Pilgrim Talk

O thou that settest out upon The Path, false is the Phantom that thou seekest. When thou hast it thou shalt know all bitterness, thy teeth fixed in the Sodom-Apple. Thus hast thou been lured along That Path, whose terror else had driven thee far away. O thou that stridest upon the middle of The Path, no phantoms mock thee. For the stride's sake thou stridest. Thus art thou lured along That Path, whose fascination else had driven thee far away. O thou that drawest toward the End of The Path, effort is no more. Faster and faster dost thou fall; thy weariness is changed into Ineffable Rest. For there is not Thou upon That Path: thou hast become The Way.


--Aleister Crowley

Love

This morning I looked back and wondered what brought me through some of the bad times of the last three and a half years. Some of it was absolutely terrible, and I find myself pinching myself because things have changed.

I remember now, coming out of the monastery. It was early winter, and a desolate time. My two best friends came from college to visit me. They slept in my bed. I slept on the floor, and then one of us exchanged places at around six in the morning. I remember, one of them got sick on Kentucky Fried Chicken, and remember us eating a mince, not a mincemeat pie.

That was a time when I was enfolded by love. Love was very strong in the midst of darkness. The last few years and all of my life are filled with times. Love sustains me. Love upholds us.

What Matters

After so many days something should be written. And we are in the midst of Christmas. So much has happened, and so much more will be happening. I feel like I ought to write to writers, or write about writing. It's the holidays, and I've a chance to rest for the first time in a while, so I've been slow on the end of calling up Reflections and working on just how we want to publish this novel.

What is on my mind as I prepare to be a writer who has his works on paper where people can read them? As I enter this world? I'd be a fool not to consider what I am doing this for, or to whom I am writing. I think of this everyday. There are some people who write and write just to explore their feelings. They are their own audience and it is rather like talking to hear yourself talk. I do talk to hear myself talk. And I sculpt for the pleasure it gives me. Those things are mine. But writing is to be shared.

I think for everything I write, I scribble in the hope that it does someone good, someone I don't know. That is a matter of faith. My family will never read a thing I write. Or they won't understand it. My friends are no different from any other writer's friends. Most of them will never read me either. It must be that I am writing to someone I cannot see. Someone I trust is there.

I was riding the bus out of downtown, thinking of this the other day and stringing together events for a story. I thought, "That is it. Everything I tell is more or less true. In a way there isn't a thing I haven't written that has happened either to me or around me." But when I am telling a tale, I am never in it. It must be that to make an event relevant, at least as far as I am concerned, it must cease to be relevant only to me. And to a large degree removing myself from it, turning it into fiction, makes it true. And makes it matter.

Has It Really Been A Year?

I can hardly believe it, but we have been here a year now. I want to thank you. Friends, hard core readers, the folks who stop by now and again, inspirations. A year later, much to my surprise, the broomstick is still flying. I owe it to you, and I thank you. This year has been so full of adventures, twists and turns and you all have been there for me in them. May all of your Christmases be white-- unless you live in Australia-- and may all of us have more joy, more surprise, and more happiness than we've had in the year before!

Hell yeah, bitch!

Over

Often what ought to be the day of rejoicing becomes the day of... what next? I know what's next. So many things are next. I am open to so much, but now, after I have come through all the things involved in going back so to school, and after I've come through this whole year blessed, I can only lay in bed and sleep.

In a few weeks, new challenges will be beging. But that is not today, and all the old things are gone. At last, this uphill and often joyous struggle is over.

Wednesday Night

Frema,
thank you for your card and your love. Mom loved the card. No, just joking. Sooooo joking. I have to call you, but as happens, I've lost your number. I swear I'm not slighting you!

The end of the semester has something to do with this: this exhaustion bordering on madness. I feel a little mad. In both senses of the word. Today, only a few hours ago, I was at the height of study, enraptured, triumphant. Now, I am tired, chomping at the bit for tomorrow night when my first semester ends. I have come through so much, thank God, but I'm feeling insane more than anything else. I've gained so much but I have lost a lot too.

One my ex-best friends.... Yes, one of them, there are too many to count now, is getting married. I heard this third hand. Who would marry the bitch? i wondered. But the world is full of bitches and they're all slipping rings on each others fingers. This morning I awoke from a dream about another son-of-a-bitch who had been my friend, who had loved me and I had loved and the dream was so vivid. Well, he has found a bitch to love him as well.

Now that all the real issues are put aside. Now that everyday isn't a struggle and I don't have to be afraid of the very real issues I have been afraid of, my heart is free to turn to knitpicking worries, to questions of why when all these dreadful people can find someone to spend their whole lives with-- exclusively-- I cannot even find someone I'd want to spend the day with. The people I loved most are gone from me, and, what's more, I know I don't really want them to return. All this day faces and memories have haunted me, what I gave up and what I lost to move to a place that is better than where I was before.

So many are gone, but none have come to replace them.

Grace Dances

"I will adorn and I will be adorned."
"Amen."
"I will be united and I will unite."
"Amen."
"I have no house and i have houses."
"Amen."
"I have no temple and I have temples."
"Amen."
"I am a lamp to you who see me."
"Amen."
"I am a mirror to you who perceive me."
"Amen."
"I am a door to you who knock on me."
"Amen."
"I am a way to you, you passerby."
"Amen."

Fourth Night, Fourth Light

It is the fourth night of Hannukah. It is also Shabos. By five-thirty, when the sun is going down, the little altar is full of going light. What does it mean? As the semester ends and I look back on everything I've come through, and all that I know I will face in the year to come? So many thoughts in my head. So many feelings. The surprise at seeing Adam Rector again. Surprise! Surprise! From my driver's ed class, all grown up and sporty, and it turns out he is the son of one my classmates. The surprise that after years of being broke I have money and a bank account and at least for a little while won't have to worry about poverty. So many changes, so many things we have spiraled through. We, yes, I was never alone. Today at Mass I look around. This is what I always wanted. God has given me what I always wanted. Could it really have been a year ago I wasn't part of Saint James's, that I was turning my back on a part of my life that I didn't want, that didn't want me.

As the candles burn this is all on my mind. This, and so much more.

What do these nights mean as the wax melts down?

Light increasing, my God, light increasing.

Dreams and Writing

I need to keep a book of my dreamings. Now the first snows have fallen, the light is lessened. Advent approaches with all the festivals of light. Final Harvest and the Days of the Dead have ended. Soon the time of new birth will come. We are in the dark time, the quiet time, the belly of the year.

I dream and meditate on people who do not come to mind every day. At least not to the front of my mind. When often I say there is no one worth thinking of back in high school that isn't true. The fact is I could never go to a high school reunion because all the people I would want to see would never come. But of late I have it in mind to write a book that I could dedicate to those people. A Delores Smythe, a Matthew Crabtree or Andy Dyko. Stephen Donnelly. I write their names here so that I know for sure there is some place where they are recorded in the Internet world. I would dedicate something to them because they made those years good for me when everyone else was senseless.

Witch's Blood

Of late something has happened so amazing, such a change, that I had to document it. I thought maybe other people would feel it too. For themselves.

I know now, that my whole life I have wanted to be, thought I should be a great something, or a good someone, and wondered what that path should be. I always tried to walk down that road.

Suddenly the only thing I must be is who I am right now. Everything is in that. I am the road. The Way is me.

Lists

There's something about this time of year... makes me feel like making lists.

The Ten Most influential novels (or series) for me:

in the order that they come to mind...

1. The Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
2. His Dark Materials Philip Pullman
3. Giovanni's Room James Baldwin
4. The World of Normal Boys K.M. Sohnlein
5. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
6. The Red Tent Anita Diamant
7. Dune Frank Herbert
8. A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula LeGuin
9. A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
10. The Harry Potter Series J.K. Rowling

What a strange list! Some of these books a lot of people have never heard of. Some of these books I know I'll never read again. But they've left their mark on me for various reasons. What are the books that leave an imprint on you?

Taste

i saw you
waiting, slowing down
for me
expecting me to come
and i didn't come
because i didn't feel like it
why do you do that to me?
how sometimes i don't feel like you
sometimes i can't stand you
all of your words
like fingernails
and i'm the chalkboard
why won't you just be quiet?
how could you ever have been
pretty to me?
add that to an
oh-my-lord
i'm so tired of you
and i can't give anything to you
and when i'm through all of this
by myself i would give anything to
you
i would make room for you
and run my hands over you
there would be nothing more welcome
more welcome than silk the feel of your body
molded by my sculpting hands
wondering, in wonder and in awe
like a catholic before the virgin
all of my love burgeons sometimes
thinking of you
is this desire?
sometimes i cannot take you
and then sometimes
i just have to taste you

Ode

Today I saw an ass--
round and tight, firm
and confident,
full of arrogance
proud and upright,
encased in cordoroy and
and naivete
and that ass reminded me of you
and your ass so long ago
so round and full of itself
and I still see your ass in my mind's eye
with the shirt hitched up on it,
shirts never ever
fell right down over it--
that ass never hid
i meditate of that ass
and wonder how you are

Vision

We all landed on this planet, not making the rules, feeling, for a time, at least, subject to them. For the first years of my writing career (which I would stay started at eighteen) I was exploring the place I was in, the world I'd been handed, trying to understand other people, always uncertain of my own interpretation of the world, gullible enough to take people at face value.

And I think I was a person of struggle. Though I would never have classified myself as deferential, I suppose I was deferential to Rome, to the Church being the final say. How could I know when I was writing Jamnia, that this little book marked the beginning of that end. Not a year would pass before I was heavily jaded by the religion of my youth, and only a little more time could pass before I had gone back to the mystery traditions that, in deference to Rome, I had forsaken. Only a little more time would pass before I traded in being a loyal Roman for a skeptical Anglican who was religious on his own terms.

