Believing In

C. S. Lewis was a glib son of a bitch, but he nailed it when he spoke of how disastrous it is to embark upon believing something "not because it is true, but for some other reason." The existentialist project as conceived by Camus strikes me as simply impossible. Certainly impossible for me. "I'll just decide that all people are important, and then they'll be important because I have decided they are important, and their importance will sustain my devotion to them --" No. No, the whole thing collapses under the slightest pressure. (for example, what the hell is important about some of these individuals? Not much that meets the eye.) For exactly the same reason, I am not going to be a Christian without a good reason, no matter how much a life of service and devotion appeals to me. (And I have always recognized that I am a servant, by temperament and inclination.) I would become a Christian simply and only because I thought it was true that Jesus was the unique human incarnation of the one God. Full stop. I'm not going to believe it because it's pleasant (and anyway, it's terrifying, if you take it seriously) or because it will make me mentally healthy. I don't know how other people are built, but I'm simply not built for that: I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I believe things that I think are true. 

Once upon a time I believed in the metaphysics of reductionist materialism. What's real are subatomic particles, and they bang into each other in deterministic ways, determining what the atoms do, and that determines what the molecules do, and that determines what cells do, and that determines what creatures such as us do, including -- somehow -- generating subjective experience and a sense of self, at some arbitrary threshold of neural complexity. Okay, well, maybe. Maybe free will is a delusion. Maybe subjective experience is a delusion: some people argue that, though it's a rather desperate move. I think it's more likely that what seems obvious is actually true: that we have intentions and make decisions. I suspect that even cells have intentions and make decisions: that mind and life are coterminous. This is I guess some kind of pantheism. It doesn't particularly leave me "believing in" God, which is a formulation that I suspect is self-subverting in precisely the same way as the Existentialist project. A God you have to "believe in" is not much of a God.

Nevertheless, my intuition is that there is Something to which one can orient, that you can know "where" it is as a blind man knows where the sun is, and turn towards it. (This is a METAPHOR, people. If you don't know what a metaphor is, look it up.) And that intuition is based partly on the surprising intelligibility of the world. It's weirdly explicable. It has rules it plays by, and we can figure some of them out. And, as the Stoics maintain, you can line yourself up with it, and swim with its current, in which case you will be happy (in an ultimate sense, not to be confused with gratified), or you can struggle against it, in which case you will be unhappy, unlucky, clumsy, and conflicted. This being so, the most fruitful thing to practice is orienting to this Sun. Listening for it.

This will distress those who insist that you must know what something is before you investigate it, which is to say most modern people most of the time. How do we know, ahead of time, that what we are orienting to is The Good (a.k.a God?) Well, we don't. But if you agree that we are not now exactly where and what we want to be, then you have to give yourself permission to look for where to go and what you would want to be, in places that are presently unknown. (Once again, this is a metaphor, Deal with it.) And it is actually not that hard to tell, most of the time, whether you are orienting yourself more properly. Are you more unified, more graceful, more at ease, more effective? Someone who is oriented more properly ought to be all of those things.

Contraction

All this may be true: but most of it is beyond my reach, and would be beyond my reach even if I were not old and deaf. My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected it to look is not going to help matters. I'll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)

I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, "You can't make socialism without socialists." Likewise, you can't make democracy without (small 'd') democrats.

Such business as I still have in the world is the cultivation of democrats and the democratic virtues (which are, after all, just a subset of the virtues, period). The lamps may not be relit in our lifetime, or in our grandchildren's. I am sorry about that. It is painful to watch an old established democracy attempt suicide, and the slow motion slide into comic horrors, while we wait to see if the attempt succeeded, is not much to my taste. But you play the hand you're dealt.

Milton and World-Building

I have an old paperback edition of Paradise Lost sitting around, and I pick it up and read a page or two from time to time. Milton is one of the few acknowledged great English poets I've never taken a shine to. Nothing about Satan's grandeur appeals to me. If all the powers and potentates of Heaven and Hell have to do is make speeches of elaborate self-justification, then I'd rather poke along here in the middle kingdom and watch a beetle negotiate a tuft of grass. Who cares about all their bombast and swagger?

