I finally got around to my December issue of The Atlantic, and reluctantly read through the piece by Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control).  I respect Goldberg’s ability to present an argument in writing, and I admit to seeing the logic scattered through his presentation; but formal logic is the abstract study of logic or reasoning from a mathematical, computational and algebraic standpoint, and in the matter of “what to do about guns in America” I am not looking for a skillful semantic presentation to determine the truth or falseness of my gun owner friend’s statements that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and “But cars kill a lot of people and no one wants to ban them!”  If I were in a formal debate, I’d point out the illogic of anthropomorphizing guns and the unreasonableness of comparing people’s use and ownership of cars with their ownership of guns; but I’m not in a formal debate and prefer to appeal to common sense whether or not my views are reinforced by syllogistic reasoning.  

Kerry Kennedy’s point of view, expressed after the Newtown shootings, makes good sense to me.  Hers is a voice of reason informed by personal experience.

“I was four years old when we lost my uncle President John F. Kennedy to a man with a gun. I was eight years old when we lost my father Robert Kennedy the same way. I can't begin to know what these days have been like for the families of Newtown. But I know that for loved ones left behind, some wounds may be healed by time, but there are others for which there is no cure but to take action.

Of the twelve deadliest shootings in American history, half of them have occurred in just the last five years. Make these the last American children to die by an assault weapon. We must permanently reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban and the restrictions on high capacity magazines.

As my father said after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., victim of yet another act of gun violence: "Whenever a person's life is taken by another unnecessarily -- whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence -- whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole world is degraded."

Enough said for me to continue to press for gun control laws that at the very least would prohibit the purchase and ownership of assault firearms. Please join me by contacting representatives in the House and Senate to urge their support in the effort by the President and Vice-President to find reasonable, workable legislative solutions to irresponsible gun ownership in America.

In Search of the fiscal cliff...

Washington National Airport... Washington Monument in the distance.

Old Houses from a century ago.  I've always liked the old house on the tow path of the old canal on the District of Columbia side of the Potomac River.  When we lived at Potomac School not far from here, the house in the bottom picture was a frequent late afternoon bicycle destination for me.

Datura Arborea/Solanaceae 

Nightshade

This plant, related to jimson weed, is said to cause some people who even smell the flower, especially at night, to have delusions of being watched, inability to collect thoughts, fragmented thoughts, feelings of flying, dreams of water, clairvoyance, and a sense of floating outside the body.

Some Birthdays are like that...

Jeremy and Michael

19 and 21

FIND YOUR SOUL WITHIN THE MIND OF THE OCTOPUS

This was one of those weeks when everything went well for me personally, but news seeping into my bubble from the outside unsettled my confidence in Robert Browning’s declaration that “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world”... So this morning I went to church.  Going to Church on Sunday Morning is a habit... a lifetime habit that I’m not likely to break. It’s a habit that I’ve occasionally considered breaking because as I’ve grown older I’ve become less religious... not irreligious, but definitely less religious and more agnostic.  My habit, like some other addictions, makes little or no sense to some of my casual friends, or even to some of the people who love me.  I like being in the glorious cathedral space of First United Methodist Church, and I like just as much being in a humble small dimly-lighted chapel.  I like the way my own voice feels rising and joining with other voices even though I don’t believe some of what the Apostle’s Creed requires me to say that I believe... and to say anything in unison with all the other people in the glorious cathedral space feels good.  Like the good natured, cheerful drunk, I’m one of the happy ones addicted to church.  Some drunks are not so pleasant... a few even downright mean.  It’s true, too, of regular church goers. It’s not pleasant to be in the company of some of them, but they are not the reason I go.

I needed church today.  The tragedy at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, rattled me... touched me.  I didn’t expect an explanation in church.  I didn’t want to hear anybody suggest that evil in the world is part of “God’s Plan.”  I simply wanted to be surrounded by beautiful space and to wish I could share the experience of holy space with grieving parents of murdered children.  