And this matters how?

I thought I was writing about my writing, not my religion. But I see the two are the same. Especially as I enter now into the actual paper publication of Jamnia. The person who wrote that was a devout Roman who felt it his task as a Catholic to disagree with his Church, to maintain a tension between himself and the Powers That Be. The author who remains is a Anglican Pagan, a bit of a gnostic, a liberal heretic. He is not struggling against any power or any doctrine. He is not chafing under any dogma because he does not believe in one. He knows God is good and God is everywhere. Very different from dogmatic faith.

And this effects my writing?

Well, yes. Because it effects my imagination. It is the difference between having an imagination that is (however grudgingly) subject to someone else's imagination. In my case the imagination of a Church was what I subjected my own to, but sometimes it is the imagination of a nation or a race. This collective imagining which demands that the individual give way to It is more like a dream than it is a vision and more like an opiate haze than a dream.

So, if in the beginning I wrote because I wanted to know, I wrote myself into a sort of knowing and it appears that now I writeto clear away the opiate haze. I don't want to impose my vision on anyone else because I don't really have a vision. Pity, isn't it. I hope, though, when I write, to prick, to slap, to sting a little bit not so that the reader may have my vision, but-- in a sharp moment of clarity-- have her own.

Hope

I'm becoming increasingly sure that one task of a bard is to be a sort of social critic. A prophet, maybe? Both terms are so loaded. One says I am coming with the fire of God, and one has me standing in the corner at the party with a martini a cigarette and a sour look on my face. But what I think I'm supposed to be doing is something much more humble. I just want to give voice to my doubts about common assumptions. I just want to suggest that maybe cherished truths are not absolute truths. I want to look at things a different way and invite other people to do the same. I am not happy about the course this country is running. I am not satisfied with the average lifestyles of American twenty-somethings. Or thirty and forty somethings either. But I am full of hope.

Third time’s the charm
For it is this third time
You have disarmed me and I remember all the times
Before
The shape of you passing me
Your smile
When you smile at me
So honestly
The set of those lips,
Waiting and wet,
Like two fruits,
Red.
Sweet I wonder
And I am so afraid of
This thunder
Distant and rumbling that rises at my horizon
After such a calm
After the quiet joys of lovelessness
And living alone

Writing Again

I am remembering someone asking me about one of my stories. He thought that somehow in them were clues about me, that to ask about the tale is to ask of the teller. The story tells about itself. And it tells about you, the reader. It is an eye, and it is mirror. Held up. Many people think that the story will tell about the storyteller.

They are wrong.

Rosh Hodesh

New Moon, New Month. After yesterday's fast I am pure. This is not liek saying I feel pure, and this is nothing, I don't think, like the Christian sense of purity. I do not feel forgiven, or justified, or better. After the last two days of the esbat, the shit is shed, the webs are cut, and I can go on to do what must be done in the next twenty-eight days. The Jewish prayer is, "May God grant us a blessed month," but it's really a blessed moon, and not month. Like the Druidic and Islamic calendars, the Jewish year is lunar. I did not shed old blood, I shed old ways, and now we move on to the new ones.

The Book and the Ignorance

Today I've thought of a new book. It will be a long time before I can even begin to sit down and write it. I read London's blog today, and about how her week ended: an SUV plowed into her car. And then today I heard about how a plane crashed in the middle of a Detroit neighborhood demolishing one house, but killing nobody. I talked to Dr. Watson, and I was telling me how his father died. I thought" a novel which begins with a plane crash in the middle of town, ends with a broadside minor collision, and the heroine laughing at her wrecked car, and has the death of a father somewhere in the middle. I would call it The Noisy Kingdom... And it would be a comedy.

They say ignorance is bliss. If that were so then America would be the happiest and not just the richest country on earth. Innocence is bliss. Ignorance is the condition we are born to, mistaking lies for truth and shadows for substance. As children it is our birthrite, but it wears out our strength to hold to this as adults. Innocence is a hard won thing, and the journey from the first state to the latter is what Christians call salvation.

To Bards and Shamans

Today at lunch, my friend. Jen, asks someone what Kabbalah is. In a church of the educated she asks someone who is not educated, and today, when I don’t feel like being rude I keep silence when he says in his bored way, “Oh, it’s just fortune telling and mysticism. Oh, he would have done so much better if he’d had the humility to say he didn’t know. These Christians and indeed, all of these religious people these days with their business suits and lukewarm religion! Or with their narrow religion.
How I tire of these people who make a god out of mediocrity and a Christ out of being middle class. Not only is their whole world grey, but they want our world to be grey too. Not only is their world a small one, but they want ours to be just as small! Let me stop before I When I hear tattoo artists speak of what they do as shamanistic, when I hear of counter cultural people who look for religious experience, divine experience far from church doors, I understand exactly what they mean.

Most people in this world are unfit for mystery. Do not tell your dreams to everyone. Do not share with the whole world your chief concerns or your heart or hearts. This is like a dragon turning up his underbelly to a knight.

To a young writer, like myself; top a shaman, to a poet, to a keeper of the mysteries: the world so desperately needs us. The world is so in need of those who can pass between the worlds and bring back healing in ritual, in story, in poetry and song. And that world doesn’t know it’s sick. For the road we walk there is so little pay off, and we may lose our way now an again. We may grow faint of heart or tired. We may even lose ourselves. No matter. London, everything has not been written yet. There is a place very deep in you where the power comes from. In you, my love, it is right beneath the surface. And if this place is in you, if it’s been building up in you like oil under the earth, for ages and ages, since before you were born, then how can it already be written. The world is filled with cheap voices, discount voices, little entertainments and easy answers. But it is waiting for something more substantial, little sister. It is waiting for your voice.

The Habit

I couldn’t get it together to work on the fantasy novel today, elections and drafty windows aside, there is the NaNoWriMo book, Eversky. Working on it I’m remembering the things on my mind.
These characters: the Laujinesse family, Jayson, his friends, I know them. I knew them. I went to school with them. When I’m writing about them I’m certainly not writing about my world. I’m writing about a world I was right beside. That world is ten years gone. Not just from me, from all of the people involved. When I take up that story again I look at it as a storyteller. There is this peculiar dance where I look at it as someone twenty-seven staring into the teenage world of these boys, where I look at it as someone who is seventeen looking into a world that isn’t really mine, that is a little better than my world, running parallel to it. But the moment of transubstantiation comes when, in writing, I become the other. Ultimately Jayson and Ryan and Scooter… all of these are me. And I remember things they said long ago, and those words echo in my brain. No, not my brain… some place else, then.

Last night, Dr. Bender said, “Many writers becomes professors to support their habit.” That’s what I am doing. That’s why I am in graduate school. Support our habit… Like we’re addicts, like what we are doing is some decadent, not quite respectable, addiction. Subversive, addictive, not exactly work.

Yes, Dr. Bender, that’s the PERFECT phrase!

First Day

Well, between Samhain and All Saints, there was a lot to do today without even mentioning the NaNoWriMo. But I have to mention it. Against all sense I have decided to write this book, and begun writing it. I have some idea where it's going. The blog looks really nice. It looks like a real book and everything. It's sort of like the web site I always wanted, and I'd better save the template because I honestly don't know how the hell I did it.

Bree! Bree! Wonderful Bree. Bree is wonderful.

No, I am not talking about the cheese.

Chew

After I've cleaned up Witch's Blood and started to get the hang of grad school, when I'm midway through working on a good novel and trying to forward my publishing career... I'm going to do something foolish. I am going to enter Blogger's story month thing. I have no idea what I'll be writing. I haven ocharacters, no plot, no nothing. I just have a sort of faith that on All Saint's Day, when the damn thing starts, the beginning of British New Year, when the spirits are out and the line between the worlds is thin, then the proper spirits will come to me and give me thier story.

I really think I'm getting in over my head.

On Writing

A lot of thoughts go through my head in a single day. Especially on writing. And then, on days like this they distill into a few lines. All week we've been looking at other author's, older authors, far more established authors in class, and the question is always, "What character are you?" or, "What do you have in common with this character...?"

Well, all of my characters are very different from me, and from each other. I was remembering an old story, written long ago about a character I would never trouble to write now. He had been born rich and and destiend for a lot and was trapped in that role, a slave to social duty. I guess I knew what mattered to me even then, when I first began writing.

My characters, my people, have this one thing in common with me and each other. I do what I want to, I follow my desire and this makes me free. And so I write now about free people.

I am the lust of the world
i am the whore who burns and turns
a girl into a woman
the stiffening cock
that turns the clock and separates
boys from men
i am the cry from heaven
that links like lovers in orgasm
the two to one
the heaven to hell
i end all divisions
i am reaching out right now
i am longing
i am...
yes, i am lusting
i will not let you fuck me
with all these sad ass expectations
and i follow one law
thou shalt not be bored
i have whored out my heart
to every flaming interest
i am reaching, i am straining
i am riding on a beast with seven snapping
heads
and i will not stop
until i have taken it all in

October leaves are falling to the ground
red and gold currency all around
God's wealth falls softly from the trees
and teaches we who live to cling
by quickly curling up
and turning brown

Labyrinth

I cannot properly go into the new day without gratitude for the one that has passed. My gratitude comes in snapshots of what I have seen. Climbing up and down the steep hills behind the woods, I met a man who was fishing and mushroom hunting. He was mad as a hatter, but most people are madder than hatters. I had the sense to wear boots and gloves though it was warm. I ended up in a ravine and had to climb out of it with hands and feet, hooking my legs around tree branches.