And then there are the weird discontinuities. The world-building, as kids like to say these days, is comically inconsistent and contrived. Having Death and Sin walk around with the same ontological status as Lucifer and Jesus, not to mention as the Creator himself? How is that supposed to work? The world dangling on a string? The invocation of a Greek muse on a Hebrew stage? And if Milton really thinks that this God is the creator of the world, and of himself, how dare he stuff His mouth with his own words? I mean that literally: you would think that even the most naive and unreflective of Christians would recognize that they're not up to writing a script for God.

Yet Milton is neither naive nor blasphemous in intent, and he's no teenager. He's a man who's taken enormous real risks and played a key part in the great events of his time. His learning is (a little too obviously) immense. What is he playing at?

---

I'm uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We're making them up. They're for visiting, not for living in.

---

Meditating on that, I realize that I'm engaged in the same thing as my children. I'm holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He's writing a poem, and he's drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he's not that arrogant. He's a man writing a poem, that's all. He's not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he's unsophisticated, It's that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.

---

I have Milton's Sonnet 19 by heart, so it's not true that he's never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I'm old enough in reading to know that its not Milton's deficiency but mine that I'm dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I'll leave the door ajar. You never know.

Waking up Worried

I woke at four, worried that yesterday I had reassured my daughter about the political future badly and wrongly. No more sleep after that. I dutifully counted 150 breaths, in hopes that sheer boredom would get me back to sleep, but it didn't. But anyway I want to get up earlier, if not quite this early, so hey. Here I am.

I get so muddled nowadays, I have so many thoughts about the future, and sorting the true from the false and the useful from the useless is difficult, even before you get to trying to evaluate whether the problem might be thinking about the future at all. We're trained to think about the future as princes, and we are not princes. We are peasants, and we will take what get, and do our best with it. 

Being old helps a little, because I know now that almost nothing I was worried about forty years ago was the right thing to be worried about. We think we know way more about the future than we do; we're O so clever. "If things keep on going this way, then..." but things don't. They speed up; they slow down, they evoke overwhelming opposition; or they are fixed by "small hands that do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." Or they are swamped by things still worse and yet unimagined in the womb of time (but that is not one of the ways to reassure your daughter.)

Still, in the run-up to the disastrous election of 2016, though the polls were looking good, my heart misgave me. I was pretty sure Trump was going to win. And now though the polls put it a knife-edge, my heart is easier. I think this time he will probably lose. Which is evidence of nothing, of course. But nothings are sometimes the appropriate medicine for imaginary illnesses.

On the other hand, the bizarre fantasy entertained by both Left and Right in this country, that the opposition is somehow imaginary and ephemeral, and one good election will make it go away, is one of the main problems. We keep not really taking the other side seriously, because we're convinced that it's not really there, people couldn't really be so awful. Surely we'll wake up and they will turn out to have been just a nightmare? And surely we are not part of the problem, heavens no, our virtue is complete and perfect and the other side fears us totally, totally unreasonably.

I say that not because I think the sides are morally equivalent. I don't at all. But we are equally negligent of our political duty to engage with each other. We have already paid heavily for that, and we will pay even more heavily, because we have not the slightest intention of changing anything about ourselves. Anything. At. All.

Round Like An Orange

The toenails of the decades click on the oak wood floor:

they patter past the post, mortality set on "stun";

they'll eventually get the zoomies

and then your race is run.

The other day I learned of a new procedure:

they peel your prostate like an orange, removing it whole

rather than slicing it. I don't know how they get it out,

or if it leaves a hole.

The yellow leaves are brilliant in the sun,

the birch bark's white puts cadmium to shame,

the sky gets pale closer to the ground,

the tide runs back the way it came.

Flailing

Something very large and indistinct is moving slowly into alignment with me, so I'm sighting down its length. Or into its barrel. I'm not sure this thing will not blow up. I don't know what it is.

Still sick, perpetually sick, these days. My old ways of recovery won't do: I need to get rid of this visceral fat without doing a whole lot of exercise, and that means letting a lot of muscle go. Maybe I'll get to build the muscle back, and maybe I won't; but nothing good is going to happen until this systemic inflammation drops. If the muscle has to go it has to go. I need to get rid of this fat, as quick as I can.

It is an achingly beautiful Fall, this year, and I have barely seen it.

