from : Wendell Berry's "The Burden of the Gospels"

Iraq and now Lebanon have proven themselves such mesmerizing distractions I have been crippled by despair. It's time to become functional again. Toward that end, I had a dream last night in which I was attending a lecture on what I can only call Sufi Astronomy. The speaker, an enthralling stranger, talked about "star charts inspired by God" and closed his lecture by saying that if our maps of the solar system were to reflect the real role of the physical world in God's plan, "the earth would be drawn as a moon of a planet called Heaven." I awoke immediately after he spoke those words and saw them as an affirmation of the following passage from a Wendell Berry speech given last summer called "The Burden of the Gospels." Reading it for the first time yesterday, itt shattered my obdurate funk of the last few weeks. My encounter with Wendell made me return to a locus of thought and action where I can again be effective and, thinking of my wife and friends, tolerable.

NOW that I have come out against materialism, I fear that I will be expected to say something in favor of spirituality. But if I am going to go on in the direction of what Jesus meant by "life" and "more abundtantly," then I have got to avoid that duality of matter and spirit at all costs.

As every reader knows, the Gospels are overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of human life, of life in the human commonwealth. In the Sermon on the Mount and in other places Jesus is asking his followers to see that the way to more abundant life is the way of love. We are to love one another, and this love is to be more comprehensive than our love for family and friends and tribe and nation. We are to love our neighbors though they may be strangers to us. We are to love our enemies. And this is to be a practical love; it is to be practised, here and now. Love evidently is not just a feeling but is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another. The way of love is indistinguishable, moreover, from the way of freedom. We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of emnity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another--that surely would be to have life more abundantly.

And where more than in the Gospels' teaching about love do we see that famously estranged pair, matter and spirit, melt and flow together? There was a s Samiritan who came upon one of his enemies, a Jew, laying wounded beside the road. And the Samiritan had compassion on the Jew and bound up his wounds and took care of him. Was this help spritiual or material? Was the Samaritan's compassion earthly or heavenly? If those questions confuse us, that is only because we have for so long allowed ourselves to believe, as if to divide reality impartially between science and religion, that material life and spiritual life, earthly life and hevaenly life, are two diferent things.

To get unconfused, let us go to a further and even more interesting question about the parable of the Smaritan: Why? Why did the Samaritan reach out to love his enemy, a Jew, who happened to be his neighbor? Why was the unbounding of this love so important to Jesus?

We might reasonably answer, remembering Genesis 1:27, that all humans, friends and enemies alike, have the same dignity, deserve the same respect, and are worthy of the same compassion because they are, all alike, made in God's image. That is enough of a mystery, and it implies enough obligation, to waylay us a while. It is certainly something we need to bear anxiously in mind. But it is also too human-centered, too potentially egotistical, to leave alone.

I think Jesus recommened the Samiritan's loving-kindness, what certain older writers call "holy living," simply as a matter of propriety, for the Samiritan was living in what Jesus understood to be a holy world. The foreground of the Gospels is occupied by human beings and the issues of their connection to one another and to God. But there is a background, and the background is more often than not the world in the best sense of the word, the world as made, approved, loved, sustained, and finally to be redeemed by God. Much of the action and talk of the Gospels takes place outdoors: on mountainsides, lake shores, river banks. in fields and pastures, places populated not only by humans but by animals and plants, both domestic and wild. And these non-human creatures, sheep and lilies and birds, are always represented as worthy of, or as flourishing within, the love and care of God.

To know what to make of this world, we need to look back to the Old Testament. to Genesis, the Psalms, to the preoccupation with the relation of the Israelites to their land that runs through the whole lineage of the prophets. Through all this, much is implied or taken for granted. In only two places that I remember is the always implicit reason--the practical or working relation--of God to the creation plainly stated. Psalm 104:30, addressing God and speaking of the creatures, says, "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created . . ." And, as if in response, Elihu says to Job (34:14-14) that if God "gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together . . ." I have cut Elihu's sentence a little short so as to leave the emphasis on the phrase "all flesh."

Those also are verses that don't require interpretation, but I wamt to stretch them out in paraphrase just to make as plain as possible my reason for quoting them. They are saying that not just huymans but all creatures live by participating in the life of God, by partaking of His spirit and breathing His breath. And so the Smaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God. {REPEAT: And so the Smaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God.}

When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life he means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finit world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all. {REPEAT: His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.}

To be convinced of the sanctity of the world, and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty of desecrating the world and of destroying creation. Amd we ought to be a little terrified to realize that, for the most part and at least for the time being, we are helplessly guilty. It seems as though industrial humanity has brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and to our work. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don't know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon. How could we live without degrading our soils, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could we live without the ozone hole and the hypoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of the fossil fuels? To the offer of more abundant life, we have chosen to respond with the economics of extinction.

If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God's presence in His work and in all His creatures? The answer, we may say, is given in Jesus's teaching about love. But that answers raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern: How are we to make of that love an economic practice?

That question calls for many answers, and we don't know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer will be living and working with a long time--if they are allowed a long time. Meanwhile, may Heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.

