Tag: poetry

Little Frigates

jono55

I can point to a short list of writings that have been truly formative when it comes to my view of life as a human being on a small planet. Their messages somehow stuck in a brain that too often seems to have a teflon surface, allowing many bits of knowledge that might have been important to fall to the floor and be swept away with the crumbs of that last bag of Cheetos. Put these books together and they could easily be carried in a knapsack.

What might these wonders be called, you ask? Here’s my list:

  • Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • The Bible
  • Buddhism Without Beliefs, by Stephen Batchelor
  • The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
  • Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry (yes, yes, a Western novel)
  • The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

At the head of the class is “The Four Agreements.” I really didn’t fully take it in until the second reading, and each subsequent perusal has reinforced its lessons. It is a straightforward owner’s manual for a freer life. Free of what, you say? Well, of shame and self-hatred and personal bigotry, just to mention a few items.

  • Be impeccable with your word: Speak with integrity, meaning, and truth. Use the power of your word to express yourself and your needs, rather than to speak against yourself or to gossip about others.
  • Don’t Take Anything Personally: Nothing others do is because of you; their words and actions are a reflection of their own reality, not yours. You won’t be the victim of needless suffering if you are immune to the opinions and actions of others.
  • Don’t Make Assumptions: You avoid misunderstandings and drama by finding the courage to ask questions and express what you truly want. Communicate clearly with others to prevent confusion and sadness.
  • Always Do Your Best. Your “best” is not static; it changes depending on your health, energy, and the circumstances of the moment. Accept that your best will vary and give your all in every situation.

Simple, right? Turns out that I like simple very much.

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There Is No Frigate Like A Book

by Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

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Emily, by Los Lobos

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What’s missing from the list above? Well, almost anything written by the man who I took as my teacher, even though we never met. His name is Thich Nhat Hanh. A Buddhist monk who worked all of his life for peace, and who taught that the way that I can contribute to peace in this world is to become peace in myself.

He told a story taken from the tragedy of the boat people in Viet Nam, who fled the country after the turmoil of the war. Of a twelve year-old girl who was raped by pirates and who then threw herself into the sea to drown.

She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.
When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate.

Thich Nhat Hanh, from the website Plum Village.

This story gave rise to a poem of his, Please Call My By My True Names. Here is a recording of Thich reading his poem.

Please Call Me By My True Names, by Thich Nhat Hanh

These days I am finding this teaching of his helpful in dealing with the conundrum posed by living among MAGA adherents. My first impulse when I hear one of them speak is usually to want to part the person’s hair with a stout cudgel. What holds me back is a suspicion that “if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate.” Substitute MAGA for pirate and there I might be.

I have no illusions about anyone being able to love these misguided ones back to happy normalcy. They are people so filled with hate and anger and fear that some of them are actually dangerous as a result and are quite capable of committing violent acts. But I can keep myself from letting their fear and hatred infect me by realizing that repulsive as their thinking and behaviors might be, I need not answer them in kind. It is chance that put me on one side and not the other.

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A Life of Illusion, by Joe Walsh

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I am reclaiming for myself the word “comrade.” For most of my life, that word was ceded to Communists for their private use by books, movies, plays … not a single one of the good guys in those stories was ever called “comrade.”

Comrade: a member of the same political group, especially a communist or socialist group or a labor union

Cambridge English Dictionary

But I like the word. It feels good rolling off the tongue. Do you know of a better expression of solidarity with someone, or a group of someones? So I am taking it back. Sorry, all you Communists and Socialists and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks … you have to share. It’s the right thing to do.

Comrade: a friend or trusted companion, esp. one with whom you have been involved in difficult or dangerous activities, or another soldier in a soldier’s group

Cambridge English Dictionary

And how appropriate for these troubled days we’re living in. Difficult or dangerous activities? You might call protesting the governance of a madman with a secret police force of masked unprincipled thugs a risky enterprise. A man who is presently showing us his disdain for life and the law by blowing up boats and the people in them? I don’t want to overstate things, but I don’t put anything past the noxious criminal at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

So if I call you comrade, I hope that you don’t take offense. Even if you don’t particularly care for the term, I am expressing my respect for you and what you are doing.