Walking the labyrinth, perform the spiral dance, all around me the trees were a mellow fire of mustards and deep reds. There was a little wind so the chimes were in constant song. The sky was a rare blue. It warm like God had painted it with pigments left in the heat. And as I walk this labyrinth, at the beginning of the esbat of the full moon, remembering the Mother of the Earth, who is the Earth, the bells from the Catholic church are chiming a Black Protestant hymn written by an Anglican. As I turn and turn and make the spiral, every tradition that intersects in me, comes together over me, right now, at this moment.

To quote the Hiltons sisters:

That’s

Passing

Today I pass a place I remember well. Three years ago it was icy and grey and I fell to piece there. Slowly, painfully, I put myself together again. No one else did it. I did. God helped, but I put myself together again. So I know that should I fall apart again, I will be able to once again to the work or reassembling.

endnotes

We're putting the new flooring down. While father and I moved the refrigerator, three dead mice fell out of it.

Disgusting.

Scott

Scott needs to shave.
Scott the librarian is so pale he is translucent. You can nearly see through him. It's nearly eerie except he's kind so if he's a ghost, you'd have to call him Casper. Only, Scott is very much a live, and even a little bit of facial hair looks like too much on someone that pale. Clumps of gold all over his face as he checks my fines and, upon seeing that I might be a little in trouble, clicks the override button for all the items I might be fined.

Whenever library fines magically disappear, or I'm riding he bus for free, or receiving a book voucher from the receptionist for this semester's text books even though my loans are in default, I remember that it's always a blessing to have friends in high places.

And high places are usually just on the other side of the counter.

Grace

The choir is singing:

Ave verum corpus, natum de Maria Virgine:
Vere passum immolatum in cruce pro homine...


Incense sweet and deep smelling fills the air, the congregation in making its circuit up out of chairs, down the various aisles, back to seats, the cupbearers leave the altar, leave their various stations to drain the last of the wine from brass chalices, shiny as gold. Maybe they are gold and I would rather not believe. Here, God, is the mystery. It is shapeless save the shape be round, round like eternity. It is not a doctrine or a creed but truth and love. You cannot grasp it, it cannot be touched except by touching the flesh and blood of the person in the pew beside you.

Amen

Scribbles

Scribbling in my journal. Writing in that book is what keeps me a "writer". The actual physical contact of the pen to the paper, the fingers to the pen, the scratching of the pen against the paper, the spill of the ink makes me a writer. Without that it's just fingers on the keyboard, and I am becoming a typer. I don't know that I can point to any way that my journal is "practical" except that it keeps me writing in something, sketching in something.

And what is it in me that feels the need to sketch down quickly, on this page, in poems, in notebooks, on a keyboard... life?

Notes

Watching a documentary: Real Time. Kids in a jail-slash-reform school. Three of them are in there for rape. One of them talks about coming into a woman's house and saying: "Can I have some pussy?" The woman says not in this room where my daughter is. Then they go into her room and he fucks her. That is what it was. It technically isn't rape, but it wasn't love or intercourse or anything as benign. After that he goes out and rapes her daughter. Another inmate raped chldren. He went in for an offense he commited when he was fifteen. And still there a boy who beat a girl in the head with hole bunch and then threw her on the floor and raped her.

But this is a school as much as a jail. What is the motivation behind the kindness and the mercy that makes this place work? The principal says: "When these people come out, they will be our neighbors. We will live next to these people. They need to know we're all in this together."

We need to know we're all in this together. When the interviewer ask Rasul if that old life was fun he says yes. There was nothing else to do but bad things. Coming home it's not fun to see cupboards bare, family hiding food.

When the interviewer asks what fun is now, Rasul answers: Life.

Well, today I’m not going to actually write about anything I learned in class about The Handmaid’s Tale. Or Oates or Atwood.

Today I’m going to write about church on Friday.

I’m Anglican, and you should never ask for an Anglican perspective on anything, because when Mass is over one third of the congregation will on a pro-life march, a second will attend a gay rights rally and the last third will do time between both. And we all read, so when I brought up the Handmaid’s Tale after Mass, at lunch, there were many statements about it that brought me to the heart of Atwood.

Father Paul stated, disapprovingly: "She doesn’t think much of Christianity."

I disagreed and corrected him, even though he’s in his mid-seventies and I’m in my mid-twenties. He modifed it to, "Well, she doesn’t have much to say about evangelical Christianity." He’s an evangelical Anglican. I agreed that she didn’t and said that I didn’t either. All the liberals were gone from lunch that day, and I had to hold the fort for right thinking leftists. Everyone who had read the book or seen the movie said that Atwood found fundamental Christianity a threat. I said pointed out that she never said it was Christianity, but that it might well have been. What was more, I saw fundamental Christianity as a threat. Like all fundamentalisms it’s so NOT fundamental. It is not basic. Fundamental Christianity should be, "love your neighbor as yourself," or the Sermon on the Mount. So would say a liberal. I recently watched the documentary "Fear and Trembling before G-D about the horrible treatment of gays in the Jewish Orthodox and Hasidic communities. But Rabbi Hi! llel, when asked what the heart of Judaism was gave the same response (and did this standing on one foot) as Jesus did about his message- which was also rabbinic. Fundamentalism is so good at picking and choosing what it likes, and what is of advantage to the mighty. It demonizes the other and makes a demon out of the oppressor. By now I’m sure I’ve stopped talking about the book, but isn’t that what a good book does, lead you discuss something beyond it? Something immediately in this world?

I am reading Oate’s The Faith of a Writer now, and going to the poems. Handmaid led me into a slight argument with a friend who is a Lutheran minister (he eats with us on Fridays and sometimes says Mass at our church). It was about the essence of faith. He is a good man, but his faith can be boiled down to three sentences he learned in seminary. There is nothing terribly strong or dynamic about it. I would that my faith was the faith of a writer: not easily set down, put out in poems and essays, changing, expressing itself in the world, whispered through ink on pages from my soul when it is quiet to the soul of another when he or she is all alone in her room reading.

Mobi Morality

Even before I showed Ma the sculpture of Mobi, I knew I had failed. It was a representation of Mobi goddess of transport, death and putrefication. Her symbol is the bottom feeding fish, and of old she received child sacrifice. Her delight was in the fingernails and toenails of babies because she had no nails (or babies) of her own. She is a death goddess worshipped by the Solahnese people in the fantasy I’m working on.

So when Ma said that the sculpture was cute, I knew I’d failed.

This new image is what Mobi ought to be. Ma was violently opposed to it. “I don’t like it. The old Mobi was cuter.”

Which is how I KNEw I struck gold with this new image.
Which is why I am dismantling the old Mobi.

Reading various scriptures and mythologies it becomes clear to me that we have not only left a mythic view of the world behind for a moral one, but substituted the moral one (good versus evil) for pleasant versus not pleasant. Cute versus ugly.

I think the problem the West has with God (gods, divinity, the universe) is that if it is not pretty, it is not right. If it is not cute or convenient, it is wrong. When I hear an atheist say he doesn’t believe in God because if God were real the world wouldn’t have so much trouble in it, I wonder what kind of divinity he was promised. I come from a mythic tradition where there is no promise of a cute God or a nice life. There is struggle, weariness, and the glimpse of a sublime and terrible power. Goodness is only one of its aspects. You have only to gaze at a Hindu goddess to see how in the East they understand this perfectly. You have only to read a few chapters from a King James Bible to realize that once we understood it too.

haven’t you had enough
all his bullshit and all his stuff
you give and give and he never
says he loves you
he can never say thank you
you understand? i hope you do
you can get down on your knees and pray
get down on your knees and say hail marys
and pick him berries and squeeze the grapes for his wine
or you can get on your knees and suck his balls
until he comes all over the walls
and still--


he won’t love you

this is me when i love you
you’re like my mother
i could be nursed by you
you’re like my little sister and i would nurture you
or you’re like the significant other
and i’m like the lusty brother
and i could just fuck you

Remembering

Well, I’d better post again. It’s been a while and blogger tells me my posting has gone down from an average of six a week to five a week. Um.
There have been things to do. Last week, I finished the rough draft of Common Prayers and I always celebrate the ending of one story by waiting a week before attempting another one. Once I waited a whole month, a month without writing. That was bad. But then Jamnia was what I produced after that, so maybe the month of rest did me good.
I doubt it, though. Some people have a feeling that they aren’t really doing anything, that they ought to be “doing something.” Well, when I am not writing that is just how I feel, and when I write again, then I feel like I am “doing it” though what, exactly, I am doing escapes me.

It is the fourth day of Sukkot now, and every night you are supposed to invite a different character from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, to stay with you. Usually it is one of the ancestors: Abraham, Sara… you know. But I am not really a Jew, and I am not really gung ho on bringing those ancestors into my tent. They had big enough tents of their own. So today I turn to the story of the concubine in the book of Judges, the woman whose husband left her to be raped and murdered by a whole town of men. He took her body and cut it in twelve pieces to send a piece each to the tribes of Israel. They were not avenging her, but avenging HIS lost property. I read the story so seldom that it shocks me every time I return to it. Something in me says, “This CAN’T be true. It can’t be.” It is just too much.

But, ah, but even if that one story weren’t true, there are many concubines, aren’t there, too many stories of two many girls killed like this.

So on the fourth day of sukkah we remember that woman, and light a candle for those like her.