--Wendell Berry, from: "The Burden opf the Gospels," a speech given at the first joint convocation of the Lexington Theological Seminary and Bsptist Seminary of Kentucky, Lexinton, KY, on August 30, 2005. Taken from The Way of Ignorance, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006, pages 134-37.

Air Raid on Narberth

True to their word, the Israelis attacked Narberth at 6 am this morning. As you can expect, my tool shed is now smouldering debris, along with every other structure like it for a 10-block radius. It's kind of sad to see the collateral damage of melted jungle gyms and charred wading pools. "Welcome to the crematorium of American pasttimes," my neighbor Steven Zeitner said, handing me a pristine plastic minature Israeli flag he had waved yesterday at a Friends of Israel rally I attended on behalf of an ad hoc group called "Jeremiah's Incredible Unstrung Band." "I don't want it, " I told him. "You're the only Jew on the block eligible to hoist it," he said. "Then I'm afraid the flag of Israel won't be flying on Woodside Avenue."

We drove over to Genuardi's Supermarket to see if it was open for business, but the looters were picking it clean. I saw a woman cramming her SUV with toilet paper and bottled water (my two favorite survival spoils). "Thatagirl," Stephen yells. "Stealing is the best defense of dignity."

We walked around the shopping center. The destruction was very surgical and selective. As expected, the post office was demolished, although the American flag was flapping unfrayed. The dry cleaners was a burned out shell. Steven pointed me to what was left of the ice cream parlor. "The perfect Beirut touch," he said with shamefully amateurish irony. Maybe I should list what was left standing: a shoe repair store, a computer software outlet, an Asian bistro and an Old Navy. Alas, the drug store was the recipient of a direct hit. "Who needs gauze and disinfectant anyway?" Steven asked, then answered his own question, "Only the terrorists, right?"

We drove past the elementary school. Steven and I saw firsthand what a 1,000-pounder can do to a building. Earlier, we had heard a janitor was buried in the rubble, but that could be a rumor spread by what a Zionist ex-friend calls, "pro-Arab fifth columnists." While standing there surveying the devestation (a funny word to use in conjunction with Narberth current events), a tiny jittney from the local Yeshiva pulls up and kids swarm all over the school lawn, waving "Stand with Israel" signs just like those I saw yesterday at the Friends of Israel rally. "Thank God, school was not in session," one student says. "Yes, we only meant symbolic damage," says another. "We are not like Hezbollah or Hamas." "Who is this 'we' you keep invoking?" Steven asks. "The 'we' of World Jewry and Justice," he answers, throwing his sign on the ground and assuming a 'never again' karate stance. "Does Jewry equal justice anymore?" Steven asks, also assuming a karate stance. "Whoa, guys," I interject, wanting to come in between them but afraid to do so. "Can't we find a middle ground?" "Yeah," says Steven, picking up the "Stand With Israel" sign, tearing it in half, offering one tatter to the Yeshiva kid and placing the other on the ground, then standing on it, pretending to wipe his feet and screaming, "Israel, Israel uber alles!"

There is the loudest stunned silence I have ever heard, a premonitory quiet like that which precedes a fatal stroke or heart attack. Suddenly, a possee of 15 Yeshiva students is charging at Stephen. He deflects the first to reach him with a karate punch, the second with a kick. It stops the rest, but only for a moment. Stephen looks at me and flashes a telepathic 'May Day!' and runs for his car.

I flee in the other direction, hiding behind what is left of the school, hoping to blend in with the ruins. The kids give up pursuit of either one of us. One kneels on the ground and picks up the two pieces of the placard. After carefully fitting them together, he kneels on the grass, and begins to cry, at first trying to stifle sniffles, then overwhelmed with heaving sobs. No wonder they try to pass anti flag-burning amendments, I think. Israel is all he has, all he wants. And he is willing to see it lay waste the world so that it may survive every danger but itself.

Later, I see Stephen at a Red Cross station. "You went a little too far," I tell him. "I didn't go far enough," he objects. "Until this morning, I was one of them." "Hey, let's build a time machine and I'll drop you off at yesterday, where the world was still a safe place for Zionism." "I'd still know what I know now," Stephen says. "No, I'm going to stay in the present and see it for what it is: a rescue from the past." "I know a cosy little mosque right across City Line Avenue," I tell him. "We can still make noon prayers." "No, thanks, Dave," he says. "What about this?" I offer. "There's a Catholic Church still standing a few blocks from here. Let's go light some candles," I suggest. "Again, No thanks," he says. " I think I'll go liberate a local synagogue with a Kaddish for every friggin' one of us. Care to join me?" "This world is drowning in self-righteousness and piety," I say with a Chaplinesque shrug. "If God grants even one of our prayers, mine included, we'd force Him to become a killing machine. Since that isn't in the nature of divinity, we've left Him no choice but to pretend He's hard of hearing."

That's the news from Narberth this stranded day Israel risked a wrath not even an anti-Semite would want to see visited on this fear-stricken, overly paranoid people.

Lebanon Leaflets for America

The Israelis are on to me. They know I'm using my backyard tool shed as a launch pad for homecrafted missiles so primitive they are lucky to get, let alone stay, airborne. Yesterday I aimed these firecrackers at an AIPAC lawn party and barbeque across the street that serves as a two-lane border line between Narberth and Wynnewood. When my cherrybombs struck, they spread black smoke, followed by the thick haze of impotent defiance.