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EXPLANATORY NOTE: I have made a small change in the image on the margin of these digital pages, substituting the Straw Hat pirate flag for the upside-down American flag. The Straw Hat pirate flag has come to symbolize freedom, dreams, unity, and defiance against oppression. Although its origins are in a comic strip, in the real world the flag has been adopted by protesters in countries like Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, England, France, and even the United States as a banner for youth-led protest and resistance to authoritarianism. I may not be a youth on the outside, but my inner child (NO FAIR! I’M TELLING!) has definitely been awakened and is now pulling many of my strings. 

And, BTW, my inner child loves the pirate flag.

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MEMENTO MORI

Earth lost a real human being this past week, which is really too bad. There are never enough of them around. Jane Goodall came into my awareness in the late sixties and following her career has been an inspiration to me ever since.

Not a plaster saint, she was a forceful and determined worker for the rights of animals, including our own species. Wish I could’ve had her over for coffee, just to talk about those things that moved her most. Perhaps she’d have been too busy, what with working to save the planet and all, but I still could’ve asked. Missed that boat.

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Changes

jono55

Here is a puff piece about Robert Plant taken from an Apple Music review of his recent album. It happens I agree with it.

“It’s hard to think of another artist from the 70s classic-rock era who has aged more gracefully than Robert Plant. Rather than trying to relive past glories, the former Led Zeppelin shrieker has spent much of the 21st-century recontextualizing his formative influences – American blues, English folk, early rock ‘n’ roll, Middle Eastern classical – into more earthy and ethereal realms.”

The man has evolved in full view of all of us from basically the poster boy for the excesses of rock and roll to a mature artist who keeps putting out really interesting music. I’ve included a couple here today from the album Saving Grace. Look at those photos and marvel at what time makes of a face. From beautiful boy to a Mount Rushmore sort of gravity.

A side note. My son Jonnie was into music from early on in life, buying albums before he was ten. When he found an artist he liked, he would often save up and buy everything that man or that band had recorded. Such was the case with Led Zeppelin, the band where Plant became a legend. At the time, they meant nothing at all to me. It took a long time after Jonnie had moved on for me to catch up with his tastes.

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Soul Of A Man, by Robert Plant

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Saw a Lewis’ Woodpecker on our neighborhood walk this week, pecking away in some dead branches. Thet are pretty easy to spot, once you know they exist. I only learned about them this summer, when I saw one on a visit to Durango.

The Lewis’s Woodpecker might have woodpecker in its name, but it forages like a flycatcher and flies like a crow. It has a color palette all its own, with a pink belly, gray collar, and dark green back unlike any other member of its family. From bare branches and posts, it grabs insects in midair, flying with slow and deep wingbeats. It calls open pine forests, woodlands, and burned forests home, but it often wanders around nomadically outside of the breeding season in search of nuts.

All About Birds

The description sounds a bit like a lot of us, who wandered from home and years later couldn’t quite figure out how to get back or remember clearly how we started out. “I know I was a woodpecker in the beginning, but how was that, again?”

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There came a period in my mid-adolescence when I chafed at being expected to attend each family gathering the way I had done as a younger child. One day I flatly refused, and quite a scene ensued, with the rest of the family eventually going on without me. Harsh words, lots of pent-up resentments released on both sides.

Finding myself alone and not enjoying the solitude one bit, I made the decision to leave home. I did own a car, had a part-time job, and thought I might be able to support myself in meager fashion. So I packed the trunk of that car with all that I owned of any value. (I will tell you that it made a pitifully small pile.) And then I took a nap.

When I awoke, the rest of the family had returned, and so I resolved to wait and leave in the morning. I never learned how it happened, but somehow my parents became aware of what was stored in my car’s trunk, and my father did a very uncharacteristic thing, for him. He sat down and had a talk with me. No recriminations, no lecturing. Just letting me know that he and I were not adversaries, and that my safety and happiness were very high on his list of concerns.

