WHERE IS THE PRESIDENT?

Where is the president?  He is not in Ferguson, that's where.  He's hiding somewhere in Not-Ferguson, USA.

Ferguson is not on his radar.  His radar is color-blind--which is to say that it's blind to color.  It doesn't see color.  Not that color looks white, just that color doesn't show up.  Hmmmn.  Maybe he isn't in the White House at all!

No statement from Washington?  But aren't National Guard troops being used there?  And isn't the president the commander-in-chief of the National Guard?  And isn't he the president of all the people
--even of black people, even in Ferguson?

Suppose the eighteen year-old who was killed in Ferguson had been--excuse me--a Jew.  And excuse me again:  this isn't about race.  It's only about justice.  So suppose he had been white.  Would he have been shot?  Or--supposing, of course, that this is not about race--suppose that white eighteen year-old he had been shot by a black cop?  Would white people be demonstrating?  Would they need to demonstrate?

A FEW LITTLE THINKS. . .


In what language would it be least troublesome to be dyslexic?

The 1946 Studebaker.  How behind the other carmakers were!  But
people bought those "old" new cars anyway.  And the next year the
other cars began to edge slowly toward change.  And soon
Studebaker was out of business.

Robin Hood is English.  American mythology doesn't have a Robin
Hood;  the US has Robber Barons instead as its inspiriting social
myth.

From Escobar to Castro to Hugo Chavez to Don Quixote to Robin
Hood to Jesus to St. Martin to Francis of Assisi to the Robber Barons.

Hmmmmmmn.



Adam Haddam.

Nye Towell.  Boniface Towell.  Beth Towell.  Hugh Towell?

Art Sifastsky.

Hy Marks.  Mr. Marx.  Mrs. Marx.

Sarah Mooney  and Gladys Canby.  And Vera Mutch.

Juanita Gopee.

Hope Leslie.  Malcolm Tent.

Eddie Fine.


"It's better to win fair than not to win at all."  Who said that?

HELPFUL INFORMATION FOR TOURISTS

Ad valorem=the price for tourists.

A la carte=all you can carry.

Al dente=with a few dents and scratches.

Antipasta=we don´t like pasta or skip the pasta.

Auto bahn=self-discipline.

Buona notte=without bones; filleted.

Carpe diem= fish of the day.

Chemin de Fer=pajamas for the sleeping car.

Corpus delicti=what a beautiful body!

Crepe du chine=dog-shit.

De gustibus non est disputantem: there is no doubt that this is a windy day.

Dejeuner: Of or about young people.

De rigeur=concerning the dead man.

Dimanche=lunch for two.

Donnerstag=gift certificate.

Et tu Brute=Champagne with dinner.

Frutti di Mare=horse shit.

Gazpacho=bloated feeling.

Hors d’oeuvres=horse hooves (a delicacy in France).

Hund in de Gut=Dutch pickpocket.

In hoc signo=in debt; i.o.u.

La Gioconda=joker (in a deck of cards).

Laus tibi=insect causing tuberculosis.

Pas de deux=two free tickets.

Pate de foie gras=fat-head.

Pax tecum=May you die of syphillis!

Place Concorde=Paris airport.

Plat du jour=your hotel.

Prei dieu=please do.

Pour boire=American-style sandwich.

Quid pro quo=how much is this?

Sic transit gloria mundi=I’m sick of travelling—thank God we go home

on Monday!

Sortie à droit=medium-dry.

Vin du pais=the end of the war.

Vin du table=spill the beans.

GENERATING LIFE

This planet of ours, that we call “earth,” has what we call life. What we usually mean by that is that this planet contains living trees and plants and animals—like us. But the earth itself has life. We need to realise that, before it is too late.

In the plant and animal world, seeding provides for continuous life. Generation and regeneration keep what we call life going. We animals are still generating and regenerating, but the plant world with which we live and upon which we depend isn't doing very well. It seems, in fact, to be dying. And the earth itself?

In the last fifty years we have been exploring what we call “space,” to discover whether or not there is what we call “life” on those other lumps of matter wandering around out there. We call those wanderers “planets.”

What we are looking for is our version of life. We are looking for what we already know. And we are thinking of the possibilities of our colonizing somewhere out there. That's what animal scientists call the “fouled nest” syndrome. Humans and some other animals live that way: when they have made a big enough mess of where they live, they move somewhere else.

But science isn't just a housing office, or Noah's dove looking for someplace to land. Science should be much more than that—and smarter than that.

What we call life—plant life and animal life--grows from seeds. Have we asked if this earth itself has seed? This earth is dying; all things, it seems, must die. But in our experience, generation is the companion of dying, which lets life continue.