Nevertheless, the Israelis dropped leaflets on Narberth this afternoon, warning me and my neighbors to get out within 24 hours, although they have already bombed Philadelphia International Airport, all four bridges to New Jersey and left craters up and down the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I'm told they will also take out bridges across the Chesapeake to stop rebels from escaping south. So I'm not exactly sure where to flee. Maybe I can take refuge at Valley Forge or Gettysburg, if they've not already become tent cities for refugees.

I'll be honest. I'm scared. I dare not accuse Israel of overreacting to my feeble gestures of outrage lest I bring charges of anti-Semitism on myself, even though I am Jewish. Besides, doesn't Lower Merion's status as one of the epicenters of U.S. fundraising and propaganda for AIPAC and other pro-Zionist lobbying groups outweigh the sputtering use of one of two smoke bombs? Apparently not.

The leaflets say that no act--whether real, symbolic or imaginary--against the state of Israel and/or the Jewish People will be tolerated. If they don't set an example here in Narberth, anti-Jewish sentiment will spread throughout the Main Line in "a thick contagion of hatred." And so while they grieve for every innocent life that will be lost when they bomb and strafe this suburban molehill of antiwar activity, the cessation of all hostility against Jews will bring a lasting peace well worth dying for. What's more, my neighbors shouldn't have harbored a known pro-Palestinian sympathizer in their midst. As the leaflet so eloquently put it, "His toolshed is your tool shed." Ah, the joys of collective guilt.

You know, reading the leaflet with its faint State Department watermark, I'm tempted to quote the words of that famous patriot, Giorgio Bushamente, "Bring it on." But instead I'll quote Yves Montand from some 1960s French noir film in which he plays a police inspector outwitted by a pair of anarchist psycopaths. Down to one witness against this demonic duo, and trying to help her escape to safety, he mutters, "Jesus, they're going to kill them all." That's been the mantra in my head for a week. And today a friend who lives in an Arab section of Brooklyn told me that shop keepers have soap-scrawled, "Give peace a chance," on their windows.

I fear there is no placation of Jewish post-Holocaust traumatic stress. There is no safety in a world in which a Jewish garrison state feels threatened by its neighbors. There is no idea of a citzenry with rights in the closed-fist Israeli psyche. The idea of the citizen and a polity in which people are defines as such no longer exists in the Israeli mind. All are enemies of their state.

Who cares if they've got atomic weapons and $3 billion worth of free bombs and airplanes to drop them from America every year for at least two decades? Who cares if a man can be sent to Guantanimo for sending sling shots to the Palestinians? I'm a devout believer in non-violence, but if I can't have that, at least make it a fair fight. As Gandhi--yes, Gandhi--put it when he was explaining non-violence as non-reistance, "I never meant it to mean, run away. I'd rather see a man fight than flee."

In my opinion, Hezbollah intervened to prevent Israel from reoccupying Gaza, which has been Sharon's and now Olmert's plan ever since Hamas won free and fair democratic elections. Hezbollah is trying to force Syria and Iran to come to Palestine's defense with weapons not just wrods. They are trying to provoke a showdown with the West. Yeah, it's a stupid idea. Yeah, it'll probably backfire. But except in America, Israel has lost most of its moral legitimacy and has begun to resemble its persecutors of the past.

In the mean time, I've done my own pathetic best to take the heat(-synching missiles) off Beirut and Gaza by further forcing Israel to stretch itself thin in a three-front war that now includes Narberth and other parts of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. I apologize to my neighbors for the coming Israeli blitzkrieg, but now they'll know firsthand what it's like to live under the heavy heel of Israeli rule. I can't wait for the Israeli check points every block or two. I can't wait to be issued my very own identity card. I can't wait to see the bulldozers sweeping across front lawns and pulverizing houses that harbor suspected anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. I can't wait to see Israeli troops demand that my NRA-member neighbors surrender their arms and, finally, someone answers fire with fire--since America's leaders have such a pronounced dislike for diplomacy.

In the mean time, I just wish the government of Israel had waited until the borough of Narberth, or the township of Lower Merion, or the governor in Harrisburg had asked for their intervention in our domestic affairs. Oh, that's right, Lebanon didn't ask for Israel to come to its aid. Nor did the UN. Only America stood back and let Israel settle scores that can never be settled.

Here, some lines of poetry written by Ed Dorn 40 years ago, when he was caught in outrage against America so much more articulate than mine:

. . . they form
the message of men stooping down
in my native land, and father an entire conglomerate
of need and wasted vision. All the children
were taught the pledge of Allegiance, and the land was pledged
to private use, the walnut dropped in the autumn on the ground
gree, and lay black in the dead grass in the spring.

What he means is that we have become a collective of greed, paying no mind to the true motives for our continual wars. We fight for the full employment that only a war economy brings, or as much of it as can be sustained at home in a global economy. Maybe some day the Chinese will make the bombs we drop on them and we will have to finally teeth on that gritty irony of a war economy.