Eversky

All this day I have been resting from most things, but not from getting the new blog ready for NaNoWriMo. It almost looks right, but there's this funky little thing with everything being centered. If I could just find a way to "uncenter" the font. This book, which has, as far as I know, no plot, is called Neversky. I didn't know it was in the blogosphere yet, and the funny thing is it got it's first comment when there was only one sentence up. Not even a good sentence. Here, at Witch's Blood, where I am working harder than ever, I hardly get comments at all. I think for a long time I let this deter me. I know I did. Well, whatever is being written, if it is good enough I suppose someone is reading.

I am getting tired. I am about to run out of juice. I'd better stop while there's a little left. I'd better take myself to bed.

The Real Thing

We may be looking for our deliverance, but it is already been sent...
-- Emily Saliers

Yesterday I finished a load of assingments, AND the rough draft of this newest novel.
There is still so much left to be done, but... one day, one hour, one week at a time.

I saw an atrocious French film yesterday. The best part was the incest scene between the
brother and sister. No, I’m not joking. Anyway, it’s about this young, rich, jaded author
who writes a book that is an instant success and... in short, an author who is not me, but
who I thought I wished I was. So I don’t want instant success? What exactly is it that I
want? Often we forfeit our power by turning away from this question, but it’s a good one.
This morning, on the full moon, I lay in bed meditating and said what I had not said in a
few weeks, “What do you want?” I have not asked myself this. Maybe because I’m afraid
that the universe will tell me I’m too ambitious. But there is a pwoer in our desire, and
jsut to open your mouth and form the phrase of your desire is to conceive.
As a writer I would prefer to last a long time than to be famous today. This first
book has taken forever just to get an e-version of it. I shake my head over what it will be
like putting it into paper. Bree, if you are reading, I need to drop you an e-mail to say do
not proof chapter four. Helen, you have been a faithful, faithful editor. Photographers for
the cover shot....? Not so faithful. I’ve had two, we’ll be making due without the
photograph. And author wants to have the perfect book, but the truth is that between the
perfect book in your mind, and the real thing you can put out, the real things is almost
always better.

Psalm

let me be your shepherd
and you’ll never want
if you follow my rod
and take my staff in hand you’ll never want
all the night I will plough with you
through the dark valley
and at the end
in the house of glory
our cups,
our love
our wine
will overflow
i can love you like that
all the days of your life

Days of Awe i i

I board the bus yesterday and say to the driver, "Happy New Year." She says, "It's early for that." I say it is Rosh Hoshanah, that is, the Jewish New Year. She looks as if this smells bad to her, and says, "I don't know nothin' about that," which can be translated, "Nothing about that funny business." It is a funny business, a new fangled holiday by a funny people out of the mainstream. Is this a little how a Jew might feel in a place like this?

The bus driver is telling me about the pool house she wants to put up around her pool, and the money she wants to spend to do this and do that, and the lottery she would like to win, and this and that and the other. She is Christian. Like me. Like everyone else. Christianity is in the water here, the hard an ancient teaching diluted into superstitions, church on Sunday, and the phrase "Jesus saves," even though nobody knows anything about Jesus, or what he's supposed to be saving them from.

Days of Awe

Yesterday I went to the river to perform tashlich. Going along the main street, past the museum you take a dip beneath the bridges like descending into the Great Mother and come out onto a park hidden from the city. The water below smells musty. I have used a ground pretzel for tashlich and the sky is bright blue ,full of sun, the bits of bread, like bits of gold scatter into the river and flow away. It is the second day of Rosh Hoshanah. I was supposed to do this on the first. Tashlich, the casting away of sin and bad fortune. But more, the casting away of the old self, the old year. And the giving of yourself to the river, to the earth, to the Mother, to God.

To begin the New Year, you must put away the old. To walk into joy and meet the beloved, you must atone, you must mend. From now until Yom Kippur are the Days of Awe, the new beginning.

Thursday I spent eight till one in the afternoon in the synagogue. Ancient words, sung from black pictures, yods and tittles traced on parchment, the letters of power given by God on Sinai. The cantor, wrapped in her tallis, chanting in my hears, the whole congregations swaying, a sea of yarmulkes, prayer shawls wrapped about shoulders. Now and again things go into English, but not often. The Ark opened, the Torahs, taken out, processed through shul to songs and shouts of joy.

Blessed art thou, Eternal our God, Sovereign of the Universe.

The shofar, blasted one hundred times, calling the soul to awake.

Maundy

what i remember
is all the old stories
from all the dark gospels
found out in the deserts
and whispered from mouth to ear
gnostic to gnostic
when I eat this bread
and drink this cup
on sunday morning
none of these distinctions-- we have been taught distinctions--
mean anything to me
there i no creed
there is no need for anything
but knowledge
and the scent of flowers on her scarf
and the memory of those who love you
and do you remember that night
when the air was balmy
jesus dancing in the garden
in a ring
and they sing and hold the torches
and the light shines on him
he is beautiful like Tiferet
like the bridegroom
in a column of smoke
and i can see him dancing
tears of joy
outweigh the fear
and a voice that whispers
sweetly
as the nails fix him
to that tree
six gold fruits dripping blood:
--He who drinks from my mouth
will be me--

Bliss

No,
hush love,
don’t listen to what they tell you
follow me
my name is bliss
hush darling,
don’t be afraid
you have always known my name
you have always known my taste
like sharp honey on the tongue,
the sight of the summer
day
i am the skill in your hands
the passion in your thighs
the dance in your legs
i make the blood wheel in your veins
you always know me
take up the sword now
do not put up with demons
now is the end of excuses
now awake from dreams of fear
under the red moon
take my hand
can’t you see i love you?
can’t you see i’m love?

The class on Tuesday night is composed half of graduate students while the other half is
undergraduates. Oh, and English majors are insufferable, especially the the young ones,
especially the impassioned ones. Those undergraduates think they know everything. We
sit around one large conference table, to horsehoes, the first made of graduates, the other
od undergrads looking right back at us. (WITH NO RESPECT!) The class wrangles over
the story,as if we were fighting for a kingdom, or religious doctrine. We fall to disruption
and shouting. Things are almost coming to blows, the blood is running high.

But, because we are English majors, a half step off of drama majors, none of this leads to
any lasting harm. Having worked ourselves into a near ire, by break time we are
laughing, ready to start thte fight again. But more than ready to fight, ready to hear, ready
to listen.

I do not know what other field is like this, probably relgion or philosophy. It must be a
humanities thing. Even if we do not all agree on a story, on storytelling, on the various
uses and intentions of the written word, we all know that the field of liertature is
important enough to bother with, exciting enough to shout about.

This makes us a strange, secret society.

Little Sister

why have they told you to stop being that way?
little sister they said your teeth were too sharp
and took them out
they called you a bitch
and made a wolf a hound
and the fullness of your belly like the fullness of the moon
is too much
they want to drain your womb
and suck away your full and beautiful breasts
next they want to tell you how to dress
and how to sit
cross your legs
and cross your heart
hope to die
hope to die
we’ll stick the needles in your eyes
and, sister,
i know how gently they lie
pretend they only do it cause they care
when they say soothing things and put a gentle
hand to your hair
and tell you to be a lady

A Writer's Work

This work is not drudgery
it is not killing me
i do not die a little each day and
hope for something better
this work
will not put food on anybody’s table
but it keeps me stable
this work is not saving anyone’s soul
but is keeping me whole

Who Am I Talking To?

On the second day of driver's ed, Zachary began telling a long animated story, and halfway through it realized that everyone else was talking, and no one was listening to him. Everyone was saying something, and none of it was being said to him. Zachary was talking, but no one seemed to be listening. But me. As the oldest I felt I had a responsibility to try to give everyone attention. It was a little like listening to all the radios playing on all the front porches of the neighborhood.

At last, Zachary said, "Who am I talking to?"

I think this is the feeling of every writer. And not all bloggers are writers. Some people journal or complain or-- yes-- even post their dull term paper on the net. Writers have journals, they have complaints. I know I have more term papers than I want to think of. But a writer does not put these up for public view. We are writing for something else. Or someone else. Or both. When a week passes with no comments, or the comments seem to make no sense, or even when feedback is great I have to ask the question: who am I talking to? And why?

Dean

And who should come out but Dean? Past the west transept of Sacred Heart is the whole section that leads into the sacristy and the porches, north and south, leading outside. I am on the northern porch, scribbling in my journal and looking at the large tree outside of the church, the one that seems to be the only relevant thing. That’s the tree I come to look at when the Mass is just too much, when it seems to have nothing to do with reality.

Dean has come out of his hidey hole n the sacristy. I didn’t even know he was here. I wave, and he comes over. We begin what is the longest conversation Dean and I have ever had. Yes, Eric is fine. It’s important that he even brings up Eric, or that I ask. “It was his birthday yesterday, we didn’t too much in the way of celebration…” And honest little paragraph that says several things about his relationship to his roommate and my relationship to him. That is, he has let me in on the roommate, the boyfriend.

I have done some thinking about this. It is not that I like Dean a lot, but that I like him at all. That means a lot. As you get older and more aware of the people you sincerely dislike, you realize how important it is just to like someone at all. Dean is honest with me. Let’s think of this: if, for some reason I had to know the most personal hidden aspects of his life, well then, I know them” just like that. I have seen him stand in church, running things and talking impressively, legs spread apart arms folded over his chest, looming. And I have seen him in a gay night club sitting on another man’s lap, having his shoulder stroked. And he had seen me writing in my precious journal. And that’s important to me. If I had one thing to tell people, one thing that defined me to myself as myself, it would be myself as a writer. And there, he has seen me as a writer. Right there. He knows it.

