Klediments:  “More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”  Woody Allen.

Interestingly, there has not been much discussion in the election season on concepts like “free will,” “predestination,” “fate,” the “eternal return,” “tzimtzum,” or even “karma” or “kismet.”  Seems like all of a sudden at election time everybody determined that their single, statistically insignificant vote is the most potent expression of human agency and power in history and that it’s potential rivals the very supremacy of God!

Well, thankfully we are reaching the end of the election here in the U.S..  So as a final sabbath reflection on the election let us ponder some words from today’s Talmudic reflection that offers some insight into our own indisputable abilities for self deception, selfishness, vanity and idolatry:  

Here is a relevant teaching from Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch, on the biblical verse Exodus 33.8,  “Whenever Moses went out to the Tent, all the people would rise and stand … and gaze after Moses until he went into the Tent.”  Rabbi Ber taught, “Everyone sees himself in the righteous one (zaddik or saint) therefore, they suspected Moses was guilty of adultery (since he had separated from his wife). But in fact it was they who were guilty of adultery with the mixed multitude.  When they gazed at Moses they saw themselves in the zaddik and thus suspected him.”  Rabbi Dov Ber suggests this is the core, and tragedy, of a leader: His selfhood is lost in the aspirations, expectations, and limitations of those “who gaze upon him.”

And even more, what is lost of the “selfhood” of the followers/worshipers of these leaders?   Ponder these things sisters and brothers until after the election.

No, that’s not MauMau Obama strangling some white colonist in Kenya, it’s Saint Martin de Porres healing a sick old white dude in Peru (bless you bro!).   Nov 3rd is the feast day of Saint Martin, the first black saint and the patron saint of mixed-race people being the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a black former slave (legitimate rape?).   As well as caring for the sick and poor, one of his miraculous abilities was bi-location, appearing in many different places at once around the world where needed (sort of like having a Saint Batman app on your smart phone).  Saint Martin was also good friends with my third favorite saint, Saint Rose of Lima (more about her later, I have some poetry, the beginnings of a screen-play, and an Icon of her in the works).

legend has it that if you pray to St. Martin and see a mouse in an unusual place on his feast day, you will receive an answer to a prayer.  I have saved a mouse in the freezer just for today so if any of you have prayer request let me know.  And yeah I know, these catholic super-stitions can really be bizarre, but at least half my friends (both virtual and in the meat world) voted for Romney and have y’all checked out some of the crazy sh%&it them Mormons believe?  So don't you go rolling your eyes at me!

In 1962, Pope John XXIII remarked at the canonization of Martin: "He excused the faults of others. He forgave the bitterest injuries, convinced that he deserved much severer punishments on account of his own sins. He tried with all his might to redeem the guilty; lovingly he comforted the sick; he provided food, clothing and medicine for the poor; he helped, as best he could, farm laborers and Negroes, as well as mulattoes, who were looked upon at that time as akin to slaves: thus he deserved to be called by the name the people gave him: 'Martin of Charity.'"   This election has made me wonder if “racism” in america has become a sin that almost nobody acknowledges and confesses, like pollution or global warming, racism has become a "sin of the world" that is, it’s everybody's responsibility but apparently nobody's fault?

Finally, I was just sitting around watching C-span and reading from Marx’s “The German Ideology” when ZOOMCRACK!!!  Obama actually  came on the TV and started giving a speech Coincidence??? 

"One has to "leave philosophy aside”  Marx admonished me.  “... one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also an enormous amount of literary material, unknown, of course, to the philosophers. ... Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love" (The German ideology, 259).  Hmmm...did Marx just say that all my pseudo-philosophizing here and on facebook was just so much cenobitic malthusianism? (I’ll just let y’all look all that up).  Now I could so see one of the apostles (not the big shots like John or Peter but maybe Thaddeus) saying something just like Marx when they were arguing about who gets what from the common purse.  But I reckon that all those “free” market Kapitalists can thank the Roman Emperor Tiberius for cracking down on and snuffing out that little cabal of upper-room neo-Marxists before their radical ideas caught on!  Alas, like so many other commies, anarchists, and re-distributists, they all spoke in too many “different tongues,” drunk on the Glossolalia of their chichi theories.  Later Marx adds:  “As individuals express their life, so they are.”   

Well, let’s just see if we can tie this all up together with a poem by one of my favorite Nordic poets, Olav H. Hauge:

Don’t Come to Me with the Entire Truth

Don’t come to me with the entire truth.
Don’t bring the ocean when I feel thirsty,
nor heaven if I ask for light;
but bring a hint, some dew, a particle,
as birds carry drops away from a lake,
and the wind a grain of salt.

Blessings and obliged. 

