Ephrem Christopher Walborn

3 Displays on Linux

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:32:30 GMT

At work I'm beginning to take on more than just IT--for better or worse I'm starting to learn the GIS world and I'm learning some CAD. I have a couple problems here. I have a good workstation: Sun Ultra 24 with dual Intel Core 2 Quads @ 2.40GHz and 8GB of RAM. That's not a problem. But I need a 64-bit operating system to use all that power. And my CAD and GIS software is, unfortunately, Windows only. (We are locked into Autodesk and ESRI... don't argue with me, it's the way it is for now, though I'm trying to use as much FOSS as possible.) Vista 64? Not a chance. See... actually I tried it. Although Civil3D and ArcGIS are both supposedly Vista 64-bit compatible, they aren't really. Things break. Things crash. Things go bump hourly. Hourly. I don't like force quitting and restarting these programs hourly. XP 64? Maybe. I haven't tried it, honestly. I didn't want to attempt it only to find out that there are still 64-bit gotchas. So... what am I doing?

I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 (the FOSS I do use for GIS has some issues on 8.10... something to do with python, I think) with plain old 32-bit XP running in a virtual machine. I'm using VMware Workstation due to the fact that we own it and it still has better features overall compared to VirtualBox. But there's more to my dilemma. My daily life is in my MacBook Pro. My email is there. My notes are there. My everything is in there, basically. And yes, I can use Linux for all those things relatively comfortably, but not as nicely as in OS X. My home is that laptop. So I installed Vine Server on the laptop and can stay connected to it from Linux without shifting to my second mouse and keyboard or having to resort to a kvm connection.

So, I've got big honking windows applications that need lots of real estate. I can't get by with them without dual monitors. And I've got my bash shell where I'm dealing with our PostGIS database and all the other IT stuff I'm doing, along with a variety of other things happening in the host OS. And I'm watching my laptop. I need 4 displays. I have 3. Driven by 2 video cards.

Or get the full size here: http://www.tuirgin.com/img/3Screen3OS.png

It's taken some time fooling around with my xorg.conf to get it all working right. I ended up using nvidia-settings, then making some manual edits, and then went back and made some more changes in nvidia-settings again. The end result is that it works pretty much the way I wanted it to.

For some reason I had to maximize my XP window in the 2nd display, then extend it with VMware's multiple display functionality to the 1st display. It didn't work correctly going from the 1st to the 2nd monitor. When I did that, XP just saw one huge display which is a headache when dealing with my programs that I want maximized on my bigger display with supporting flyouts and toolbars on the smaller display.

I don't suppose this is of any interest to anyone but myself, but there it is. I'll include my xorg.conf below.

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 2960 0
    Screen      1  "Screen1" LeftOf "Screen0"
    Screen      2  "Screen2" LeftOf "Screen1"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load           "glx"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option         "Xinerama" "1"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Generic Keyboard"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "XkbRules" "xorg"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Configured Mouse"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "ViewSonic VP930 Series"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 82.0
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor1"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Proview"
    HorizSync       31.0 - 80.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 76.0
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor2"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "ViewSonic VP930 Series"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 82.0
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Configured Video Device"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    Option         "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro NVS 290"
    BusID          "PCI:2:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard1"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 7950 GT"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    Screen          0
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard2"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 7950 GT"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    Screen          1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Default Screen"
    Device         "Configured Video Device"
    Monitor        "Configured Monitor"
    DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen1"
    Device         "Videocard2"
    Monitor        "Monitor1"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-1"
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Videocard0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen2"
    Device         "Videocard1"
    Monitor        "Monitor2"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-1"
    Option         "metamodes" "DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
EndSection

We're All Mad Here...

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:05:42 GMT

As the devil sticks his flag into the mud
Mrs Carol has run off with Reverend Judd
Hell is such a lonely place
And your big expensive face will never last
...
We're all mad here
—Tom Waits

What follows is an excerpt from an email conversation. It's rough and stream-of-consciousness. It's certainly not a carefully crafted political position statement. My first thought was to hold off on posting this until I could take the time to reorganize, polish, re-write, polish, edit, polish, start over from scratch, polish, etc. ad nauseum. Best intentions, however, get nothing done when you are me. So. It stands as is. Incomplete. Incoherent. Incontinent. Erm... anyway.

Here's where I'm at. I'm 100% pro-life. Abortion is murder. End of story. But I'm not a single issue voter. And I don't think that legislation is even the most effective way to deal with abortion. Legislation is just a bandage, however necessary that may be. The real solution is the hearts and minds of people, and it's essentially a moral question, which no legislative body is really capable of addressing. Governance sucks as a means of enforcing a moral norm, it can only play the role of protector.
I also think asinine wars are immoral, but that hasn't stopped our trigger happy commander in chief, who is at least somewhat guilty of attempting to propagate a quasi religious war. His language in regards to Iraq was that of "Good vs. Evil", which is fine and dandy when the world is black and white and the black hats and white hats are all so very clear AND the outcome of the white hats actions only negatively effect the black hats and their supporters. Saddam Hussein was an evil man. I believe that. His regime was evil. I believe that, too. But our actions there were arrogant, impetuous, and inept. The novelist T. H. White in his Arthurian romance novel, "The Once and Future King", had Merlyn say something to the effect that you can tell who's at fault in a war by who started it. I do not buy into the Bush Doctrine's defense of the preemptive strike. The doctrine is corrupt and immoral. And our ineptitude has cost us and the Iraqis dearly. Did Hussein deserve to be deposed? Of course! Did we do the right thing by going in there, guns blazing, and destroying all semblance of civil order? Not a bit.
I'm also entirely at odds with the vulgar and irresponsible mentality that takes "Drill, Baby, Drill!" as a beloved slogan. Yes, we're reaching a crisis point with our off-the-chart energy consumption. But those who criticize the West, and particularly America, for decadence have a point. We're a culture of commodity, consumption, and excess. We don't want to be told no. We don't want to be told to slow down. We don't want to restrict ourselves in any way. And when we go up against a culture that understands sacrifice and self-restraint we're going to have major problems dealing with it in a successful way. We either have to change or become mightier. Our only solution for dealing with the Japanese at the end of WWII was to destroy a monumental number of civilian lives. We know how to overpower. We succeed by using an outward reaching extremism. This is entirely counter to any sane interpretation of Christian morality, which is one of the reasons why I am so chaffed by politicians claiming God for their ambitions. Hrm. I went from vulgar consumption of natural resources to military power... woops.
Back to the environment. Environmentalists as represented by those who readily wear the label are a mixed bunch, with many of them verging on a kind of hostile anti-humanism. My sense of man's place in the world is largely formed by what you might call an Orthodox Christian anthropology. The created world was created by a loving God. The Creation is "Good", and we are to be wise stewards of the created world. Destruction of natural beauty is a type of violence against beauty, and not just in an aesthetic sense, but spiritually and morally. Our appetites need to adjust. The cosmos is more than just a set of resources for us to take advantage of for material gain. The West has gone mad and lost all sense beyond easy, tactile, physical pleasure. And we're destroying ourselves and everything around us as a result of it. The whole world has gone mad.
The other area where I am conservative is in gun control. Bring on the guns. More responsible citizens need to carry guns. Kids need to learn how to responsibly use firearms. They need to stop being an icon of fear and become a tool treated with knowledgeable respect. We are being made weak against victimizers because they have the guns and the will to use them and we don't have them, or don't have the guts to use them, or are just plain jittery about them. That said, I don't own a gun, don't know if I'll ever own a gun, and am not comfortable with them. I wish it were otherwise, but lack the motivation to change it at the moment.
I'm not fond of government institutions and programs. The government is terribly inefficient. So theoretically I'd be against major social programs, socialized health care, government bailouts for people being foreclosed on, etc. But I'm even less fond of corrupt, greedy, and faceless companies screwing over anyone they can in order to make or save a dime. Health insurance companies, mortgage brokers, even the medical institutions themselves have lost sight of the human beings they are there to help. It is all about making money for the shareholders. My wife's employer tried it's damnedest to not insure Madelyn after she was born. There was a mix up and they didn't get the documents they needed within the first 30 days after Madelyn was born. They fought us for a month and somehow, for some reason they finally gave in. I think someone pulled strings, but we don't know who. We were rejected not just by the company, but by specific people in positions of relative authority more than once before somehow she was finally accepted. Bureaucratic, dehumanizing indifference and greed. Our culture likes to vaunt some sort of affirmational humanism at every moment. I feel good about you, you feel good about me. We feel good about the world. Meanwhile we habitually walk over people in the most undignified way with the apology of "it's nothing personal -- it's business." Humanism would maybe be an improvement over this -- this is nothing but careless materialism.
I guess this means that I'm at odds with capitalism. The free market doesn't make moral choices. The free market makes choices to advance monetary interests. Where money is the primary interest, the moral relationship amongst people is challenged, to say the least. Does that make me a socialist, marxist, communist, fascist... hell, I don't know what it makes me. We've got capitalism, and until I know of something better and less inherently evil then I'll continue to argue that we need to engage capitalism from a moral and spiritual foundation. After all, the problem isn't some one socio-economic or political ideology over another, it's people. People are the problem and people are the solution. The hearts and minds. If people begin to think in terms of "love thy neighbor", they'll act with that love in whatever they involve themselves. The real problem isn't a particular method for governing national and international trade, it's that people don't know much of anything about love outside of some romantic or politicized and meaningless humanitarian love of the people.

