Hillary 2016

I have several times cited Stanley Kunitz's piece called The Layers in which he admonishes folk to "Live in the layers and not the litter' of life. He ends it this way:

"Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
Is already written.
I am not done with my changes."

As I listen to the the newscasts and their talk of fires, murders, theatrics in the world of American politics, and terroristic shootings, I find myself annoyed and amused at the manner in which the pundits wink at each other about peoiple's plans for the future. We all know that McCain is too old to run for the American Presidency, and chances are Biden is, too. But when Hillary Clinton says she hasn't got her plans straight for running in 2016 and running the free world from 2017-2021, everybody "winks" .... as if to say ... "We know she's gonna run."

Lets see. Sen. First Lady Clinton will be 66, this year and 69 at the next election. She'd be 68+ and working almost 24-7 during the primary and the general election. If she made two terms, she be 77 when she could start collecting retirement benefits and packing up the White House. Mind you, it's not that I think that's impossible .... but ... "Oh, My aching back."

Brings to mind the whole process of planning 5-10 years ahead in the Last Qurter. I suppose we do it and I suppose there is no other way. But do we live with the presumption that this will go on?

I guess we have no choice.

And still ....

Any case, when Mrs. Clinton says she doesn't know whether she's running, I tend to believe her. Hell! I was running 4-6 miles a day just a coulpe of years back and now running sets me into an arrhythmia ... in a snap.

You go, Girl!

 

 

 

When I think of my visitor

Witnesses (HHC July 1994)

On the bottom of his closet, like two soldiers they stood
A layer of dust demanded “You’ve seen these before”.
Witnesses for what he now couldn’t and once could
When he bought them.
Was it nineteen sixty four?

One at a time, he picked each up, turned it around,
“Look! The pattern on the toes is just the same,
The leather’s still good, the color still brown,
And inside
The author hadn’t changed his name.

Yet they spoke of different times and of a different man
Who wore them then more than a quarter century ago.
These shoes were now witnesses to god’s sinister plan,
That from vibrant forms,
Takes man and transforms him to Lore.

They Say It Ain't Easy

Well, it isn't uncomplicated to say good-bye to a friend. (I know, I know. It's a kind of double negative ... but you can ignore that, this once.)

J had been visiting me every week for about ten years and had only recently significantly cut back on his practice of medicine ... J turned 83, this Summer. I don't know that the ten years that we met flew by in a flash like screaming through an abandoned train-stop without even slowing down ... no ... that was more something that came on slowly. J was a private kind of person and warmed up slowly to our meetings. He collected pictures and statues of wolves and, maybe, saw himself less as a member of the pack than as the proverbial lone wolf. Oh, he had children and wives and was much beloved by those people who came to visit us both. Mine didn't know that he came to visit me and since he was a bit older than I am, if they had suspicions, they might have thought that I visited him. I remember one who looked puzzled when I explained that I didn't know how to travel to his office from mine. "He knows exactly where your office is!"

J did, in fact, cease coming to see me about a month ago ... after falling. We Last Quarter types (he was technically what I call an Overtimer ... Over 80, that is) often have something minor ... a fall in J's case ... Harold had what they thought was the flu until someone checked his pancreatic enzymes and found the worst just 4 or 5 days before he died .... Corbett had suffered nonspecific pain before they found nasties in his bones. In J's journey, they found problems in his GI tract .... doesn't matter what they were. I began visiting him in the hospital.

Funny how you know someone in one way and then the relationship changes. I got to meet one of his kids ... actually, I had met one years ago ... I talked more to his partner of many years .... We had talked for all these years mostly about his journey, an internal one .... talked somewhat about mine, too.

Montaigne, the essayist, had begun writing his essays, as I recall, after his friend Etienne de la Boitie had died. They had spoken often about the variety of matters that occasion life and, now, Etienne was no more. I don't know Montaigne's life story any longer (I think I once did) but it seems to me that his and maybe all of our creative bursts arrive after losses ... arise out of the mourning process. The newest issue of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to categorize human frailties lists mourning as a sickness, if it goes on too long.

Oh! Our silly language. I think of the advertisements that say, for instance:

1) Use this medicine which might kill you but talk to your doc, first ...

or

2) This donation is tax deductible to the full extent allowed by the law.

As the kids say: No shit!

I don't know when sadness about loss is "too much" .... but I'm still, indeed, quite sad even for this man whose time had come and with whom I'd never broken bread.