I’ve been lied to my whole life: by friends, by parents, by priests, by the television, by professors. The whole world is busy lying to you, and some how you have got to be wary with out being bitter. Dean is not a liar. Not to me at least. He is beginning graduate school the same time I am, going to school at night, like me, with prospects of almost gainful employment during the day, like me. Unlike me, he is not a storyteller, has never been an actor, and isn’t dramatic about any of this. He’s understated. Dean is always very Indiana, very Midwestern, thin, sort of pale, understated about the things he says. There is ambition and excitement behind him. But, like a good young white man from the heartland, he is appropriately embarrassed about both.

Tisha B'Av

After they had traveled for the waxing and waning of three moons, on the third new moon the Children of Israel reached Sinai. And if you have ever walked with God you know how it is to pass through light and shadow, shadow and light again before you reach the holy hill. God came to them in smoke and fire to give them his Law. But Israel said to Moses, “Let God speak to you and you may speak to us and declare what the LORD has said.” And God said that if anyone but Moses and Aaron stepped on Mount Sinai they would die. He said they must not approach the mountain lest his power break out and destroy them. So Moses made aliyah, that is, he ascended into the darkness alone to meet God.

Now after a time the Children of Israel, in fear, said “Where is the God who let us out of Egypt, where is Moses. He must be dead.” And so they petitioned his brother Aaron the high priest who made the Golden Calf, or the Golden Mask. And Aaron built also an altar for it, and the people worshipped this Golden Calf, and this was the Ninth Day of the month of Av, Tisha B’Av, which begins the last season of the Jewish Year. It is not wise to blame Aaron for providing a God Israel could see, nor is it just to blame the Israelites. Moses was goen, he was lost in dark cloud. They were all alone.
Often I have felt alone and abandoned of God.

How often have we all turned to Golden Calves?

Every time we do, quailing in fear, it is the Ninth of Av all over again.

And this was the first time Israel turned from God, and God smote them. Av means father, and he is the Father, and his children had disobeyed. Hebrew Fathers do not forgive, and they do not forget.

They punish.

So Tisha B’av is a time of retribution and sorrow.
After Tisha B’av comes Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the year. But Tisha B’av is the time of mourning when Israel celebrates how far he has gone form God, and all the times of separation and sorrow. Tisha B’av is a three week Ash Wednesday. The first day, the Ninth of Av—which fell this year on August 14th, is a day to eat raw vegetables and boiled eggs rolled in ashes. Jews never do a thing by halves. The entire Book of Lamentations is read. The whole nation is given up to sorrow. And as a Kabbalist, I celebrate… no… to commemorate this time: Tisha B’Av.

Tisha B’av is the time of the destruction of the Temple. When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem six hundred years before Jesus, it was on Tisha B’Av, and seventy years after Jesus, when the Romans destroyed the Temple again, this was also Tisha B’Av. So Tisha B’av is the destruction of the Holy Temple, and the scattering of the Holy people.

Ah, but it is also the beginning. Every destruction is a beginning, or why celebrate it? Modern Judaism would not exist, sadly, if the Temple had not been destroyed and the diaspora occurred. And it is true that Judaism really would not have begun if not for that first exile under the Babylonians. This was when most of the Tanakh and much of what is now called Judaism took a solid form.

And the meaning of this? A deep meaning, for in these three weeks as my life goes from one thing to another, I am heartily aware of my own temples and idols that must be destroyed, have been destroyed, and of all the things that are lost. We have all felt the sting and the smite of God’s hand. Now is the time to deal with this. And now is the time to make aliyah, like Moses, and rise into the dark cloud to meet what we feared. God said, “”They will die if they touch the mountain! But if they do not touch the mountain they will never know God. That is much worse. They will spend their life chasing calves.

in the beginning that bitch-- that cross eyed hag, screamed creation into being
don’t act surprised--you always knew it was that way. They took you and locked you in
sunday school and told you it was an old man because that’s the story old white men like to tell
but you know it was Her and now she haunts your dreams and steals your seed and
screams in your ear and that’s why shit’s the way it is.
dress her up and call her Wisdom, call her Mother Mary
but Astarte is still quite happy to take your children and the red on her lips
is not from revlon. No
denying her only makes her all the more frightening
and like any woman of any good character she will not be denied
but
in the begnning
in the beginning
with a note, with a prick, with a single
“ah!” the song began and grew louder and louder and went to a blinding scream--
you thought-- the light, how sweet is light--
a blinding radioactive scream that shattered everything that lived
only nothing lived
and that’s how everything began

old jews, old jews, we’re all old jews
old jewish men they saw Her hand and made it look like theirs
fathers and sons, fathers and sons
and holy spirits, threes in one
the Catholic church, down the street
on sunday morning must repeat
i do believe i do believe

but crossed eyed hags must be received.

and what did she do before she screamed?
for years and years she sat alone and kept no company but her own
and where she sat was darkness, and it was good and she called it nothing but preferred
it that way
and they etell you bullshit about the light, and having you running to it
but there was none of it. She did want it. Not back then
and under raven wings she brooded, floated over water and exuded everything you know or are
afraid to know. She made the stairs, she made the stairs that spiral down to
your nightmares
she made the snares, she made the snares and punched black holes like polar bears
in the screen of the whole wide world
she rode the snake, she rode the snake and then she did not hesitate to fuck the snake to fuck the
snake and if you ever really take a notion to stare into Her face
you’ll have to scream and then--
that-s when we run and make up something comforting
and become old jews, old jews, we’re all old jews
old jewish men they saw Her hand and made it look like theirs
fathers and sons, fathers and sons
and holy spirits, threes in one’
the Catholic church, down the street
on sunday morning must repeat
i do believe i do believe

but crossed eyed hags must be received.

they make a man twice as scary take the root and take the berry, worship not these other gods
but follow me on canaan’s sod, the only thing i want from thee is faith and love
unendingly
all i want is your only son
slain on an altar
everyone must prove their love to me-- you loved me faithfully
we’ll let him live
the christians say-- in exchange you can have mine
all just, sweet fathers would do the same
sacrifice their boy who came to the slaughter, as a lamb
and isn’t that sweet, here again
a father who killed his only son and made you drink his blood
it’s done-- the height of religion and a white man’s need
but the hag still needs to be received


old jews, old jews, we’re all old jews
old jewish men they saw Her hand and made it look like theirs
fathers and sons, fathers and sons
and holy spirits, threes in one’
the Catholic church, down the street
on sunday morning must repeat
i do believe i do believe

Auschwitz and armeggedon
school house shoot out at eleven, three crusades and bishops councils
crucifix, remember Rounceville
bloody ice cream, lemonade
the poor, unfortunate chambermaid
who on her knees cleaned up the floor
and on her knees, she did much more and more and more
than she was paid
now wipe your mouth sweet chamber maid
and you with all your Catholic guilt
who held the chalice and then spilt
your seed in a laundry room somewhere
with the girl you met behind the stair
and Protestants Zwingli, Knoxie John
for all their rationale and song, tossed in their beds and they were fucked
by Lillith till she’d had enough
and spewed out demons from her crotch
who sailed in ships and minds they tossed
and witches burned
and niggers hung and churches
sang old funeral songs
and God became a dreadful man
no smiling here, no rhyming.... no, and the whole pattern is lost.
ashes, ashes, ashes, and green tattooed numbers
and the feel of your tattoo, and the feel of your tattoo
and three hundred years later in this room the feel of your tattoo, and the warmth of your skin
and the warmth of your sheets
in this sexy room
the serpent blooms
and the hag screams again

old jews, old jews, have you heard the news
that everyone of us is an old jew
and fags who take it up the ass
you know that hate has got to pass
the fags, the fags, the fags, the fags
but each one of us takes it up the ass
sooner or later
in this life
and believe the lie that paradise
is bought at a price, bought in blood
from a man like a nigger hanging from wood
old jews old jews
and catholics too
on sunday morning they repeat
i do believe i do believe

but

the screaming hag will be received

When Annie comes to visit she brings two bottles of white Merlot and a case of Labatts. We drain the wine and finish half the case in a night, laughing and smoking and drinking until one side of my face is numb. Often I go to visit people and have the dullest time in the world. I’ve even gone to visit folks in large cities and been bored out of my mind for my entire visit. When Annie comes we sit on my floor in my room with a little bit of liquor and some Burger King and have a great time. I guess it’s the person. Or the people.

When a friend comes to visit, especially one who’s not normally around, I remember how odd I am. I remember because Annie points it out, laughing. What’s that? Oh, yes, I suppose keeping your socks and underwear in your desk is strange. I guess most people don’t keep a coffee pot in their closet. When someone says, “Want coffee? “ And you slide open the closet door to reveal it percolating…. Yeah, that is weird.

She must be back by the afternoon, so I go to church alone. I had contemplate not going at all, but knew I would regret it. Mass in a large Catholic church can be considerably improved when one is hung over. It’s even better when there is no seating left, so you hang around in the vestibule looking at the ceiling and singing hymns loudly to yourself. Dean was there. Apparently Notre Dame is much like a roach motel (or like my own alma mater for that mater) Once most students come in, they can never really seem to get the fuck out. I’m not complaining. I hoped he’d be around. Did I talk to him? No. Did I want to or need to? Not really. Did I just want to know he was still here? Yes. Does that make sense?

It does in my world.

The Mass seemed to last three times as long, but I liked it. I did not like my headache. I did not like not like not being able to find the aspirin until later that day.
Later that day I sit in bed smoking cigarettes and drinking Labatts while I drift off to Joseph Campbell videos from the public library.