I sought him whom my soul loves...

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:09:03 GMT

I have been absent from the Orthodox Church for most of 4 years, which means that I have been absent from her for longer than I was present. And yet Orthodoxy has an undeniable claim on me. After four years of avoiding the Church, of wrestling with complex waves of longing, despair, and mistrust of Orthodoxy in America I have arranged a meeting with my old priest, now retired, to see how I can set my relationship with the church to rights. From this step alone I have experienced an amount of peace.

In coming to Orthodoxy, I was responding to an entirely new landscape, a new view of heaven and of the Kingdom of God which completely transcended any experience I had known prior to this. And yet, as I became Orthodox, as I joined myself with Orthodoxy I failed. For a long time I battered myself against an impassable obstacle -- I tried to be Orthodox through thinking and to some extent through doing. It became a framework upon which to hang my life, with which to identify myself, all the while I was growing increasingly despondent as I experienced one devastating disillusionment after another.

In my recently renewed zeal for the Church, for God as made present within the Church, it suddenly dawned on me -- I habitually "nest"; I almost obsessively surround myself with Orthodox "things" books, music, icons, prayers. It is as if I am trying to find God through the addition of things, a sort of spiritualization by acquisition and accumulation. And yet, all these things, however good they may be, do not make God more present to me. It is as if I am blindly groping and grasping at straws, trying to force God to be present to me, or to force myself to be present to Him. And in realizing this, I realize that at the core of all this is a deep and insatiable longing to be aware of God, to be assured of His love for me, to be assured of His goodness and his involvement with the world, to find myself not an alien to Him, not at odds with Him. I long for peace, for a sense of His love. I long for His presence.

There are moments when I feel blessed, when I feel the immediacy of God, his immanence. And yet, most often, he seems to me to be a concept, an abstraction, a possibility, an idea to be considered. Those moments when God "appears" seem to be at odd moments, completely beyond my grasp, completely beyond my ability to control. The rest of the time it is as if I was groping aimlessly, looking for something lost, misplaced. It is as if, on my own, my faith is still intellectual and emotional, psychological, but at moments the reality of God exhibits itself. How can I have more of God without self delusion? How does one go beyond psychology and moral, pious actions? How does one become truly a child of God?

I read a great deal of Mother Theresa's letters in Come Be My Light and have to admit that after a while I grew sick of it, despondent with her darkness, self-accusation, self-hatred. She was convinced of God almost, as it were, through her own doubt and darkness. I put it away. Her darkness and conviction spurred her on to great works of love and charity. But I can only think that it's all rather beside the point when God seems so far off, so distant and vague. So dark.

By night on my bed,
I sought him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but I didn't find him.
I will get up now, and go about the city;
In the streets and in the squares I will seek him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but I didn't find him.
The watchmen who go about the city found me;
"Have you seen him whom my soul loves?"
I had scarcely passed from them,
When I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go,
Until I had brought him into my mother's house,
Into the chamber of her who conceived me.
I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roes, or by the hinds of the field,
That you not stir up, nor awaken love,
Until it so desires.

When he is found -- how do we not let him go? When he makes himself present in our lives, how do we hold on to that closeness? How does one grasp at light so that darkness remains at a distance? How do we keep our souls from retreating back into the abyss?

Update: For those of you who care, I've been back in church for a while now (today is September 19, 2008). I've found a parish I'm can live in. A place to put some roots. I'm glad to be back. I'm glad that being back, I am not what I was before I left.

Christ the Conqueror of Hell

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:41:09 GMT

I came across Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev's essay "Christ the Conqueror of Hell" at Father Stephen Freeman's blog Glory to God for All Things and decided it was too long to read online. So I typeset it in XeTeX.

PDF: Christ_the_Conqueror_of_Hell.pdf

Source: Christ_the_Conqueror_of_Hell.tex

Oh Hell...

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 03:24:16 GMT

A couple emails about hell. The context was that the world is becoming worse as people lose their fear of hell.

The emphasized sections in brackets are a summary of my correspondent's statements.

I've kept quiet in this thread up until now. And honestly, I really am hesitant to say anything. But I will say a short word.
Fear of hell doesn't inspire love for God. Fear of hell inspires a self-oriented desire to protect one's self. Christ was far more than a fire insurance salesman. Yes, Christ talks about gnashing of teeth. Yes, he says that he shall say, "Depart from me for I never knew you." I'm not trying to squeeze past an uncomfortable truth. At each point Christ spoke the word of healing that his hearer needed. Often it was a word of forgiveness and compassion. But it was also frequently a challenging word, a word to crush the idols of our minds.
I'll admit that I do find the concept of a literal, physical fire and brimstone hell to be both vulgar and spiritually naive. Our God is, himself, a consuming fire. His love is the purgatorial fire, his love is the condemnation of those who resist him, and his love is the mysterious flame that beckons us inward and upward into the heart of joy.
A vengeful god that has to sate his ego by eternally tormenting those of his creatures that turned on him isn't conceivable to me as a god of love or goodness, but rather a monster of the most vindictive type. Hell is only compatible with God if it is, itself, an experience of God's goodness and love. This Hell is very real, and very tragic. It is the heart of love which burns us. What a horrible thing it is to be loved by someone we hate.
Ask yourself this: in what way have you ever experienced fear for your own skin as a beginning of love for another? It simply makes no sense against the human condition, except insofar as there is a sickness of the mind and soul which can cause the victim to become attached to the perpetrator. Is that the kind of God we worship?

