From the Headlines

From the headlines: “Pay Up or Children Go Hungry.”  A local school district is refusing lunch to kids who have a balance on their cafeteria bill.  This is just the latest outrage that local schools have inflicted on students.  Now they’re making kids go hungry and humiliating them in the process.  Why do schools treat children like they are the enemy?  I could go on and on about the injustices, both arbitrary and imperious, that our own boys suffered at the hands of administrators and others at the local schools that they attended.  And the constant throw-downs we had with those schools in defending our children’s rights.  It seems like every day there is some story in the news about another abuse of power by a local school.  (Not to mention stories concerning fascist behavior of schools in other cities.)  But making kids go through the school day hungry?  What have we come to?  Where is our basic decency? 

St. Thomas Aquinas

May Our Lord grant me

your wisdom,

your love of truth,

your devotion,

your generosity of spirit,

and your singleness of heart,

that we might rejoice together,

in the presence of the Trinity

to whom all glory and power belongs

forever and ever,

amen.

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject.  For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it. 

                                                                    --St. Thomas Aquinas

Lewis Mumford

Twenty-one years have gone by since the passing of Lewis Mumford, but I think of him often, as I see the way that people replace their cell phones like toys for a “more advanced model,” as the “obsolete” computers only a few years old pile up, only to release, like fatal eggs, the phthalates, antimony, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, lead, and other poisons they are made of when they are opened by a child in India or China at an illegal recycling plant.  The information revolution has turned into another nightmare of consumerism, and the poor and the planet pay the cost.  Personal computers and cell phones are the holy grails of planned obsolescence.  The most advanced technology is paired with poor engineering, base advertising, and programmed wastefulness.  Dear Mumford, help us to remember your words--your wisdom--so that we can find a way out of this madness!

(Lewis Mumford was a true renaissance man, and I am certainly not attempting to reduce his thought to a critique of consumerism alone.  So much of his work concerning literature, urban planning, architecture, the environment; his philosophy of history and his outspoken criticism of the Vietnam War, to name but a few of the subjects on which he wrote so powerfully and with such an interdisciplinary depth, are also extremely relevant and necessary for us today.  But his discussion of technology, especially in relation to the modern production of consumer goods, really speaks to me these days.)

NB: I write this on a computer that is probably filled with spyware, and I think of how Mumford predicted that computers would inevitably end up spying on us!

The Bee

Who does not love the bee?  She is beautiful, hard-working, and generous with the fruits of her labor.  She is an architect of incomparable accomplishment, a chemist of surpassing brilliance, a careful mother, nurse, and faithful servant.  Her wax is so fine that no artificial product should bear that name.  Beeswax candles are the only non-essential I can confess to having indulged in for a very long time.  But are they a non-essential?  How they offer a special richness to prayer, to meditation!  When one is weary, their light and scent refresh the soul.

     The honeybee.  Her honey is truly liquid eloquence, a fair reminder of all the sweetness of creation.  She lives in a shining temple, and her song is a constant chant.  The flowers welcome her, because she is a midwife to their seeds.

Anniversary of the Death of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

In memory of your great and heroic spirit, I earnestly pray for peace and for an end to American aggression in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Love-In-A-Mist

Because love surrounds like a field

and cannot be touched but everywhere touches,

and makes only the occasional blossom,

but remains through winter’s

persistent night a spiritual flower;

death’s adversary in a concealed struggle,

I leave it to the earth

that pulls me down impatiently.

Mother, why are you in such a hurry?

The Astronomy of Novalis

The amazing astronomy of Novalis.  An intimacy with the mysterious heavens is the hallmark of the poetic spirit.  George MacDonald, in his novel Phantastes, says, “They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fate of men are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law.  All that man sees has to do with man.  Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship.  The community of the center of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts.”

     The sun, the moon, stars, and planets speak to us of the grandeur of creation and bind us to our ancestors who marveled over the same celestial drama as ourselves.  The special closeness that we feel to those lights brings forth in us a desire for their companionship.  They are truly our brothers and sisters.

Was ist also die Sonne? Ein durch sich erregbarer, mithin immer selbsttätiger, ewig leuchtender Körper. Und ein Planet? Ein relativ erregbarer, für fremde Anregung gestimmter Körper.Licht ist Vehikel der Gemeinschaft des Weltalls; ist dies echte Besonnenheit in der geistigen Sphäre nicht ebenfalls?

Wie wir, schweben die Sterne in abwechselnder Erleuchtung und Verdunklung; aber uns ist, wie ihnen, im Zustand der Verfinsterung doch ein tröstender, hoffnungsvoller Schimmer, leuchtender und erleuchteter Mitstern gegönnt.