The next day, I unpacked, feeling relieved. I think that over those hours I had realized that although I was now perched on the edge of the nest, I was not quite ready for flight, and was glad to have been talked out of it.

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Too Far From You, by Robert Plant

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POETRY CORNER

Over my life I have written things that for want of a better name I call poems. Thought I’d put one up here once in a while, just to air them out.

Us

Our personalities are like sweaters

Which are never finished

For as we add a row or two

Of length, to fit where we are now

A cuff or collar may unravel just a bit

And need repair

I think that illness is a time

When many rows are dropped at once

And not replaced

The wind blows through the holes 

That have appeared for others

To appreciate

We stop, pull back

Repair enough to make it wearable

Then go on as before

All knitting

And unraveling

Together

May 1983

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I Never Will Marry, by Robert Plant

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Screenshot
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As of this morning our government has shut down, whatever that means. This might be a good time to push it into a hole, kick some dirt over it, and start afresh. In its present iteration it serves no one well but the criminals at the top.

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Genghis Noem

jono55

Things to feel positive about when each day seems chockablock with disheartening news.

  1. We are learning so much about our own country’s constitution through the efforts of those who are attempting to subvert it. Knowledge is power so that’s a good thing, right?
  2. While eggs at City Market now average above a daunting $9.00 a dozen, it means that chickens all over the country are now earning enough that they no longer need to work two jobs and can spend more time with their families.
  3. February is hump month vis-a-vis the weather. Get past it and we are coasting downhill into Spring, which is a swell time. Very swell.
  4. If you are reading this you probably don’t have the bird flu.

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Kristi Noem has been confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security. While that is not great news for the U.S. as a whole (she has an unfortunate tendency to shoot creatures who displease her), within seconds of that confirmation we received a phone call from a lifelong South Dakotan who was so ecstatic to be rid of her as governor that her joy could not be contained.

Before she gained renown for blasting away at her pets and livestock she was already famous for mostly ignoring COVID in South Dakota and for getting herself barred from all Native American reservations in her own state.

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[Some people have an antipathy toward poetry. Perhaps it might help to think of a poem as sometimes serving as a hone, sharpening their senses and appreciation for what was already there in front of them. Here is one by a pediatrician/poet, written in 1921. ]

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Winter Trees

by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details 
of the attiring and 
the disattiring are completed! 
A liquid moon 
moves gently among 
the long branches. 
Thus having prepared their buds 
against a sure winter 
the wise trees 
stand sleeping in the cold.

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From The New Yorker

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On the subject of pediatricians (you didn’t know we were discussing them?), long ago I had a mentor named Henry Staub M.D. who I met only after my formal pediatric training was completed. Henry was a children’s physician, an ardent community activist, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. As a young man with Jewish parentage he, he had left Nazi Germany just in time to avoid being drafted into the army and thus discovered.

There is much of what I became in my own professional life that I took on from Henry by osmosis, but there were two sayings of his that I still think of frequently.

“The best doctor is the one that hurts the most.” On the surface this might seem paradoxical, but what he had observed was that there was a strong tendency to be “kind” to sick children, and for that “kindness” to delay discovery of sometimes serious illness.

For example, suppose that a child presented with symptoms that might be early signs of something really damaging. If the patient had been an adult, there would have been no question about doing the required but often uncomfortable testing, but in this case the physician decides to wait and watch for a while, to be certain that investigation is required since the patient is so young. However, in not wanting to cause pain to the small one the doctor instead sometimes hurts it far more by delaying diagnosis and proper treatment.

The second was a brief description of his own hypothetical professional journey, and was always told with a smile at the end. “I went into pediatrics because I didn’t like adults. After a few years, I didn’t like children, either.”

But Henry did love children, and was their constant advocate. Not for just those in his practice, but the larger community as well. A wise guy.

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“I heard a very good joke yesterday, someone said: ‘Musk is not a Nazi, Nazis made really good cars.’”

Stephen Fry

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Hypnotic. Beautiful. Don’t worry that you can’t understand the lyrics. No one can.