At the beginning of the service children and young adolescents processed down the aisle of the sanctuary and turned, bright and beautiful, to face the congregation and their director.  They weren’t doing it because of what happened in Connecticut.  It was on the program already before that awful Friday morning.  They had practiced.  When they began to sing, I grabbed my camera and hurried to a place high up under the organ pipes at the back of the church.  I was alone up there and the camera’s viewfinder was blurred because I was crying.  It felt good to cry and to let the sound of those young voices singing as if they would live forever wash over me.  It wasn’t a blubbering, sobbing sort of crying... just the soft, comfortable slow running of tears.  I got the pictures and came down with hope that these children and others around the world might make earth a safer place. It's what I expect church to make me feel... Hope.

The way the world looked today from the Burnight's home in Crest... 

Margaret and I joined friends from our neighborhood out in Crest for another wonderful luncheon to begin another Christmas season... a reminder of the importance of friendship and family.  We are grateful.

O horror, horror, horror!

Tongue nor heart can conceive nor name thee!

What’s the matter?

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”   Act 2, Scene 3

As anyone can see, this is not a sitar... not even close; but it's a rainy day in San Diego and I'm getting my  photo du jour at home; and the nearest... some would say farthest... thing from a sitar is a mountain dulcimer, but I happen to have one hanging on the wall near my computer, so it will have to do.

As you might guess, some of my friends are bloggers. A couple of them I’ve never met face-to-face.  We’ve connected in cyber space, and I’ve come to think of them as not just distant acquaintances but close friends indeed.  One of them, Mark, an engineer on a boat working now out in the Gulf of Mexico who describes himself as an “old fan of rock,” wrote yesterday in his Blog, “I hate to say this, but I think it’s time they wheel Kieth Richards off stage, and Mick Jagger, who looks awesome and is in great shape can’t hide the fact that he is approaching 70.  There’s nothing wrong with 70, but I think you need to stop ripping your shirt off and swaying your hips to “Start me Up” when you’re 70.”  

(http://mark-marksrantsandraves.blogspot.com)  

Another cyber friend, Rajesh (http://inkthatblots.blogspot.com), is Indian and lives and works in Secunderabad, AP, India.  Mark’s post yesterday and Rajesh, just by being an Indian friend and having the soul of a poet, came to my mind yesterday when I learned that Ravi Shankar has died.

Much more than “just a sitarist,” Ravi Shankar has been for me ambassador plenipotentiary from the world of music since I first heard him in Singapore in 1972. I was thirty-something and he was fifty-something at the time. He died Tuesday at the age of 92.  No shirt ripping, hip shaking performances for him... just dreamy swaying by people listening to him.  His sitar was a space ship that has taken me and millions of others on many amazing journeys into the cosmos. His soaring riffs, usually accompanied by tabla, transport me with no help needed from drugs of any kind.  As I write this, I am listening (and vibrating) to one of his albums, the one called India: Ravi Shankar Living Room Sessions.  “Session 2: Raga Khamaj.”  I am transported.

I can’t say anything better about Ravi Shank than the tribute to him by Los Angeles Times music critic, Mark Swed: “In Classical Indian music a raga begins with the choice of a scale.  The musicians toss out the notes in the air, letting them float around for a while to produce an atmosphere.  This becomes the acoustical oxygen that the listener breathes.  The player then emphasizes certain pitches.  An order starts to be suggested.  Notes gradually take on personalities and group into melodies.  A rhythmic cycle gears up, becoming the motor of creation, the life force.  These note/particles eventually burst into a furry of cosmic dancing.  Wild oats are sown, and by the end all hell breaks ecstatically loose, as if life itself has emerged.”  

Yes!

I need pegs to hang things on...

pegs that are mine exclusively

waiting empty until I need them,

where I know everything is mine.

I need places to put my shoes...

places close to where I sleep

so they’ll be there when I wake

to take me into the world again.

How do homeless people do it...

keep their things together and

their wits about them day to day?

How do they know what’s theirs?