(p.s. Zoomcrack is one of many useful neo-logisms created by my good friend Johnny Van Patten, obliged Johnny) 

Poem of the week will be some song lyrics from Judee Sill.  For those of you old enough to remember her tragically short career, she toured with Nash and Crosby and lots of folks have covered her songs. Judee wrote some extraordinary lyrics, “Jesus Was a Cross maker” and “Crayon Angels” (covered by Fleet Foxes) are among my favorites. I know it seems like such a cliche for a singer/songwriter to die young of a drug overdose, but I think it was more than that for Judee.  From church organist to prison for robbing liquor stores at 15, to writing gospel songs patterned on Bach fugues to then turning tricks on hollywood blvd and then dying of a heroin overdose in 1979.  It seems that starting with the early family deaths of siblings and parents and the trauma of rape and car accidents that the only anchors that Judee could ever set into this world were chained fast by pain and sorrow.

She wrote in “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,”  “Sweet silver angels over the sea / Please come down flyin' low for me / One time I trusted a stranger / Cuz I heard his sweet song / And it was gently enticin' me / Tho there was somethin' wrong, / But when I turned he was gone. / Blindin' me, his song remains remindin' me, / He's a bandit and a heart breaker, / Oh, but Jesus was a cross maker.”  

If there is any recrimination of a god for her tribulations to be found in her songs, perhaps those lines above are the most explicit.  She affirms that ‘the sweet song of the Cross-Maker remains and entices her, but later she writes that “at every turn” she found herself too much alone, that she often felt abandoned and maybe even cursed, as she wrote in “The Lamb Ran Away With The Crown:”  

“Once a demon lived in my brow / I screamed and wailed and I cursed out loud / And I sailed through the clouds on ten crested cardinals / ...But I laughed so hard I cried / And the lamb ran away with the crown. / But I laughed so hard I cried, / And the lamb ran away with the crown.”

These same binary themes of joy and pain, laughter and tears, love and betrayal are repeated throughout the three albums of her short career, especially that of The Heat-Breaker and the Cross-Maker, and I have wondered if Judee is making references to the Jesus of Nikos Kazantzakis in “The Last Temptation Of Christ.”  A Jesus that contends with God, that often desires to escape the anguish of God’s burning love, a Jesus who often feels betrayed and abandoned as Kazantzakis writes:  "The feeling begins. Very tender, very loving. Then the pain starts. Claws slip underneath the skin and tear their way up. Just before they reach my eyes, they dig in. And I remember. First I fasted for three months. I even whipped myself before I went to sleep. At first it worked. Then the pain came back. And the voices. They call me by the name: Jesus." 

Of course, this Jesus never escapes from his chosen-ness or the awful grace of God.  This Jesus earns his living by making crosses, crosses for criminals and rebels, crosses for his disciples, and most significantly, a cross for himself.  Below are the lyrics from Judee Sill’s “The Kiss.”

Love, risin' from the mists
Promise me this and only this
Holy breath touchin' me
Like a wind song
Sweet communion of a kiss

Sun, siftin' thru the grey
Enter in, reach me with a ray
Silently swoopin' down
Just to show me
How to give my heart away

And once a crystal choir
Appeared while I was sleepin' and called my name
And when they came down nearer Eli)
Sayin', "Dyin' is done",
Then a new song was sung
Until somewhere we breathed as one

Stars, burstin' in the sky
Hear the sad nova's dyin' cry
Shimmerin' memory
Come and hold me
While you show me how to fly

Sun, siftin' thru the grey
Enter in, reach me with a ray
Silently swoopin' down
Just to show me
How to give my heart away

And lately sparklin' hosts
Come fill my dreams descendin' on firey beams
I've seen 'em come clear down
Where our poor bodies lay
Soothe us gently and say,
"Gonna wipe all your tears away"
“
Love risin' from the mists
Promise me this and only this
Holy breath touchin' me
Like a wind song
Sweet communion of a kiss...

Kazantzakis wrote that in the Last Temptation “I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death — because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered.”  I can’t say that Kazantzakis was successful in what he wanted to achieve, or that after reading his Jesus that I lost my fear of of pain and death.  But I think that I agree with him that “If we are to follow Jesus we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish: his victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men and his ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to martyrdom's summit, the Cross.”  I think that Judee Sills knew something about the snares of this earth and reliving it’s conflicts and anguish.  But I wouldn’t want to argue that she gave us a model of how to avoid or overcome them, but I think that like Kazantzakis she did show us how they could be embodied in words and music, and for that I bless her; be at peace dear sister.  Obliged. 

“...your golden Hair Margarete”

Please open another window and listen to this composition by Shulamit Ran called “Perfect Storm.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohVf5Q27cbw  while reading.  Thank you for your cooperation.