In exploring space, we look for life on other planets: but we are looking for what we call life. Ego interferes with learning, even with understanding. Other is hard for us to accept. Our exploration is limited by our self-centered definition of life.

And thus we think of colonizing other planets. “Will other planets support life?” we ask. Of course, what we mean is will those other planets support us, and what we call “life.” Once we have made this planet, earth, uninhabitable, we will need someplace to go.

With our determined assistance, this earth may be dying. So we want off. We want another planet to go to. But maybe what is needed, in the larger order of existence, is for earth itself to “seed” another planet, not with us but with its own seed.

Of course, we don't know what earth's seed is. And we haven't even tried, yet, to find out. Or imagine.

Human ego would send us to other planets. But maybe we aren't earth's seed. Maybe there is something beyond what we humans call life.

What Writing Is About

     My writing career began when I learned my name. That's not to say that I could actually write, then. It took a while to get to that point. I was already five when I wrote my first story.

     But when I learned my name I had something specific I could identify as me: something which was not my experience in this new world. Until I had a “handle,” as we say slangily, on the idea of a self, I had no sure way of differentiating between self and other-than-self. It was all just existence, or existence as experience.

     Identity creates, for each of us, the first conscious separation of self from everything else. And once that separation happens, we can begin to discover, learn, and make connections: to make a world—and a society. Until I exist, us is impossible.

     Chaos isn't chaos, looked at from the outside. Chaos is something that is experienced, from the inside: where one exists, not as one, but as and in the chaos.

     The discovery of self—given to each of us, formally, as a name—is what opens the way to society. And society—as it puts things together (socius is the Latin word for friend)--comes about as the newly discovered self begins to create relationships with what is not self.

     The earliest relationships are probably just identifications: I see that. But then we come to associations: I see that this is like that, or unlike that. And then the young self makes a huge leap: a leap that will eventually lead to choice, or preference. It creates, for itself, the idea of relation. I start to see that toe which I have been playing with as a part of me.

     When I learned my name, I stepped out of the chaos of experience which had included me, a chaos which by definition had no center, no axis, no focus. As I stepped out of that chaos I could for the first time identify a me, which was not my experience in that world.

     And at that moment, though I couldn't write yet, I knew the first principle of writing: the engagement of the self with the other which is not self: with the world. Working out that engagement, thst relationship, is a life's work for a writer. A life's work: as it should be , for everybody, writer or not.

     (When I was a new young professor of English at the University of Michigan, one of the poets in the English Department was a very dry, unengaging and unengaged man who existed under one first name and wrote under another, explained that he wrote poetry “to honor the Muse.” When I heard him read his poems I felt sorry for the Muse, until I remembered that she is deaf.)

     For each of us—each self among us—engagement must be with life itself, in this world.

     The assertion of self is justifiable because the self has work to do. It must engage, relate. That's what writing is all about. To be alone is to be dead, to cease to exist. Individual is meaningless on its own: that is, as simply individual.

     When I master the first-person pronoun—or my own name—I am at step one. Next, I or me or whatever my name is must encounter the world, engage with it, establish a relationship with it which will let me understand it.

     Understand is such a big word! It's as big a word as love—and more demanding, because it says what it means so explicitly. To understand means to “stand under.” Newton, again, standing under that apple tree and understanding gravity. It isn't just weight, or heaviness. If that's all it is, the earth would fall everything else. Gravity is the attractive force that makes things come together. And that coming together is what's important.

     Metaphor is a word for coming together, for putting things together. Sometimes in Greece you see big trucks with “Metaphoros” printed on their sides. They aren't trucks carrying loads of metaphors, however; they are what we would call “moving vans.” They are carrying somebody's belongings—furniture, clothing, books—somewhere. The Greek word metaphoros says to “carry across.”

     But across what, or to where? When the “Metaphoros” truck arrives at its destination, we will know: and we will call it “home.” Somebody's new home: if not ours, somebody else's.

     What a metaphor does is put together things or ideas or whatever than haven't been put together before—and in putting them together, it makes something new.

     When Newton put together—in his mind—the apple falling from the tree and its hitting his head, he got something more than a bump on his head or a bruised apple. He got an idea, a new understanding. From standing there under that tree.

     When, as a child, I discover me—when I isolate me, see myself as an entity, I will immediately start making metaphors. Relationships. Maybe at first I will think “mother” is a breast, or a nipple. But soon I will discover that she is more than that. I may think a brick and a ball are the same thing—until I try to kick the brick. A cat isn't a pillow—but at first, when she was asleep in front of the fireplace, I thought she was a pillow.

     I am the center of my little but ever expanding universe. But soon I discover that there are other centers in addition to me, and each of them has its universe.