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I believe myself to be living in a revolutionary time, where many of my long-held standards and beliefs about my country are being dissected and discarded, their fragility revealed, the spider’s web of a platform on which they rested found to be riddled with gaps … easy pickings for the unscrupulous.

One one hand there is the thuggery and brutishness of MAGA, a collection of the benighted if there ever was one. On another hand there is the aging creakiness of the Democratic Party leadership, which seems unable find the laces on its Louboutins in order to tie them properly and so to get on with the people’s business. Yet another hand says a pox on both those houses. There are other “hands” as well. We may only have two official political parties but there exist oh so many constituencies.

One of those constituencies is the most influential of all, and that is that of the extremely wealthy. This one is actually more powerful than any of the parties.

In the old days (anything more than one election cycle ago) those people ran the country and the world but much preferred being invisible. These days the one percenters have not been not just taking blatantly more than their fair share of everything, they have used their fortunes to stack every deck they can get their hands on to perpetuate and increase their privilege.

Our history shows how easy it has been to pit us one against the other so that we would ignore their machinations. For instance, in our Civil War there were 620,000 deaths. While slavery may have been the spark that started the whole bloody mess, only a very tiny fraction of the men who died in either army had ever owned a slave. So why would a threadbare farmer from Minnesota travel a thousand miles to shoot at threadbare farmers in Virginia? What was their quarrel?

Who told them that taking up arms was the proper thing to do?

Guess.

So if there is a revolution coming, count me in. I may not mount the barricades as nimbly as a couple of days ago, but if nothing else I am more dangerous because I have good eyesight and less to lose.

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No Banker Left Behind, by Ry Cooder

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Coping

jono55

Some good things that come from the cold weather are the coping strategies that we use. A steaming bowl of steel cut oats is a warm and chewy way to start a morning. Aromatic soups both mundane and exotic are just the right thing for supper, and their preparation warms and perfumes the rooms.

Sharing a small blanket with a friend while watching television harkens back to the bundling practices of colonial America. And if you and your friend are of like mind, there are delightful liberties that can be taken under that covering.

Those puffy down jackets and coats are amazing armor against arctic weather. Even my 35 year-old Loden parka, heavy wool that it is, is a barrier no icy blast can penetrate.

And when your bathroom feels like the crisper drawer in a refrigerator as you strip down to take a shower, a small portable heater can create a micro-climate just for you.

I think that our cats feel much the same way. Without the need to constantly patrol the back yard against marauders of various species, they can remain indoors and devote themselves full-time to their true love … napping.

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Father’s Son, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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We still don’t have much snow here in Paradise, and the nearby ski areas are starting to complain that they would like quite a bit more, if you please. Ski resorts here in the mountains so frequently grumble about how much snow they’ve received that in this they are much like the farmers of the prairie states who absolutely never get the amount of sunshine or rainfall that they want.

In general talking to those farmers during the growing season is tiresome. They will rail against the weather of the present, and when they are done with that they will begin bringing up the meteorological misdeeds of the past several decades.

These orations are so similar to one another that farmers could really save themselves time and energy by transcribing one of them and then printing it as a handout to be passed around in place of conversation.

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I can’t recall if I’ve brought this up before, but my approach to cooking is to learn how to do everyday dishes well, and leave the more exotic and the gourmet to others.

So it’s a tasty roast chicken that might come from my stove, but probably not coq au vin. I don’t worry about the intricacies of working with phyllo dough because I skip over any recipe that contains it.

From time to time a new recipe will work out so well that I take one bite and my jaw drops and my pupils dilate. Although this is not a culinary blog, I am going to start sharing with you those times when something turns out that good that I can’t shut up about it. My first such share is for a chicken noodle soup that rocks, and is in a total ‘nother country.

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Cuckoo, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Readers of this blog over time have learned that I attend AA meetings pretty regularly. Even though I haven’t used alcohol for a very long time now, there are at least two reasons that I still go to those meetings.

