tojointhelost.com

Due to current events in my personal life, I have been thinking again about how poorly our culture prepares us to deal with death and with people who are dying.  Not strange, I guess, for a nation founded on the pursuit of happiness.  People wonder why I put Thomas Jefferson in hell in To Join the Lost.  Mostly, it’s because of his hypocrisy as a slave-owner who not only knew that he was doing wrong, but knew the degree of evil that it involved.  But I could have put him there for this seemingly benign phrase as well, which shackles the body politic to a warped, limited vision of the human condition, easily subverted into greed, lust, and the quest for satiation.  A people dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is not going to have a lot of time and thought to spare for such unpleasant things as death.  They’re going to shove it aside into hospitals and nursing homes; prettify it in funeral parlors; hide it in closed caskets that no one is allowed to welcome home from Afghanistan and Iraq; have broadcast journalists censor it from Syrian twitter feeds as too upsetting for the average viewer.  We have no emotionally satisfying Read the rest of this entry »

A Fat Rich Elderly White Guy Who Wants To Be President

It is gratifying, for those of us who enjoy our schadenfreude warm, to watch the Republican presidential contestants expend upon each other the slyly ad hominem vitriol they normally save, to the betterment of our political discourse and in service of the nation’s preservation,  for the defacement of their electoral adversaries from the other party.  One can perhaps attribute this delightful leveling of the playing field at least in part to the recent return to prominence of Newt Gingrich, a character who sometimes seems to have sprung straight from the pen of Charles Dickens on one of that Master of Snark’s more sardonic days.   Newt has the gift of bringing others to his own level, just like what happens when you flush.  I’m prompted to these thoughts by the recollection that last week, television ads aired in support of Gingrich famously twitted Mitt Romney for the sin of speaking French.  Today we learn, from David Bromwich’s article in the New York Review of Books, that Newt’s Ph.D. dissertation relied on sources in that very language.   What a nice smile he has, though: a shark with a full belly.

A colleague standing next to me said, “I come from Mississippi.  If we moved out every time something got flooded…”  She didn’t get to finish her sentence because at that moment a car drove by, honking to express support for the couple hundred of us standing in front of the Waterbury State Office Complex, and we whooped and hollered in return, waving our “BRING US ALL BACK” signs.

The first couple of months of displacement were hard.  I don’t mean to compare our plight with that of people who lost their homes or businesses to the floods, but the fact remains that the lives of the state employees who had been based in Waterbury were profoundly disrupted.  The familiar spaces and procedures in which we had spent the majority of our waking hours most days were gone, swept away, finished.  In their place were makeshifts and make-dos.  One doesn’t realize how Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be a lot of death around here, lately.  A friend’s father died.  Another friend’s father is dying.  A dear woman I knew at work passed away last week.  Two other friends, a married couple, are dealing with cancer.  Either this is a statistically random cluster, or the world is coming to an end.  In honor of either possibility, I have been thinking about a poem I wrote a long time ago:

I have beheld the end of a life,
the blue eyes turning to the ceiling
and closing, and the strange orange hue that
then suffused the cooling skin,

and a life’s beginning I’ve also beheld,
the mewling, stick-limbed lump of tenderness,
eyes clamped shut, trading the womb for
its exhausted mother’s arms.

It’s odd to hold them both within me,
two pale lights at the ends of a stick
that do not balance: the one cannot
be weighed with the other or cancel it out.

Some console themselves with rhythms,
tell the children the gracefully falling
leaves make mulch for what will rise,
as if the steady beat of days,

of seasons, generation and decay
makes white noise and drowns the silence.
Others flood the quiet betimes with
droning of the eternal.  Others

watch tv.  In the body’s
sealed envelope, we carry
from lips forever shrunken open
to the inarticulate young

a sediment of sentiment.
It gives them heft, to bear their growth.
Devoted as robins to their hatchlings,
we pass it down the straining gullet;

unlike them, we’re no more empty
for giving our young what we had in us.
Passing on is not unburdening.  When
my father died, he handed me

a weight no one could bring into
this world except by leaving it.
My first born bleated her little welcome in
that same building’s other wing.