And later...

I'm not going to argue this. I'll allow myself one response and then silence.
I never said there was no hell. Here's what I wrote:
Hell is only compatible with God if it is, itself, an experience of God's goodness and love. This Hell is very real, and very tragic. It is the heart of love which burns us. What a horrible thing it is to be loved by someone we hate.
We damn ourselves, as did the dwarves in Lewis's The Final Battle. I believe it is much like that. Where can we go that God is not? What limit can be put on him? He is here, not there? Separation is from the perspective of the subject, which is us; it is not actual separation, but rather the desperate desire to get away from God, as we see with Jonah. If we experience hell as searing pain, I believe it is the agony of knowing that what we are, what is our condition and not being able either to hide from the glory of God nor to accept the love from which his impassive, unchangeable nature will never cease.
[One of my correspondents posited that fear is "under-rated", cites Proverbs's as instructing us to preserve our children via punishment, as well as fear of fire so that we don't burn ourselves. Fear of hell can protect those who might otherwise deny Christ and live a sinful life.]
This fear is the fear of the child. And it is not, or at least should not be a fear that their parents will torture them mercilessly.
[Punished by parents, taught fear and respect of them. Rebellion of the angels and the question of where I'd have God put demons, murderers, rapists, child molesters, evil dictators "and the multitude of other vile sinners" who resist salvation. "Do you want these monsters in heaven?"]
Evil they may be, but they are not monsters. Christ died for all mankind -- not just the nice people. Not just the good people. Not just the people that don't need it, as if there were such a thing. Who is more pathetic than a person that has so corrupted their soul as to be capable of committing monstrosity? Looking at them in this life I can hate them. But I cannot wish damnation upon them eternally. I can only mourn the tragedy of evil.
[Do I believe that the damned will eventually be allowed into heaven. And the statement that a heaven filled with "monsters" is not heaven but hell.]
Where do you get this idea of "us" and "them"? What separates you from them? Are you not also human? Are you not also capable of evil? I'm unwilling to look at such people and say that they are somehow other than me. I am only preserved from the depths to which they have fallen through struggling, grace and mercy.
I do not say that all will "be saved". The Church has consistently admonished it's saints that have wandered into universalist back-alleys. But still I can hope it, and I do have faith that God is merciful and knows best how to deal with these wretched ones, not only for the benefit of the mass of others, but for themselves as well.
Can I ever wish for a Hitler in heaven? My answer is simply this: not as he was on earth.
[Statement that God is neither cruel nor unjust, but that man is both. What would I do with "unjust, dangerous humans"? While many things about God are mystery, a literal hell is unavoidable according to scripture.]
I take no issue with the existence of hell. I take issue with hell in the materialistic conception which would have God as the grand tormentor of the fallen. Take Hitler. Tie him to a post. Light him on fire. Deny him the mercy of losing consciousness. Watch his skin blister. Watch the fluids of his body ooze from his blistered skin. Listen to him scream uncontrollably as he is unable to fall into unconscious numbness. Watch his eyes shrivel into raisin-sized pellets, and yet he can see. If you love justice you may find it appropriate -- for 5 minutes. If you are vindictively self-righteous, you may take pleasure in it for 10. But could you endure the torment of this person -- no matter how evil he is -- for longer than this? 2 hours? 4? But no. This isn't even a beginning. Listen as the blood begins to boil and burst through his flesh with a dull popping. Smell the burning hair, the righteous immolation of the damned. He will not continue to blister and boil into jelly for a year, nor two, nor two hundred. We will praise God's justice as we roast this monster for two thousand years and rejoice that his torment has just begun. Let us not snuff him out, let us not end his existence, let us not cave to human weakness of heart -- he must be capable of feeling his torment eternally and without end, for it is just. Let him smell the burning of his own flesh, for it is righteous. Let him taste the gorge and blood as it rises to his mouth, for it is holy.
What kind of heaven can I have if I know that others suffer such torment? What kind of peace? Oh, but says tradition that I will be made incapable of feeling sorrow for such a one. Yes, of course. Inability to feel pity is infinitely more godlike than such weak-spined, touchy-feely, bleeding-heart sorrow.
It's all backwards. Don't even question it. God is just.
Something is wrong here. I cannot recognize Jesus in such an image. It reeks of the gleeful hatred of the evil one.
So. Now I ask myself -- do I send this or remain silent? I am afraid these words will offend. Too vivid. Too passionate. Too angry. But we sit around comfortably and lightly chatting about damnation with some kind of settled self-assurance. Guess I'll be the forum heretic.

New Photo: Flora

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 21:03:35 GMT

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons NonCommercial Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

Which art film are you?

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:25:59 GMT

You are Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. You are recovering from personal loss and trying to come to grips with the reality that the person you love most is gone from this world. You want more than anything to feel love and will even venture out into the furthest reaches of space to have this void filled.

Ultimately, you have hope for the future and an undying faith.

Which Classic Art Film Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

But is it art?

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 04:29:32 GMT

I received this in my email today. It is astoundingly confrontational, provocative, titilating. Is it art?

Caveat emptor!

Terrence Malick's The New World

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 21:41:41 GMT

I took my dad to see Malick's The New World today. I'm already trying to figure out when I can go see it again before it leaves the theaters. It's a beautiful film.

Malick's way of telling a story is just as far removed from the "serious" dialog driven films as it is from flashy, fast paced action films. His films tell their stories through image and through time. What dialog exists is minimalistic -- the most meaningful words of his films are delivered in meditative voice overs, which speak from the inner thoughts of the characters.

Some people are challenged by it, or frustrated, because of the lack of action and the lack of dialog. But I wonder if the same people grow impatient when sitting in the woods and contemplating the life around them, or even by laying in a hammock and watching the clouds pass. The movie is something like that, something between laying in a field and just being aware of all that's around you and sitting in a museum in front of your favorite painting, considering it, meditating on it for a few sweet hours.

Take some time while The New World is still in the theaters -- take some time to be quiet and just watch. Forget thinking, forget figuring out meaning -- just be present to the film. You'll find yourself richly rewarded.

This is for you... (you know who you are)

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 21:59:18 GMT

Cáitlín according to the IPA:

ˈkɔɪtˌlɪən

Blood for Sale

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 22:52:27 GMT

[This was originally posted as a comment at bigsleepj's lj.]

When I was in college I went to this little place that would buy your blood. Yes, indeed. I sold my blood -- actually my blood plasma, if you want to get technical. The first time around they gave you $25. After that they'd give you $15. I used it to buy books. Not books I needed for school, but books for entertainment. Yeah. I was that hard up for money and entertainment.

