Happy Birthday

Charles William Keeperman

Who knew we both were nine

When last we heard such roar

Another shot heard 'round the world

America: Your Reality Check is in the Mail

While Congress dithers and the U.S. economy burns, many citizens are becoming anxious about the prospect of failing to get the 2020 Presidential Election results that they feel they deserve. This doesn’t worry me at all, because regardless of the outcome, I am confident that we will get exactly that which we deserve, and probably a lot more. I shall briefly explain why:

 

Whichever incompetent is declared the victor in this spectacularly farcical election year there can be no doubt that “We The People” have screwed ourselves into a corner from which there is no possibility of painless egress.

 

Out of our very own separate, but decidedly unequal dalliance with American Exceptionalism, we have emerged after all these crisis-ridden decades of carefree, careless governance, and pathetic public participation, into a nightmarish blind alley in which only the monstrous can survive, and even then, not for very long.

 

Quite ironically, we have lost our bearings in the material world. We have chosen, instead, to live and become moored to an alternate reality in which each of us is god-like and can manipulate our fate in the time it takes to render an uninformed opinion, or an irrational presumption to be self-represented as Gospel.

 

Blame it on, if you will, the Media, The Other, or the Bossa-Nova, it matters not—what matters is that as materialistic as we have become, as success-driven that we have become, that as proficient at acquisition that we have become, that we have lost, first our reverence, and at last our relevance, and thus our connection to both our spiritual, and perhaps more importantly, to our physical world.

 

Finally, It won’t be “Good-bye cruel world,” but quite the contrary, and that shall, indubitably, zoom home to us post-haste.

 

 

 

 

Sanchitta

 Thou grievest where no grief should be! thou speak'st

Words lacking wisdom! for the wise in heart

Mourn not for those that live, nor those that die.

Nor I, nor thou, nor any one of these,

Ever was not, nor ever will not be,

For ever and for ever afterwards.

All, that doth live, lives always! To man's frame

As there comes infancy and youth and age,

So come there raisings-up and laying down

Of other and of other life abodes,

Which the wise know, and fear not. This that irks--

Thy sense-life, thrilling to the elements---

Bringing thee heat and cold, sorrows and joys,

'Tis brief and mutable! Bear with it, Prince!

As the wise bear. The soul which is not moved,

The soul that with a strong and constant calm

Takes sorrow and takes joys indifferently,

Lives in the life undying! That which is

Can never cease to be; that which is not

Will not exist. To see this truth of both

Is theirs who part essence from accident,

Substance from shadow. Indestructible,

Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all;

It cannot anywhere, by any means,

Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed.

But for these fleeting frames which it informs

With spirit deathless, endless, infinite,

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never

Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!

Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever;

Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!

---sayeth Krishna in Bhagavadgita

Statues of Limitations

There is in the clamor by some to rid the physical world of certain people from pedestals a toxic odor of self-defeat that once would have saddened me more; but with so much else making lives appear forlorn, I can only muster up a modicum of pity for those few who believe that their past can be erased and obliterated by merely wishing it tossed away.

Statuary, commemorative works of art, commissioned and created by our ancestors being relegated en masse to "the dustbin of history" will in no way change the past; not an iota, but will forever be a blot on our collective memories.

Those who want to change the world to suit a preferred vision of themselves ought first change themselves to confront the reality of the world that they inherited, and the desired future world that they must seriously prepare themselves to create. They must begin by learning who they are and how they became who they are. They must be reminded of their failures as well as of their successes.

It's often said that we learn best from our mistakes. Having made such a monumental amount of missteps, I'm constantly amazed that we haven't demonstrated more improvement in so many critical areas of our development.

Dismissal

A late day in June like this,
as hard as then to remember,
I thought maybe it's
Time I'd stopped--

The notion unstuck itself
quick before summer's door.
I can't or won't remember if,
when, or where, I picked it up.

A Particular Order

In my January 2018 post I randomly entered 10 words that begin with the letter "b" that I had encountered in my reading during that month that required my consulting one or more of my reference books. This current post lists 11 words since that previous post that start with the letter "c" that I had to look up.

casern: barracks in a garrison town
crustie: an anti-work, dumpster-diving, hippie type
conurbation: an extended urban area
clepsydra: an ancient water-clock
cicatrix: a scar
clerihew: in prosody, a light verse form of two couplets of uneven length or meter
cambric: thin plain cotton fabric, usually white
caitiff: a contemptible or cowardly person
crescive: growing, increasing
cuirass: armored breastplate fastened with a backplate
coprolite: fossilized turd

Death in the Open

"Dr. Lewis Thomas has written numerous articles about science, medicine, and life structures and cycles geared for the lay reader . . . His observations often bring fascinating clarity to the cycles of life and death on our planet.

"The following 'Words to Watch' appear in his brilliant essay into the 'natural marvel' of death which can be found in the 1975 National Book Award winner for Arts and Letters, Lives of a Cell (1974)."

While you have the time now  -- track it down and read it -- it won't hurt.

Words to Watch when reading Lives of a Cell.

voles rodents
impropriety an improper action or remark
progeny descendants or offspring
mutation a sudden genetic change
amebocytes one-celled organisms
stipulated to make a special condition for
incongruity something which is not consistent with the environment
conspicuous very obvious
inexplicably unexplainably
anomalies irregularities
notion an idea
detestable hateful
synchrony simultaneous occurrence