I think I may turn into this man sometime soon, if I am not him already.

Klediments:

I bought Roman Vishniac’s book “A Vanished World” at a used bookstore today, it was a steal at 2 bucks.  Vishniac traveled throughout Eastern Europe taking pictures of Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, etc., just before WW II and the holocaust; indeed a vanished world.

Poem of the week comes with a picture that Lynda took of me late one night last week. I was painting outside in the dark, in the cold mist (I don’t have anywhere inside to paint this big). It is another in a series of reproductions of the eroding/disappearing symbols on the walls at the death camp Auschwitz/Birkenau. Sometimes I paint exact copies of the walls to preserve the names, art, poetry, messages, and prayers that still remain. Sometimes, like in this painting, I use some original material written on or carved into the walls and then add some of my own images and reflections or words, phrases, and poetry from people like Hannah Arendt, Mother Maria Skobtsova, Simone Weil, etc., and this poem below by Paul Celan. 

Death Fugue:

Black Milk of Daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at noon and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we dig at a Grave in the Air there one lies unconfined

A Man lives in the House he plays with the Serpents he

writes

he writes while it falls dark over Germany your golden

Hair Margerete

he writes and steps from the House and they’re shining the Stars he

whistles his Jews up to dig at a Grave in the Earth

he commands us to strike up the Dance.

...A Man lives in the House he plays with the Serpents he

writes

he writes while it falls dark over Germany your golden

Hair Margerete

Your ashen Hair Shulamith we dig at a Grave in the

Air there one lies unconfined

He cries dig the soil deeper you there you others sing out and

play

he grabs the Steel at his Belt he waves it his Eyes are

blue

dig your Spades deeper you there you others play on for

the Dance

Black Milk of Daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at noon and morning we drink you at evening

we drink and we drink

a Man lives in the House your golden hair Margarete

your ashen Hair Shulamith he plays with the Serpents

He cries play Death more sweetly Death is a Master from

Germany

He cries stroke the Strings more darkly you’ll rise like Smoke in

the Air

then a Grave you’ll have in the Clouds there one lies unconfined

Black Milk of Daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at noon Death is a Master from

Germany

we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink

Death is a Master from Germany his Eye is blue

he strikes you with leaden Bullets he strikes you true

a Man lives in the House your golden Hair Margarete

he sets his Dogs onto us and he grants us a Grave in the Air

he plays with the Serpents and dreams Death is a Master

from Germany

your golden Hair Margarete

your ashen Hair Shulamith

Dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden?  “Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.” Simone Weil, Letter, March 30, 1936.).  

Is there such a thing as “Jewish Science,” Steven Gimbel asks in his book, “Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion.” That is, could we say that there is something about Jewish culture (in a most comprehensive sense) that enabled Einstein to discover the theory of general relativity?  “Jewish science” is the term that fundamentalist nazi’s used for Einstein’s theories.  But the nazi’s rejected the theory of relativity not because they questioned it on logical scientific grounds, but they rejected it on the ideological grounds that Einstein was Jewish (are we moving towards a time where there will be something like “evangelical christian science?” or “republican science”). 

In his review George johnson writes:  “It’s no wonder Nazis hated relativity. They lived in a world of absolutes. There was a master race with one true religion and one true language, with a music and literature that celebrated its glory. There was a true German empire, sliced up by the arbitrary boundaries of concoctions called nation-states. With absolute might the Fatherland would regain its proper position in space and time.”  Nazi Scientist Phillip Lenard argued:  “The Jew wants to create contradictions everywhere and to separate relations, so that preferably, the poor naïve German can no longer make any sense of it whatsoever.”  This kind of political, ideological, and race based rejection of science should not seem unfamiliar to us today.

Those of us studying the Talmud (and who participate in Daf Yomi) understand that the heart of the Talmudic view is that there is absolute truth, but that this truth is not directly and completely available to us in it’s fullness (another aspect of tzimtzum).  Einstein’s proposition is that “...from our blinkered perspective we see qualities called space and time. But in relativity theory, the two can be combined mathematically into something more fundamental: a four-dimensional abstraction called the space-time interval. Time and space vary according to the motion of the observer. But from any vantage point, an object’s space-time interval would be the same — the higher truth that can be approached only from different angles.”

It’s just this kind of “relativism” and mind-stretching questioning that enrages many kinds of fundamentalists who too often choose to believe convenient and simple lies rather than complex and difficult truths.  Then again, no matter how simple Jesus made the Gospel for us (i.e. “love your enemies”) we just refuse to believe that that is just what Jesus wanted us to do!  The Gospel could be called something like  “Jewish Science for  Dummies” (but that may be given us too much credit!).