School starts next week. My God, can you believe these people would actually not only let me earn my Masters, but be trusted with TEACHING kids? Tsk, tsk, those poor fuckers don’t know what they're in for.

I dreamed of many things last night, most of them only pertinent to me and all of them heralding good things. But what may interest you, or scare you, is that you were there. In
my dream. You were walking around my apartment, all over the place, too big to beallowed, just as I remember.

Well, anyway, I had just talked with one of my professors, and as I ran, excited about some news, into the kitchen I stumbled and looked down to see I’d accidentally kicked you in the head. You had been sleeping in the middle of my kitchen floor and now you looked up at me, little brother, blinking and hurt. I didn’t stoop to stroke your head or say that I was sorry. I didn’t ask if you were okay. No, I just looked down at you and said--
though there was concern in my voice (I thought) “You should be more careful where you lie down.”

And I remember how your transparent green eyes looked at me with hurt and shame. And on waking I realize that was how it always was between us...

SONG IN THE BLOOD- Jacques Prevert, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

there are great puddles of blood on the world
where is it all going? all this spilled blood?
is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk?
funny kind of drunkography then,
so wise,
so monotonous,
no,
the earth doesn’t get drunk
the earth doesn’t turn askew
it pushes its little car regularly, it’s four seasons,
rain, snow, hail, fair weather,
never is it drunk
it’s with difficulty it permits itself from time to time
an unhappy little volcano
it turns,
the earth,
it turns with its trees, its gardens, its houses
it turns with its great pools of blood
and all living things turn with it and bleed

it doesn’t give a damn the earth
it turns
and all living things set up a howl,
it doesn’t give a damn,
it turns
it doesn’t stop turning
and the blood doesn’t stop running

where’s is it going
all this spilled blood?
murder’s blood, war’s blood,
misery’s blood, and the blood of men tortured in prisons,
and the blood of children calmly tortured by their papa and their mama
and the blood of men whose heads bleed in padded cells
and the roofers blood if the roofer slips and falls from the roof
and the blood that comes and flows and gushes with the newborn
the mother cries,
the baby cries,
the blood flows
the earth turns
the earth doesn’t stop turning,
the blood doesn’t stop flowing

where’s it going all this spilled blood?
blood of the blackjacked,
of the humiliated,
of the suicides
of firing squad victims
of the condemned
and the blood of those that die
just like that
by accident

in the street a living being goes by with all his blood inside
suddenly there he is,
dead
and all his blood outside
and other living beings make the blood disappear
they carry the body away
but it’s stubborn blood
and there where the dead one was, much later
all black
a little blood still stretches
coagulated blood, life’s rust, body’s rust
blood curdled like milk, like milk when it turns, when it turns like the earth like the earth
it turns with its milk, with its cows,
with its living, with its dead,
the earth that turns with its trees, with it’s living beings, with its houses
the earth that turns with marriages, burials,
shells, regiments, the earth that turns and turns and turns
with its great streams of blood.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO YAHWEH?

Such is the nature of comments, and the nature of all things in general, that my friend Jenny’s statement got me thinking about so many other thigns I hadn’t initially been thinking
too much about when I wrote the blog passage to which she was responding.
I began Kabbalah study around the same time I was reading God by Alexander Waugh. The point he makes in the book is an essential point to reading the Hebrew Scriptures, one that slapped me full in the face:
Remember Yahweh? Remember the desert god who lived on a mountain top and told Abraham to sacrifice his child on Mount Moriah JUST BECAUSE HE WANTED TO FIND OUT IF ABRAHAM WOULD DO IT? Remember the guy who helped Rebekah lie to her husband to get Jacob his inheritance, and let Satan bump of Job’s kids for the sake of a
wager? Remember the Yahweh who opened the earth and swallowed any Israelites who argued with Moses and Aaron? The Yahweh who bumped off the Amelakites and sent bears after children because they made fun of the prophet Elisha for being baldheaded?
Remember him? He was vain, megalomanical, often detestable, inscrutable but... ah,not for the faint of heart. And never boring.
What’s more, he was a mythical God. He was A VERY REAL GOD.

The ancient Hebrews told their experience of God mixed with thier own personal prejudices, and this became the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings: the Tanakh. To a Christian, be he Protestant, Catholic, be she either liberal or conservative, this set of writings is called “the Old Testament” a title indicating it’s uselessness, and usually ignored except for
when it comes time to pull an obscure, often racist or sexists comment out of its contexts and into the modern world.

I have said, “Do you remember? Do you remember?” and given a long hosts of the attributes of Yahweh, but most Christians will have to confess they certainly DON’T REMEMBER Yahweh doing these things. The mightiest scholars of Jewish Scripture in the Christian world tend to be laymen, often outside of the ministry or active church participation. Most Christians remain woefully ignorant of Jewish Scripture, which is a mystery considering it composes the bulk of the Bible. We are, quite frankly, embarrassed by Yahweh. We have made for ourselves a god who is all good, all knowing, all the time, without flaw and... completely alien to our experience of life which is full of flaws. The Jews were dealing with the world they knew and divinity as they experienced. Often the writers of the Scriptures were irreverent as we know reverence. Many of them paint God in a flatly nasty light. The authors of Scripture are often far more like the old world equivalents of Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolfe and Tennessee Williams than any priest, or for that matter, modern rabbi. And they were writing with humor. Yes, a few Jerry Falwells may have had the last say, but they did not have the first, and their words are not the ones you hear overwhelmingly.

Why is it important to approach the Bible as a Jew? Firstly, because Jews wrote it and who reads it in a vivid fashion still. Secondly, because this was just the way how Jesus approached Scripture and if we are to understand Christianity, truly, we’d better understand what Jesus talked about. For in the end it was Tanakh he was preaching.
Well, then the question is really: how do we approach this book? I would say approach it as a Jew. If the Bible is repugnant--and in the end analysis even your most conservative Christian will have a problem with Yahweh--it is because it has been read in the wrong way. To an observant Jew the Tanakh is not an old book, a long prologue to the Gospels. It is the Gospel. Studying Torah is salvation. It is God’s gift to the world, and it is alive not when read in a cursory fashion, but when read in a lively way, taking it seriously, seriously enough to debate it, disagree with it, reshape it’s words. In Kabbalah there is the idea of playing with letters. Often in rabbinic tales rabbis make the words of Torah fly about the
room and change patterns. Whatever miraculous or mystic implications those tales may have they possess one practical lesson for anyone who would take the Bible seriously:

Do not be afraid to get your hands dirty!

thank god!
i had begun to think i’d never see you again
i had begun to put that hope far far away
and then, there you
who i love dearly
were only a few paces away
and you did catch my eye
as you were walking by
or was it the other way?
whatever
love and friendship
honesty and openness were in that gaze
one simple look,
one little smile from you
opens up the world of possibilities like that day
two years ago when i walked in the building and there
like my old friend you stood waving at me
and do you remember when you twirled that broom
thinking no one saw?
and you dropped it
it was All Saint’s Day
and though the rest of them missed it
this saint saw you
i turned away before you caught my eye
but this last time
i did not turn away
and you…
you caught me
you have me.

today i saw you but i turned away
you think i hate you only
i’ve already said all there is to say
and no other words will conquer the silence
of your tongue
there is no way i can take us back to what is gone
when you held me and i held you and
there was love and hope between us
but you thought i was a saint
and i thought you were reliable
and being with you took me through so many
trials and yet
whenever i see you from the corner of my eye
or looking back at me
i
cannot help but love you

I wish neither to be called an activist or a liberal. I wish to be a Christian. I would be content to attend Mass, make few waves, say very little, take out my teeth and sip my tea by eight o’clock. Only I cannot. This faith compels me to say and write things which I feel people should already know anyway.
On one side of the country the Catholic governor of New Jersey admits not only to having an adulterous affair, but an affair with another man. He speaks of all the pain and confusion he experienced growing up and how he has finally come to terms with his homosexuality, but is now resigning from office. On the other side, an order comes down in the state of California, that the four thousand plus gay marriages performed by the mayor of San Francisco are now invalid. And now it comes again to my attention that, out east, there are splits in my very own church over the ordination of our first openly gay bishop. Gene Robinson. Whole parishes have divided. Dioceses have formed divorcing themselves from the Episcopal Church.
But for all of these great matters happening far away it boils to what is before my eyes in South Bend.
For the first time in a long time I saw Dean in church (The Catholic one that was my old parish) on Sunday morning. Two years Dean mowed the lawn, kept the ground, cleaned the church, laid out the hosts, cleaned the chalices, led people to their seats, swept the porch, exhausted himself as a servant in that house. But I never saw him attend as a member of the parish and only last weekend did he come with his boyfriend. They ducked in and ducked out, careful to show little sign of affection for each other. As much as I—now not even Catholic—complain about the little welcome I find there, there was even less for Dean. I feel.
And now we come to the core of the issue. When, in the churches, we speak of gay rights we make it all very rhetorical. We keep it up in the air. We talk about gay people as if there were “out there”. But the gay people “out there” are not the ones we are concerned about. Not really. The only gay person who cares about what Orthodox Judaism has to say about homosexuality is a gay Jew. The only gay man who cares about how the Catholic Church treats gays is a gay Catholic. I am not talking about us taking a radical or an unbiblical stance toward homosexuals. No: I am saying that we must respect our brothers and sisters beside us in the pews who happen to be homosexuals. The spirit in most churches and mosques and shuls in one that shows little respect for a large segment of people beside us in the pews, behind us in the choirs or, for that matter, above us in the pulpit.
I have heard a lot of rhetoric spewed by conservatives about what God says about homosexuality. God says a great deal about a great many things, but I find very little in Scripture he said about gays. In fact, Jesus said nothing. And there are many people who like to say—my bus driver told me this—that God doesn’t like gay people, like gay things. Well, maybe God talks to them and tells them these things, I don’t know. All I know is that God does like a fair person, a just person, a heart full of charity and loving kindness that does not fear things different from himself.
I know this: In the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, Christ gives a parable wherein he divides all mankind between goats and sheep. The goats receive condemnation and the sheep salvation and joy. The test for who is a goat and who is a sheep is not how much they tithed in the church basket on Sunday, or how good of a Baptist, Catholic or Anglican they were. What it boils down to is” When you saw the least of your brothers and sisters, did you treat them as if they were me? Because they were.”