Maybe that is why Israel has such appeal to us: they don't invade for oil or fight to defend any extensions of corporate greed (although, God knows, those Palestinian wells are pure gold). They fight for a clearly defined, glaringly bright right to exist. But that right is no longer an affiliate of justice or compassion. It is fertilized in nitrite and nitrate--fire and fear. But like the smoke from my uncles' cigars when I was a kid, it is still an aromatic ideal, not like the odorless bug spray I aimed at some wasps a few minutes ago.

What Dorn means is that there are no bodhisattvas left, no gnostic eyes to open and encompass the unquenchable light behind the front-and-center glare of bomb burst and gun fire.

There's a Friends of Israel today noon in downtown Philadelphia. Maybe I should represent the non-brainwashed Jews of America and duck the outstretched fists of Jewish rednecks from the JDL. Pray the light of reason and the voice of conscience have not been utterly extinguished. But don't blame God if they have. His Creation is designed to be a conduit of wisdom. Just ask the Prophets, most of whom were sent to Israel to condemn bullying, brutal conduct unbecoming believers in Providence.

"Once bears get hooked on garbage, there's no cure"

You who seek a root cause for America's presence in Iraq, read below. Gary Snyder saw it coming 42 years ago. You might care to look through his crystal ball, which even, by then, was singing an oil elegy for this country. The metaphor of America's power as a mud puddle oil slick spreading in beautiful iridescent colors which fade the larger the slick becomes said and still says it all.

Ah, that's America:
the flowery glistening oil blossom
spreading on water--
it was so tiny, nothing, now it keeps expanding
all those colors,
our world
opening inside outward toward us,
each part swelling and turning
who would have thought such turning;

as it covers,
the colors fade.
and the fantastic patterns
fade.
I see down again through clear water.

it is the same
ball bounce rhyme the
little girl was singing
all those years.

--Gary Snyder, from "The Back Country," Fulcrum PRess, london, 1967

Stephen Kretchmer: R.I.P

It's been a week since news of your death reached me. Naturally, I thought it was medical, some long or short cancer you had kept secret to yourself, maybe even a heart attack you didn't even know was lurking. "What was it?" I asked the caller, my editor, whose regard for you was as deep as mine. "Cancer?" "No, motorcycle," she answered, like it was a leading cause of death.

Later in the week, I learned you were turning a bend in the road at whose concealed end a car was making a U-turn and there was no way to avoid a collision. How could there be any way for us to get used to the news of your death when you had no way to get used to it?

The motorcycle dead aren't like any other. They leave an emptiness that can't be filled, a tiny hollow in the heart, an ache in the pit of the throat, a gap that can't be closed even by a fist. The motorcycle dead don't go gentle into that good night. They rage against the dying of the light, often adding one incendiary final flare to it. Until you, my motorcycle dead had been Richard Farina and John Gardner, no one I knew personally.

I'm glad I got the chance to pay earnest tribute to you in Las Vegas at the palladium seminar, while you were still alive, while word might have got back to you that I called you my guru in jewelry matters and that I wouldn't have been on that rostrum if not for you. I wanted the industry to know how much you meant to me because you meant as much to them. So I told the audience how I went to you and asked you to steer me clear of palladium if it was, in your estimation, a lousy metal. And you thought for a moment, then answered, "You Know, Dvaid, I can't think of one good reason not to use it."

Now it's come time, unfairly sudden, to say goodbye. You were a maker. So much of you that is good will survive you. Your estate was well-distributed before you died. And you will be forever synonymous with good work and ceaseless creativity. So all of us who knew you will be grateful custodians of your memory.

Rest in the peace you deserve and which I pray you have no choice but to find. May you become the standard bearer for the reminiscences we have of each other, we who are united in collegial love and respect.

When the news came, I knew I would read the following poem in your memory, a poem from 1964 by Gary Snyder to a beloved potter friend who was one of the motorcycle dead. I can't think of a better elegy for you than this.

FOR JOHN CHAPPELL

Over the Arafura sea, the China sea,
Coral Sea, Pacific
chains of volcanoes in the dark--
you in Sydney where it's summer;
I imagine the last ride outward
late at night.
stiff new gears--tight new engine
up some highway I have never seen
too fast--too fast--
like I said at Tango
when you went down twice on gravel--

Did you have a chance to think
o shit I've fucked it now
instant crash and flight and sudden death--

Malaya, Indonesia
Taiwan, the Philippines, Okinawa
families sleeping--reaching--
humans by the millions
world of breathing flesh.

me in Kyoto. You in Australia
wasted in the night.
black beard, mad laugh, and sadly serious brow.
earth lover; shaper and maker.
potter, cooker,

now be clay in the ground.

--Gary Snyder, from: "The Back Country," Fulcrum Press, London, 1967

Women Waiting for the Mail and their Men

The following poem by Ed Dorn,"OnThe Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck," written circa 1960, is the best depiction I have found of pre-war America, long lost and not ever to be recovered. Reading it tonight made me realize why socialism was doomed here, why it could never take root. Sears was the Wal Mart of my parents' time, the last point in time when the things Americans bought were the fruits of their own labor. The world was still flat then (in the sense of a closed system). It didn't need to be round. As Dorn makes clear here: You didn't have to see too far past the mail box that brought word and pictures of the great industrial plentitude to prarie and village. In that world, purchase was the final stage of production; ownership was so much a part of manufacture you wondered, chicken-and-egg fashion, which came first. There was a soft penumbra of pride to what we called goods. Beginnings and ends were so inseparable then that the intimacy between the two became a kind of quality control.