However, an Italian scientific study found that penises are on average around 10 percent smaller today than 50 years ago. The study cited weight gain, pollution, stress and smoking as possible factors in the shrinkage.  But Rush Limbaugh on reading about the study characteristically stressed the evil power and potency of feminism on penis size in his radio show. Rush claimed that the shrinkage should be attributed to feminists (“feminazis” as he puts it) who have the power to determine the size of male genitalia.  Scoffing at the idea that air pollution might influence one’s dickishness, he stated, “I think it’s feminism… it’s tied to the last 50 years — the average size of [a male's] member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else”  (The article doesn’t mention it but perhaps the male brain has shrunk by 10% as well?).  

 http://www.salon.com/2012/09/21/rush_feminism_shrinks_penises/

“Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being” (Simone Weil).

When the first cro-magnon human drew a picture of the sun on a wall, the cave became a church and that artist became a priest, and then the hunters feared her because she took for herself some of their power.  And so the hunters came to her before every hunt to bless them.  She drew pictures of the hunters, and then drew a great beast on the wall with a spear through it’s heart, then she drew the people dancing and feasting; and the hearts of the hunters were filled with courage and the hearts of the people were at peace.  But when the beast escaped or some hunters were killed and the people went hungry then the priest proved just how much power she really wielded!  I am an artist, but art can be a way of claiming power over the imagination of those who fear, over those who rule, over the god of nature, even over death.  That is the great temptation that the artist should resist.  The artist must let death end the artist’s will to power and break her hold on simulacra and illusion.  Is there an impulse behind every simple snapshot we take that is a will to power and a denial of death?  Say cheese.

“Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being” (Simone Weil).

This brings us to the “Malleus Maleficarum,” or the "Der Hexenhammer” (available on-line here: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=witch;cc=witch;view=toc;subview=short;idno=wit060  ) which I have mentioned before.  It is a treatise on the discovering and prosecution of witches, written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer, a German Catholic clergyman and first published in Speyer, Germany in 1487 (see wiki).  Basically Kramer traveled throughout Germany teaching form his handbook on how to hunt, capture, prosecute, punish, and kill witches.  It was the Wikipedia of the inquisition for the 15th to the 17th centuries. 

In Chapter VII. Titled: “How, as it were, they [women/witches} Deprive Man of his Virile Member,” is an expansive section on the phenomenon of ‘disappearing penises’ (could Rush be on to something?).  There are some cases recorded where all the men in a particular town would have there penises disappeared!  Here are some narrations from the MM by a ‘venerable Father from the Dominican House of Spires,’ a man well known in the Order for the honest of his life and for his learning. "One day," he says, "while I was hearing confessions, a young man came to me and, in the course of his confession, woefully said that he had lost his member. Being astonished at this, and not being willing to give it easy credence, since the opinion of the wise it is a mark of light−heartedness to believe too easily, I obtained proof of it when I saw nothing on the young man's removing his clothes and showing the place. Then, using the wisest counsel I could, I asked whether he suspected anyone of having so bewitched him. And the young man said that he did suspect someone, but that she was absent and living in Worms. Then I said: 'I advise you to go to her as soon as possible and try your utmost to soften her with gentle words and promises'; and he did so. For he came back after a few days and thanked me, saying that he was whole and had recovered everything. And I believed his words, but again proved them by the evidence of my eyes” (now I rightly pass for a Roman Catholic, but am I the only one that thinks that if an outbreak of disappearing penises occurs that maybe priests in confessionals are not the ones who should be in charge of the examinations?). 

Now a great deal of discussion in the MM occurs around whether “...such members are really torn right away from the body,” or if they are merely “hidden by the devil through some prestidigitory art so that they can be neither seen nor felt.”  Either way, it seems that torturing, drowning, and burning women usually offered an effective remedy for disappeared penises (whether the same thing will work for a more gradual shrinkage the Hexenhammer doesn’t say, so perhaps we should wait for fundamentalist christian scientists to weigh in on this before actually burning anybody).  

The MM continues:  “..and what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? It is to be said that it is all done by devil's work and illusion, for the senses of those who see them are deluded in the way we have said. For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest.”  

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” apparently not, so at least these witches don’t appear to be Marxists.

The photo above is of three members of Pussy Riot awaiting trial in Russia for blasphemy and hooliganism in an Orthodox Church (but can a ‘church’ be defiled from the outside? ).  Yet the Orthodox Church in Russia is growing in power, wealth, and influence.  But in Europe and america a constant lament from church authorities is the decline of their members.

“A Vanished World” Indeed. 

“your golden Hair Margarete

your ashen Hair Shulamith” 

(btw, Shulamith is Hebrew for Solome).

Obliged.  

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”  (From “The Plague of Doves” by Louis Erdrich, a Turtle Mountain Ojibwa).