I had just sat down at my computer this morning, thinking that there is nothing I can usefully add to the welter of comment, analysis, reminiscence, and blether about this season, when I came across this little gem of purity of spirit.   Sit back, sigh, and enjoy.

Siri Nilsen

First, a couple of disclaimers.

Siri Nilsen is the daughter of Shari Nilsen, whom I knew back when she was jus’ plain li’l Shari Gerber back in the ‘hood.  Shari had long straight black hair, perfect olive skin, considerable personal beauty, and one of those pure angelic soprano voices.  Kind of like a short, Jewish, Buffalonian Joan Baez, only more buxom.  She was a year ahead of me at Kenmore West Senior High, and I used to go listen to her play her guitar and sing folk music at the Rue Franklin coffeehouse.  I had a hopelessly unconsummated crush on her, of which she was either entirely unaware or in denial.  But we were good friends.  (Ouch!)  A few years out of high school we lost contact.  She went on to marry and then divorce a Norwegian folk musician, Lillebjorn Nilsen.  No, I never heard of him, either, but he is a big deal in Norway.  Siri is one of their daughters.  Not long ago, Shari and I came back into contact via Facebook.  So that’s how I know of Siri.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Tea Party's Bitch

On public radio this morning, I heard three stories whose rapid juxtaposition seems to illustrate perfectly this moment in our society’s life.

First, congressional Republicans were playing politics with extension of tax breaks for the working classes.  The version they passed would have paid for the tax break by freezing federal employees’ wages,  instead of the funding mechanism proposed by the Democrats to increase taxes slightly on the highest income earners.  The GOP bill also contained a “poison pill” provision that they knew would be unacceptable to the Senate Democrats and the President.   The poison pill would, if enacted, force the President to decide quickly whether to allow construction of an unnecessary and environmentally questionable oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, rather than wait until after the election.  I guess the idea is to divert attention from the GOP’s unwillingness to increase taxes on the richest of the rich for any purpose whatsoever, and to allow themselves to say the Democrats oppose both working class tax breaks and “jobs creation.”  As an added bonus, in this age of climate change they get to continue the pretense on behalf of their corporate masters that protection of the  environment conflicts with economic development.  Of course the cynicism is breathtaking.  To add to the bizarro world flavor of our national politics, later today, a Senate vote on the bill was blocked by… Senate Republicans playing politics!  But read on…

The second story was about testimony before a legislative committee by a woman in her eighties, concerning the cuts to the federal home heating assistance program proposed by the Obama administration.  Funding to help poor people buy fuel for heat would be cut roughly in half.  She was talking about what a reduction in this assistance would mean to her, this winter.  Last winter, she kept her thermostat at 60 to save money on heat.  This winter, she’s wondering what she has to give up in order to keep from freezing – food? medications?

The third story was about a local arts center, the Flynn Theatre.  It has just received an anonymous $1,000,000 donation to help replace its  squeaky seats.

Evil Kenyan Socialist Muslims, Beware This Man!

Long-time readers of this blog will know of my affection for Charles Dickens, class warrior extraordinaire and the greatest wielder of snark and outrage the English language has ever known.  Often, reading Dickens, I am struck by the feeling that except for the funny costumes he is talking directly about contemporary America.  Apparently the wonderful blogger Lance Mannion feels much the same way, likening New Gingrich to the evil schoolmaster Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby.  I would quibble with only one thing.  Nobody named “Lance Mannion” has any business making fun of “Newt Gingrich” as a moniker Dickens might have invented.

In this same vein, and with a nod to Newt’s claim that whereas most people think in terms of relatively short periods of time, he himself habitually contemplates vistas of 500 years, I would like to direct your attention to a fairly recently published book, one of whose themes is the unvarying nature of malevolence over the centuries.

In addition to exquisite taste in literature, Ted Lehmann seems to have a fine blog.

The Indextrious Reader joins the chorus.