To R. part I

Dear friend in twilight hour
Lift up your eyes
Beaming ethereal Light
Angelic host in unison
I light a candle with pale hands
And behold your gentle gaze
Through burnt matchstick rising Veil
Cast my own eyes on that glory
Unapproachable Light streaming
What crescendo wave befalling!
Turn dust motes into supernovae-

Given

"The eye - it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will."

Wordsworth

For R.

I know a man, an old friend, who is dying of cancer.  He's about to leave us.  He's not much older than me.  He has a young family.  His friends are praying, for what they don't say.  They're telling him to hang in there, their approach aggressive, we'll beat this.. but his physical frame is a shadow of itself, a skeleton.  He has lost his colour and is white.. as white as the snow he so dearly loves.  Emaciated, laying upon the couch wearing a toque, covered in blankets and posing for pictures with visiting friends, I try hard to see the man I used to work side by side with.  I have seen this picture before, in my mind's eye I can still see it.. this earliest of memories.

I was close to 5 years old, the same age as my oldest boy.  I sat upon the legs of an older woman who was also covered in a blanket.  She wore some kind of head covering, a handkerchief perhaps, and looked kindly at me.  Directly in front of her was a metal bucket, once used to hold flour but now converted to hold vitamin C crystals.  She had been told that vitamin C would fight the cancer in her body and so sat there all day, scooping one half of a translucent capsule into the powder, screwing the other half on, then swallowing it, without any water (or at least I can't recall her taking a drink).  This is the earliest, and only memory of my grandmother.  She had bone cancer and would not live to see the end of the year.  She smiled at me.  I smiled at her.  I couldn't understand what was happening.  I just knew that she was my grandma.

So you see, I've seen a person ravaged by cancer near the very end.  No matter how hard they fight, or how much others would like them to fight, the cancer takes them in the end.  When the disease is this advanced, calls to "Fuck Cancer!" are barbarous.  My friend knows the fight is over.  I can see it in his eyes.  Must he continue to play the game for you? 

This does not mean dying should be left to the funeral mourners.  After all, dear R., how pleasant it is to look out your window and see the freshly fallen snow.  Can you picture yourself flying over it like the wind!  Your perfectly tuned machine carrying your body and spirit into the sun?  Into the sun dear R.? 

For Nickle

"...And all the phantoms of the dream,
With present grief, and made the rhymes,
That miss'd his living welcome, seem
Like would-be guests an hour too late,
Who down the highway moving on
With easy laughter find the gate
Is bolted, and the master gone."     Tennyson

Nickle you will be missed..

If I Lost You

Merry Christmas, or What's in a Greeting?

It seems Christmas has become thoroughly.. multicultural. The debate over whether one should say "happy holidays" or not should finally come to an end. One should have no more difficulty saying "Merry Christmas" than Happy Thursday or Merry Wednesday, though hopefully with a greater twinkle in the eye.

A friendly detractor may say, yes but hasn't Christmas always been multicultural?  To this I must agree, but add that it was multicultural in a different kind of way.  Christmas has always been multicultural precisely because Christians have always been multicultural.  The multiculturalism I speak of today is different.  Now not only Christians celebrate Christmas, but non-Christians too, and these in far greater numbers than ever before.  It has led to the now common sighting of the little white and red signs in front of people's houses or on their cars which say "Keep Christ in Christmas".  There would be no need to make such declarations unless already Christmas was seen as existing outside the circle of Christianity.  How odd this is considering "Christ" is already in Christmas, literally forming part of the word.  

This marks a transition I have perhaps not so subtly referred to above when I use the greetings "Happy Thursday" and "Merry Wednesday".  For some time now these words have lost their religious connotations for us, except for a very few pagans perhaps.   Wednesday of course was named for the Norse god Odin or the Saxon Wodan, the All-Father.  Thursday was named for one of his sons, the god of thunder Thor:  Wodan's-day and Thor's-day respectively.  We may greet one another quite cheerfully with a "happy Thursday" and think nothing of it.  There are many cultural/religious artifacts that we use in this way.  So the term "Christmas" has slipped toward this usage, demonstrated by the insistence of Christians that we keep the "Christ" in Christmas, as a kind of resistance to the transition that is already taking place. 