That is a photo of me above and my latest painting, “The God Particle” (Higgs-Bosun particle). 8 feet by 2 1/2 feet, acrylic on board.

I’m not an astro-physicist anymore than I am a theologian or philosopher (although I play one on facebook).  Nevertheless this is my latest painting inspired by the *discovery* of the “God particle.”  Of course, just like pictures of God (whether fashioned from weapons, words or paint) pictures of the God particle are subject to the artists imagination (and the artist’s fears, hopes, prejudices, desires, pride, faith, doubts and weakness for sinful idolatry).  When tragedy, suffering, and death happen we are right to ask “where is God,” but can we ask the same of the ‘god particle’?      

David Bentley Hart painted a pretty good (though not altogether original and convincing) picture about all this in his book, “The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami.”  And in this interview below he says:

“To see the world in the Christian way–which…requires the eye of charity and a faith in Easter–is in some sense to venture everything upon an absurd impracticality… But, as I was writing the book, I found myself thinking again of a photograph I had seen in the Baltimore Sun.  The story concerned the Akhdam, the lowest social caste in Yemen, supposedly descended from Ethiopians left behind when the ancient Ethiopian empire was driven out of Arabia in the sixth century, who live in the most unimaginable squalor. In the background of the photo was a scattering of huts constructed from crates and shreds of canvas, and on all sides barren earth; but in the foreground was a little girl, extremely pretty, dressed in tatters, but with her arms outspread, a look of delight upon her face, dancing.

To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise.….That child’s dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God’s throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption.” (from “Where Was God? An Interview with David Bentley Hart.” The Christian Century 10 Jan. 2006: 26-29.)

I too like to think of that pretty little Yemeni girl as much more than a particle, even more than a god-particle, I like to think of her as an inseparable part of God’s very being in the world.  As if one morning God woke up and just felt such joy that God felt like singing and dancing so God created children!  “Amazing, innocence, paradise, glory, dancing,” these are the colors Hart uses to paint for us that little Yemeni girl. But there is war in Yemen, and the life of that little girl of Hart’s imagination is in real danger from us (americans).  And when we kill her with one of our predator drones who will ask, “where was god?”  So my ‘god particle‘ is violent, and it looks like an explosion, like war, but no matter how many atoms we smash we do not seem to be getting any nearer to the ‘true face of creation,’ to wisdom, to love, and I wish I was the kind of artist that knew how to paint that.

In Yemeni culture poets and poetry are very highly esteemed.  Indeed, many of their ongoing tribal and political/religious/ideological divisions and battles are fought with words and poetry (as well as guns and bombs).  These noisy contests often take place in the street and village squares and go on for hours.  Here is one of my favorites from Abdulwahhab Al-Bayyati 

The Rats of the fields of words

Buried the head of the poet

In a field of ashes

But the poet on the cross of exile

Carried the sun and flew  

Klediments:

“To be a poet in a destitute time means to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods.  This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy” 

(M. Heidegger).

Let me just offer a klediment of fb posts, book reviews, news updates, and poetry from the last month or so.  And so again, I suggest you open up another window and put on this music, Pérotin's "Beata Viscera,"  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KX_Wr_kAo&list=FL9jaxhjKAZ3xS_xu6DVRP9Q&index=2&feature=plpp_video  

It is  based on “The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin” and I pray it reminds us that ‘The world lives in the death of speech.’

I was watching the news between commercials, listening to politicians and jesters (human product placement ads for principalities and powers) explain without explaining, answer without answering, talk without saying, smile without joy, cry without sorrow; feigning anger and moral outrage over the sheerist silliness while great crimes go unmentioned.  They pretend to speak for god, for humanity, for life, for justice, for the people, for the children, for the future, for us, for me, but they are hollow puppets, empty reeds, and not even when it comes to killing and death, net even when their hands are red with blood, do they come near anything that might be called ‘the truth.’

So I was sad and fed up and I put on this music and went to work in the garden.  And because I was sad and a bit lonely I did not shoo away the damned bunnies that keep eating my lettuce and beet sprouts like I usually do.  I let them eat in peace and keep me company until the shadow of an eagle fell over us and they raced in panic into the bushes.  For bunnies the shadow of death and death itself may be closer to the same thing and they are wise to be afraid.  As far as we know bunnies do not write poetry, but if they did what would they make of eagles?  gods or devils?

Well, if the music is still going, maybe as you listen you can read this poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez because the words to Perotin’s song are too sad and I don’t want to post them.

Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!

How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!

This rose was poison.

That sword gave life.

I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.

I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.

