Hiatus

I will be not be adding entries for a few weeks, as I must attend to family concerns and the celebration of my mother’s life well lived.

I will also be away from e-mail, for which I apologize in advance.

Beloved Mother

Florence Adalia

4 April 1939 – 26 April 2009

Will The Circle Be Unbroken

I was standing by my window,
On one cold and cloudy day
When I saw that hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away.

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky.

I said to that undertaker
Undertaker please drive slow
For this lady you are carrying
Lord, I hate to see her go.

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky.

Oh, I followed close behind her
Tried to hold up and be brave
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in the grave.

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky.

I went back home, my home was lonesome
Missed my mother, she was gone
All of my brothers, sisters crying
What a home so sad and lone.

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky.

We sang the songs of childhood
Hymns of faith that made us strong
Ones that mother Florence taught us
Hear the angels sing along.

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky.

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky.

Always near, you to me.

New Troy Davis Song and Video

Steve from Amnesty International stopped by last night and commented on my most recent Troy Davis Update.

He posted this YouTube link to a newly released video written and recorded by State Radio, a group I’m happy to discover is from Boston, just across the river from The Bandit.

Thanks Steve for letting me know about this video.

Thanks State Radio for getting the word out.

Visit Troy Anthony Davis for more information.

To The Muse

On my trip to the Coop last week, I found a book “Committed to Memory: 100 Poems to Memorize,” with a forward or introduction by Harold Bloom.   It seemed heavy on the English poets, and short on works that I’ve committed to memory.

I wasn’t impressed with the choices, so I’m creating my own list of “Poems To Memorize” or “Poems That I’ve Memorized And Can’t Understand Why The Rest Of The World Hasn’t.” Poems weaving around my memory through images, rhythm, cadences, feelings.

I’ll not follow any particular order. I’ll  post my choices intermittently and over time, archiving my selections in the new “Muse-ings” page, found above. I have at some time committed most to memory, even if in the most cursory way, by simply gorging on them repeatedly, or by making a concerted effort to take them into my self through repetition.

Some I remember better than others. Most often, I simply remember lines, passages, phrases. Some emerge as images in my mind’s eye.

There are those I remember word for word.

It’s fair to ay I started my list in January with William Carlos Williams “The Ivy Crown.“

W. H. Auden’s “First Things First” is another:

First Things First

Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well
As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise,
Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind
With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,
Likening your poise of being to an upland county,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.

This, moreover, at an hour when only to often
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do,
Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,
And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quetly drew my attention to what had been done
—So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

*********

The next poem I quoted last month in “Homage The New iPod,” Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” I wholeheartedly believe that large chunks of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The First Elegy should be nestled in the collective psyche.

Such an exercise might by a slim chance breathe life into an increasingly soulless world, where bodies inhabit casual spaces, and bloodless hearts beat as though living.

(Please note, WordPress interface won’t allow me a proper alignment; I prefer Mitchell’s translation to most others, for those who want to wrap their fingers around a book.)

The First Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?  and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?  Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.  Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision; there remains for us yesterday’s street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.   Whom would it not remain for–that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers? But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

Don’t you know yet?  Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes–the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.  A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?  Weren’t you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.) But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal.  Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost) who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.  Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.  But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself, as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time. Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love and might say to herself, “Perhaps I can be like her?”  Shouldn’t this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us?  Isn’t it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.

For there is no place where we can remain.

Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened:
until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground;
yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn’t notice at all: so complete was their listening.  Not that you could endure God’s voice–far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.

It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.
Didn’t their fate, whenever you stepped into a church in Naples or Rome, quietly come to address you?  Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission, as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa. What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death–which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward. Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to learn, not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one’s own first name behind,
forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.

Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.  And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.  Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created. Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.

The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.
In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers.

But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit’s growth–: could we exist without them?  Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus, the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god has suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

*******************************

For this first entry, The Prologue from The Gospel of John comes to mind, language and the eternal mysteriously manifesting in the imagination. (With that statement, I ignore the gospel’s theological concerns.)  The prologue was committed to memory decades ago and it has never departed. I’m not sure if the rhythm of the ancient text parallels our English translations, but the modulations of John’s Prologue make it particularly memorable.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.   He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.  In him was life, and the life was the light of men.   The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him.  He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.  The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.  He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.  But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God;  who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.

(John bore witness to him, and cried, “This was he of whom I said, `He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.’”)  And from his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace.

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Troy Davis’ Letter to Friends and Supporters

For those of you following the Troy Davis case, good news! According to Troy’s website, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has granted oral arguments to be heard, 9 December in Atlanta at 1:00 p.m.

The The Troy Anthony Davis site has also posted a letter from Troy to friends and supporters. I have reprinted it here, in its entirety, with the permission of Amnesty International.

Please consider visiting the Troy Davis site, learning about the case, and if you are so inclined, dropping Troy a note.

“This is a message from Troy Anthony Davis
November 2008

I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe.

I want you to know that the trauma placed on me and my family as I have now faced execution and the death chamber 3 times is more punishment than most can bare; yet as I face this state santioned terror, I realize one constant, my faith is unwavering, the love of my family and friends is massive and the fight for justice and against injustice by activists world-wide has ignited a fire that is raging for Human Rights and Human Dignity. You inspire me, you honor me and as I pray for strength and guidance for my family and loved ones, for the victims family and loved ones, I share with you this struggle, I share with you our triumps, knowing that you add to my strength, my courage and because of that, I share with you my life.