Why have I been so fretful and self-absorbed? Being sick does that to you, I guess. For one thing. But also I am more cut off from the world than I have ever been. Flailing in space like an untethered astronaut; every action its own equal and opposite reaction, summing to zero.

I fumble towards an idea of how I am in the world that includes the notion that understanding things may do some good even though it remains implicit and uncommunicated, but my materialism is so ingrained that there's not much traction there. What good does it do? I mean, there are side-glimmers, mistakes I don't make, injuries I don't inflict. Maybe. But the steamroller of Dickensian liberalism keeps bearing down on me: what good does it do? Where are the children saved from poverty, the tigers from extinction, the libraries from demolition? I'm just a black-robed priest muttering to himself in a dark place, grudging the virgins their sunlight.

Thus Dickens. Blake has another point of view: but then Blake was visited by the Christ in the morning, and drank God with his morning tea. I am a spirit of another sort.

Checking In

So I guess the three times I check in would be morning, afternoon (meaning not long after I get home, whether that's 10:00 or 4:00), and evening (meaning not long after dinner), and the idea of the afternoon and evening check-ins is to not get lost in the mindless repetitions for hours at a time -- not, anyway, until the constructive things are done. I don't tend to get lost in the morning, so that's more just a matter of getting out into the light of day and the air of the world.

I can invoke the divine double, if he'll show up. What would the angel bearing my semblance do? What would he feel and think? I don't need to do this alone, and I don't need to know what I'm doing. I can ask for help.

They can be very short walks: at this stage of my recovery, they should not be long ones. Hell, they can even just be standing out under the sky.

I do not need to know what should be done. My job is to find that out. I am groping my way: I don't know who I am or what my surroundings are: I'm blind. My light is spent. Pretending that it's otherwise is not going to help at all.

"And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless..."

The constructive things might be almost anything. Don't close that circuit prematurely.

Health

On an abbreviated evening walk -- all my exercise is abbreviated nowadays -- I took a leaf from OCD exposure therapy, and said, okay, let's just run with it. What if I never fully regain my health? What changes in my life? What adaptations do I make? 

And the answer was -- really not much changes at all. I can still do most of the things I do now, maybe less often, less strenuously. My life isn't predicated on robust health. And I'm not particularly invested in living twenty-five more years: having watched my father's extreme old age, I'm not all that enthused about spending a long time playing defense and waiting to see which system gives out first. I don't want my highest priority to be "keep this individual animal breathing." 

Not that I "believe in" an afterlife, or would find anything reassuring about the prospect if I did. Death as a candle going out has always struck me as something a little too good to be believed: a little too much of wish-fulfillment. Mebbe, mebbe not. But given that I'm going through that door eventually, willy-nilly, I do have some curiosity about it. I don't number, among my numerous faults, putting off the inevitable. What might one wake up to? If it's a clearer understanding of what one is, then -- bring it! 

So enough of all the histrionics. Most likely I just have a cold, and my lungs are a little damaged from Covid still, and I'll bounce back, just slower than I'm used to. 

September

So September, dearest of months, when the sweet rain returns and hope lifts its brindled nose! The sun slews round to shine straight down Burnside: driving away west from my house in the morning, I see a huge red orb in my rear view mirror (the fires aren't out yet), directly behind me. The promise and threat of the One, I suppose. How do I picture God? As that bloody orb: too bright to look at directly for long, but that by which everything else is seen. There, that's my theology, as far as it goes. I welcome the cloudy days and cooler weather, the veiling of the sun, as more suited to my weakness; but I don't entertain the delusion that I could do without it, or that my eyes make their own light. 

A scattering of airborne seeds, like baby dandelion fluffs, float over me when I'm coming home and walk back up the drive. And early in the evening Vega is still right overhead, still presiding. Yes. This remains my favorite month. I don't hate the summer any more, and I look forward to the cold and the rain less than I used to, but it's still, to me, the month of promise. It's the month I used to look over my new school books, and anticipate understanding new things and meeting new people (living and dead: new to me.) Mysterious names will fill with meaning; eyes will fill with light.

I go a little less in fear of saying what I've said before, I guess. I'll bang the drum I have, for the time given to me. Lots of love, you.

But What Is Piety?

