An ancient cast this unburied corpse
like a leaf blown apart by a storm.
The Fallen cannot be seen by day.
One could drag the bloodied sea, the devil's den,
And seize no scrap of his blackened soul.
Soulless, his face shall sully forever.
His just reward his mirror reflecting
Naught but his eternally open grave.
The hawk swooped and scattered
congregated birds at their feeder.
A lone squirrel screamed.
It was lifted, clawed and bloodied.
A silent cardinal watched from his treetop perch.
Sparrows fled. Defiant jays did not. Doves took cover.
Waves of crows dived and circled above.
Caw caw caw. Caw caw caw.
The hawk flung its prey on the shingled
roof, shreiked, tore, and shredded
The lone squirrel was not yet dead, but silent,
and the vultures spread their frightful wings.
Sparrows, doves, a hungry squirrel returned.
The cardinal chirped his happy song.
The ancients had to deal with it.
There's still no getting away from it.
Some say it was started by a fractious God.
Some say He didn't cotton to diversity.
Some say He set out to prove a point--
No Goddamn Tower could game Him.
He started them babbling.
Some call this a lot of malarkey.
Some don't.
"It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power, but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms into skills and makes life various with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy 'Let there not be' -- and the many coloured creation is shrivelled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. And looking at life parcel-wise, in the growth of a single lot, who having a practised vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled -- like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp -- precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction?
--Mary Ann Evans, epigraph lifted from Daniel Deronda, Vol. II, Ch. XXI.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of our country.
It has been months since I last had an inclination to write with the intention of posting to this weblog. If pressed for a reason why, I suppose that it was because I've been resisting the temptation to contribute to the uncivil discourse taking place in online society.
Of course, it was only slightly problematic to find something to ease the pang of withdrawal from what had become the habitual monthly casting of a seemingly quite harmless missive into the widening cyberswamp that many of us poor, lost souls had found ourselves gravitating toward, pulled-in, held-fast, and perhaps, not altogether charmingly, sunken.
I had, because of an apparently incurable genetic disorder, to find another outlet for my creative impulses, another lowering activity that I believed would be of some small value during my hiatus from even this mostly tamed patch of social media. I thought about painting (no tools), or maybe drawing or cartooning (no talent); I even contemplated learning music theory and composing (not really), and writing poetry or fiction or essays (no inspiration).
What was a mind to do?
I continued to read with gusto, but for the first time in my life I found myself reading to truly escape from reality. I delved deep into Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber multiverse (10 volumes -- and still counting, post-mortem), Stephen King's seemingly bottomless body of work, and tragedies Greek and Elizabethan. Nothing, however, could keep me from returning to our ever darkening realpolitik.
I have risen from those past myths to our current familiar ones, and the constantly up-creeping, self-made, all-encompassing, bothersome, smothering fog.
A Prospero notwithstanding, there is no island refuge in sight.
And yet, cliches be damned! "Come Hell or High Water" "By Hook or By Crook" -- Today! On the gosh-darned gol-durnedest pre-dawning of this -- my 80th annual recycling! I am intent on picking up the pieces of a broken year and with the hope that only a cautious pessimism can offer, I am sending out this drear note in a dark green bottle to roil and spin upon a raging sea of troubles.
While keeping a journal of the plague year might be of interest to some readers I'm positive that I wouldn't be one of them. I was never tempted to mine Daniel Defoe's work in that vein, even though I see myself as being possessed of a congenitally curious nature and despite having all the downtime in the world.
It feels like some farshtinkener uberchef has baked something peculiarly rotten into the American zeitgeist. A bitter taste has been left in our mouths, but one that's hard as hell to identify. Deep down we know that it's rooted in the eternal fight between those who love and those who hate white bread.
