Waiting

I hated waiting.  If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.  I expected--an arrival, an explanation, an apology.  there had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.  That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility hat the next moment might be utterly different.  And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention.  Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Shenendoah

New Books

Transients, All of Us

"It was because of his tolerance of transients that they haunted the town as they did, sleeping in abandoned houses and in the ruins of fallen houses, and building their shanties and lean-tos under the bridge and along the shore.  They seldom spoke in our hearing or looked at us directly, but we stole glimpses of their faces.  They were like the people in old photographs -- we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred as they were startled or blank."  

Burnside's Bridge

"Like the dead, we could consider their histories complete, and we wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting, since their lives as drifters were like pacings and broodings and skirmishings among ghosts who cannot pay their way across the Styx.  How ever long a postscript to however short a life, it was still no part of the story.  We imagined that if they spoke to us they would astonish us with tales of disaster and disgrace and bitter sorrow, that would fly into the hills and stay there in the dark earth and in the cries of birds.  For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine?"

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Foreshadowing

"For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.  To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.  For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?  And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole.  For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it.  So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.  though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Harper's Ferry

Credibility

"Does happiness strain credibility?  Is there something in the human spirit that distrusts its own appetites, its own yearning for healing and contentment?"

-Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

Maryland-Virginia Overlook, February 2014

Mystery Finally Claims Us

"My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer some quiet benediction and call it the end.  But truth won't allow it.  Because there is no end, happy or otherwise.  Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved.  The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of conclusion.  Mystery finally claims us.  Who are we?  Where do we go?  The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story.  There is no tidiness.  Blame it on the human heart.  One way or another, it seems we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows.  Our whereabouts are uncertain.  All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe."

-Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

February 2014

"Night Gleam"

Over and over thru the dull material world the call is made
over and over thru the dull material world I make the call
O English folk, in Sussex night, thru black beech tree branches
the full moon shone at three AM, I stood in under wear on
the lawn --
I saw a mustached English man I loved, with athlete's breast
and farmer's arms,
I lay in bed that night many loves beating in my heart
sleepless hearing songs of generations electric returning in-
telligent memory
to my frame, and so went to dwell again in my heart
and worship the Lovers there, love's teachers, youths and 
poets that live forever
in the secret heart, in the dark night, in the full moon, year
after year
over & over thru the dull material world the call is made.


16 July 1973

from Mind Breaths, by Allen Ginsberg

The Road Was Dark

THE ROAD WAS DARK, even at six in the evening, and if it held any wonders aside from the odd snug house or the stubble field, she couldn't have said because all that was visible was the white stripe of heaven overhead.  Her horse was no more than a sound and a presence now, the heat of its internal engine rising round her in a miasma of sweat dried and reconstituted a hundred times over, even as she began to feel the repetition of its gait in the deep recesses of her seat and that appendage at the base of the spine her mother used to call the tailbone.  Cousin Robert was some indeterminate distance ahead of her, the slow crepitating slap of his mount's hooves creating a new kind of silence that fed off the only sound in the world and then swallowed it up in a tower of vegetation as dense and continuous as the waves of the sea.  Though it was only the second of October, there had been frost, and that was a small comfort in all of this hurt and upset, because it drew down the insects that a month earlier would have eaten her alive.  The horse swayed, the stars staggered and flashed.  She wanted to call out to Robert to ask if it was much farther yet, but she restrained herself.  She'd talked till her throat went dry as they'd left town in the declining sun and he'd done his best to keep up though he wasn't naturally a talker, and eventually, as the shadows came down and the rhythmic movement of the animals dulled their senses, they'd fallen silent.  She resigned herself.  Rode on.  And just as she'd given up hope, a light appeared ahead.


from the short story "The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight's Journey to New York, 1702"
Tooth and Claw, by T.C. Boyle

Prospect Hill Cemetery, Washington, DC

Tolkein

The "right" Answer

I recall my classes at Harvard.  Some of my students used to regard public policy-making as a matter of finding the "right" answer to a public problem.  Politics was a set of obstacles which had to be circumvented so the "right" answer could be implemented.  Policy was clean--it could be done on a computer.  Politics was dirty--unpredictable, passionate, sometimes mean-spirited or corrupt.  Policy was god; politics, a necessary evil.

I'd spend entire courses trying to disabuse them.  I'd ask them how they knew they had the "right" answer.  They'd dazzle me with techniques--cost-benefit analyses, probability and statistics, regression analysis.  Their mathematics was flawless.  But--I'd ask again--how did they know they had the right answer?

They never did.  At most, policy wonks can help the public deliberate the likely consequences of various choices.  But they can't presume to make the choices.  Democracy is disorderly and sometimes dismaying, but it is the only source of wisdom on this score.

Next to the policy wonk who presumes to know what is best for the public sits the pollster who presumes to be able to tell what the public wants.  The pollster's techniques are just as flawed, and his conceit is no less dangerous to democracy.  The public doesn't know what it wants until it has an opportunity to debate and consider.  Engaging in a democratic process is not like choosing a favorite flavor of ice cream.

Politicians must lead; they must try to educate and persuade.  They must enter into an ongoing dialogue with the public.  No one can discover the "best" policy through analytic prowess; nor is the "best" policy that which happens to be the most popular on a questionnaire.  Democracy requires deliberation and discussion.  It entails public inquiry and discovery.  Citizens need to be actively engaged.  Political leaders must offer visions of the future and arguments to support the visions, and then must listen carefully for the response.  A health-care plan devised by Plato's philosopher-king won't wash.

-Robert Reich, Locked in the Cabinet

The Lincoln

The Blackbirds Are Rough Today

lonely as a dry and used orchid
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.

shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.

taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.

a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.

the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail--
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.

and everywhere is
nowhere--
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:

where do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school--
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.

we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garbage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.

don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.

-Charles Bukowski

Washington, DC