It's a curious thing -- takes a lot longer than regular blood donation. They stick this huge needle in your arm, then pump it out. That's all well and good. But after the blood left my arm it'd go through a separation process so that they could get my plasma, and then they'd cycle the left-overs back into my arm -- and the stuff they pumped back in felt freezing cold, which only makes sense... not a nice 98.6F when they pumped it back in. Anyway, after that the process would begin again. The whole thing cycled maybe three or four times and it took about 45 minutes from start to finish, if I recall correctly.

I only did it a few times.

There were others there, however, who made a job of it. Even though you could only go once a month, and had to sign off that you hadn't given blood anywhere else within the last month, there were those who would go to all the different clinics that would buy their plasma, so that they were probably selling their blood at least once per week.

These were sad looking people. Some of them looked respectable, but just plain hard-up. Others left one guessing what they were purchasing with their blood money, and leaving little doubt about the guesses. A number of these had so much scar tissue from the innumerable previous visits that the techs had a difficult time getting through the scar tissue into a healthy, blood-ripe vein.

While waiting for my turn at the chair I started talking to one of these sad ones. He was a small guy. And a little off his head. He told me all kinds of stories about the assassinations her performed during "Beirut," and how he got screwed over by the government who sent him. He told me he'd been dishonorably discharged for murder. He wore an old army jacket. Probably picked it up cheap at the surplus store. But who knows.

Film-o-rama

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:00:31 GMT

[This is just a placeholder for the post that is to come.]

Beginning with last Thursday (January 12) I managed to watch 4 movies and parts of 1 other this last weekend -- I don't count that monstrous piece of shite from Disney called, Hercules... and no, I don't care that the critics all liked it.

Here they are:

Rashômon, 1950, Akira Kurosawa
The Lower Depths (Donzoko), 1957, A.K.
Red Beard (Akahige), 1965, A.K.
Ugetsu monogatari, 1953, Kenji Mizoguchi
Ikiru, 1952, A.K.

Having watched these five incredible films, you'd think -- at least I do -- that I should have something to say about them. When I figure out what that is, I'll finish this post. So, yeah, this is a teaser, and a carrot for me to actually post something.

A Love Supreme

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 19:53:34 GMT

Swingo ergo sum.

tuirgin: I watched Branford Marsalis and his band do Coltrane's A Love Supreme. From the time it started I was weepy. I was literally choking back sobs and had that clenched throat thing going—I was sucking it back because my dad was watching it with me. I had to do that throughout the whole 50 minutes.

tuirgin: Branford ain't Coltrane, but he did a fine, fine job of it.

tuirgin: I want to watch it again with an empty house so I can crank it up, close my eyes and let it all flood through me.

shishno2: Wow!

shishno2: Jazz really says something to you.

tuirgin:

I was at the top of the Grand Hotel in Chicago (on tour 1987) listening to 'a Love Supreme' and learning the lesson of a lifetime. Earlier i had been watching televangelists remake God in their own image: tiny, petty and greedy. I knew from my earliest memories that the world was winding in a direction away from love, and I too was caught in it's drag.
There is so much wickedness in this world but beauty is our consolation prize ….. the beauty of john Coltrane's reedy voice, it's whispers, it's knowingness, it's sly sexuality, it's praise of creation.
And so Coltrane began to make sense to me.
I left the music on repeat and I stayed awake listening to a man facing God with the gift of his music.
—Bono

tuirgin: shishno2: jazz really says something to you

tuirgin: That piece does.

tuirgin: I don't know how to put it. Hyperbole, but I had the thought that if I could live inside that song I'd find salvation. Like I said, hyperbole, but it speaks towards what I really mean.

tuirgin: Santana's silly sentence keeps drifting through my mind: His tone truly puts demons on a leash.

tuirgin: More Santana:

When you hear this second kind of Coltrane music, the only way you can describe it is the way you would describe Machu Picchu in the Andes mountains. It's a whole other level of high consciousness that causes the slicksters and the hipsters and anyone else to say, Hey, this is not coming from an intellectual trip or some dude trying to show off.
When he starts a solo with his saxophone, it actually sounds like his heart is made out of light, and it is coming out of the horn; the horn is rumbling, and all of the keys are shooting off light.
Coltrane has come the closest to connecting the alpha to the omega through sound.

tuirgin: It sounds ridiculous. But to me it seems damned close to ridiculous truth.

shishno2: I'll burn a cd tomorrow of Coltrane.

tuirgin: heh

shishno2: But I don't speak the language, so I dunno if I'll reverb the way you do.

tuirgin: I asked my dad what he thought. He said, I liked it…I didn't know what I was listening to, but I liked it.

tuirgin: I said, Knowing doesn't matter.

tuirgin: I didn't have the big response to it the first time I listened to it. I liked it, but wondered just what the fuss was, but as I kept listening to it I began to hear it. It went from my ears to my heart. But it took a lot of listens and time and my own searching

shishno2: Like me and tarkovsky, but thru eyes.

tuirgin: Yeah. That's exactly it. It's nearly impossible to talk about what T means. But if you're open to it emotionally it will work it's way into you and devastate you and put you back together again. Catharsis.

shishno2: Yeah. It just is, when you open up the right way.

tuirgin: Yeah.

tuirgin: Coltrane, like a lot of jazz musicians had the habit of showing up at the studio having no clue what he'd put down on tape. He'd compose the songs in the hallways of the studio and take it in and play it.

tuirgin: But A Love Supreme, he went into a room in the upstairs of his house. Locked himself in. His wife would bring food up and make sure he ate something, but nobody went and bothered him—nobody saw him for like a week.

tuirgin: Finally he comes down—his wife, Alice, says, "Like Moses comin' off the mountain," and he tells her that for the first time ever he has all the music. It's done. It was delivered, as it were, in one week-long sitting.

shishno2: Wow!

tuirgin: He took it to the studio and didn't rehearse it with his band—he told them what to play and they played it. They had no idea. No idea that this was a prayer in 4 movements

tuirgin: I just downloaded the only live concert he played of Love Supreme. In the intereviews Branford brings it up to Alice Coltrane and says he was shocked when he heard it because no one but Coltrane knew what he was doing.

tuirgin: The drummer didn't know when to come in, the pianist, the bass player—they couldn't remember it. And he goes on to say, the level of players they were, had they played it even twice they'd have had it memorized. But they didn't.

tuirgin: Which makes the recording all that much more remarkable.

tuirgin: Sorry…going off. :D

shishno2: Nah, that kind of going on I can handle. :)

shishno2: It's not knowing the names of people or anything about them that gets distracting. But art is a fun listen.

tuirgin: The thing with jazz is that though there's a ton of people to know about, at the same time they're all inter-related. They all knew each other and played with each other. So, I'm finding that learning the names of one quartet then hearing about another that shared a player, and then another and another.

tuirgin: It's a big web and it feels like a small world.

shishno2: Just like hollywood, sorta.

tuirgin: Not my scene, so I don't really know. Take your word for it.

tuirgin: Something that has been on my mind…let me see if I can figure out how to relate it…

shishno2: k

tuirgin: Ok…you know how you find a piece of music or art or whatever and you like it, and you read about the artist and they totally blow—drug addled, or a mean S.O.B. or this or that—and it's a bit of a disappointment?