I bought a copy of that Diagnostic Manual just this week ... the paperback version that was about the size of a harlequin romance. I remember leaving the store and wondering whether I must be very rich, indeed, to pay $74 for a paperback or whether I was just $74 poorer. I won't read what it has to say about mourning; I really don't care and will continue to be saddened over no longer meeting with the crusty but kind old fellow who brought much to many, including me.

The Good Life

Couldn't quite sleep, last night. The great god Sopor, the demi-god of sleep, doesn't visit every night of the Fourth Quarter. Had spent a couple of hours in the dental chair having my lip torn from my chin ... maybe that was it. It could've been the work outside I had done the previous day ... I had felt good doing it and, indeed, had felt good 'about' doing it. Still, the Soul willing or not maybe needs to find housing in a younger wrapping.

I was visited at night by a dream in which two men were threatening to throw a jagged, cantaloupe-sized rock through my car window. I saw them and invited them into my office ... they were dressed like G-Men. Maybe all the talk about the NSA spying on citizens got me. I thought it odd that I would invite those who wish me harm into my office. Still, for almost all my adult life, I have invited people into my office, even though they often harbored expressed-inclinations to do me harm. But back to the dream. I thought of stunning them and magically had a stun-gun nearby.

Instead, I found myself reminded of an ancient morning meditation on the Good Life that I decided to share with them. It goes something like this:

"These are the activities that one benefits from in the here and now even though the principal reward must remain for some other venue: Respect for Parents (I'd add respect for children and grandchildren, as well); Random Acts of Kindness; Morning and Evening Visits to Sacred Spaces; Hospitality; Visiting of the Sick; Provisioning the Newly-Wed; Accompanying the Dead; Deep Involvement in Meditation; Fostering Peace among Friends and among the Married, as well; but Study of the World is Equal to the Lot!"

I don't know, any longer if or how my visitors reacted. Were they impressed by my acumen or did they throw their rock on my smart little crown and do me in. But as I walked downstairs with GuntherDog, I found myself wondering about the various descriptions of the Good Life. From the Biblical description of Holiness in Leviticus 19 to the Greek notion of Sophrosune (sorry! Greek transliteration is such a pain in the ass for me after all these years) to the everyday little kindnesses that we show each other. Maybe the Last Quarter is made for reflecting on such matters.

I don't really believe that those lost "overtime" Souls in the Nursing Homes are wondering about "The Meaning of Life" ... but that would be nice.  

And the Beat, indeed, Goes On!

Sierpinski's Triangle is made by pulling out the middle quarter of an equillateral triangle and, then, replicating that process with the triangles that remain. This rendering of it lifted off the net is a variant that doesn't quite work but that's a mathematical matter ... not to worry. The point of this fractal, as it is called, and others is that no matter how many "generations" you go into the process, the entire process is represented.

I knew Warclaw Sierepinski and his sidekick in developing Topology, Kazimierz Kuratowski, in the late 1960's/early 1970's. They had worked mostly from the 1920's to make Poland and its Academies of Science centers for the study of a specific type of Mathematics. S & K were young, then and full of their "unfolding processes." The French said that such national specialization would fail ... the French were wrong and those young men and a third, Janiciewski, who died in one of the Wars that took many young men's lives between the Great Wars played out their parts.

I thought of these Fractals last night ... as a denizen of the Fourth Quarter, I watched one of my younger grandchildren having already developed her own specific charachter. One of the younger ones, still not quite 10, was doing some performance art ... pretending in an improvised skit that the few drops of wine she had imbibed had changed her character. K intends to be an actress. Her older sister will be a writer. Even us Last Quarter types can recall when we were taking form ... at least our taking on the first of a number of forms that constituted the first Quarters of our performance arts.

And the beat goes on.

Days for Reflection

I opened up my e-mail this morning and there was a request from a Dog Rescue Service for an old and grey fella ... looks mostly Beagle. Listed as a Senior. He's lying in wraparound position that so many dogs assume ... Is it the foetal position for dogs? Head on Tail. Sad eyes. What can he be remembering? I wonder.

Today is a Day for Remembering. So much, indeed, to remember. Met a number of older men ... my generation ... in the past few weeks ... bathed in memories of the past or bounded by them. So much depends on the position from which one views .... I guess that's perspective ... or something like that.

