Inadequate Response to Sktrbrain

Sktrbrain ... Wish I knew how to respond to the sentiments you present ....

The following came to mind ....

Einstein received a letter from a young  Palestinian man (I think it's in a collection called Ideas and Opinions [of Einstein]) ... maybe 1947 ... Einstein had much earlier asked Freud for the League of Nations if there was any hope of putting an end to war (published under Varum Krieg? [Why War]). Einstein's answer to the young man was more elegant I think than Freud's, who left it as a need for increasing the recognition of similarities and love to the mix ... more tatological than pragmatic.
Einstein, on the other hand, talked of choosing a group of maybe 10 people ... 5 from each side ... and an agreement to abide by their mediated ruling. I think it was something like a Doctor from each side, a politician from each side and a Mother from each side and some that I forgot.
I am struck, though, that in my own field of working with people who come with personal angst, inevitably I find that these experts, my colleagues, cannot make peace and get lost legislating against each other. At one point, I was paying dues to three organizations that were seeking each other's destruction.
What madness. The people in Judges 12 or 13 send the son of hooker-woman off to fight for them ... Yiftach [the opener] (Jepthah, in transliterated butchered form). He comes to a tragic end. My kids were in the generation between Viet Nam and the Desert Wars ... I'm guiltily pleased for that.


I am a member of an online listserv for such healers. Yesterday, I was filled with hope as the group not only showed concern for each other but shared their gratitudes ... for each other ./.. for the world we get to visit for some number of years .... I did feel ... and continue to feel ... hopeful. Maybe Freud was right in his view that only Love and the Recognition of Similarities will ever act as as buffer against gratuitous enmities and wars. During the day, I had managed to go into a nasty cardiac arrhythmia and found that my Falling Leaves weigh more than my back's listed Load Capacity. So many colleagues held out a helping hand ... ideas for taking care of my heart ... and then began talking of gratitude. One sent a hyperlink to a You Tube ... another a choral rendition of Christmas musiocs by Britten.

Life has its good stuff!

Thanksgiving Ceasefire

Haven't checked whether ceasefire between Israel and Gaza has held. Afraid.

 I suspect, like many others, I find my sympathies split between innocents on both sides of wars ... for,
indeed, most participants in the product of war (its death and devastation) are innocents ... At least innocent of the propensity to turn hurt to anger to hate to rational decision to exhaust that hate on all others who are 'like' the persons who induced the hurt.

I often in my mind go back to what some feminist thinkers think of as Freud's negative comments about women's uber-Ich (conscience), about women's inability, according to Freud, to make a purely rational decision to offer up hot and cold retribution without being effected by feelings. Wouldn't it be nice if our generals had just a bit of that womanly conscience?

Over the years, I've spoken a number of times about Jonah's lesson on the need to feel at the hands of his God. The teaching moment doesn't come till the end of the story. I suspect this audience knows it but I like telling it ....

God wants Jonah to warn the non-Jewish dwellers of Nineveh (Mosul) to repent or get the shit kicked out of them ... Divine wrath. Jonah the Son of Amitai (maybe best translated as Jonah who came out of Truthtelling) takes the morning boat to Tarshish for fear that if the Ninevites repent, it won't look good for HIS non repented brothers and sisters. The whole thing with the big fish and the big storm happens and the big fish spits him back up on the road to Nineveh. Vocatur atque non vocatur, Deis aderit ... Beckoned or not beckoned, alas, God and all your dilemmas are still present.

Any case Jonah gets to the outside of the Gates of Nineveh, mouths some words, and sits down in his pity pot. It gets hot and hotter. He bemoans his plight ... God grows him a shading gourd ... A kikayon ... and Jonah feels cool. That night, his God brings him an East wind and with the next day's sun and a nasty little worm, the Gourd and it's shade disappear. God asks him ... So, are y'sufficiently pissed-off-depressed, now. Jonah responds ... Damn straight! Then, his God hits him with his teaching moment and metaphor .... You're angrily depressed for the gourd for which you never toiled and I shouldn't cry for the 125,000 of my children and their many cattle that may die of their own corruption.

I don't know how to deal with my need to feel for the needs of the dwellers of all Ninevehs ... All the suffering Others .... And the fact that someday I may have to make the decision to go to war with them. Awareness sucks and Instincts rule. Awareness sucks because, in its healthy form, it brings doubt and the skeptic's paradigm .... Instincts are binary. The still fly is not food to the frog. The moving fly is nothing but food to the frog.
When I was young, mon grandpere would swing a sacrificial chicken over my head ... Take this chicken, God, and not my grandson. Today, many Americans offer up their 'Big Chickens' .... Even if the grandson-now-grandfather doesn't swing a bird over his grandkids.