shishno2: Like when I found out Grace Kelly slept with half of hollywood?

tuirgin: That's starting to turn around for me, somehow. I'm beginning to be more and more interested in the lives of all these messed up people. They made beautiful music, but they had really screwed up lives.

tuirgin: NO WAY!!!!

tuirgin: Damn.

shishno2: Yeah…I know. It was a big letdown.

tuirgin: No shit.

tuirgin: Anyway, there's something really affirmative to me in that these screwed up people were able to make beautiful music.

shishno2: I know what you mean though…

tuirgin: It's kind of like saying, look, we're all frail, fucked up people, and that doesn't matter—look at this, my art. And the art doesn't excuse the baseness of a person's life, but it's like it says that somewhere they still had a sense of God or their basic human nature, which is the image of God, at least in my terminology.

shishno2: Sort of like man looks at the outward appearance, but the lord looks at the heart.

tuirgin: Yeah.

shishno2: And what comes out is more important than what goes in when it comes to holiness.

tuirgin: If a really fucked up person can make one thing of beauty… that thing of beauty speaks to the reality that still exists inside him. It's not the thing of beauty that matters so much…but it's the thing which shows through to what's still there.

shishno2: Don't let that backslap you though…at least, recognize that beauty isn't just in really hard to play jazz prayers.

tuirgin: No, I know. It can be in the simplest thing. The whole art as religion thing is all wrong.

shishno2: :p I know…but it took me years to get that.

tuirgin: I'm beginning to understand why, whereas I "knew" it was wrong, but felt like it wasn't. It's not the art…it's the soul that made the art. Our true art is always the soul

…

tuirgin: A novice goes to a famous old monastery. And his father asks him what he wants to achieve: theosis, to see the glory of God, to become love. The father reaches back to his bookshelf and pulls out a novel of Dickens and hands it to him and says, Read this. You'll start here.

shishno2: Go figger.

tuirgin: The novice protests that this is Victorian, Western claptrap. The father says, Until you can love as such and such character loves, you'll not attain anything greater.

shishno2: Scrooge?

shishno2: :)

tuirgin: heh

tuirgin: Don't remember. I've heard the story several times with different features.

…

shishno2: It's too easy to pick one trait and bring yourself down to hell because it doesn't match up to some bar you've set and it's hard to keep an eye on your life as a whole and not the day to day.

tuirgin: totally

shishno2: They talk about seeing life through the eyes of eternity and say that it involves living in the moment. That's part of it, the open part. The other part is seeing all that was and will ever be, and a lot of that is already written in a book.

tuirgin: Yeah…I still like how Campbell described the eternal moment—the experience of the particular moment without a sense of time.

shishno2: I prefer Thomas Wolfe's all the walls that ever were as a description of the everlasting in a moment.

tuirgin: Yeah.

shishno2: It's not that this is a brick. It's that this is all bricks and all the bricks are a wall. But they're every wall.

tuirgin: eternity in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower

shishno2: And the whole thing is one big multi-faceted something, and seeing your reflection in one facet is wrong. I'm pretty sure every life, when looked at through every facet, is complex and noble and nothing to be ashamed of.

tuirgin: I was listening to this new album. Not sure whether to call it jazz or R&B. But it's got singing. Really fine singing by this black (presumably) lady with a rich alto voice. The lyrics themselves are kinda… Well, they'd be really cheezy if it wasn't for her delivery.

tuirgin: Let me see if I can find the lyrics, though, because there was a part that really struck me

tuirgin: Damn…it's not popular enough to have the lyrics in a gazillion places…

shishno2: heh

tuirgin: It's a song called Raining on the Moon.

shishno2: k

shishno2: William Parker Quartet?

tuirgin: And it's a utopian piece, punctured by the chorus line, it's raining on the moon.

tuirgin: Yeah.

tuirgin: Anyway, it talks about the righting of all the wrongs in our country. And this one section talks about all the black, white, and yellow men that have been lynched being resurrected, and those that did the lynching apologizing profusely. And those lynched say that there's nothing to forgive.

tuirgin: And there's the allusion, you know not what you do, and it continues because if you did you'd be evil…and I know you're not evil. It was really powerful to me.

shishno2: It echoes one of our discussions.

tuirgin: It's talking about some of the worst shit that happened in our history, but people are so blind that they don't even know how wrong what they're doing is.

shishno2: About hell being here on earth, and the judgment being everyone going to their persecutors and forgiving them

tuirgin: Yeah. That convo is on my mind a lot…never totally leaves it, really.

…

shishno2: I watched this movie, The Weather Man, by myself last weekend. It's a downer, I don't really recommend it. But the main guy's dad dies and the movie ends pretty quick after that.

shishno2: The guy repeats what people said about his dad at the funeral, about how he was all these quality traits that the main guy wanted to be through his life, but as time went on he kept losing one, and then another, and another until he ended up who he was, and that was ok.

shishno2: and i was thinking to myself, Not really! I mean, yeah, acceptance is good, you are who you are, but the flick really gave me the desire to be good, noble, strong, faithful, all these things that the main guy wasn't, and looking at myself and seeing how i'm not those things in so many ways was depressing.

shishno2: I just remembered it.

tuirgin: Acceptance is the first step to progress…seeing ourselves how we really are. I guess that's what repentance is all about, and not wallowing in being "bad".

shishno2: Well, if you saw that you were bad, and stuck there, you'd become evil. Usually we realize we're bad and don't want to be bad anymore, though changing is harder.

shishno2: Being bad is easy: all you have to do is nothing.

Narcissus and Echo: translations compared

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 20:49:20 GMT

Just inside the cut, Martin and Mandelbaum face off in what should be an exhilerating match of prowess and manhood. Let's join the action already in progress…

Narcissus at sixteen seemed to be both
boy and man, and many boys and women
desired him; but in his yielding beauty
was such inflexibility and pride
that no young man or woman ever moved him.

Once, as he drove the trembling deer to his nets,
resounding Echo sighted him, a nymph
unable to keep still when someone spoke,
or speak at all before another did.

Until this time, Echo had a body;
though voluble, she wasn't just a voice,
as she is now—although she used her voice
no oftener than she does now, repeating
just the last words of any speech she heard.

Juno had done this to her, for whenever
Saturn's daughter was poised to apprehend
Jove in his dalliance with a mountain nymph,
Echo, who knew full well what she was doing.
detained the goddess with a long recital
of idle chatter while the nymphs escaped.

But June figured out what she was up to:
Once too often has your tongue beguiled me;
from now on you'll have little use for it!
And that is why Echo skips now to the end
of any speech she hears and then repeats it.

One day Narcissus happened to be roaming
the countryside when Echo happened by,
and at the very sight of him grew hot;
she secretly pursued him through the woods,
her heat increasing as she overtook him,
as torches smeared with highly flammable
sulfur ignite themselves, brought near a flame.

Often she wanted to come on to him,
accost him with endearments, tender prayers—
but her nature won't permit such forwardness:
advances are denied her, though she may
repeat, in her own voice, a sound she hears.

That day he was cut off from his companions,
and called out, Anyone here?