Similar to the preponderance of Fourth Quarter denizens, I am an orphan. I remember my religious parents praying to their God .... meditating ... eating ... meditating, still some more. My memory, need I add, is not of them but of my meditations and reflections on them. I don't rightly know if my parents were devout in their beliefs or skeptics. I remember them shopping and cooking much of the days before their Holy Days. M and I shopped and, this year, she cooked a great deal. By the time of a family gathering around the tablee, M was tired. I had been with visitors almost the entire day and had barely time to make a fruity green juice for the co-celebrants.

A lot of spinach and some red kale
2 oranges
2 lemons
2 apples
Celery ... maybe 4 or 5 stalks
A fat cucumber
A green pepper
A Big chunk of Ginger

I served it, last night, in a pitcher with a big stalk of celery to keep it mixed.

Only 2/3rds of my spawn and theirs were in attendance. By the time one reaches the Last Quarter, the magical slight of hand that has one believing that one has produced a new generation free of strife has been tempered by the light of too many days to count. Let's see. The Fourth Quarter begins after 31,000 sunrises and sunsets have been witnessed. The Sun Also Rises ... The Sun Also Sets.

The meal was joyously followed by a vigorous game of after dinner basketball in which napkins are smooshed up to find airborne pathways ... trajectories ... in an attempt to "sink one" in a water glass across or on the furthest side of the table. That doesn't sound "reflective" but I have a feeling that it is.

"Worship God with Glee and Awe."

My Mom and Dad had a sense of humor ... at least between them. So, do M and I. It's very good to meditate while hearing both the pratter and laughter of grandchildren. A teenager ... two tweens ... and the Big Time Cute 4 year old baby-of-the-cousins.

Mah Tovu! How good are your tents and dwelling places, O Jacob!

In my faith tradition, the word for prayer is in the reflexive voice and means roughly "to wonder at oneself."

How blessed are the tents and the dwelling place of  M & H .... Praised Be!

Gibran wrote of Tears and Laughter ... apparently in that order.

 

Still "In the Fray"

Still trying to eat the last three peas on my plate with semi-perfect equanimity. Mostly, things move slowly towards change and (1) my 85'ish visitor is back in the ICU, (2) M's back is still a mess from the fall two months ago, (3) Friend R's broken shoulder socket still makes it impossible for her to settle the shock of white hair on her head (though her husband, due to her infirmity, has no managed to cut his 4th onion in 50 years of marriage ... Go, Miltie!), (4) I'm worried about the young friend who was just released from a psych ward after feeling she and her husband  had enough, (5) still living with my own state of incompletion and (6) aware that my children were not God's answer to my inadequacies ... perfecting the mold, so to speak. Oh! And the thumb that lets me balance this laptop has announced its arthritic state ... the Cosmos' way of telling me that I could have more empathy for the likes of GuntherDog and colleagues who argue theory. I think it was Goether who opined: Grey, my friend, is all theory; but Green, the evergrowing Tree of Life.

It does look, this morning, that the USA will be bombing Assad in the upcoming weeks and something less than 1% of the World's population will be celebrating a New Year on their lunar calendar which figures the World to be 5773 years old, tomorrow. A much smaller mystical subpopulation of Jews finds interest in theoretical questions about how an omnipresent being such as their God who "fills the Earth and all that is contained within it" could find space for the creation, say the Sixth Day creation of humankind?

"Where could he put them," these heaven-centered folk ask. Where was the the space for them to occupy. Their solution? God, the omnipotent, had to redact herself or himself ... had to undergo Tzimtzum, they called it, in order to give room for other Selves at the Table of Life.

May it be thy will, Oh! God ... Great Spirit of the Universe ... Animator of the World ((Anima Mundi) ... that willed being that goes under the name "I shall be as I shall be" ... may it be your will and my effort that I find it in myself to make room for others ... for the Great M who I've accompanied and who has accompanied me for just shy of 50 years .... for our aging children and their companions and children and livestock ... all those who grew out of an innocent flirtation in the early 60's and now claim to be kin of mine .... May it be your will that my near and dear and the others with whom I share this space someday learn to make room for each other ... so that the task of Elijah set forth by Malachi will be realized:

"And he shall return the hearts of the parents unto their children ... and the children onto their parents ... lest I need to return and fuck up the Earth completely."

Peace in the family ... Peace beyond. The Biologist Folk Singer, Sam Hinton, was prone (Newport Folk Festival 1965 maybe?) to say that the choice could be no clearer: "Peace to the World or the World in Pieces."