Wishing for the hegemony of the Female uber-Ich, I remain with warm regard .... Au nom du grandpere

Singing in the Last Quarter

Was reading a review of a Leonard Cohen concert ... In part ...


"“Reach into the vineyard of arteries for my heart / Eat the fruit of ignorance and share with me the mist and fragrance of dying,” he wrote in “The Spice Box of Earth.” As an aging lion with a storied past, he does not wish to retire or retreat, but to invite others to accompany him in old age.  The love he never gave, he wants to give now.

“I had wonderful love, but I did not give back wonderful love,” he wistfully told a Swedish reporter in the 1990s, according to The New York Times. “I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation. I couldn’t touch the thing that was offered me, and it was offered me everywhere.”

Growing old means admitting regret, and it has made his music more melancholy."



Regret? I gotta think on that. Maybe it's too late, Lennie? or maybe it's never too late? Time don't pass slowly up here in the endgame.

Back hurts more than usual, today. Need especially today to construct gratitude.

Losing (It) with Grace

After thinking of my sweet pooch's ways of training me, I must report that Gunther Dog continues to prevail. I am a reasonably intelligent Soul and thought, perhaps -- just perhaps, I could get him to compromise on his need to be petted right at the top of the stairs. I was like a wrestler whose name is lost to me ... He would in the midst of a contest point to his brain and say something like "Smart ... I'm smart."

My plan was direct. The stairs begin 5 meters from the bedroom door. Open the door and invite Gunther Dog out for his AM pee. Stop after closing the door and scratch his head for a good bit. Then proceed to the stairs and just keep walking.

Best laid plans of mice and men, aye? I implemented my plan ... closed the door. Scratched Gunther Dog's head for twice as long as I normally would and then proceeded to the stairs. Gunther dutifully followed and sat at top of stairs while I walked downstairs quite alone and feeling defeated.

You win, Gunther.

Reminded me of trying to teach a school full of disturbed urban inner-city high school kids how to read and do Math. But this was 40 years ago and I was younger. I figured, then, that hiring an ex-priest to teach them how to read Latin and having the math teacher slowly go over all the Fisher-Spassky Chess games of the 1972 Reijkavic world championship was better than confronting their resistances. (they never learned how not to read Latin or how not to play Chess.) Damn! It worked like magic, ... then. The big rule in this school that I instituted was: NEVER CONFRONT THE RESISTANCE. OK, Gunther Dog, the Rubicon is not yet crossed. Alia non jacta est!

But, I suppose, another way of saying this is: Lose with grace, Kid! Lose with grace.

OK, Gunther, you win ... at least for the moment.

And I envy the Dog

Poor Gunther Dog ... little is known of the plight of the Middle Aged dog living with Older Adults who don't Play nearly as much as they once did in the Fourth Quarter. It took us awhile to find out why he needed to be rescued in the first place ... 8+ years ago from some quick-kill shelter in KY. It's no wonder Sarah Palin was concerned about "death panels" .... and we older folk are concerned about going in to nursing homes. But Gunther, as we were to name him after a fallen colleague, must've gotten himself into trouble. He hated men or maybe it was the other way around ... maybe he came to hate men who hated him. We'll never know.

In any case, Gunther has developed a night and morning ritual. He spends the night in a chair that sat in Marsha's parents' den and gets there as soon as he has his evening pee and is told that it's time to go upstairs. Gunther, I should point out, isn't walked ... he goes out in the yard, alone ... pees alone and returns to several words that he knows (he's originally from Kentucky .... Shoulda called him Daniel Boone or something): "Gunther ... wanna go upstairs."

Gunther flies up the stairs and looks down ... "Hey, you comin'?"

Then, he climbs on the bed and gets looked at by his adoptive Mother and jumps onto his chair for the night.

Morning comes and Gunther waits patiently until I shower and dress ... oh! and I get to pee, as well. He looks at me pitifully, especially if I'm struggling to get my pants on ... "Poor Old Man with a bad back." Gunther has a troubling oedipal complex and clearly prefers children and his Mom to me but in the morning, I feed him and let him back out into the yard before his breakfast.