Hear!answered Echo.
Narcissus searches all around, astounded:
cries out more loudly,

Come! His cry returns;
he turns around, but there's no one approaching:
Why do you run away from me? he asks,
and the very same words are given back to him.

He halts, astounded by that other voice:
Here let us come together, he cries out,
and Echo gave her heart with her reply,
Come! Together! And leapt out of the woods,
eager to give her words a little help
by swiftly embracing the desired neck;
he flees, and fleeing, cries, Hands off! No hugs!
I'll die before you'll have your way with me!
You'll have your way with me, Echo replied.

Spurned, shamefaced, she slipped into the woods
and hid herself, living alone in caves
from that time on. And yet her love endured,
increased even, by feading on her sorrow:
unsleeping grief wasted her sad body,
reducing her to dried out skin and bones,
then voice and bones only; her skeleton
turned, they say, into stone. Now, only voice
is left of her, on wooded mountainsides,
unseen by any, although heard by all;
for only the sound that lived in her lives on.

For when he reached his sixteenth year, Narcissus—
who then seemed boy or man—was loved by man:
both youths and young girls wanted him; but hi
had much cold pride within his tender body:
no youth, no girl could ever touch his heart.

One day, as he was driving frightened deer
into his nets, Narcissus met a nymph:
resounding Echo, one whose speech was strange;
for when she heard the words of others, she
could not keep silent, yet she could not be
the first to speak. Then she still had a body—
she was not just a voice. Though talkative
she used her voice as she still uses it:
of many words her ears have caught, she just
repeats the final part of what she has heard.

It's Juno who had punished Echo so.
Time after time, when Juno might have caught
her Jove philandering on the mountaintops
with young nymphs, Echo, cunningly, would stop
the goddess on her path; she'd talk and talk,
to give her sister nymphs just time enough
to slip away before they were found out.
As soon as Juno had seen through that plot,
she menaced Echo: From now on you'll not
have much use of the voice that tricked me so.
The threat was followed by the fact. And Echo
can mime no more than the concluding sounds
of any words she's heard.

When Echo saw
Narcissus roaming through the lonely fields,
she was inflamed with love, and—furtively—
she followed in his footsteps. As she drew
still closer, closer, so her longing grew
more keen, more hot—as sulfur, quick to burn,
smeared round a torch's top bursts into flame
when there are other fires close to it.
How often, as she tracked him, did she pray
that she might tempt him with caressing words
and tender pleas. but she cannot begin
to speak: her nature has forbidden this;
and so she waits for what her state permits:
to catch the sounds that she can then give back
with her own voice.

One day, by chance, the boy—
now separated from his faithful friends—
cried out: Is anyone nearby? Nearby,
was Echo's answering cry. And, stupefied,
he looks around and shouts: Come! Come!—and she
calls out, Come! Come! to him who'd called. Then he
turns round and, seeing no one, calls again:
Why do you flee from me? And the reply
repeats the final sounds of his outcry.
That answer snares him; he persists, calls out:
Let's meet. And with the happiest reply
that ever was to leave her lips, she cries:
Let's meet; then, seconding her words, she rushed
out of the woods, that she might fling her arms
around the neck she longed to clasp. But he
retreats and, fleeing, shouts: Do not touch me!
Don't cling to me! I'd sooner die than say
I'm yours!; and echo answered him. I'm yours.
So, scorned and spurned, she hides within the woods;
there she, among the trees, conceals her face,
her shame; since then she lives in lonely caves.
But, though repulsed, her love persists; it grows
on grief. She cannot sleep; she wastes away.
The sap has fled her wrinkled, wretched flesh.

Her voice and bones are all that's left; and then
her voice alone: her bones, they say, were turned
to stone. So she is hidden in the woods
and never can be seen on mountain slopes,
though everywhere she can be heard; the power
of sound still lives in her.

Martin, Charles, trans. Metamorphoses. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. 104–106.

Mandelbaum, Allen, trans. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995. 91–93.

Frailty, thy name is woman!

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:40:33 GMT

Tuirgin: how short a time the fire of love endures in woman
if frequent sight and touch do not rekindle it.
Purgatorio VIII.77-78, trans. Hollander

shishno2: quite.

Tuirgin: Whoever said, "Absence makes the heart grow stronger," was a blubbering idiot. Or else a woman writing to a man away at war, trying to convince him she was not writing from the bed of his crippled best friend with hands that lit her on fire.

shishno2: mark twain?

Tuirgin: He said that?

shishno2: no, i thought you were quoting

Tuirgin: Oh. No. That's just me. I'll take that as a compliment. :D

shishno2: heh

Tuirgin: You've made me proud... I'm going to post the last little bit. :P

shishno2: what hath I wreaked?!

Thought Thrusting Ahead Of Thought

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 19:12:27 GMT

A bit of Dante's Purgatorio that really caught my attention yesterday. Dante and Virgil are climbing Mt. Purgatory, and are passing by the negligent or lazy. Canto 5, verses 10–21; I quote the Mandelbaum translation.

Virgil speaks:

"Why have you let your mind get so entwined,"
my master said, "that you have slowed your walk?
Why should you care about what's whispered here?

Come, follow me, and let these people talk:
stand like a sturdy tower that does not shake
its summit though the winds may blast; always

the man in whom thought thrusts ahead of thought
allows the goal he's set to move far off—
the force of one thought saps the other's force."

Could my reply be other than "I come"?
And—somewhat colored by the hue that makes
one sometimes merit grace—I spoke those words.

…always / the man in whom thought thrust ahead of thought / allows the goal he's set to move far off— / the force of one thought saps the other's force.

…sigh…

Those Crazy Classics

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 18:37:37 GMT

This had me laughing out loud at one point, and I just thought I should share it with all of my 1½ readers.

The following excerpt is from Charles Martin's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book I, the first section on Jove & Io. Io by now has already been turned into a cow by Jove and she's fled and is licking her father's hand and begins to cry. I take up with line 896:

If words would just have come, she would have spoken,
telling them who she was, how this had happened,
and begging their assistance in her case;
but with her hoof, she drew lines in the dust,
and letters of the words she could not speak
told the sad story of her transformation.
"Oh, wretched me," cried Io's father, clinging
to the lowing calf's horns and snowy neck.
"Oh, wretched me!" he groaned. "Are you the child
for whom I searched the earth in every part?
Lost, you were less a grief than you are, found!
"You make no answer, unable to respond
to our speech in language of your own,
but from your breast come resonant deep sighs
and—all that you can manage now—you moo!
"But I—all unaware of this—was busy
arranging marriage for you, in the hopes
of having a son-in-law and grandchildren.
Now I must pick your husband from my herd,
and now must find your offspring there as well!
"Nor can I end this suffering by death;
it is a hurtful thing to be a god,
for the gates of death are firmly closed against me,
and our sorrows must go on forever."

I can see this all in my head—tragic, farcical. It makes me think of British humor. Poor Io, seduced by Jove, is then turned by the king of gods into a cow so that Juno doesn't catch him with his godly knickers down. Io's beautiful voice is now a bovine "moo". She catches up with dear old dad, and is crying and seeking solace and sympathy, and all dad can think about is grandkids, be they gods or cattle. Hillarious! Poor him—he even wishes he could die, meanwhile she's stuck in the shape of a heifer. Moo.