Saint Xenia of Saint Petersburg

My list of Icons I want to paint is a bit daunting. I just don’t have much time to ‘waste on art.’  Almost all of those on the list are mostly extraordinary women like Raissa Maritain, Rosa Luxembourg, Hannah Arendt, Edith Stein, Simone Weil and Mother Maria Skobtsova, who wrote: “The cross of Golgotha is the cross of the Son of Man, the crosses of the thieves and our personal crosses are precisely personal, and as an immense forest of these personal crosses we are moving along the paths to the Kingdom of Heaven. And that is all.”  And then, just like that she took the place of a Jewish woman in the line to the gas chamber in the concentration camp at Ravensbruck and was killed in her place.  I read these women devotionally over and over again and I encourage others to do so as well.  If I had to I would choose Stein, Weil, and Skobtsova over all the rest of the top read 50 theologians/philosophers put together. 

But my most recent Icon project is of Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg (above).  She was one of Russia’s many “Holy Fools.”  She wandered homeless in Saint Petersburg, ministering to the poor for 45 years.  She is a favorite of the Punk-Saints Pussy-Riots, though I’m not sure I see the direct connection with them.  Truth is, I haven’t figured out yet if Pussy Riots have more of an affinity with ‘free thinking,’ individualist/existentialist theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, the american ‘Tea Party militia,’ the ‘Nuns on a bus,’ Ayn Rand, Mikhail Bakunin, Lady GaGA, or Michele Bachman.  Nevertheless, I look fwd to reading more from and about them as they spend some time in prison, I really don’t want to miss out on some new moving of the Divine Sophia even if she is wearing a ski mask.

And who knows, perhaps it’s true that the ‘Pussy Riot grrrls are sitting in jail for living out a radical theology of liberation rooted in the Spirit of Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament.‘  If so, isn’t it truly astonishing that after 70 years of Stalinist atheistic communism, of burning churches, jailing priests, killing and torturing christians, etc., that just after enjoying barely 15 minutes of “democracy and freedom” and the Russian state throws 3 young women in jail for dissing the Orthodox church!  My faith in the power of propaganda and “the media” to control people’s minds is being seriously challenged.  Turns out the most powerful lies are the ones we tell ourselves.   

Here’s a little something from one the Pussy Girl’s inspirational mentors, Russian theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, “Religious discussion centers upon the possibility of new revelation and a new spiritual epoch. All other questions are secondary. The new revelation is not at all a new religion, distinct from Christianity, but rather the fulfillment and completion of the Christian revelation, bringing it to a true universality. This we do not have as yet. But we cannot simply wait for the revelation of the spirit. It depends upon man's creative activity as well. It is not to be understood as only a new revelation of God to man: it is also the revelation of man to God. This means that it will be a divine-human revelation. In the Spirit, the divisions and contradictions of the divine and the human will be overcome, while the distinction between them will be maintained. This will be the crowning of the mystical dialectic of the divine and the human.”

Yeah, ok, but I get as inspired by the theological jargon of the “mystical dialectic of the divine and human,” in about the same way I get inspired by contemplating the god-particle.  But what I wish I could preach and pray with any amount of genuine faith is what Mother Maria Skobtsova said before she was killed: “I am your message, Lord. Throw me like a blazing torch into the night, that all may see and understand what it means to be a disciple.”

And now that the music should have ended let us read together the poem “Silence” from Wendell Berry:

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men's silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.

Obliged. (обязано) and please leave me a howdydoo.  It would be nice to know if at least one person was reading any of this stuff, at least until I f figure out how to operate this blog and find out if anyone ever even pops by.  blessings. 

Caution, some adult language in this video.  (from the movie Goodfellas).  

Just in case you want to better understand the complexities of how Romney’s company “Bain Capital” actually functioned, here is a tutorial from the movie “Goodfellas.”   When the Bamboo Lounge was is trouble and needed help due to no fault of the owner or workers, the Goodfella Pauli is brought in as a partner, but once he’s made a partner then:

“...Pauli could do anything, especially run up bills on the joints credit.  And why not nobody’s going to pay for it anyway.  As soon as deliveries are made in the front door you move stuff out the back and sell it at a discount It doesn’t matter it’s all profit, and finally when theres nothing left, and you can’t borrow another buck from the bank you bust the joint out you light a match.”