He has a certain ritual, though; he has his ways. He begrudgingly climbs off the chair and follows me in the dark room into the lit hall where he walks to the top of the stairs and sits. If I do not come and pay homage to the Great One (all 40 pounds of the mangey mutt) by stroking his head, he refuses to begin his descent. I must scratch his head and invite His Majesty the Dog down for breakfast and then ... and then ...

The SOB shows his stuff ... Without missing a footfall, he descends the stairs .... in a blurry (to his myopic Dad) motion ... left-front with right-rear blending into right-front with left-rear into left-front with right-rear, etc. Show-off! Proving a point!

"I'm a mind to just feed you dog food, this morning ... then see who is boss."

Oh! The shame of envying one's dog.

Playing "after" the Last Quarter

Last night was the election here in USA. We'll see how it all flushes out, eventually.

Past couple of days, however, has brought me into contact with two 90+ gents ... I had some friction with both, though I had no intention to initiate such adversarialness. Both men were angry ... one was speaking publicly. I suggested how nice it might be to get, if we had time, to a related issue .... and ... he unloaded on me. The other was in a reading group to which I belong ... he expostulates ... goes on and on, as if what he was saying was obvious when it wasn't, at least not to me.

In spite of my age-related infirmities, I suppose it is possible that I'll reach my 90's .... and become obstreperous and begin to pontificate. Now, it hadn't passed me by that in writing a blog, one may well go on and on, as if the world were interested. I remember often lunching with a friend ... 30 years my senior but we had been chums together in an educational institute for a number of years. I recall one incident (though similar events were not infrequent) in a restaurant where he ordered a sandwich and coffee. The waiter brought out the coffee and E. went after him ... "When someone orders coffee, don't you know that they want it AFTER the sandwich." And he went on and on.

A dozen years ago, I wrote about a mirror phenomenon ....

"I sometimes imagine an array of mirrors. Some of these surfaces are fine reflectors while others are foggy or cracked or but partially reflective due to some aging process in the surface’s material. Some face each other and others face away. Diagonal, orthogonal, pairwise skewed — a congeries of mirrors set in a never to be replicated  pattern.

I imagine choosing a spot in a singular mirror upon which to focus my gaze. I shall have arrived at this moment and this place and this choice of spot after years of trekking through many other such mirror mazes. Still, I shall now marvel and fascinate at the array of sequential visions that are visible through this chosen spot in this mirror. The images will stare back at me at that moment. Not simple images, but compound ones that, if I look with care, may include me, the intrusive observer who has inadvertently been cast as a shadowy figure in his own observations. And after all is done and looked at, what shall I know of what I see? What is? What is smoke and mirrors?  And what may be contingent on the choice of the chosen spot arrived at here at this random point in the midst of travels? And what shall be known of the identity of others who fortuitously may be looking in on this maze of mirrors just as I do? ' ...

Many such conclusions that arise from such observations are responsive to queries relating to who I am in the diverse roles that I come to play in life. Who am I as child to parents? Sibling to brothers and sisters?  Friend to friend? Lover to lover? Parent to child?  Among them are those relating to who I am as a gendered other to my others. Male to Female and other Male? Female to Male and other Female?"

Geez ... life is complex.

An Old Man Feels Shame

The lights did go out and so did the heat. It was dark and it was cold ... true it is. Psalm 140-something has it "before His chill, who can stand?" .... Well, indeed, most of us can. I found a pump in a local hardware chainstore and managed to pump out the 3" of water, not the 9" of anticipated rain. 300 or so candles and blankets and sweaters did the trick. And then! irony of ironies ... just shy of four days into "the big chill," I heard a noise in my office. Poor old man! What was it but a laser printer in the office going into its warm-up routine. That was 3:00 pm, yesterday. All the other amenities followed suit ... phone, internet, etc. Went to eat with some kids and grandkids and went to sleep in an already warmed home.

Then, it was like a Scrooge nightmare. I already heard about the devastation on the Atlantic Coast and NY City and Staten Island and Lord-knows where else. 2:00 AM and the sense that I had just experienced the petty narcissistic cave-like experience of a neurosis .... that's more or less all I could experience during those four days ... the petty disturbances of life by candle-light, sweaters and blankets. Oh, yeah! Gunther-dog was shivering and Pretty Girl Freud le Chat looked annoyed.

Sat around till 4:00 AM thinking about how easy it is to feel sorry for oneself.

Ach du lieber ... enuff!