Martin, Charles, trans. Metamorphoses. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. 41-42.

Rising From The Deeps

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 02:18:40 GMT

To read only children's books, treasure
Only childish thoughts, throw
Grown-up things away
And rise from deep sorrows.

I'm tired to death of life,
I accept nothing it can give me,
But I love my poor earth
Because it's the only one I've seen.

In a far-off garden I swung
On a simple wooden swing,
And I remember dark tall firs
In a hazy fever.

—Osip Mandelshtam
[trans. James Green]
(4) 1908

Words are unnecessary,
There being nothing to learn:
How sad and exemplary
Is an animal's dark heart!

It has no urge to instruct
And no use for words,
And swims like a young dolphin
Along the grey gulfs of the world.

(11) 1909

With her delightful uneven way of walking,
Limping on the empty earth,
A halting freedom draws on.
It seems that a clear conjecture lingers in her gait—
Something to do with this Spring weather,
Original mother of the sepulchral dome.
And this shall always be beginning.

There are women who are natives of the sodden earth:
Their every step a hollow sobbing,
Their calling to accompany the risen,
To be first to meet the dead.
And we should trespass to demand caresses of them,
And to part from them is beyond our strength.

But whatever shall be is a promise only.

(from 394) 4 May 1937

A Review: Hunting and Gathering Heaven

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 01:38:22 GMT

Poems by David Athey

Paperback: 58 pages
Publisher: Bellowing Ark Press, Shoreline, WA, 2000
ISBN: 0944920373
To order the book contact David directly at davidathey@hotmail.com

Hunting and Gathering Heaven is a thin little book. It is light. Light in weight, obviously, and light in tone. But more significantly, it is light in the sense of being luminous.

The book is sectioned off into three parts—Part I: North; Part II: Kingdom of Florida; Part III: Bliss. Part I begins with “Fishing Minnesota”.

Ten thousand for the tourists,
but Uncle Ned knows
there are twelve thousand
lakes in his state.

Retired from the ore pits,
his good eye glitters
with visions
of a new vocation:

“Gonna catch one fish
from every lake,” he proclaims,
while Aunt Gloria yawns happily,
detached from her hearing aid.

Near death or childhood,
Uncle Ned has been found
singing in his workshop,
polishing lures.

Uncle Ned and Aunt Gloria make several appearances throughout the first half of Part I. Uncle Ned is a great lover of nature, fishing, and life. One could easily consider him both a guardian and a conqueror of the North—as his name, Ned Vincent, claims him to be—and of a particular way of living life without presumption and affectation. In “Genesis, Part Two” he is described as having the laughing, howling face “of a heavenly coyote.”

These poems have something to them which suggests that the world of archetype is working just beneath the surface. But our archetypes here are not grandiloquent. There is fishing, thermal underwear, and a homey old thermos full of coffee—Athey manages all of this without indulging in sentimentality, and because of this, we are not startled to come upon a poem entitled, “Anna Akhmatova”.

This is how I slept,
swaddled in moonlight, walking
on the roof of my father’s house.
Up there, a girl learned—between heaven
and earth there is a tightrope,
not a ladder.

This is how I dreamed,
with tears and grinding teeth,
while the one I loved lingered
on the spector of another
no more lovely than I
but luckier.

This is how I lost
my innocence, like the birch
making love to the sky,
making love to the earth,
with branches and roots.

This is how I married
the man I did not love; I blinked
and there appeared a bright poet
who knew romance
with words, but not with flesh
and blood.

This is how I bled
innocent bystanders, those words,
into the prison cells of paper.
This is how my heart became
a chaplain.

These poems are gripping for all their apparent simplicity. There is constantly the feeling of something not quite seen, but felt and describable only as “mystery”. One could easily argue that it is “mystery” which Athey has made his subject, and the characters, earthy and fantastic, are his supporting cast. But, it is obvious, he loves these characters, too. They are not “merely” secondary any more than you or I are secondary to the meaning of this wild life. These characters, whether fictional or not, are living creatures, eccentric and wise and foolish. One of my favorite poems appears in Part II and is titled, “Phog”.

The strangest man in Florida
is a priest from Scotland
who claims to have lunched with the Queen
Of Heaven, and to have the habit

of mentally undressing
a certain blonde virgin
as she stands before him to receive
Holy Communion.

Father Phog is a redhead who smokes
Marlboros right down to the butts.
He believes UFOs are us: humans
from the future, returning

to harvest healthier genes
from these Good Old Days!
He laughs through his ruddy nose
and slaps the hell out of his thigh.

The other day at the beach,
I asked Father Phog
if he’d ever seen the Loch Ness Monster.
Good Lord, he said, blowing smoke,

I do confess—I’ve had a glimpse or two
of that slithering beast
within.

This poem, falling almost perfectly in the center of the book, sums up the embrace of the contradictions of life which fill Athey’s poems. Life Is. It is all around us, created by the only One Who can claim to be “I AM”. Taking the “Kingdom of Florida” for the pattern, Athey tells us that

There is nothing to do
in this coeval kingdom, but be

drowned, strangled, eaten, or
grown.

It is in Part III that the book becomes most luminous. And yet, for all the mention of souls, heaven, and “godsong”, this is no detached idealism.

He is Tired of Self-Portraits of Artists, Pouting

One simple sonnet
about the white gloves
of a true lover, unpublished
in a nun’s notebook,
turns his crank
immensely.

There is the holy fool of “Love in the Ruins”, the trees “getting naked” in “Above Duluth”, the “Apophatic” theology of a crow, and the almost erotic longing “to know the uknowable” in “Proposition”.

So much of this poetry is simply good poetry, easy to read, and yet inviting one to consider longer for a few or many moments. There is no disdain to these poems, just bliss. And with “Bliss” we will end.

A glass of anything
with a friend who knows
everything you want him to know.

A musty copy
of Don Quixote
savored in an empty cafe.

A true lover
with many secrets
and few regrets.

A steady rain
that does not pour.

A glimpse or two of ever-
lasting glory.

Facing Outward

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 03:11:39 GMT

Over the last week I have been a part of a rather interesting series of exchanges that spanned four different weblogs (unos, dos, tres, catorce... Turn it up loud, captain!). A joke: An Orthodox and an emergent drag a Baptist into a bar. Ba-da-boom!

The engagement started over the strong position that the Baptists took against the use of contemplative prayer at a church camp. The prayer as practiced apparently followed the book, Soul Shaper, by Emergent-U.S. National Coordinator, Tony Jones. Jared Moore, Jeff Wright, and others voiced an intense disapproval of contemplative prayer for a variety of reasons—the alleged association with transcendental meditation and/or the adoption of, as one writer put it, "pagan Catholic prayers" among others—and I started out by chiming in with a defense of contemplative prayer as practiced by the Catholics and Orthodox.

It turned into a sprawling debate about Sola Scriptura, Holy Tradition, homosexuality, ecclesiology, church history, heresy (as if that one was avoidable), the Regulative Principle, and someone's trip to the masseuse (which was interpreted as code for "man on man lust"). The comments flew around, the tempers flared, and the vitriol spewed. Several times I asked my friend Jamie just what we were trying to accomplish. At different times we both said we'd stop posting, and time would pass, and comments would heap up, and eventually we'd jump back into the fray. Why? What use was it?