We must Dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,

‘I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!’

Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!”

(end of letter)

Time Article on Troy Davis

Because the life of one man matters.

The World Speaks

I’ve tried several times to offer something on Obama’s election last night; it’s all been truly foolish and mediocre at best. But then I ran across the following.

So I offer these voices from around the world, courtesy of the BBC. They say it best:

The World Speaks on Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States of America.

YouTube Find Of The Week

I ran across this Kennedy Presidential campaign song on YouTube this evening, and I thought it was too good a find not to share.

I find it fascinating that Kennedy had a schtick, “cast your vote for Kennedy and the change that’s overdue.”

Sound familiar?

Why Women Should Vote

I received the following in an e-mail from my friend Dave, about mid-September.

All of it is true.

The essay’s writer is anonymous, but I thank the woman who wrote it. I recognize her as an everyday hero, one who cares enough to keep history alive.

I offer it here in honor of election day with pride, enthusiasm, and great hope in America’s citizens, men and women of every color and from every religion.

“A Message For All Women

How quickly we forget.

Why Women Should Vote

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; they lived only 90 years ago.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.

Lucy Burns

And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic’.

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.

Dora Lewis

They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote. For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms.

Alice Paul

When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

Library of Congress PDF of Women Suffrage Prisoners, including hyperlinks to related LOC archival photos and documents of women prisoners.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because–why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO’s new movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels’. It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was–with herself. ‘One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,’ she said. ‘What would those women think of the way I use, or don’t use,
my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.’ The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her ‘all over again.’

HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn’t our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men: ‘Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.’

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party, remember to vote.

History is being made.”

(End of e-mail)

To honor my African-American sisters, many of whom have too long wept bitter tears for their loved ones and themselves, I also remember the incomparable Sojourner Truth during this historic election:

Sojourner Truth at Women’s History About.com

Richard Fuld, Jr.: Time the Pay the Piper

Richard S. Fuld, Jr. appeared before Congress this morning, and, to put it delicately, fell all over himself. His appearance coincided with the Dow’s 800 plus point dip this morning, the first day that the market fell below 10,000 in four years.

Fuld, some of you may remember, was awarded the “Michael Eisner Award for corporate rapacity and poor corporate governance” by Nicholas Kristof in his column Need A Job? $17,000 an Hour, No Success Required.

I wrote elsewhere last week, that I think Fuld and others should be rounded up and corralled in a pen somewhere on Wall Street, and let the masses have at them. Well, I am advocate of non-violent action, and I doubt that will happen, but there is still a need for accountability and a semblance of justice. I suggested rotten eggs and overripe tomatoes to obtain a kind of national catharsis–but in light of today’s testimony that’s a bit optimistic.

The parading of Wall Street greed over the next months will not yield “justice,” but as I also wrote, I think these individuals might be well served by changing their identities ASAP. On second thought, the American public may simply be placated by the televised blame and shame.

If so, that is bad for America.

The more things change, the more they stay the same:

The Great Divide (Once Again)

My previous posts on “Sarah Palin and the Great Divide” met with more than polite hostility by many of my friends on the liberal left. One friend summarized my attempt at parsing as “that religious garbage.”

I refrained from saying flat out, “point proved, the intolerance cuts both ways.”

I found the following today by Stanley Fish:

Politics and the Pulpit (Once Again).

Fish grapples with many of the Constitutional nuances of the debate, and although his specific concern is the tax exempt status of churches, he explicates concerns similar to mine with more insight, experience, and skill. His analysis is worth reading. He writes in his conclusion that “[t]he bottom line is that there is no rational or principled or constitutional resolution to this conflict. The resolution, if there is one, will have to be political. Either the Johnson amendment will be repealed or it won’t be. And when one or the other happens, the boundaries between church and state, at least with respect to this issue, will have been settled — for a while.”

The reader’s comments are lively and diverse, and worth scanning.

Most social activism and change comes from the belief that all humans are “created equal,” and that this truth, often framed in the language of religion, must be politically realized. The morality of equality and the immorality of social oppression has fundamentally shaped human development. Unfortunately, the assorted maps to broader and more inclusive equality are diverse and subject to interpretation. For that reason, I’m sympathetic to Fish’s analysis: the roads to heaven and hell are paved with the best of intentions, and politics reflects the best and worst of our ideas, writ large.

Professor Fish’s bio and his intellectual predispositions can be read here.

As a post-script to my first entry on the V. P. debate, in Sojourners this week, Elizabeth Palmberg writes in her entry “V. P. Debate’s Blind Spots on Darfur” that Biden, Palin, and Ifill all got it in part wrong on Darfur last week. She states that “talk of boots on the ground misses the point: what we need on the ground is the wingtips and sensible pumps of real diplomats, backed up by real economic consequences for Khartoum, including an array of new, substantive economic sanctions on Sudan (which has learned to circumvent the ones we imposed years ago). This would enable the various groups in Darfur –- armed and, most importantly, unarmed –- to come together and negotiate with Kharoum from a position of strength, as their neighbors in southern Sudan did in 2005.”

Her entry is short and worth the minute or two it takes to read.