I don't want to idealize this world too much. I grew up in a landscape of abandoned factories. Now most of them have been razed or renovated to become condominiums and quaint industrial parks. So there is little physical evidence of the disappearance of America. Occasionally one finds arrowheads in the attic--unused ration stubs from the war, transfers good for a ride on the interurban, and the like. But by now the amnesia is complete. The yard sales have ended any need for archeology. If you want to remember, however, let Dorn's poem attach electrodes to your brain and bring his America back.

I leave the decision up to you. This poem is extremely sad, filled with humbling, resigned Great Plains longing that makes that of "Waiting for Godot" almost lascivious. Dorn grew up in Oz country. Frank Baum could have written the opening lines of this poem:

Summer was dry, dry the garden
our beating hearts, on that farm, dry
with the rows of corn the grasshoppers
came happily to strip, in hordes, the first
thing I knew about locust was they came
dry under the foot like the breaking of
a mechanical bare heart . . .

That's Dorothy's Kansas, heartless Tin Man country. And the glue, the cohersion, of that farm life is provided by Dorn's mother waiting in any empty farm house by day for the promises of the good life to arrive, courtesy of Sears Roebuck, in the morning mail and her men to return at evening.

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck
we brooded, she in the house, a little heavy
from too much corn meal, she
a little melancholy from the dust of the fields
in her eye, the only title she ever had to lands . . .

Those last two lines are among the most beautiful in the English language ("the dust of the fields / in her eye, the only title she ever had to lands").

There's so much to say about this poem. Believe me when I say it says exactly what it means, and it says it in a way few others have matched. This is not a T.S. Eliot poem. Everything you need to understand it is right on the surface or sequined to its detail. Read this poem, then open The New Yorker, and wonder why their poetry editor doesn't buy a hearing aid or learn to speak English as a first language. I first read this poem at age 18 and it was an early encounter with true speech. This, a voice inside me proclaimed, is real poetry. Learn to read it and, perhaps, some day to write it. I thank God every day for Ed Dorn and I wish I had gotten the chance to fawn all over him with admiration and gratitude. May this poem announce new worlds to you the way it did, and still does, to me.

ON THE DEBT MY MOTHER OWED TO SEARS ROEBUCK

Summer was dry, dry the garden
our beating hearts, on that farm, dry
with the rows of corn the grasshoppers
came happily to strip, in hordes, the first
thing I knew about locust was they came
dry under the foot like the breaking of
a mechanical bare heart which collapses
from an unkind and incessant word whispered
in the house of the major farmer
and the catalogue company,
from no fault of anyone
my father coming home tired
and grinning down the road, turning in
is the tank full? thinking of the horse
and my lazy arms thinking of the water
so far below the well platform.

On the debt my mother pwed to sears roebuck
we brooded, she in the house, a little heavy
from too much corn meal, she
a little melancholy from the dust of the fields
in her eye, the only title she ever had to lands--
and manys ways winged their way to her through the mail
saying so much per month
so many months, this is yours, take it
take it, take it, take it
and in the corncrib, like her lives in that house
the mouse nibbled away at the cob's yellow grain
until six o'clock when her sorrows grew less
and my father came home

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck?
I have nothing to say, it gave me clothes to
wear to school,
and my mother brooded
in the rooms of the house, the kitchen, waiting
for the men she knew, her husband, her son
from work, from school, from the air of locusts
and dust masking the hedges of the fields she knew
in her eye as a vague land where she lived,
boundaries, whose tractors chugged pulling harrows
pulling discs, pulling great yields from the earth
pulse for the armies in two hemispheres, 1943
amd she was part of that stay at home army to keep
things going, owing that debt.

--Ed Dorn, from "The Newly Fallen"

Lament for a Fish Peddler & Cobbler

Mark this date on your calendar: August 23rd. It is the 79th anniversary of the electrocutions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two Italian anarchists falsely accused and convicted of killings during a 1920 paryoll robbery at a Boston shoe factory. In 1977, as combo gesture of exoneration and remorse, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis declared August 23rd, Sacco & Vanzetti Day. However, no employees were sent home or flags dropped to half mast. It would have offended the growing number of rightwing revisionists who now think--and attempt to prove--that at least one of the two immigrants was guilty as charged. Yeah, and Lee Harvey Oswald is the Pope!

On that day, in remembrance of the fish peddler and cobbler, as well as the disappearance of American radicalism, I will read the following poem by Kenneth Rexroth written on the 30th anniversary of their executions. It is one of the most beautful laments for the lost, unrecoverable strain of anarchist idealism in American life. Please pause and read this simple, lovely poem to yourself and, if sufficently moved by it, spread it around the Internet. I am proud to serve as Rexroth's scribe this morning.