I've had several different motivations carrying me through these exchanges. The most obvious, but actually least significant one is my desire to be a witness to the Tradition of the saints, and to provide whatever apologia I could. But I'm not a tremendous apologist, I'm not terrifically learned about Church history, theology, and practice.

A more personal reason is my desire to work off the resentment that I have had toward the churches of my upbringing. I've been very bitter about many different things—all ways in which I somehow ended up feeling repressed, or perhaps even to some extent rejected. My idea was that if I could engage these people without letting my bitterness take control that perhaps it would dissipate. And to some extent it has. More than anything, I guess, it settled in how remote that past is to me now. It's distant, and non-threatening. There's no more reason to feel claustrophobic, no more reason to feel like my toes are being stepped on. I can breathe. I can disagree. And I can try to deal with these people who think and believe so very differently from me.

There's a third reason, too. It has to do with my growing conviction that "inter-faith" or ecumenical dialog should be happening at the personal level much more than in any official way. There are a great many obstacles to true dialog at the... dare I say it... organizational level. But there's a difference between the necessary theological boundaries that have been drawn and must be respected and the boundaries between individual persons. This was to be my true topic for this post, but I see that it must be continued and taken up in full at a different time.

If I can leave you with one thought, though, a challenge, let it be that we stop cloistering ourselves among those with whom we have so much in common. Let's strive toward a personal catholicism, a universality of relationships. Befriend someone whom you find difficult and try hard to listen to them. Argue if need be, but respect them. Try first to listen. Speak later, and don't throw in the towel. Stretch a little. Who knows where it will lead us.

The Jerusalem Bible: My New Favorite Translation

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 02:31:42 GMT

I have been reading the bible for most of my life. I grew up on the King James Version, the NIV, and the NASB. I could read it and understand what I was reading, but somehow it was all rather technical. I would read and semi-consciously annotate, categorize, and analyze the text in my head—this speaks to this doctrine, that to this, I wonder if this could mean… And so when I came to a point at which I was starting to realize that I couldn't simply read the Bible I started thinking about how I could rediscover it—to somehow start over again, to read it as if I'd never seen it. It was right about that time that the New Testament portion of Eugene Peterson's The Message came on the scene. I picked up a friend's copy and started to read it. To some degree it worked for me. It was… fresh. Whether it was fresh as in, "ahhhh, the fresh country air," and "oh, my, what fresh tomatoes these are," or a little more like, "don't get fresh with me, young man," I really couldn't make up my mind. I eventually decided that The Message needed a subtitle:The Message: According to the Beat Poets. Ok, so maybe I'm being unfair—I respect what Peterson was attempting to do. But I simply couldn't get away from the sense that it was just a wee bit (ever heard of "English understatement?") too idiosyncratic for my tastes. No, the gospel writers were not Homer, but were they really hip? Ok, so maybe "hip" is the wrong word…"chatty"?

At any rate, I gave up on trying to find a highly readable, literary Bible and just tried to deal with my tendency to read by doctrine. Until recently.

I was reading Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary and was really impressed with the translation he used there. So I looked it up: The Jerusalem Bible. I'd heard of it—J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the editors and it had always been highly spoken of as an excellent English translation. So, straightaway I ordered a copy.

I find it's just what I needed. I can sit down and read it as a book instead of some kind of catechism. Not only that, but the text isn't wooden—it has character, the writers have a texture to their voices that always seemed muddily homogenized in other translations. It has rejuvenated my reading—for once I truly enjoy reading the Bible.

Here's an excerpt—Romans 8:18–27:

I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is waiting for us. The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons. It was not for any fault on the part of creation that it was made unable to attain its purpose, it was made so by God; but creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free. For we must be content to hope that we shall be saved—our salvation is not in sight, we should not have to be hoping for it if it were—but, as I say, we must hope to be saved since we are not saved yet—it is something we must wait for with patience.

The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God.

A couple more notes: the text—in the Readers Edition, at any rate—is in single column, with none of that "Jesus' words in red print" nonsense, the verse numbers are in the margin, with a simple black dot indicating the change of verse. If the chapter changes mid-paragraph, the chapter number takes the place of the black dot. The footnotes—and in the Readers Editionthey are mercifully few—are relegated to the bottom of the right hand page. In other words, there is nothing that gets in the way of the text, itself.

Don't get me wrong—there are times when I want to do serious study of a more scholastic nature, and at those times heavy annotation and cross-referencing is very useful. But for the way I read and study, it's something rarely needed. Most often, I'll read, and after finishing a section, if there is anything difficult I'll ponder it, and then make use of commentary—Johanna Manley's Bible and the Holy Fathers for Orthodox, and St. Chrysostom's homilies, for example. If I need to do cross-referencing I can always use a concordance, or the search feature of any Bible software.

Here's the details:

Manley, Johanna, comp.,ed. The Bible and the Holy Fathers for Orthodox. Crestwood, NY: Monastery Books, 1989.
The Early Church Fathers. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. <http://ccel.org/fathers2/info.html>.
The Jerusalem Bible: Reader's Edition. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2000.

Words from an old friend

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:10:58 GMT

Last night I dreamed that Christopher who is now not going by that name but it kills me to try to call someone a different name arrived here unexpectedly. In the dream I cried and cried and cried - and NOT because I was sad. I wonder if that dream might one day come true? But I'll try not to cry.
link

Voice from the past
So you called tonight. How long? Six years? It doesn't seem possible. Spur of the moment drives to Leavenworth, arguments in the kitchen, dinners eaten on the floor in front of your computer. Six years ago? More? Unthinkable. Your voice still sounds the same and can still lull me into that same complacency that says let's just drop the important and do the urgent; fly far from here. No, it's awareness into which you lull me. I know how quickly nine months pass and six years of silence take their place. Maybe seven. I haven't yet counted. Long time. I do read. I do lie on the grass and think sometimes. Not often enough, you'd say.
Your voice brought back so many good memories. I wish you to return.
Tears aren't always bad, young upstart. This post is for you. I raise my glass to you. The contents are unworthy, but the gesture means the same. Here's to you. To you coming home one day. To friendships that do not yield to the pressures of time. To loving forever. To understanding. To your mood not being my responsibility, but my concern. Here's to you. To children being a direct deposit by God Himself into the eternal bank account of our soul. To the means by which they are acquired being a non-issue. To life. Where there's life, there's hope. I will pray that God smiles on you and grants you a speedy end to trouble. God bless you. God bless you. God fill you with hope. God fill you with life.
link

C.S. Lewis once gave the advice to never move away from one's friends. Good advice, that. A few simple words from a long-time friend, one who knows me as only a few others do, and the world is disassembled and rearranged. Home is where? A locality? An emotional frame of reference? A state of the heart? It is hard to be out of the presence of those one loves and by whom one is loved, even as one is in the presence of other loves. The heart yearns for home even as one is already home. In this life there is too much division—space and time are too real. Love is made more poignant by loss and longing. And all these words are so much static of the soul, the heart, as interpreted by the mind. There is only one faithful expression of all of this: I sigh.