  • First, one is never “cured” of whatever being an addict is, and so far there has been nothing found that works better than the comradeship and support of people in the same pickle that you are in in maintaining abstinence.
  • Second, if you have found a small boat to have been a lifesaving tool for you, gratitude leads you to personally want to make sure that such a useful watercraft is tied up to the dock and available for the next person who needs it. An AA meeting can be that boat.

Robin and I are watching the British television series Call the Midwife, and in one of its story threads it has subtly laid out the progression that many people who now suffer from alcohol addiction have followed in their lives. A main character in the show first enjoys the camaraderie and sophistication that she feels when having a dram on special occasions. Then it is on non-special occasions. Then nightly. Daily.

Because the series was so successful and lasted so long, this progression took place slowly over several years, as it often does in real life.

Eventually there come the attempts at self-control and their subsequent failures with accompanying guilt and dishonesty. The lucky ones eventually find their way to a therapeutic community, with AA being one example.

All of this has been laid out quite believably in the series. There are no big dramas, no surgeons passing out and pitching forward into the abdominal cavity (oh, the stories we accumulate), but only a good woman doing what other good women were doing but finding that somehow … inexplicably … she developed a problem while they did not.

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[Sometimes it helps to turn to poets to see through the smoke, at those times when life becomes a dance of perplexity and anguish. A friend of mine long gone used to say “Poets are the last truth-tellers.” Of course, he said a lot of things … some of them were true.]

Exquisite Politics

by Denise Duhamel

The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,

maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,

maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.

Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.

Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth

of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,

anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.

I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,

resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric

languages. I sat on Alice’s mushroom in Central Park,

smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor’s mansion.

Someday I won’t politic anymore, my big heart will stop

loving America and I’ll leave her as easy as a marriage,

splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage

before the other side yells: Wow! America,

Vespucci’s first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.

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I’m A Song, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Haiku, Winter

jono55

I have started to write the Great American Novel scores of times. Each effort was eventually scrapped. If I have any talent at all it seems to be in shorter pieces, essays, poems … the sort of meanderings found in this blog, for instance.

Which is why when I first came across haiku and bothered to learn something about it, I knew instantly that I was among friends. It was the economy of it all, the formalities, the natural themes that appealed to me. The Japanese must take all of the blame for starting me on this path. Traditionally haiku are three-lined poems, of 5-7-5 syllables per line. Most of those I selected today but the very last one are by Japanese masters of the art, but that 5-7-5 format did not survive translation.

To me, they are like photographs, whereas a novel might represent a movie. It’s not too hard to put myself or my experiences into the picture with haiku, which is part of its charm.

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When the winter chrysanthemums go,
There’s nothing to write about
But radishes.

Basho

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Song For A Winter’s Night, by Gordon Lightfoot

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Here,
I’m here—
The snow falling

Issa

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Going home,
The horse stumbles
In the winter wind.

Buson

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Colder Than Winter, by Vince Gill

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Cover my head
Or my feet?
The winter quilt.

Buson

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Winter solitude—
In a world of one color
The sound of wind.

Basho

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Winter, by Tori Amos

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Miles of frost –
On the lake
The moon’s my own.

Buson

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The snowstorm howling,
A cautious man treads upon
Bare and frozen earth

Anonymous

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Winter, by Peter Kater

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Some comments on the music –

Song for a winter’s night: there’s a cabin, a crackling fire, and a big ol’ down quilt to get under. We just have to find where Gordon put them all.

Colder than winter: I have experienced winters of the heart, and since I know that I am not unique, perhaps you have as well. Vince Gill never sounded better or more plaintive.

Winter: from Tori Amos’ first album, an exceptionally brave and talented young artist just getting her career underway.

Winter: yes, yes, of course Peter Kater is New Age-y as he can be, but it’s still a rather nice way to pass a few minutes. Remember how way back in those dim dark days (almost) beyond recall when your teacher in “music appreciation class” would put on a piece of music and ask that you imagine that it was snowing or raining or that the oboe’s voice was a duck quacking? Well … have at it.