FISH PEDDLER AND COBBLER

Always for thirty years now
I am in the mountains in
August. For thirty Augusts
Your ghosts have stood up over
The mountains. That was nineteen
Twenty-seven. Now it is
Nineteen fifty-seven. Once
More after thirty years I
Am back in the mountains of
Youth, back in the Gros Ventres,
The broad park-like valleys and
The tremendous cubical
Peaks of the Rockies. I learned
To shave hereabouts, working
As cookee and night wrangler.
Nineteen twenty-two, the years
Of revolutionary
Hope that came to an end as
The iron fist began to close.
No one electrocuted me.
Nothing happened. Time passed.
Something invisible was gone.
We thought then that we were the men
Of the years of the great change,
That we were the forerunners
Of the normal life of mankind.
We thought that soon all things would
Be changed, not just economic
And social relationships, but
Painting, poetry, music, dance,
Architecture, even the food
We ate and the clothes we wore
Would be ennobled. It will take
Longer than we expected.
These mountains are unchanged since
I was a boy wandering
Over the West, picking up
Odd jobs. If anything they are
Wilder. A moose cow blunders
Into camp. Beavers slap their tails
On the sedgy pond as we fish
From on top of their lodge in the
Twilight. The horses feed on bright grass
In meadows full of purple gentian,
And stumble through silver dew
In the full moonlight.
The fish taste of meadow water.
In the morning on far grass ridges
Above the red rim rock wild sheep
Bound like rubber balls over the
Horizon as the noise of camp
Begins. I catch and saddle
Mary's little golden horse,
And pack the first Decker saddles
I've seen in thirty years. Even
The horse bells have a different sound
From the ones in California.
Canada jays fight over
The last scraps of our pancakes.
On the long sandy pass we ride
Through fields of lavender primrose
While lightning explodes around us.
For lunch Mary catches a two pound
Grayling in the whispering river.
No fourteen thousand foot peaks
Are named Sacco and Vanzetti.
Not yet. The clothes I wear
Are as unchanged as the Decker
Saddles on the pack horses.
America grows rich on the threat of death.
Nobody bothers anarchists anymore.
Coming back we lay over
In Ogden for ten hours.
The courthouse square was full
Of miners and lumberjacks and
Harvest hands and gandy dancers
With broken hands and broken
Faces sleeping off cheap wine drunks
In the scorching heat, while tired
Savage eyed whores paraded the street.

--Kenneth Rexroth, from "Natural Numbers", 1964

Robert Creeley & The Meaning of Beyond

Some day they'll see me on park benches and subways, eyes glued to my New Testament, sub-vocalizing lines of Robert Creeley which I know so well they are friendly Scripture to me. In this poem written around 1980, Creeley is evidently practising epitaphs. If I could come to the same acceptance of my life as he does his here, I'll judge this sojourn a flamboyant success:

ECHOES

Step through the mirror,
faint with the old desire.

Want it again,
never mind who's the friend.

Say yes to the wasted
empty places. The guesses

were as good as any.
No mistakes.

--Robert Creeley, from, "So There: Poems 1976 - 83"

And how's this for the transcendence of failure and regret? If Emily Dickinson reincarnated as Samuel Beckett (happy 100th, Sam!), this is how the output might read. Of course, you know that the title "Ambition" is ironic, meant as slyly comic relief from the very values the word conjures. Creeley, some say, was a hermit. To me, he's a renunciate. What a clean break this monk makes here! No looking back. No further wrestling. Living in the merciful beyond of his refusal.

AMBITION

Couldn't guess it,
couldn't be it--

wasn't ever
there then. Won't

come back, don't
want it.

--Robert Creeley, from "So There"

The Best Flags are Flammable--for Our and Their Own Good

I'm a man who believes that the sabbath is any moment of liberation from uncontrollable allegiance to ideas or desires. That's why I'm suspicious of flags. They're too Pavlovian for me. The pride they instill is too laced with guilt.

I say all this because the latest it's-a-crime-to-burn-the-flag amendment lost by only one vote last week. That's too thin a margin. When such a ludicrous measure comes that close to victory, it has already won.

From a met-a-physical standpoint, the flag is the flag precisely because it can be cherished or destroyed. Yin-Yang applies to all things, even sacred objects. St. Wordplay says, Kali-Flower.

Just as Moses breaks the tablet that is the minutes of his meeting with God, a flag is a flag because it can be torn or torched. How else can it be prevented from being burial cloth or gag of free speech if it cannot serve as rag of rage? St. Wordplay says, Burn, baby, burn.

St. Wordplay and Rev. Simple Semantics both note that 'dis' is just a prefix--a preface--to honor. When a man burns a flag, he may be swearing allegiance to principles his countrymen have forgotten or betrayed. When a man burns a flag he may be exercising devotion to causes such as justice his country no longer stands for. Flag burners often suffer the tormenting conviction that their country is alienated from compassion, mercy and sanity.

I'm not a flag-waving man. It has been years since the Stars and Stripes filled me with tears. But if I were such a man, I could only be so because there were days on which I was ashamed to show the flag as well as days on which I was proud to salute it.