The insistence in so many schools that we refrain from saying "Merry Christmas" or have Christmas concerts is a sign therefore of a number of things.  First, interestingly it is a sign that schools are colluding with Christians to keep Christmas a religious holiday (and thus not a celebration appropriate for all their students), this despite the availability of a number of Christmas symbols that are capable of carrying both religious and secular meaning almost entirely in either direction.  Think of Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, gift-giving... all of these can be thought of in terms completely unrelated to the Advent of Christ, and in fact are thought of this way by many many people.  Following this point, schools themselves therefore restrict our freedom to define Christmas in whatever way we choose, already naming for us the meaning of Christmas (i.e. it has religious meaning).  This is similar to arguing that Santa Claus can only be white or Canadian etc., failing to take into account the symbolic givenness of the season and the signs of its presence.  Christmas, unchained from a specific cultural interpretation, becomes not devoid of meaning, but free in its openness to us.  Instead of shying away from its celebration in schools, now may be the time to ask each beautiful little child what it means to them and their families.  It is precisely in that chorus of small voices that we might hear the melody and meaning of Christmas emerge. 

The Prophet Dead, He the Wretch

 Rest in peace Harold Camping.  You deluded old man.  You instigator of broken lives and hope.  Your guilty conscience will bother you no more...

Blog post from the past

The following is taken from a blog draft written December 16, 2006, separated from my wife, on the verge of divorce, after returning home to spend Christmas with strangers.

How is it that a man can sit in a room surrounded by people and still feel alone?  Some men prefer it this way.  They are at ease until someone should happen to say something to them, at which point, the man feels suddenly shaken, even violated in some way.  The offence is worse if the person should speak directly to him.  It is not so bad if the other should sit down beside him and, gazing out into the crowd without looking at the man, say something requiring no more than a grunt or a “hmm”.  At this point the two can remain silent and feel no awkwardness.  It is only when one becomes aware of the other’s presence that discomfort should follow.  When one has the expectation that two people sitting next to one another should speak to each other then any silence is hardly tolerated.  One can often observe one of these people in action, trying to stimulate conversation, saying the most ridiculous things to prompt the other to speak.  “This is certainly a nice evening isn’t it?”  Or even more ridiculous: “I hear it’s supposed to get colder.”  The silent man, at this point, may do one of three things.  1) He will answer with a nod of the head or raise his eyebrows but for the rest of the evening bear a grudge against the one who violated his peace with such foolish statements; 2) He will simply move to another location where he can dip some shrimp in seafood sauce, or quietly stack a piece of cheese, some assorted meat, on top of a cheese or perhaps herb flavoured cracker; or 3) He will lash out at the offender with a verbal assault.  He may do all three.  Slowly he will nod his head, his neck and face beginning to flush with fury, his eyebrows will rise and his eyes bulge until suddenly he bursts out with “For God’s sake is that the most intelligent thing you can say?!”  Or perhaps, “Who really cares about the weather, it will be what it will be, and the evening is like any other!”  Afterwards he’ll make his way to the table with assorted cold cuts, cheese and crackers, and if he’s lucky the shrimp, where he’ll prepare a tasty tidbit which will distract him from the embarrassment of his outburst.  It is embarrassing in the end, though also gratifying.  It is embarrassing because he was forced to break his own silence, to violate his own spherical vacuum of silence surrounding his body.  He’ll realize he had a choice, that he could have remained silent, adhered to point 1) or simply moved straight to point 2) without calling any attention to himself.  But it was also gratifying, he’ll decide, as he eats his cracker and cheese.  He may even smile to himself.  The look on the other person’s face was priceless. 

The Fire i' the Blood

Look thou be true; do not give dalliance
Too much the reign: the strongest oaths are straw
To the fire i' the blood: be more abstemious,
Or else, good night your vow!

Prospero to the two lovers, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1

But language-
In thunder speaks the
God.
Often I have it, language
anger, she said, was enough and approved by Apollo-
If you have love enough, then, go on, rage out of love.
Often I tried to sing, but they did not hear you.  For
that was holy Nature's will.  For her you sang in your youth.
Not singing
You spoke to the deity,
but what all of you have forgotten is that always
the first-born belong not to mortals but to the gods.
More common, more everyday
the fruit must become, only then
will mortals possess it.

Hölderlin, Fragments.

This place I know.  My second gif.. hmm you had to be there :)

It moves

I just unfriended close to 40 people on Facebook.  That's a significant amount for my account, about 25% of my friends.  The criteria for selection was easy: if I had no interaction with them in over a year they were gone.  If I enjoyed their posts but didn't have any personal interaction with them they stayed.  There were a few nostalgic ones that slipped through too, even though I really had no meaningful interaction with them in any way. 

This is all part of a larger program I've initiated in my life.  It involves a reorientation toward real things and people, things I can touch and talk to, things that have a face, or cast shadows.  Of course I'm not cutting off the virtual completely.  This is in fact impossible- as Zizek has said: "Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction."  I'm simply scaling back on a particular mode of the virtual.  Its truths are still present for those who have ears to hear... I've simply heard another sound.

Gabriel's Oboe

Rainy nights

"Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant."  Heidegger

How Big Is the Universe?

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