Now I would ask this question to certain people: When you stand before God: and you will—we all will—and he asks you why you didn’t recognize him in people who were not the least, but, in many cases, the best of his brothers and sisters, and the only reason you chose not to recognize Him in them is because they were gay: in that hour, before God, what will you say?

She Said to Solomon

lover,
so close i'd call you father, brother,
brother it's no bother
don't hesitate to come to me
as day follows the morrow
so when you leave i am left all hollow
the space between these young thighs
sighs for the memory of you
longs to encompass you
i am all like your private house
the door wide open
waiting for you come inside me
and this room at evening
under the white blue moon
is just too big, this bed too empty
unless you come and fill it.
your scent is better that the musk of perfume
your scent is better than the heated garden in late June
your body,
over me
is my delight

It is not penitence that I have trouble with. Penitence is necessary. It is the Catholic spin that it was given while I grew up. Maybe a sping that is all over Christianity. That there is shame and lots and lots of sorrow in pentinece. That penitence has anything to do with feeling bad. That if you only feel guilty enough and make the right ceremonies, then you have repented. If you begin to feel better about yourself, the nthe penance was real.

Ah, but this is all bullshit. Tonight at early (early, early) morning prayers I read of the concept of return in Kabbalah, that the right heart is the heart that is always returning to God, and as I read about this I am filled with the same longing and the same prayer I was when I began to read the Quran. (You must always begin Quran by saying the phrase: "In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate..."

The prayers that well up out of the heart are: purify, bring peace, bring peace, purify desires.

Growing up I was taught that if we prayed for these things, God would give them.

It is only now that I am beginning to think that what God really intends is for to not only desire these things, but for us to do them ourselves. Peace and love are what we must cultivate with hard work, not what God hands out to people who beg enough for them.

I thought: there is no time to write this down. There are things to do. But it is just turning two in the morning and this busyness has cost me my joy and my sanity for the last few days. It seems the busier I get, the less time I make the less time I have. And then, maybe we can actually MAKE time. For it seems when I stop a while, to acknowledge the world, there is always time and peace enough to get done that which needs to be done.

So here I am at one of my favorites times. Early, early in the morning. A steady rain shot with pan flashes of lightning is breaking the unwelcome weather. I am still coughing from a bit of lemon cake that went down a half hour ago, and in her sad voice Patty Griffin is singing from the CD player

Isn't it hard sometimes?
isn't it lonely?
how i still hang around here
and there's nothing to hold me...

THE NICENE CREED

I don’t really like saying it, and usually when the time to recite it comes, I’m not inside of the church, I’m in the vestibule writing in my journal. Today I was in a pew, with several other people. I chose not to say it. I don’t care for the Nicene Creed. I’ve never felt right about a whole house full of people muttering a pat statement of things they believe in—amazing, incredulous things—as if this matters.

Around the fourth century, which is to say when Christianity had bee around for a good three hundred years—several things. It became first acceptable, then fashionable, then crucial (if you wanted to escape death) to become a Christian. Every bishop and every church began fighting—in a most un-Christian manner—about whose Jesus was the right one, those who lost were killed or denounced, the scrolls and holy books powerful people didn’t like were banned, the ones that were liked became the Bible and any jackass could be a Christian.
And now any jackass is.
And after that , to make it nice and simple, so that no one could disagree, a bunch of disagreeable bishops got together and drew up the Nicene Creed. If everyone could agree to this, everyone would be a Christian. Simple as that.
And yet, for three hundred years before this, Christians raised the dead, worked miracles, witnessed the power of God and were held in awe (often mixed with fear and repugnance) by the people around them. For three hundred years before anyone mouthed the words “I believe” or had a definite doctrine or dogma there was something that definitely held Christians doggedly together. They gave their lives for something. They loved something more than the world, and it is not contained in the cold lines of the creed recited every Sunday. Belief is not enough.
And over fifteen hundred years later we have Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, just to name a few, who all agree to this Creed and yet don’t seem to agree with each other (let alone love each other) at all. The Catholics split from the Orthodox over a single word in it, but the Orthodox have this creed too.
As we progress into the twenty-first century anyone who ever thought Jesus meant anything to them might want to concentrate less on “I believe, I believe” and more on, “I love, I love, I dedicate, I am dedicated. I know. I know.”

Oh, you old drunk motherfucker, fat and sightless in all of your ways,
groping like a worm through the shit you made, jealous and malicious over the shit you are, the
shit you were, the shit you ever shall be
world without end
Amen
why is it a crime to wrench a man’s throat open
and wouldn’t the police understand if I dipped you in lye
if i ripped out your eyes
slowly
you bastard
shut the fuck up
i’m talking now
and how would you like it if i carried out my dreams
ripped you into seams
i suppose you thought i’d sit silently
silently, for one year and one half i listented to motherfuckers
was fucked over by motherfuckers
sons and daughter motherfuckers
little baby motherfuckers
fuck that shit
next time you’ll get lit
i would like to ram a car through every asshole near and far
i would like to make you pay
for all the bullshit you’d like to say
if would take forcep and prong
just to rip out your fucking tongue
and i would laugh you all the way
to the hospital that way
the Morrigan is high tonight
don’t piss me off
get out my sight.

Good night.

This was the love we shared
Tenderly like being ripped open
I pretended that you never cared
And you could not seem to leave me alone
I set you all on fire
You walked the wire
You spoke on pulpits to testify to me
And my
Love was rat poison
It made you curl up
And it made you scream
And you
You were unable to
Make me come
To make me cream

This was the love the that we had
You would slap me
And I’d make you mad
You’d throw a table
And I’d make a scene
I’d get the blow torch and you’d start to lean
Into the fire
Into the fire
And I
Was like your whiskey
And were like the drunk
And I was the Jim Beam bottle
You threw to the floor with a thunk

This was our love
Soft,
Like back seat fucking
This was the passion you burned for
Like the bishop for an altar boy
You thought I’d alter you
You thought there’s something in me
That was something like you
You spoke about all these deeds
You were never up to my speed
You never met my needs
By I thought I had to meet yours

And I
Was your confession
You whispered me into your rosary
And I was your emission
When you dreamed I caught your wasted seed
And this love
Was so nasty
It tore you up and split your shit in two
And now
Whenever you see me
Your face is red because the time that I fucked you

TENDERLY… LIKE BEING RIPPED OPEN

I finally faced my fears, or began facing them, and opened up the first of the two volumes I have of William Blake. I didn’t make it past his engravings. I was sucked in by them without getting to the poetry. It’s popular for teenagers to read “Tyger Tyger” and say how much they love Blake, but that’s just the tip of his work. Blake, like Yeats and Milton, was an epic poet, and like Yeats and other British authors of the last two centuries, his poetry embodied a complex mixture of philosophy and spirituality that evolved from a mixture of Christianity, British mythology, Greek though, and Judaism.
Like the Jewish Kabbalah, Blake’s work, and Yeats’s comes out of a dream. It is told with eyes half closed and heard in a half waking state. Blake’s illustations and poems are visceral, sometimes frightening. When he creates from what he has read in the Bible, he does it like a Kabbalist. Scripture is an untold treasure house of poems and myths, lust dreams and nightmares. What he produces is neither didactic nor comforting. There is no propaganda. To him the Bible was not handbook, but soulbook, and what he had heard and read from it is etched on his soul. So the art he produces is real.
There is a lesson here—all about the bringing forth of story. My worst work is “TV show work” reading a myth or an article, hearing someone tell me something, and knocking it off, doctoring it up and pasting it together to manufacture a cheap story. But real story, and it’s inherent visions, heavens and nightmares “come up” they come forth like Lazarus from the grave or oil up out of the earth. They come up from the insides after you have consented to let yourself be opened.

Reading Kabbalah Naked...


