Category: Meditations

In the train station

Carol and I were walking through the San Mateo train station late at night, on our way home. It was very quiet. I looked down, and there was a playing card on the platform, face down.

“A playing card,” I said. “Let’s see what it is.”

I bent down and turned it over.

“Five of clubs,” I said. “That means good luck.” That’s the kind of thing my mother used to say: she’d see some random thing, and say that it meant good luck.

“You just made that up,” said Carol.

“Not me,” I said.

Why I dislike cleaning out desks

This afternoon, I set myself the task of going through a desk that I had used when we lived in New Bedford, but which has since then stood in the garage. I found stationery I had forgotten about, a brass button that had come off my blue blazer, blank checks from a bank that is now defunct, and a set of keys to my parents’ old house. For some reason now forgotten, the keys were on a key ring that originally had held the keys to a 1969 Plymouth Valiant automobile I once owned, an automobile (not that it matters) which I had purchased from a direct lineal descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The sight of the key to the porch door instantly brought back a vivid image of walking up to my parents’ house and letting myself in. This was a disturbing image because when dad sold the house after my mother’s death, the new owners tore it down; nothing from it had been salvaged but everything merely thrown away; while in its place a tawdry three-story mansionette was erected, the new building extending to the absolute limits of what the zoning regulations allowed.

This train of thought led immediately to a consideration of the vanity of human endeavor. This is why I do not like to clean out desk drawers and make them tidy: better, I think, to let some things lie unseen.

On a rainy evening

At last we’re getting a real winter storm: dark clouds all day long; an early dusk; constant rain all afternoon and evening, sometimes light, sometimes heavy; occasional gusts of wind driving the rain against the skylights of our little second floor apartment. A perfect evening to read Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson.

I’ve gotten to the point in the biography where Bates describes what Johnson was like when he had just turned fifty: his wife dead; his great dictionary done; well over a million words written and published (half a million alone in his reporting on Parliamentary debates), most of it ghost-writing or anonymous hack work that paid little; and he has always struggled financially, has been arrested for debt, and wears clothes that a homeless person might wear. But however skillfully Bates tells Johnson’s tale of middle age, Johnson himself told it better, more concisely, more pointedly, in this essay from December of 1759:

We do not indeed so often disappoint others as ourselves. We not only think more highly than others of our own abilities, but allow ourselves to form hopes which we never communicate, and please our thoughts with employments which none ever will allot us, and with elevations to which we are never expected to rise; and when our days and years are passed away in common business, or common amusements, and we find at last that we have suffered our purposes to sleep till the time of action is past, we are reproached only by our own reflections; neither our friends nor our enemies wonder that we live and die like the rest of mankind; that we live without notice, and die without memorial; they know not what task we have proposed, and therefore cannot discern whether it is finished. —The Idler, no. 88.

Rosy-fingered dawn
appeared in the east
to find neither bird
nor beast yet awake.
Last night’s candle still
burned, small and steady,
in the window, there
to guide something home.
I yawned, listened
to the holiday
stillness, felt the cold,
put on the teapot.
I’m pessimistic:
I don’t believe that
peace on earth, good will,
or even much love
will ever come to
this generation,
nor to their children;
just wars and hatred.
But still it happens:
Rosy-fingered dawn
comes again, starts us
on another day.

Outside

Once when the sky
burst open and down
came creatures, twisting,
screaming, wings outstretched,
falling, falling,

a poet looked
up. He tried to turn
away, but could not.
Falling, writhing, down,
out of his sight.

He felt the need
to tell a tale of
what he had just seen:
the creatures, the screams,
the fall, the fall.

The creatures were
angels — he became
convinced of this fact —
falling from heaven,
exiles. Exiled.

They were rebels.
Hate-filled, overweening,
ambitious. God had
exiled them, forced them
out of heaven.

He turned away,
went inside to write.
Outside, flawless sky
and fertile warm earth,
perfect and still.

 

The day that lived in infamy

Seventy years ago today, U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor were bombed by Japanese military forces. President Franklin Roosevelt said it was a day that would live in infamy. Yet Pearl Harbor Day feels increasingly distant in time, and decreasingly important to most U.S. citizens. There are fewer people alive who remember December 11, 1941; for example, this will be the last year that Pearl Harbor survivors gather, since there are no longer enough of them left to keep on organizing the annual gatherings. That attack on Pearl Harbor almost seems to have happened to a different country: Pearl Harbor was followed by a military draft, rationing, tax rates of 94% by 1944 — all of which were politically inconceivable following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. The terrorist attack of September 11 now looms far larger in our collective memory than Pearl Harbor Day: I’m willing to bet that the majority of Unitarian Universalist congregations won’t bother to recognize Pearl Harbor Day this coming Sunday, yet probably most Unitarian Universalist congregations recognized the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attack.

Thinking about this has put me in an Ecclesiastes mood: “There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” And then I think about all the ancient battles that were fought by cultures around the world, and those who survived those battles said that their memory should live forever, and now those memories are gone. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”

The real revolution is not over

Gil Scott-Heron said:

“A lot of times people see battles and skirmishes on TV and they say, ‘Ah ha, the revolution is being televised.’ No: the results of the revolution are being televised.

“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.

“What you see later on is the results of that; but the revolution, that change that takes place, will not be televised.” [recorded in 1982 at the Wax Museum, Washington, D.C., for the film Gil Scott-Heron: Black Wax.]

I once thought that first revolution, the one in my mind, would happen once, and then I would be done. But it hasn’t worked out that way. I keep seeing that there is another way of looking at things than the way I was shown: consumer goods are not so good; the free market is not free, it is both expensive and restrictive; media are called that because they mediate, they get in between you and the world; and the ultimate goal in life is not to be contented.

The poem that you like best

A friend writes:
Which poem do you like best?
And he mentions Ezra Pound, who
said that less
is more.

I guess I
like the shorter one the best.
I want to sense the holes in
existence.
Less, less:

pare away
words, thoughts, images, and sounds.
Pare away feelings, and the
self, go well
past Pound.

Pare away
until nothing is left but
truth. And if truth is gone too,
nothingness
is fine.

I wrote back:
I like the shortest
one best.