     And instead of trying to lie down on the cat, I will pet her. And my mother and I will start to talk. And one day I will start to learn my letters. And then I will spell words. I will be able to put those magical things my mother and I say—words--on a piece of quiet paper. They won't make any noise, but they will be in their own way real. I will have made them. And they won't go away.

     My career as a writer will be launched.

     Writing, as we know it, began a long time ago. Early cave men cut marks into stone. The famous cave paintings at Altimira, in Spain—those beautiful polychrome bulls—are from some 20,000 years ago. Writings were later inscribed in stone. And on baked clay tablets. Then written on the dried bark of trees. Then on papyrus. On paper made from linen, or cotton. Then on paper that has a shelf-life of maybe several years. Then electronically “saved.”

     Will we have access to what we have “saved,” electronically, fifty years from now? Or does that matter? Will our society save anything by then? Will we have—or be—a society by then?

     I don't know. But I know the value of writing, and what writing represents. Writing represents the social ambition to understand this world, and us who inhabit it.

     Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, ended his first book with a poem about being fascinsated by wells when he was a child. And he confesses that the fascinastion remains, though to explore them now the way he once did is “beneath all adult dignity.” Now he writes, he says, instead:

          I rhyme

         To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

For Heaney, rhyming is--was--the very social and socially necessary act of understanding. He practised it brilliantly.

          History says, Don't hope

          On this side of the grave.

          But then, once in a lifetime

          The longed-for tidal wave

          Of justice can rise up,

          And hope and history rhyme.

     When I was very small I loved rhyme. If someone told me to put on my hat, I would run through the alphabet quickly, saying “bat cat dat fat gat hat jat kat kat mat nat pat rat sat tat vat wat yat zat.” And then I would put on my hat. The multiplication tables were fun—but not as wonderful as rhyming. Once you knew the multiplication tables, they were always just the same. No changes, no surprises, no interesting juxtapositions. But rhymes were wide open—and they opened up the world to the rhymester's understanding.

13 April 2014

In Memoriam Seamus Heaney


     That first cry.  You don't even know that it's yours yet, don't know the idea
of you yet, or what a cry is.
     But you make it.  The noise.  An assertion of self, perhaps, just as self starts.
     Self starts before consciousness--and consciousness, when it comes, quickly
becomes self-conscious.
     That first noise is not conscious.  And it recurs, not as a willed noise, not yet
identifiable as noise by you, and still inseparable from you.
     When self becomes conscious, it starts the collecting and accumulating that
become life.  When self-consciousness happens, the collecting and accumulation
will start to have a form, and begin to be what grown-ups call knowledge.
Understanding.  Wisdom.
     And then it's gone.  Where?  Where to?
     And the last thing we know before knowing itself stops is the silence.
     "Don't be afraid."

ENLARGING THE EUROPEAN UNION

            Since 1959, the United States of North America has extended from the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean halfway across the Pacific Ocean.  When Russia joins the European Union, that Union will extend from Ireland, traditionally a part of Europe, just off the eastern coast of the Atlantic ocean, to the northwestern shores of the Pacific Ocean  And across the Bering Straits, the European Union and the United States of North America will be only 82 kilometers—51 mies—apart.

          Since 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii became members of the United States, the distance between the eastern (Atlantic) coast of the United States of North America and its western-most states is roughly 6,000 miles.  The distance from the western-most (Atlantic coast) parts of  Europe  to the eastern (Pacific) coast of Siberia is roughly the same.

          The land mass of the USNA, including Alaska and Hawaii, is  3.8 million square miles.   The total land mass of the current EU is 1.7 million square miles—but add Siberia, and the enlarged EU has a land mass of  8.3 million square miles. And Siberia is a lot closer to European Europe than Hawaii is to North America. Most of the 6.6 million square miles Russia would bring into the EU,  is—like much of Alaska--frozen Siberian tundra, though a lot of that tundra  is rich in minerals, oil, and natural gas.

          The total population of the USNA is 313 million.  The total population of the EU is 507 million;  with Russia (and Siberia) the population of the EU will be 640 million.

          And what—beyond numbers—will this mean?  For Russia, it will mean that it and its citizens will have better access to European technology.  For the EU, it will mean that the current EU countries will have better access to Russian oil, natural gas, and other natural resources.  And it will mean enlarging significantly the greatest experiment in human political history, a voluntary union of  peoples.

          The USA was cobbled together out of revolution, purchase, war and conquest.  And it was built on the backs of black slavery and violent subjugatioin of the Native American population.  The European Union has been and continues to be built on application and invitation.  There is a huge difference—and it shows every day.  And what it shows—on the USA’s side—is the greatest obstacle, not just to world peace but to world-wide human justice.

          If Russia joins the European Union, mankind will take a real (and un-hyped) “giant step” forward—and that step will be taken on this planet.