true. And some are false.
But seldom can we know
Which falsehood is the falsest as the falsehoods come and go.
I know there is a best way. I doubt that it is good.
For we all were born to trouble in a vast and sunless wood
Where many are the paths of 'must' and few the paths of 'should'.
And we wander here to measure. We wander here to think.

The usages of Sulva! The portion of Lothair.
There are two sins against hope:
Presumption and despair.

Take that, Google!

All I could find searching for this poem by author and title were posts by people saying they couldn't find it. And when I had found it out in the real world, and Googled one of the lines not quoted in Chesterton's Autobiography, I got no hits at all.

The Rebel, Hilaire Belloc
From 'Sonnets and Verse', first published 1923, 1954 edition.

There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homesteads and our native grounds.

But I will gather and I will ride,
And I will summon a countryside,
And many a man shall hear my halloa
Who never had thought the horn to follow ;
And many a man shall ride with me
Who never had thought on earth to see
High Justice in her armoury.

When we find them where they stand,
A mile of men on either hand,
I mean to charge from right away
And force the flanks of their array,
And press them inward from the plains,
And drive them clamouring down the lanes,
And gallop and harry and have them down,
And carry the gates and hold the town.
Then shall I rest me from my ride
With my great anger satisfied.

Only, before I eat and drink,
When I have killed them all, I think
That I wll batter their carven names,
And slit the pictures in their frames,
And burn for scent their cedar door,
And melt the gold their women wore,
And hack their horses at the knees,
And hew to death their timber trees,
And plough their gardens deep and through-
And all these things I mean to do
For fear perhaps my little son
Should break his hands, as I have done.

The world's great age begins anew...

...The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream."

Hurrah! The 20th century is still over, and recedes further into the dustbin of history with each passing moment! Hurrah for the now! Today I am only going to emote foolishly in this vein, and give you a long quote from Chesterton:

"It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the 20th century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system.; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalisations. ... We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. ... Examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy. Examples are scarcely needed to show that, whatever else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist, a Cartesian or a Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist. ... But there are some people, nevertheless- and I am one of them- who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them."

1999 Again

And today was the fifth anniversary of this poem-like entity, which is actually relevant to the Separation of Church and State argument- as a central idea of the PLE is that when religions become too concerned with the idea of 'individual salvation' instead of remaking society, civilisation is doomed...


(to the tune of “Away in a Manger”)

Outside of my window the muscle-cars roar;
and arabic techno blares out as before
Like stallions of ‘Umar at Badr they go by;
Like Tariq’s white chargers they lift my heart high
O Soldiers of Allah!
O Men among Men!
Rise up from the south-west and start it again

Once numberless anchorites camped by the Nile
And sought their salvation in durances vile
Honoured and sainted, their souls were saved well
while Rome’s Eastern Empire slid sideways to Hell
O Soldiers of Allah!
Your ancestors came
To bring Egypt justice and lift up God’s name

Now numberless channels on Cable TV
Sell us salvation from the Land of the Free
Safe in our blindness, we’re all born again
to beggar our neighbours still steeped in their sin
O Soldiers of Allah!
Let Islam arise
and cast out false Prophets who damn with their eyes

We are a sad country of lost Nazarenes
who’ve long since forgotten what holiness means
Blaphemers of ‘Isa are feted and paid
Usurers, sodomites, merrily trade
O Soldiers of Allah!
Rise up and proclaim
That all must now bow before God’s holy name

Cast down all the idols from where they’re enshrined
The Satans of commerce and all their foul kind
We’d find it far better to live as your slaves
Then with Packers and Murdochs and such godless knaves
O Soldiers of Allah!
Come save us we pray
Convert us or kill us or drive us away

We murder our children, we grind down the poor
We steal and we lie and we drunkenly whore
Like Many-Columned Iram, like Aad and Thamoud,
Bring God’s wrath against us as God’s people should.
O Soldiers of Allah!
O Party of God!
For love of our children do not spare thy rod

1999

I find that it is exactly five years since I wrote this, and it has been a long time since I have put up anything even vaguely like a poem, and "vaguely like a poem" describes this pretty well:

If you had asked me how I felt yesterday morning, I would have said
(were I not timid, knowing myself to be a craven, a poltroon)
“Nine parts Walt Whitman to one part Osama ben Laden”
(will any of you remember those names on December 18th, 2999, children of my children’s children?)

Some days the beggars at Redfern station are infinitely precious to me, their faces and their voices and their ethereal lies.
The dance of the Filipino Baptists in their carpark, moving backward and forward and backward again, each in turn, until each car has made its way out.
The men with crutches, the men whose gaits are strange, who look down always, who I see on the footpath outside the coffee and nut shop.
The women who do not look weak, not in the least, the women in the hijab, who make me think of Kipling:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
and the women come down to cut up what remains
just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your God like a soldier

All of these are precious to me.

Some days I can see the Spirit of God hovering over every person I see, every silent passenger, every jogger glimpsed out the window for a half-second, every infant passed by incomprehending as I am swept along by the inrushing or outrushing human tide on Abercrombie street.
I see the face of God in the tired faces of the old men in Ramadan, in the square-jawed young men from Utah with mandarin nametags - in the little girl whose mother is feeding her peanuts from a paper bag, in the empty lullaby of the quatschen of the city office girls.

The names of the twelve stations and their waiting crowds are like the verses and the notes in a great hymn of praise.

Bless and keep them all, Lord God, Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

And it struck me as I arrived at my place of work yesterday morning that joy and rage are less than a hair’s breadth apart in my being, and one is always mixed with the other.
If you are Walt Whitman, all is good in itself, whatever it is, and joy is just joy.
But if you are one part Osama ben Laden, if you believe that a flaw is a flaw, that no man is good but God alone, that suffering is real suffering and despair is real despair,
then the joy and the pity and the rage, the thirst for goodness and the hatred of the dark,
are only one thing, one thing, one thing.

The Milonga of Manuel Flores

Hmm, have to start in some non-threatening, not-too-extreme way...

A few days ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a sudden urge to read Borges' poem, The Milonga of Manuel Flores, again. I did my own fairly lame verse translation of it, which goes like this:


Paul Jennings Hill is gonna die.
That’s a bet you’re sure to win.
Dying’s a thing that’s common enough
in our fallen world of sin.

Tomorrow they’ll bring me the needle
and kick off my long dark ride;
I think it was Merlin who said it:
“You ain’t been born till you’ve died.”

But that doesn’t dull the pain much
Of telling this life goodbye-
This thing I’ve gotten so used to,
As sweet and true as the sky.

I look at my hand in the morning.
I look at the veins in my hand.
It’s strange to find they look just like
the veins of some other man.

How many things my eyes have seen
on this road I’ve walked along!
Who knows what else they’re yet to see
After Christ has judged my song.

Paul Jennings Hill is gonna die.
That’s a bet you’re sure to win.
Dying’s a thing that’s common enough
in our fallen world of sin.