The marvelous chutzpah of Le Guin, to finish her career by writing a novel celebrating piety for an audience teeming with libertarian tech bros and lefty utopians! My delight in Lavinia grows and grows.

And having just got as far as Book VII in rereading the Aeneid, I'm staggered by a) how faithful she is to Virgil and b) how faithful she is to Ursula Le Guin. Her conversation with Virgil is a conversation between equals. 

The model of the book, maybe, is the intimate conversations in the sacred grove between Lavinia and the sending of Virgil: a girl speaking on equal terms with the incarnate Western Tradition. Just a conversation, between a girl and a dying poet. 

Le Guin is aware, no one better, that he is dying, and that we need to bring his lares and penates to a new shore.

"But what is piety?" asked Aeneas.
That brought a thoughtful silence.

Voices Behind

It's just going to be a longer journey than you thought, that's all. Soberly watch the omens, make all the due sacrifices, know that you're paying debts incurred by the jealous spouse of God. Make mistakes: of course. But when the messenger speaks clearly, do what he says.

What else is there to say?

Well, this, of course. If you're not founding Rome all you're doing is ricocheting around the Mediterranean causing trouble. Do you know what Rome will be? Of course not. Then how do you know what the hell you're founding? You don't. (Okay. Class dismissed. That didn't take long.)

What we keep coming back to is that if we are to be something more than we are, we don't know ahead of time what we are becoming. We aspire to be better, but one of the things we aspire to be better at is knowing what "better" is. If we already knew, we'd be done. 

There's this caul of falsehood over my face. The wrongness that comes between me and the world. The doctrine of original sin has been in great disfavor all my life: but it was a hell of a lot better than the doctrine of original worthlessness that has replaced it. If you're not uniquely worthwhile now, always already, you will never be worthwhile. You or anyone else. Asking the question creates the answer, and the answer will always be "no." 

Bah. Enough of this. This is all trampled ground in late summer: the dust rises from our feet. Stop being stupid. Use the brains God gave you, boy. 

The wind blowing snow off the mountain top; the little tarn, voices behind.

The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood

A half moon low in the south: why so low? I don't think I've ever understood quite why the moon wanders so far from the ecliptic. Or does it? Maybe I'm just not minding the swings of the ecliptic. But sometimes the moon is high, way high, and sometimes low. As tonight. Mid-August, not particularly close to a solstice; it seems like the moon should be riding a middle way, not tangled in the trees of the flats south of Burnside. I'll have to look it up. But not now.

Now: that rounded chip caught in the trees, ivory-yellow. Diana. Σελήνη. Me he quedado mirando a la luna, a través de las finas acacias. And yet.

Feeling age pull at me, feeling the waste of my strength. I'm exercising a little again, going for little walks. Still feeling fragile, easily irritated, easily tired. What troubles me most, of course, is not having a lingering illness: it's discovering that the reason I haven't had a lingering illness before now is not that I'm a special person, who just doesn't put up with that sort of thing: it's that up till now I've had a nice run of dumb luck. in point of fact I'm just a regular person like other regular people. 

In Searoad an Important Man from Salem comes to a little Oregon beach town and takes a room at a hotel that has been mostly booked up by -- according to the side of their bus -- "The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood: A Christian Community." He views them benevolently, but as the weekend progresses and people in town repeatedly assume he's one of them ("Your party is on the patio, sir") he gets less and less happy about them. Le Guin didn't go in for humor much, but it's deftly done.

Well. Let's call it a night, Dale. Here's hoping for another run of luck, eh?

Morning

Phew. Difficult time in Eugene: I didn’t know Dad knew so little about Mary’s suicide. We were so bad at communicating in those days, and so wrapped up in ourselves. I spent most of my time with my head down nursing dreams of grandeur, to be played out in distant lands far from my family, among the houris of paradise, where none of this would matter. Maybe I’m unfair (I’m certainly unfair), but I don’t miss the young man I used to be. And to be trying to communicate now, with my broken voice and my deaf ears, what I didn’t even know well fifty years ago! Christ.

Still a new day comes. A fresh cool morning. I climbed the ladder by the garage and popped my head up to look over the roofs and the tree crowns at the wind dancing, and that was a thing worth doing.