Vulture capitalism 101, I think we (Catholic) Sicilians may have invented it, but it took the Anglicans, Mormons, and the 'born-agains' to make it legal (and y’all who are salivating over Clinton’s speech at the democratic convention tonight, remember he helped de-regulate the financial industry that further allowed Bain/Romney to function this way).  Oh, and the pension funds of the workers?  Bain/Romney took those too.  And the folks who lost their jobs and had to go on welfare or food stamps, we all pick up the tab for that with our tax dollars (unless you have a Swiss bank account) as well as their emergency room and health care costs. I reckon a prophet like Amos or Jeremiah might have something to say about all this, but don't count on hearing from any biblical prophets at any of the presidential conventions, so let me offer this from Abraham Heschel's "The Prophets" :

"When Amos appeared in the North there was pride (Amos 6:13) plenty, and splendor in the land, elegance and might in the palaces.  The rich had there summer and winter palaces adorned with costly ivory, gorgeous couches with damask pillows on which they reclined at their sumptuous feasts.  They planted pleasant vineyards, anointed themselves with precious oils, their women, compared by Amos to the fat cows of Bashan were addicted to wine.  At the same time there was no justice in the land, the poor were afflicted, exploited, even sold into slavery, and the judges were corrupt (5:12).  In the midst of this atmosphere arose Amos, a shepherd, to exclaim:  *Woe to those who are at ease in Zion...." (Zion?...is that anywhere near Seattle?).  

Well, Amos always hits me pretty hard, but Bill Clinton is about to speak so I got to get my grapes peeled and my damask pillows fluffed up for the show, obliged.    

I think I am still a little stunned about Eastwood’s performance at the republican convention.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80505.html

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” 

Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man."

I forgive Clint Eastwood, thought it’s not really my place to do so.  I forgive Clint only because I need forgiveness myself.  For too many republicans (and some democrats too) president Obama has always been the “Invisible Man,” that is, Obama has not been seen for who he or what he has actually done, but rather what has been envisioned and engaged has been a phantasmagoric projection of white america’s distorted fears, prejudices, and hate.  Eastwood’s pantomime with his ‘invisible man’ demonstrated the pathology of Obama’s enemies more than any burning cross could, because virtually everyone would condemn a white-hooded Klansman ranting about the “master race,” but it’s harder (especially for this white privileged man) to be angry at a mentally crippled old man, to condemn an old fool talking to an empty chair and yelling “You’re crazy, you’re absolutely crazy” at his own illusion; and then watching a coliseum full of privileged white ‘christians’ applaud and cheer.  But hasn’t most of the republican convention been merely a variation of Eastwood’s performance, even when the producers supplied more articulate ‘ethnic’ props for the stage?            

After watching most of this convention I guess I can agree with what the narrator later says in Ellisons “Invisible Man,”  “The world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.”   But the more I understand the more ashamed and in need of forgiveness I am.  obliged    

This is my very talented daughter Amber and me (is she the next Emmylou?).  We are singing “Prayer in Open D” at my birthday party, it was a real gift to have her sing it with me (sorry I don’t have audio).  Thanks to all my friends who showed up it was a great party.  We ate Mulanchani, whiskey marinaded pork roast, fresh Frazier river sockeye in white wine and butter sauce from my old fishing buddy Rich, some great fresh garden salads including italian potato salad, oh, and of course baked ziti and pesto pasta.  Some days are just great blessings, days to bank against different days...days of shadows, sorrow, and thunder.  But not this day, this day was a day of abundance, great friendship, love, and joy.  Obliged.


Prayer in Open D


There's a valley of sorrow in my soul
                                   
Where every night I hear the thunder roll
                           
Like the sound of a distant gun
                           
Over all the damage I have done
                               
And the shadows filling up this land
                                 
Aew the ones I built with my own hand
                           
There is no comfort from the cold
                             
Of this valley of sorrow in my soul
                                 
There's a river of darkness in my blood
                             
And thru every vein I feel the flood
                             
There is no bridge for me to cross
                           
No way to bring back what is lost
                           
Into the night it soon will sweep
                             
Down where all my grievances I keep
                                 
But it won't won't wash away the  years
                             
Or one single hard and bitter tear
                           
And the rock of ages I have known
                         
Is a weariness down in the bone
                               
I use to ride it like a rolling stone
                   
Now I just carry it alone
                               
There's a highway risin from my dreams
                           
Deep in the heart I know it gleams
                             
For I have seen it stretching wide
                         
Clear across to the other side
                       
Beyond the river and the flood
                                   
And the valley where for so long I've stood
                           
With the rock  of ages in my bones
                             
Someday I know it will lead me home.

Obliged.

Oh, and my good friend and photographer Joan Davison took pictures of some of my older paintings on/for my birthday.  This one is my response to all the “Inventions of Eves.”