About Faulkner... and first paragraphs... three people put me on the spot today and asked me which opening paragraph is my favorite.  I had a hard time with that.  At first I thought it might be The Sound and the Fury, but that’s probably the one everybody remembers; so I decided to think about it some more... and then I remembered: 

“There was a man and a dog too this time.  Two beasts, counting Old Ben, the bear, and two men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which was in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible.”

So I’ve definitely settled on “The Bear” from Go Down Moses... at least until tomorrow.  

  

Well, I guess I can’t wait for tomorrow... Now I remember another story that has in it Sam Fathers... “The Old People,” and I guess maybe because I am one now, I should consider letting it be my favorite:

“At first there was nothing.  There was the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn, with the voices of the hounds converging somewhere in it and toward them.  Then Sam Fathers standing just behind the boy as he had been standing when the boy shot his first running rabbit with his first gun and almost with the first load it ever carried touched his shoulder and he began to shake, not with any cold.  Then the buck was there  He did not come into sight; he was just there, looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not only moving it but disseminating it, already running, seen first as you always see the deer, in that split second after he has already seen you, already slanting away in that first soaring bound, the antlers even in that dim light looking like a small rocking-chair balanced on his head.”

I knew the fifth or tenth time I read that paragraph, maybe sixty years before I was one of the old people, that here was a man who understood and respected the subjunctive mood when few other people in the American English speaking world did and that I probably was in love with him and should just give in and become an English teacher so I could have a reason to talk about how impossible it is to write the way he did.

I didn’t take a single picture today that I can even remotely relate to Sam Fathers or Boon Hogganbeck or Tennie’s Jim or William Faulkner... or the boy.  I’ll just go with the images I got today and wish I could ever in my lifetime get even one that would be as awesome as what Faulkner said about the boy and Sam Fathers: 

“Also, since he was nine now, he could understand that Sam could leave him and their days and nights in the woods together without any wrench. He believed that he and Sam both knew that this was not only temporary but that the exigencies of his maturing, of that for which Sam had been training him all his life some day to dedicate himself, required it.”

Wow!

Every now and then I go to the bookshelf in my house that has collected on it all the works of William Faulkner and several books about the man and his stories.  I was born across the river from Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County and lived there, steeped (marinated might be a another way of putting it) in the culture that is peculiar to Arkansas and Mississippi, to that part of the south. My parents took me away from there and transplanted me in the Central Valley of California at the time when I was passing out of my childhood and entering the confusion of adolescence. I liked the new home, but I never got over being occasionally homesick... without ever knowing what it was specifically that I was homesick for. It has been a chronic condition all my life.  I like to travel; but always after I’ve gone on to someplace else, I find myself looking back with unspecific longing.  Living in a place for awhile, even for a short while, puts something in me that wasn’t there before.  My Mother recognized  something in me that she apparently didn’t see in her other children.  I heard her say once when she was talking to her sister and didn’t know I was listening, “If someone came along dragging a sack, Jerral would get on it.”  

“Dragging a sack” was something one of Faulkner’s people could have said. It isn’t something that Central California people would say. Mother was right.  I like to travel, but I also like looking back to where I’ve been. It’s why I went to the Faulkner bookshelf today.  Sometimes I need to reread the first paragraph of one of his novels or the beginning of a short story.  Usually I don’t go to the shelf with anything in mind but mainly just to reconnect with an old friend, but today I went specifically to reread his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I would love to have been there to hear it.  A few years ago I was in the great hall in Stockholm; and when I was there, I squinted my eyes and pretended I was hearing him say it.  He spoke his speech in the language of my childhood; and when I listen to a recording of it, I close my eyes and it’s like listening to my Grandfather.

William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Stockholm, Sweden, 1949

      “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

      Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

      Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

Eight o’clock

and still no picture for today, 

at least not one that stirs me;

so I take out the little camera

and aim at the mask from Bali

that I got

in a village 

I don’t much remember...

on the top shelf

above my desk

with the brushes

and bicycle and

sepak takraw ball 

balanced

on a picture

of Brother Jim and me...

to go with the birds of paradise

and a lily... It’s late...

It’ll have to do.

METAMORPHOSES