I'll let Wendell Berry lead the Pledge this morning:

LET US PLEDGE

Let us pledge allegiance to the flag
and to the national sacrifice areas
for which it stands, garbage dumps
and empty holes, sold out for a higher
spire or the rich church, the safety
of voyagers in golf carts, the better mood
of the stock market. Let us feast
today, though tomorrow we starve. Let us
gorge upon the body of the Lord, consuming
the earth for our greater joy in Heaven,
that fair Vactionland. Let us wander forever
in the labyrinths of our self-esteem.
Let us evolve forever toward the higher
consciousness of the machine.
The spool of our engine-driven fate
unwinds, our history now outspeeding
thought, and the heart is a beatable tool.

--Wendell Berry, from "Entries," 1994

Today's Jumah Sermon: The Right to Bare Arms

The following poem came some weeks ago, in far different form, from a former jewelry industry co-worker who remains a friend. His name is George Willoughby (an agreed-upon nom de plume) and I used to argue pacificsm, non-violence and arms-control with him. He tried as hard to understand a life without guns as I tried to understand a life with them. Sick and tired of give and take where there was no giving or taking, I asked him to write a poem, short story or essay that would explain his world view and the semi-sacred necessity to bear arms. A long, meandering combination of all three called "A Sniper's Journal" came via email with a request for me to edit it. I put it into narrative-poem form, sent it back, and he edited my edit--deleting sections, lines, words, adding others, and leaving parts alone. As a journalist, I am used to putting words I think were meant in people's mouths. So even if the poem isn't entirely or exactly his, the life is. And in this case, its the life of someone profoundly patriotic--with a saving sense of the dangers from this allegiance.


A SNIPER'S JOURNAL

1
The title is meant only to grab attention.
In all other circumstances,
attention is the last or least thing I want
since at such times I would want your life.
The devil may require a handshake
but my hand would be otherwise occupied
with the trigger of the rifle
now leaning against the wall
while I tell you some things about myself.

2
Sniper is code-name for diligence.
I don't see any mirror of myself
in either a Palestinian or an Israeli
or an Iraqi or an American
on a rooftop in some occupied city
where everyone has been taken hostage
by the unfleeable fact of war.
Here in America the captives wear sunglasses
and try to convey a saunter of indifference.
The guys I'm looking for are far beyond
the clutches of contempt.
Futility would be putting on airs.
No, the guys I'm looking for
are--retrospectively speaking--dead
before they are born.

3
I don't see myself as soldier, sheriff or constable.
I'm a maintenance worker stationed mostly
in the urban order of things. So far,
and far is four years, I've never had
to take my gun off safety
except in target practice
where, I'm proud to say,
there's no longer any itch for fire.

4
The president will be here today
to shake hands with donors
and speed by protestors.
"Is it election season already?"
my dad, a sheriff, would ask
strapping on his holster
as his days became littered
with special events.
"Got to protect the bastards
from the rest of us
with every good reason to shoot them."

5
Look, I could have been one of those guys
I'm supposed to beat to the draw.
You have no idea what it's like
growing up the oldest child of a Mormon cop.
Man, I'm ashamed of the things I did
to make him think his own flesh and blood
could go over to the dark side.
Finally, he arrested me. You heard right.
Put hand cuffs on me, shoved me
in the back seat of his cruiser
and locked me up for a night
in an abandoned jail house.
I felt like Job with only the companionship
of desolation plus the bonus tribulations
of rats and spiders. You'd be surprised
how quickly your jailer becomes Jesus
on a night like that when his keys to your cell
the next morning shine the first light you've seen in hours.
I heard the merciful clanks and squeals of doors
and, just to show him I had no hard feelings, asked,
"Did you bring me anything, daddy?"
"I brought you your freedom," he said
just before we lunged, crying, into each other's arms.

6
I grew up in Utah. Most people think
I'm asking for pity when I say that.
But I have never thought it a strike against me.
It's just a fact, a frame of reference.
It's what I thought when you asked me
what it's like to grow up with guns
and see them as an indispensable measure of freedom.
I brought a rifle to school with me
every day from first through sixth grade
and I never turned into a Colombine shooter.
Every boy I knew did the same
and no one ever went postal
on family, friends, strangers or himself.
We'd just hand our guns to the teacher
and she'd put them in the cloak room.
My dad would always tell gun-control types,
"The first word out of my son's mouth was safety lock."

7
I'm saying all this because it's someone like me
you want on this roof scanning the streets
of today's parade or ceremony or drive-by from the airport.
I see you the way you want to be seen,
beehive citizens not dupes of the devil.
They're people out there armed with scripture
who see you as mercenaries in an army of spenders
combatants in a war to the death or your credit limits
whichever comes last in your miserable soulless life.
Hell, anyone of you could be my younger brother or sister.
You have every right to finish your Starbuck's coffee
to look good in that tank top from the Gap now 50% off.
Someone's got a problem with our dress or moral code
me and dad can handle it. It's strictly family.

8
When my dad retired last year
they gave him a watch made of solid Klondike gold.
"Hey, where's the inscription," my father asked
when the mayor presented it to him.
"Shit, Dan, you'll never get half the money for it
that you'll get if there's no name
or trace of ownership on the case."

9
You know the days I hate most:
the ones when this is a job
like clerking or doing something so mechanical
the employee's manual advises you
to leave your mind at home or on hold.
You know the days I love most:
the ones when this duty serves a purpose
so big and bulging that all of life's a blank check."