If I could hold in my mind just for a moment how fast this planet is really spinning, and how fast it’s whirling around its star, my hubris might be torn off in the wind of its passage. Or loosened, anyway. So I like to imagine.

Piggie-Wig

Glittering leaves: high summer: sheets rigged to keep the sun off the windows: watering the trees. In this tender semi-rainforest we stand a heat wave as if it was a seige of nomads: surely they’ll go home soon? They can’t live here.

I mostly keep my counsel. My thoughts are deep undersea, moving in the guck of the sea bottom. I had thought I must review God’s resume and curriculum vitae before doing anything so outlandish as praying: but of course that’s backwards, stupid evangelical stuff. Why would I accept him without knowing him, and how could I know him but by listening to him? So I try from time to time to listen to him. Or “pray,” in the queer Christian terminology. I don’t particularly want anything from him, at the moment. I want to know what this thing is, that I am part of – liegeman of – perhaps the ears and eyes of. Asking favors strikes me as presumptuous and premature. And if I were to ask, it would only be that I learn better to how to listen; and I doubt there’s an reply other than “listen more carefully; listen more often.”

So. It’s been a long time, longer even than it seems.

An old man – a man my age, I mean – stopped by my table at Tom’s, and laid a hand on my arm. “I just wanted to tell you how happy it makes me,” he said, “to see you praying and studying your Bible in the morning.”

I do say a brief prayer over my breakfast when it comes, but it’s a Buddhist prayer, because those are the only ones I know. I suppose he thinks that any Greek must be the Bible; actually the passage I was working on was a dumbed down paragraph from Herodotus. But he had gone off again before I had really come all the way up from my study-trance. And anyway, correcting him seemed idle, or even churlish. Do I know that he was wrong?

Last night, Ellowyn having become fretful, I picked her up and danced with her under the enthralling ceiling fan, and sang The Owl and the Pussycat to an improvised tune:

They sailed away for a year and a day
To the land where the bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a piggie-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose!

She always likes the advent of the piggie-wig.

This, and That

But my question, the linchpin question, is, "will I come through for myself?" Am I actually on my own side? Can I rely on myself to defend myself and protect myself? Because there is a Gollum portion of me that believes that it can hide, and survive in the wretched dark on cold fish, and by throttling the occasional goblin imp. I have betrayed myself, at critical moments of my life. I can see my way to doing it one last time, and I very much do not want to end my story this way.

You see, this is why the Food Thing has been so important to me: it has been the most basic and chronic betrayal of myself. When in stress and doubt I would hide, and let myself down. Let the Dale of the Sun fend for himself, let him be fat and ridiculous! I was going to hide in the dark, and eat, eat until my mouth was raw, eat until my belly was swollen, eat whatever ever I wanted and never stop, not for him, not for anyone.

But we are not two different people. We are one person, in the light or in the dark. That's why the food thing is important. And though the solution may look like simply thwarting and oppressing Gollum, it must not actually be any such thing. It has to be bringing him gently into the light, reminding him of flowers and grass and sunlight, reminding him of when he too had a family, and listened to wonderful tales out of the South. 

We are not equals. I must be the master. Because I can see him clearly, but he can't see me clearly. Because I can say, "this is enough: this is due proportion." When I let him misbehave I am letting him down, as well as myself. He can't look after himself, not really, though he doesn't understand that. 

---

"There is one God, and his name is Allah," one of them said; and the old man answered, "maybe there is only one Kindred, but there are many people." The roses came back and gave me their scent, yesterday. White roses. If there's not room for them, what is there room for?

But anyway my time for disputation has come and gone. One God or many, my life is His, or theirs. Little noises come piping from our mouths, for a little while, and a wind bends the roses. It's not my part now to quarrel with anyone. And anyway, I only ever quarreled in my head: I taunted my phantasmal enemies, while I grovelled in front of anyone real. It's time to admit that courage has never been my strong suit. Nor do I think I would have done much good, if I had had it. The first struggle is to see things clearly; swinging wildly at shapes in the dark was not going to help anyone.