Die Kometen sind wahrhaft exzentrische Wesen, der höchsten Erleuchtung und der höchsten Verdunkelung fähig – ein wahres Ginnistan – bewohnt von mächtigen, guten und bösen Geistern, erfüllt mit organischen Körpern, die sich zu Gas ausdehnen – und zu Gold verdichten können.  (Novalis)

     When I read the works handed down to us by chroniclers and poets of earlier times, I find myself thinking: is it any wonder that they saw the comet as a dread augury?  Our astonishing nearness to, and distance from, the celestial realm and its inhabitants is central to our relationship with it and with them.  At times we can even touch the stars.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

                                                               

                                            --Martin Luther King, Jr.  “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”

Cultural Murder

People all over the world have developed ways of surviving in partly dangerous, partly agreeable surroundings.  The stories they told and the activities they engaged in enriched their lives, protected them and gave them meaning.  The ‘progress of knowledge and civilization’ – as the process of pushing Western ways and values into all corners of the globe is being called – destroyed these wonderful products of human ingenuity and compassion without a single glance in their direction.  ‘Progress of knowledge’ in many places meant killing of minds.  Today old traditions are being revived and people try again to adapt their lives to the ideas of their ancestors.  I have tried to show, by an analysis of the apparently hardest parts of science, the natural sciences, that science, properly understood, has no argument against such a procedure.  There are many scientists who act accordingly.  Physicians, anthropologists and environmentalists are starting to adapt their procedures to the values of the people that they are supposed to advise.  I am not against a science so understood.  Such a science is one of the most wonderful inventions of the human mind.  But I am against ideologies that use the name of science for cultural murder.  

  

                                                                         --Paul Feyerabend, Against Method

In Praise of Herbs

For he fashioned all things that they might have being;

and the creatures of the world are wholesome,

And there is not a destructive drug among them,

nor any domain of the nether world on earth,

For justice is undying.

                         --Wisdom 1:14-15

Music

I was thinking about the power of music when compared to mere words.  So many minor Renaissance poets are remembered today only because of Lassus, Monteverdi, de Wert and other composers whose music managed to give an enduring life to their rather tedious verses.  Contemporary song lyrics, without the accompanying music, often seem silly or slight.  But as music, they become magical.  On the other hand, even the finest lyrics usually don’t have the power to overcome flat or boring melodies.  In one of his letters to his father, Mozart pointed out that people were willing to put up with the most pointless stupidities in the librettos of comic operas because the music carried them away.  (I quoted part of the letter in my story, “Laurel Eberharter.”)  I know that “experts” attempt to set forth all sorts of idiotic psychological and even (ugh!) biological explanations for why music has this power over us, but I prefer to believe that it is the product of qualities so subtle that they cannot be explained.  Music is magic, and sometimes, sheer glory.   

Flowers

FLOWERS—

  they still have

      The Power!

click on photo to enlarge

Tagore

For a while now, I’ve wanted to write something about my love youthful love affair with Tagore’s poetry.  It is not something that I’ve outgrown, but other voices have also entered my life, and Tagore is now one among many.

     

It is fashionable these days to dismiss Tagore’s poetry as “dated” or simply “quaint.”  His importance to the poets of the Latin American “boom” generation is often met with incredulity.  Part of the problem has always been that we in the West know Tagore only through translation; the essential Bengali qualities of his poetry, the musical and linguistic character of the originals, are lost in translation.  And the translations that we have were, for the most part, done almost a century ago.  Despite this, those pale reflections, the free verse English translations penned by Tagore himself and others, remain special to me.

                                                                                              

     As a teenager and young man, I had plenty of (self-imposed) psychological and emotional turmoil in my life, but I could always find refuge and peace at the local university library, where I poured for hours over Gitanjali, The Crescent Moon, Fireflies, The Songs of Kabir, Fruit-Gathering, The Gardener, Stray Birds and The Fugitive.  What was more real, the dark library with its narrow staircases, or the luxuriant tropical gardens, the lonely seashores, the ecstatic dance of the disciple before his Beloved in Tagore's poetry?  I will never forget the joy that those books brought me, the way they entered my dreams.  All of the world’s desires and emotions seemed spread out before me, as well as the persistent call of the world hereafter.  Only a few other poets have spoken to me so powerfully: Neruda, John of the Cross, Cavafy, Novalis.

Night

Wie schön, hier zu verträumen
Die Nacht im stillen Wald,
Wenn in den dunklen Bäumen
Das alte Märchen hallt.

              --Joseph von Eichendorff
                 "Die Nacht"