10
I used to work at the Pentagon.
Man, the place looks like an industrial park for war.
"Think of it as noble tedium," my dad wrote
when I complained of being bored.

11
I couldn't stop the Pentagon from becoming a job
where I played war games with myself
for something to do. I was amazed
at how much danger I could pose
just by thinking like a man
who has waited ten years
to turn himself inside out
and finally become his lethal secret self.

12
I wrote my dad when I decided to ask for a transfer,
"To stay here, I'd need advanced persona training."
"What do you mean?" he asked over the phone.
"When the people at the water cooler no longer
have any way of appearing like mom or dad, sis or bro,
you're no longer doing anyone any good."

13
I dreamed Bob Dylan-style the water cooler
was empty except for a Statue of Liberty
and that everyone in the office was applying for citizenship.
Our Lady of Liberty beckoned me with her torch.
"No. Can't. Duty," I said. She blew on her torch
and it erupted like the smoke stack of a steel mill
belching flame and cinder and smoke.
She was frowning, starting a tough-love countdown
to some utter loss of patience.
I let the crowd jostle me in her direction.
She started to smile. I started running toward her.
Suddenly I heard a loud intercom voice:
"Call on Line Three for George Willoughby.
It's your sister and she says it's important."

--George Willoughby, 7/7/06

A Real Reason for Doing This

No matter what your measure of abundance, safety and well-being, it will probably falter, if not fail, before some private summit of meaning. Too many wonders in my world are marked "FYI." Every one of them was supposed to have been passed, or offered, like a peace pipe.

In any case, injustice, is defined for me this morning as living in a world which has permitted the work of poet Ed Dorn to go out of print, that forced me to buy a stolen library copy of his collected poems so he would once again be an active adjunct to my life. Injustice is the fact that Ed Dorn is not a more common moment in my life or a better known frame of reference like Rilke or Whitman.

This blog will try to be a corrective of such injustice.

Mind you, I ennumerate the injustices of world that does not lack for food or comfort. I have never starved but by my own volition. I have never been hungrier than the excesses of diet and voluntary fasting. Besides, I don't think the famished of Sudan will make it to Blogspot today. So I address the famished of my own land. And to them I say the following: It just seems wasteful, if not wrong, that you can't collide with a poem of reckoning as beautiful as this.

IF IT SHOULD EVER COME

And we are all there together
time will wave as willows do
and adios will be truly, yes,

laughing at what is forgotten
and talking of what's new
admiring the roses you brought.
How sad.

You didn't know you were at the end
thought it was your bright pear
the earth, yes

another affair to have been kept
and gazed back on
when you had slept
to have been stored
as a squirrel will a nut, and half
forgotten,
there were so many, many
from the newly fallen.

--Ed Dorn, circa 1960

It will be a day like any other, except it will be the last, or the marking of a new norm that makes it impossible to see time as an accumulation the way it was. I read recently that the only pair not on the ark was from Noah himself. The Mrs. stayed behind. Better to drown amidst what I've known, she reasoned, aloud. In this poem, Ed Dorn imagined losing touch with the familiar. Hey, it was 1960, nuclear obliteration was as real a prospect as it is today. Only then we found ourselves taking constant farewell in our dreams, our prayers, our poems. Today we believe our luck has lasted so long that we do not need to run dress rehearsals of that, or any, destruction in our minds. So we see the conservatives playing freely with the proposition of fire again.

I have decided that a miracle today would be if Donald Rumsfeld is shown this poem. And I am determined to improve its odds of happening.

By Way and byway of Introduction

My name is David Federman and, like most blog proprietors, I am very opinionated and believe I have the wisdom to save the world. For some time now, I have been considering taking up a soap box in the Hyde Park of Cyberspace and beginning regular transmissions on numerous subjects from politics and art to God and Mammon (sometimes spelled: Mammals).

But it won't always be blabbery. Occasionally, I will post pix and tunes that I am convinced will be beneficial to human life. Other times, I will lovingly type out poems and prose by writers like Wendell Berry, Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer whose work has kept me from taking the long swin to China. If this becomes a non-destructive habit, I'll try to organize events such as my unsuccessful Pentagon Exorcism of July 4th. When American is in danger of doing dangerous things like invading Iraq or bombing Iran, I'll publish related articles and petitions.

By now you might have guessed I'm a liberal. And you'd be right. Indeed, I'm a liberal who proudly remembers FBI visits to my father in the early 1950s. Maybe the world would be in better shape if I remembered visits from my father to them. But he spent most of that time hiding from the 1930s and hoping he could comfortably remain under the Democratic Party's then expansive Big Top. Alas, that Big Top is now a pup tent for former leftys who don't want to admit they've had a sect-change operation and are really Republicans.

In any case, good morning and welcome to The Best Little Blog in Cyberspace. When all else fails, drop in for reminders and remainders of American beauty and planetary sanity. We'll try to keep the premises neat and well-lit so that we can disguise our true purpose as a loading platform for the new Underground Railway. If nothing else, we intend to be an escape form the slavery of ignorance and the Nuremburg Rallies of Fox entertainment plebiscites such as "American Idol."