The Dalai Lama said it was best to stay within your own tradition, "if you could": I used to take that to mean I should be a Christian, if I could, but of course the tradition I was raised in was not Christianity, it was Nothing, the religion of furtively snatched treats, and my god was the Self I was going to be someday but somehow never quite got around to being. Heya! Enough of that. Square One is a fine place to be, if you don't fool yourself into thinking you're somewhere else. Times of collapse are times of beginning.

I used to think that I would figure the world out, and establish a solution, and then impose it -- by force of my brilliance, I guess; that part was always a little hazy -- and the stupidity and hubris of that idea, the revolutionary's idea, has been late in appearing to me. The thing to do was to talk to people, and to come to a common understanding of what was wrong and what needed to be done. That would actually be a political life. Issuing manifestos and marching in shows of ritual (or real) violence is actually about as apolitical as you can get. Politics is talk. It's talking with people you don't understand, and people you don't agree with. It's listening. It's making yourself vulnerable to your neighbors. It's something I can't do. Heya! Enough of that.

So what now, you little rootless last-gasper? Do you go to that little Orthodox church, where the people are so benighted as still to think that a church should be beautiful and services should be reverent? Do you go to that Episcopalian church, where awkward people are actually trying to be nice (in a clumsy and ineffective fashion) to the unfortunate? Do you go to that Zen temple up the street where they take silly Japanese names and dress in weird overalls and take it from the top, all bald heads and rationality? Do you walk under such stars as still can be seen through the city glare, and chant heya? Hah! You don't know. You're hopeless. Go home.

Aubade

 Have I mentioned that a wind blowing up my nose
inflated me to gigantesquerie, and flew me, uprose,
(rows encolumnated, hedgerows overthrown), and gave
to every cipher just the meaning it could hold?

Have I said already (I have already said) that one
dog's cold nose could turn the world to ice, and
a cat's tongue warm it all, in the space between 
the first line and the third? Well, it's left undone, then,

and the sun lays rude and violent hands on me,
shakes me awake and tells me all the things still left to do.
All right. The first on my to-do list was to love you,
and that's done, that's never done, to do.

Names for Things

 If I ask myself why I do certain, in some sense altruistic, things, the answer that seems most apt is "because I don't want to live in a world where..." I don't want to live in a world where no "rational" person voted, or made efforts to conserve energy, just because their contribution made no significant difference; I don't want to live in a world where we turn our backs on the weak, the suffering and the needy, because they are not productive; I don't want to live in a world where we always counted the cost before engaging in acts of helping others. This acknowledges the fact that every decision we make is not just a response to a known and certain world, but is part of co-creating that world for what it is. 

 -- Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, p 1144

As I slowly reread both Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home, and Iain McGilchrists' The Matter With Things, I find myself continually seeing McGilchrist's book as an immensely long footnote: giving in expository form what Le Guin has distilled into vision and story. Just in case you thought it couldn't be made into exposition, that it couldn't be rationally laid out end to end in a single argument: here it is. For those so crippled by the shoes of the modern world as not to be able to walk so far on their own.

I know that in fact McGilchrist read and admired Le Guin, so the fancy maybe isn't so farfetched.

The joy, the pure joy, of having names for things at last. All these gifts. And so little to give back, and that so uncertain, in these troubled times! But no matter. We go on, as we always have, co-creating the world: it's not as if we could stop.

Lots of love, dear ones.

Autistic Kid

"One, two, three, ONE; one, two three, TWO; one, two three THREE..."

We were supposed to chant aloud as we did our calisthenics, in gym class. If an exercise had four sub-moves to it, we counted like that: rather than saying "four" on the last move we inserted the number of full exercises completed. 

I found this bewildering: in fact, I couldn't do it, and when I tried to do it, I couldn't move my body. So typically when performing these sorts of calisthenics, I slowed, moved spasmodically, and ground to halt. Following the two sequences felt deeply wrong. In what world does "three" follow "three"? What is the relationship between the murmured "three" and the bellowed "three"? The further the count went the more confusing it got: my brain worked desperately to establish a mathematical relationship between the sequences: there really wasn't one. but I couldn't help looking for it. 

From the outside, of course: here was that weird kid slacking off again, not even trying to look like he was doing the exercises. Not paying attention, not willing to to try. I can hardly blame my gym teachers for being exasperated with me. Explaining my internal experience was beyond my capacity, even if they had had time to listen, which they didn't. 

