The Faith and the Reliance

Stanley Kunitz began his poem, The Layers, with the common sensibility that accrues to many that, while we have some notion of a continuing identity through our lives ... "I am me and the same me that I was yesterday" .... we had and have had a multiplicity of identities, roles and functions and each one is in a constant process of change and 'leaving behind':

The Layers (from the opening)
by Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. My own early life was destined to taste so-called Sacred Texts, as much as it was to know the difference between the feel of a Craftsman wrench and one made by the many companies that have mastered the art of designing offset wrenches that feel "just so" in one's hand. My Mother came from a line of religious thinkers, keepers of sacred traditions and Writings; the one I was named after, indeed, died September 1913 ... just 100 years ago ... even his name was to carry forward. My Father, on the other hand, was born to smithies and dairymen and thought little of demolishing what was in order to build what was to become. Mutt of such a "mixed marriage," it is, perhaps, of little surprise that yesterday I continued my writings on a theoretical piece about the sanguine value of sadness, while spending some hours pulling apart and rebuilding a pump and a filter  ... all between hours with the visitors who occasion my office and dealing with GuntherDog's need for a haircut. I never forget the other layers of my life ... of course the familial ones which come in layers of their own ... my trek through teaching and running two schools in my life, one a place for disturbed inner city high schoolers ... and one a postprofessional training institute for those who sought to work with fractured Souls by talking to them. There were the years of trying to do Mathematics, a piece of which I continue to see being cited ... the Covitz-Nadler Theorem. (A piece of theoretical Mathematics that never impressed me and still doesn't.) I remember, too, treks through trying to modify that Viennese Doctor's Theory of the OEdipus complex and, now, my work on Sadness ... nevermind years of mixing cement, building walls, plumbing and my favorite ... trying to balance vacuum driven carburetters on a slew of old cars before the process was hijacked by perfidious cyborgs and their computerized fuel injection systems. But what unifying force is there to bind all this together ... what "principle of being abides" ... to go back to Old Stanley's words? While I don't know the answer to that question, yesterday as I was playing with the filter ... dismantling-cleaning-running .... dismantling-cleaning-running .... the title of a book by the midevil Bible scholar, Nachmonides, ran through my head. In his language: Ha'Emunah v'ha'Bitachon .... rendered in English, I suppose ... the Faith and the Reliance (maybe written mid-13th C.). I haven't worked this through in my head and little if anything remains of the Nachmonides' words ... but this much kept swirling about with wrenches at hand .... life ain't much without a confidence that -- whatever the future has in store for us ("See what tomorrow brings" was the name of an early 60's LP) -- whatever unfolds, we ... in some inter-reliant pulling together .... we'll give it a whirl. I wish I remembered after this half Century + of not looking at this pamphlet-sized book of letters how the Old Guy parsed the connection between Faith and Reliance ... but that's gone to memory, at the moment. In any case, I found myself watching myself and others all day ... but particularly myself. This Last Quarter stuff? It doesn't even always make it to Overtime, y'know. Its success, it seemed to me, yesterday, and seems to me this morning, relies on whether or not we (I mean "I" and "You,"  of course) can welcome a future, whatever it may be, with that sense that it will, indeed and with great joint effort, work out ... The filter, this morning, is still running ... and so am I. And GuntherDog is still a schmuck!