Things that come in Opposites

I have asked once and again to all and no one in particular, what are we to do? I mean, what is your vision for America, in these last days of the Bush presidency? I stumble with words that lead in a circle, i.e. that don't get anwhere. I pray for a vision. As an appetizer for such, I give you this link http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/david_biespiel.html. Here David gives his vision for Christmastime in the age of fear and retribution. "Despite our many disagreements, the dog still needs his walk . . ." It's concrete. It specifies an action. It exhorts. It gets you out of your head.

What else? That compassionate communication can replace the felt duty to punish! For my own daily offering of a poem, here's one by Robert Frost, always a delight, and with rhymes for those that thought them lost. May your vision before the New Year come!


To a Thinker

The last step taken found your heft
Decidedly upon the left.
One more would throw you on the right.
Another still——you see your plight.
You call this thinking, but it's walking.
Not even that, it's only rocking,
Or weaving like a stabled horse:
From force to matter and back to force,
From form to content and back to form,
From norm to crazy and back to norm,
From bound to free and back to bound,
From sound to sense and back to sound.
So back and forth. It almost scares
A man the way things come in pairs.
Just now you're off democracy
(With a polite regret to be),
And leaning on dictatorship;
But if you will accept the tip,
In less than no time, tongue and pen,
You'll be a democrat again.
A reasoner and good as such,
Don't let it bother you too much
If it makes you look helpless please
And a temptation to the tease.
Suppose you've not direction in you,
I don't see but you must continue
O use the gift you do possess,
And sway with reason more or less.
I own I never really warmed
To the reformer or reformed.
And yet conversion has its place
Not halfway down the scale of grace.
So if you find you must repent
From side to side in argument,
At least don't use your mind too hard,
But trust my instinct——I'm a bard.

Anger and the Villains around us

Some would have our President sacked like Noriega or even Ceausescu. Some hunt out Cheney. Still others fume at those responsible for the unregulated disaster receiving bailouts: the cabal with balls. Who would have thought the Republicans would bring socialism to America?

Anger abounds. Anger fuels revenge. Take out the Bush crime family! Where is our Godfather?

401(k)'s spur our passion. What to do, what can we do? Leave it to Obama? What can he do? He is riding a high. Be angry, but sin not? One particular solution came to me a few months back in the form of a poem, of all things! It's one century old, not really political, unless we call it the politics of relationship. It's a break up. Bush leaving office is a break up. Can we still be friends?

The City
by C. P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Peeking through the curtain (to view your audience)

I asked, who is your audience? In the theatre you do your best, you do your part, whether the house is full or pitiful. In that spirit I give you an old, five centuries, and popular, i.e. anthologized, poem about a changing relationship. I mean to relate it to America's changing relationship to the world.

After WWII, came the Marshall Plan, basic foodstuffs to a war torn and wintry Europe. We asked the respective countries to match our dollars: the audacity of hope. It was a success.

Fast forward to Iraq, just after the decade of sanctions. We offered to take out the despot we put in, install democracy, make people get along. It was a failure. What do we do now?


They Flee from Me
Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.


I mean no one-to-one reading, no simple reduction. I simply detect disillusion and wonder what to do.

Not right, not ethical, not real.

For those who have the time to read, here's a short best-of-the-year list http://thephoenix.com/Boston/Arts/74084-Year-in-Books-Word-plays/
At least we can note some of the best that we're not reading.

Imagine writing a review of one of these; first you'd have to read it. You have that to look forward to. Who would your audience be? Now imagine writing a review of a non-existent book.
Rather like Whitman publishing his review of Leaves of Grass. Not right, not ethical, not real.

I've been reading Harold Pinter obituaries. I don't know his work well. I am reminded of the word trenchant. In his work, in any good work, comes this vision of how things are, behind the words and silences. Nothing new there, I suppose, but here's the rub. That trenchant feeling of cutting through the words and silences works elsewhere, specifically in the world of politics. And so in regard to the torture of Iraqi prisoners, we imagine how it was, not to be tortured(that's a different realm), but how it came about. Imagine a War Crimes trial, a few years from now, President Bush on the stand:

"No. No, I never gave any orders about torture. That was all Cheney. Cheney said he'd, you know, handle it, and I didn't have to worry about it. That was all Cheney."

Pinter considered his country, England, embodied by Tony Blair, as sort of America's bitch. I consider President Bush more as a good looking, though unruly, adolescent and, as such, a victim of child abuse.

Can you remember your mother saying, "Now get dressed. We're going to your Aunt Louise's birthday party." You got dressed. You rode with the family. But you weren't really there for Louise. Where was your sense of autonomy? Now the acid test: imagine Bush's autonomy.
I can't.