It was the more galling, because I prided myself on my mathematics. Numbers were my friend. I could solve quadratic equations in my head. I was in math classes with these kids: some of them found adding 1/2 and 1/3 insuperable. Yet here they were, chanting enthusiastically, tracking two numeric sequences AND moving their bodies. It was a total mystery. How did they do it? And how was I to fake it?

I faked it by trying to ignore the numbers, moving my mouth randomly, and trying to do what the others were doing. It didn't fool anybody. They may have had trouble with fractions, but my classmates had no trouble distinguishing my awkward counterfeits from their own fluid, well-grounded movements. I was the weird kid, and I always would be. 

I pretended not to care about gym class. I aspired to the position of "absent-minded professor," at school: it was not the same thing as a full-fledged person, but it was a role; it qualified you for a spot on Gilligan's Island. I got by. I was bullied a little, but not too much. I had a way with words and a deep fund of malice -- I might land you with a nickname you'd have trouble getting rid of -- and there were easier targets. 

---

Long ago, long ago: why bother with it? I've gotten by, sidling through the world, finding dusty corners to live in, like a wary spider in an untidy house. The weird kid had a will, and a brain. He did all right. Burned out spectacularly twice; threw away two promising careers, but he had a nice family; he ended his working days comfortably doing part time data entry and part time massage: and he had time enough to spend on meditation, prayer, history, literature, and philosophy to actually understand some things. To write some essays and poetry. More than most people ever get. Far more than that kid under the florescent lights of the gymnasium, bewildered by the rhythmic bellowing of the neurotypicals, dared to hope for.

Still the mind goes back, and gnaws on things; misspoken words return, the scent of chalk dust and gym ropes. The painfully obviously developmentally disabled kid I should have befriended, and did not. God's going to ask about him, at our debriefing, and I'm not looking forward to that conversation. His name was Martin -- as if he didn't enough troubles already -- and he was even more duck-footed and awkward than I was, even more easily confused. I didn't participate in tormenting him, and that's as much as I can say for myself. You don't have to run faster than the bear.

---

The physical awkwardness went away completely: I think of myself now as fluid and deft in my movements. Maybe it's just because I'm no longer required to do unfamiliar things at unfamiliar tempos, while receiving a firehose-stream of nonsensical verbiage. Maybe it's some delayed developmental thing. Maybe it was dance class and contact improv in college; maybe it was as late as massage school; maybe it was reading and writing poetry. Anyway I live comfortably in my body now, which has been one of the great, unexpected blessings of adulthood.

---

In the morning the light gleams on a rectangle of copper foil, as I let my spine extend, and the Copper Buddha appears in a circle of radiance. Sometimes it's the sun blazing through a circle of wet twigs. Sometimes it's neither, but only a feeble, elderly reaching of the mind for things half remembered and half made up. If you push for resolution on these things, all they'll do is collapse and shrivel. You take what you get, gratefully; and when there's nothing offered, you take that gratefully too.

Vulture

When this poem germinated I was thinking only of vultures, of their long patient deliberations in the sky: the math teacher walked into it and surprised me. He was an ancient man who taught me calculus -- an amazement that still amazes.

A math teacher stooped in his pulpit walk:
as he turns he lifts one dull black tine
(a primary feather, like a sprig of chalk)
and slowly underscores the horizon line.

He is deliberate, hooded, ugly, sincere.
There is a beat (stroke of pen, sweep of oar)
in his blood-naked head only he can hear:
this is what it means for an old man to soar. 

In Praise of a Huntress Moon

And the sky en vidrios corúscat, multisplending;
O sake us for God, and mend us for bendas, bensittay!

Say clearly what you mean, before you end your say.

Look where the vultures ride the thermals, where you can

or can't see

the waves of air they ride on, hypérvolant and vigilant:

if we love to watch them, it's because we love to watch

the things we can't quite see. Mr God is like that: you find

the lint from his pockets, but his hands are always elsewhere.

I would not spend a lot of time 

turning inside out the cloth, or checking all the seams.

Bang! this damn tambourine, and sing a song of praise,

song of ending, song of nightfall, the iridéssing of default,

when the sky is violet lavender and fades, surprised

by such a clair à voyant, clair à voyaging moon.