In this painting I tried to  engage the  2 (apparently) contradictory creation narratives in Genesis.  In the first one in Genesis 1. man and women are created simultaneously after the garden of Eden is already populated with all the animals.  In Genesis 2 man is created first and finds himself lonely after all the animals are not suitable companions, and then Eve is subsidiarily created last.  The Rabbis have speculated in the Talmud and elsewhere that Adam’s first wife, the first “Eve,” was actually Lilith.  Lilith usually doesn’t fare well in the bible and most mythological speculations, often described as the leader of the Lillu, hordes of female demons, etc..  Other narratives are more ambiguous like this verse in Isaiah 34:14:  “The wild cat shall meet with the jackals, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow, yea, Lilith shall repose there and find her a place of rest.”  I also hope that this functions as a bit of a parody on one panel of the Sistine chapel, which I have re-appropriated here to suit my intentions.  Incidentally, those are actual leaves I collected along the Seine in Paris about the same spot where one of my favorite poets, Paul Celan, killed himself.  I pressed them, and repainted them and then glued them onto the canvas. I always intended to use them in a painting for him.  I have many leaves left though, and I promise brother Paul to paint something for you.  Let me offer one of Celan’s poems: since I mentioned him:

Paul Celan - Tenebrae

We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.

Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Wind-awry we went there,
went there to bend
over hollow and ditch.

To be watered we went there, Lord.

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It gleamed.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Our eyes and our mouths are open and empty, Lord.

We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.

Blessings and obliged.

“Murmurs From Earth”

Here is an update from a previous post on Voyager 2 along with my recent painting project.  I have been listening and practicing some of the songs of Blind Willie Johnson again.  My favorite (which I don’t even attempt to sing) is “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-4jTbrLtUk   You have probably heard it before, and I think the images chosen on the video are ok, but they can also be distracting and superfluous.  Now if you have never been to a place beyond words, caused by either profound joy and astonishing beauty or else the unspeakable anguish of soul deadening pain, then that particular song by Willie may not mean much to you (but you should remember it anyway for someday in the future).  There are no lyrics to this song and I won’t clutter it up with my own ramblings, but, let me just add this; some extraordinarily insightful person chose this very song to go aboard the unmanned Voyager spacecraft that was launched into space in 1977.  That song by Blind Willie along with some books, drawings, mathematical equations, religious symbols, a greeting from President Carter, etc., that NASA called “murmurs from earth” is inscribed on that  “golden record,” above, and were sent into space to represent all of humynity to any advanced life forms that the Voyager encounters, along with directions and a map to earth (though I don’t know how smart that was).  

That space ship is still heading into outer space and I marvel at the idea that maybe 100,000 light years from now in a galaxy far far away some alien sisters and brothers (and whatevers) will discover and listen to this amazing song by Blind Willie and they will know something profoundly important about who we earthlings are; something more than all our philosophy/theology, dictionaries, diagrams of ovaries and testicles, nature pics and a portrait of Carl Sagan, could tell them about us. 

Of course, I am assuming that any extraterrestrials may already exist in a perfect, or at least a much better relationship with God.  But when the “aliens” find voyager they are going to know that we are the same sons-a-bitches that killed God’s son Jesus (who probably was loved and welcomed to their planet and visits there from time to time when he needs a break from us).   However, at least when they listen to Willie they will also know something of our own capacity for suffering, sorrow, and compassion, and that we are not a species of completely worthless skank-bastards, thanks to Willie that is, an old blind black man who died laying on a soggy mattress after being turned away from a white hospital.  He was broke, hungry, and living in the ruin of his burned down house in Beaumont Texas.  Do you think the folks at NASA included that bit of info on the ‘Golden Disc?’  (I kinda hope that they didn’t, let’s give ET a chance to know us better first).   Obliged.

“BE FREE!!!”  An in--dependence day reflection.

One possible definition for freedom is the ability to name anything we choose as ‘freedom.‘  Then again, our imaginations are also like colonies.  Foreign masters have sent forth emissaries, priests, soldiers, and moneychangers, with shiny baubles, exotic sweets, and magic words from unknown gods; and the power of those words is in paper, gold, steel, and lead.  The new gods are bloody gods and those that serve them take delight in death.  And so they call it “freedom,” these new gods and their killer angels, and they proclaim ‘freedom or death,’ freedom and death, freedom; death.  And when all that we once had has been given over, all our sacred places, our sons and daughters, all our ancient affections, then even our shadows must surrender the ground they fall upon, must surrender to this freedom.  Yet still they come, they have never ceased coming, the gods of this world/word, whose greatest commandment is to “Be Free!”

“Be Free” is the title of that life size sculpture of myself I constructed from paper, plaster, bronze and barbed wire about 15 years ago.  That face is my own ‘death mask.'  The title "Be Free" inscribed at the top in gold leaf I borrowed from Louis Althusser and his philosophical concept of 'hailing' and  ‘interpellation.‘  Obliged y’all, happy in--dependence day, be well, be happy, be thankful.

A "life size" perspective.  And following is a picture of the other or back side, depending on what you choose to call it.  Again, obliged.