It’s almost two in the morning. I told myself I’d be in bed by now. But I’m still up and writing and there is so much more to write. The air is warm and thick tonight. The world is full of a thick darkness. I can’t come to the end of what I want to write before I climb back into bed. I’ve set to writing a long and rambling poem, totally blasphemous and slightly pornographic.
Kabbalah takes you into the place of terrors and the land of nightmares, and when I have been with Kabbalah I can see into that place and write out of it. There are warnings of too much study of Kabbalah, too much looking into the light or the darkness or what have you. But the truth is the smallest glimpse has you looking and looking, making connections, synapses snap together. It is sitting down to read the Old Testament in a very different way, freed from what keeps most Christians in the modern world from reading scripture: that they are SUPPOSED TO. Not that Ezekiel contains the finest stream of consciousness poetry along with Isaiah and Wisdom, not that the tales are some of the most engaging anyone will ever read.
And of course this attitude that does not allow for the Hebrew Scriptures to be taken as story and poem and sung record, but as rule book, comes from a CHRISTIAN and RATIONALISTIC understanding that story is unimportant, that stories are fancy and fancy is lie.No, story is absolute and infinite truth, layer upon layer of truth, the only way we can say what is without limiting it. Because, in a myth we are already knowing that what we say is limited. In a tale we are already saying things are contrived and so there is no deception in it.
And still you will say: how can a story be infinitely and absolutely true if it’s “just a story” and there are other facts that contradict it? If you ask that you have not been paying attention. Myth is infinite and absolute because and not despite its truth never being ultimate or exclusive.

dedicated to Jackie Nelson...

you know who you are...


with him you’ll always wonder how real love might have been
but with me--
here’s the downer

you’ll never walk straight again

Don’t you know how filled with love i am for you? if i didn’t love you so purely,
like pure sulphur or unmixed radium, good whole uranium
i wouldn’t want to fuck you so badly
i wouldn’t need to fuck you until i was at the core of you, until over you and around
you all there was would be me and you would ever see me as the secret high priest
telling you eat my body and you will live forever, drink and drink and you won’t die
i’d never want us to exhaust ourselves in each other and on the bed and on the table
and in the shower,
in the car for an hour,
in deep private and in public
and i would not falter
to think of us behind the church altar

love,
this is how i love
there are no doves or angels singing

but demons howling as you take me, rake me with your press on fingernails on my back and
drum my ass until we pass
out.
Turn the light out
don’t you see i’m still an innocent man? innocent of shame,
pure enough to make you scream my name
to fuck you over and over again.

with him you’ll walk with your head up high
with him you’ll walk with your nose in the sky
you’ll never know passion or truth with him

but with me you’ll never walk straight again.

Kabbalah

The study of Kabbalah hinges on a truth that most Westerners: Christian, non-Christians, conservative liberal, creationists, evolutionists would simply not understand about myth and story. Not that the Bible is a different sort of myth and story, or that myths are a SORT OF TRUTH but that stories are true and everything is real, therefore the Scriptures are read on many levels and all of these levels are held to be true. American religious thought is sadly shallow and often centers around two badly educated people arguing about if evolution happened or not, or did Jesus REALLY feed five thousand people. Kabbalistic thought is mystic and slightly more sophisticated.
Did God make the world is six days? Of course not. You know better. Of course he did that’s what the story says? What the story says means something different? What is God? What is a day? Are all appropriate answers with question upon question. Kabbalah is the serious initiation into God’s Torah. I use a Hebrew Bible for it.
Much of it does not center around a Bible, but around a book which had never been fully translated: the Zohar. The Zohar reads like Allen Ginsberg’s' Howl meets Green Eggs and Ham attached to the Gospel of Thomas and The Story of O. Men waste their semen in sleep and are raped by demons. Wives cook the resulting children and eat the them for dinner. Mysteries are unsolved but produce still more questions.
Kabbalah is best studied in your sleep, in the passions of the body. It comes to life in your visions and in your dreams.
Kabbalah is not Bible Study. Bible study centers on the idea of reading a text in the hopes of “getting it”. Bible study is a chance for you to expound upon “how you feel” about this passage or prove that it proves what you believe. Both are fruitless tasks, completely different from Kabbalah which presumes that very few conclusions are definite, and translates to English as the phrase” that which is received.” You cannot study Kabbalah. You must receive it, and sometimes you receive very little. Kabbalah is not studied. It is dreamed. It is hearing the Bible for the first time and realizing that it is a series of tales fit only for children. Hence why Christ said you must be a child to receive the Kingdom of God.

Cursing Psalm

Goddamn Joseph Daley!
Goddamn him Goddamn him!
Goddamn Aileen Cokely!
Goddamn her fat ass and her horrible wardrobe. Goddamn that little slut, Catherine!
Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!
Goddamn Notre Dame’s undergraduate program for making such little bitches.
Fuck them all.
May they go to hell! Let them burn in hell!
They are in hell! Let them take their fucking hell from
the rest of us.
God fucking damn them all!

Goddamn Joe deCant! Goddamn Gerlac O’Loughlin, Goddamn Vincent Bataille, Goddamn Tim
Kelly, Goddamn Luke Armour! Goddamn! Goddamn! Goddamn! Goddamn all of these fuckers!
God fucking damn them. God damn people who hide behind the cross of Christ and you
know--you KNOW they don’t fucking believe in it.

Goddamn the little ushers at mass on Sunday! Goddamn the Folk Choir! Singing those songs
they know they don’t believe! Goddamn the priest for trying to snowjob the fuck out of us. God
damn the servers, esepcially that little fucking prick with the glasses!

Goddamn! Goddamn! Goddamn! Goddamn them all!




2.

Goddamn the war in Iraq!





3.
What is curious is all the things I do not wish to damn. Surely there are other people, places,
things, institutions that I am not happy with. And yet, I have no wish to damn them....




4.
Goddamn global warming!
Goddamn Saddam Hussein!
Goddamn George Bush!
Goddamn NAFTA!
Goddamn Roe V. Wade!
Goddamn the fact that sodomy is still a crime in Texas!
Goddamn all the men who fucked over my female friends.

Goddamn all the men who fucked over my gay friends.

Goddamn nuclear meltdowns! Goddamn forty-thousand children dying of starvation everyday!

Goddamn all of this shit!

5.
Goddamn that Tibet is still not free!

6.
Goddamn the bastard who fired my brother, Nick! Goddamn him roving around like the Son of
Man with no place to lay his head while the birds have the air and foxes have their holes.
Goddamn that Bill is in Arizona when I need him now.
Or would like him here now!

Goddamn the Devil!
Goddamn whatever he did to make all the people I hate into the people they became.
Goddamn whatever turned you and you and you into what you are so that we are at war. So that
we cannot be at peace. I am a Holy Peace, not a Holy
Let’s-sit-down-close-our-mouths-and-fucking-pretend-they’re’s-not-a-problem!
And that’s why,
ironically,
we won’t be having peace.


Why we’re at fucking war!





7.
Goddamn this fucking war!
Kevin,
I hate the fact that I hate you.




8.
And the congregation says: “Selah!”


9.
And King David having slain his tens of thousands lays down his sword and says, “Shalom,
shalom, Amen.

And I say:

Part 10.

God bless Rachel
and bless Griffin
and Cody playing outside their house, secure in their love.
Love still pure,
all of seven,
may they possess the love of seven year olds their whole life long.
It is the love of seven year olds which will stand against all this darkness.

Bless my mama who just took her dialysis bags out--I can hear her doing it--though she
know’s it’s easier for me.
Bless my papa who still ain’t bought coffee
Bless Linda, and Joni and Sarah at the library, bless the public transit system, bless the
sun ,the moon ,the trees who talk to me if I listen, the sweet eternal wind.

God Bless me.

Bless all my brothers and sisters. The ones who agree to be my brothers and sisters.
Bless our tears for all the motherfuckers who hurt us.
Bless the motherfuckers who hurt us.
Bless us when we are hurtful motherfuckers.

FINE

Everyone here will do well. I know it. Now it’s evening. The day is ending and I am thinking of all of my friends. Annie, I know you will get past this crap. You’re so strong and you keep on loving. Frema, you know I cannot thank you enough for all the hard work you do for me, after yu have done the hard work at school and the hard work at the office. I know you will be exactly the writer you want to be and Andrew, you may not know it, but your very desire is making you the writer you need to be. In time you’ll know everything you need to do. I know you’re thinking: but I’ve already given things time. Give it more time. You can’t make a thing happen before it’s time. There’s no good from that. Trust me. David, you really have no idea how good a guitar player you are, and that’s your trouble. You idolize other people too much and don’t understand your skill. Once you trust your voice and find your vocal range (which is probably a lot higher that you’d like it to be) you will soar and no one will be able to stop you. Everyone will idolize YOU. How does that sound?

HOME

The sun is high at six in the evening as the train pulls into South Bend. For the last half hour of the ride it has raced along the tracks, across the green fields and through the trees and the little hidden rivers. As the train turns into our city we all look out on it and at the setting sun as if we’ve never seen a Walgreens, never seen a Masonic Lodge, never seen a landing strip before. We are all filled with wonder and gladness to return home.
No matter how good the trip was, no matter how enjoyable the journey to friends or place may have been there is nothing like the journey home and the walk into one’s own house. There is no relaxation like that the body takes when the feet plant themselves on the floor and seem to reach, like plant roots into the ground and draw up strength from being in this place: home.
People who have never loved their home don’t understand. People who have never been rooted to a palce cannot know what this is like. To come home and say, “New York was nice, yes. But it wasn’t South Bend. To travel to Amsterdam and say, “Well, yes, there were plenty of museums and the canals were lovely. But you can’t get two packs of Marlboros for four dollars at the Speedway gas station.”
Americans are addicted to rootlessness and in love with places they don’t belong. We are supposed to like our big cities and our individual lives and run from our families and the places that sustain us. But two days from Chicago were two days I couldn’t see the sky, and felt disconnected from the land. The neighborhoods on the North End now aren’t like the old neighborhoods, or like my neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else and everyone’s sister and mother and grandmother, where everyone is tangled together in invisible webs. Here, in my city there are buses and trains and cabs but courtesy is not simply a formality. You WILL see this cab driver again. So you’d better behave. This bus driver is your girlfriend’s cousin. So you are connected. Everything is related to everything. The woman at the cigarette shop with not charge you for what you bought today because she likes you. The librarians will wave your fines. If you ask a waitress for free dessert she will think about it a moment, and then come out with one. Money is not quite as powerful as sheer decency. On the busy streets of down town lawyers wave to you, the trolley drivers lean out their windows and shout to you. You must give to the bums because, yes… they know you. You are wholly responsible, wholly cared for, wholly a part of this city and, therefore… whole.