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Alarum!

jono55

There are way too many alarmists working in the weather service. We were told to expect 1-2 feet of snow in the mountains above 8000 feet along with sub-zero temperatures. None of this sounded good to Robin and I as we tried to plan our Thanksgiving journey to Durango. We hunched over the weather app on my phone on Wednesday, waiting and watching, finally calling the pet sitter at mid-day to tell her “Game On.”

Predicted driving conditions

Our wills were in order, we had food for two days survival, enough warm clothing, and a reliable vehicle. We said our prayers and climbed into the Outback, looking tenderly at our little home for perhaps the last time. Off we went, anticipating treacherous patches of glare ice, hard drifts across the highway that could make you lose control, and trucks skating sideways right at us coming down a mountain two-lane road.

What we found was no snow at all on 99.4 % of the road, and temperatures in the thirties. The countryside was beautiful under a couple of inches of new and trackless snow. It was a breeze.

Actual driving conditions

I tried to imagine the home life of those prognosticators, how each flutter of a leaf or errant drop of moisture must send them into fearful spasms where they rush their families into basements or attics, handing out stored hardtack when their little ones cried out from hunger.

Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

I’m looking for a hive of valiant meteorologists. Growing less interested in what the Chicken Little variety has to say.

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Elon Musk is naming people that he might recommend to be fired when the new administration takes over. Naming people might be thought of as reckless of life (by uncharitable folks like me) when he and his new orange BFF have a large following of blackshirts and brownshirts who like nothing better than than to be given an excuse to hit people.

The richest man in the world publicly picking on ordinary citizens … anybody see a problem here?

Where’s my dictionary … let’s look under “bully” … ahhh … there we are. Perhaps that should be the name of his Musk’s new quasi-official-department: The Office of Cravens.

He fits right in with his new pal, President-elect Bonespurs.

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(Ran across a line from this poem, and just had to look it up.)

When Great Trees Fall

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory,suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die
and our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

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There are those who speak our language, this English we trample on and murder daily, in such a way as to ennoble it. Or perhaps to show how innately noble our mother tongue really is. Maya Angelou had one of those voices. Each syllable ringing clearly as any bell. No mumbling. No idiosyncratic elisions. Poetry.

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If We Make It Through December, by Phoebe Bridgers

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So it is December. I must now join the consumer herd in search of some small remembrance for a handful of people. It is a dangerous thing, this entering a large and crazed group of people which has already been in motion for at least a month now. The herd slavers as it passes, every pupil dilated, every nostril flared, every breath labored. They have only just left one of the seemingly endless Black Fridays behind, and are looking desperately over their shoulders at signs reading: Only (X) shopping days till Christmas.

I will do my duty. I am no shirker. If overconsumption is required of me, overconsume I will. I am a full-blooded American, after all, and once I am galloping with the rest of the swarm it pays onlookers to be cautious of those sharp hooves and horns!

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Tougher Than The Rest

jono55

Let’s think of the present political season as opera, shall we? It makes some sense that way. The participants are given to warbling daily arias that mostly involve loud vocalizations with small content. Every word of one person’s utterances is attacked by the opposite side who respond with their own attacks on everything from grammar to logic to underlying sinister meanings.

While we don’t have the “fat lady”singing as in the old jest, we do have the overweight and orange-tinted man, who is never given anything to sing that has an extended set of lyrics, because of his short attention-span. His companion is a man of darkness and twisted sense of humor who thinks nothing of resurrecting an old video that once nearly cost a young woman her life, as a joke.

On the other side we have our heroine, who is saying just as little as she can, having found that a picture (or a video) is truly worth a thousand words. Her sidekick is a wise and amiable dispenser of homespun truths who has already coined two words or phrases that have resonated with the electorate – “weird,” and “mind your own damn business.” Not bad for a Minnesotan, but then, no one knows what to expect from these denizens of a land where winter lasts eleven months and residents wear peat moss.

We’re still in the first act of this musical drama, and who knows what is to come? One of the problems with finding music for the Dark Side is that no first-rate musician wants to lend their tunes to them, leaving only Kid Rock to help with the score.

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On a walk yesterday we saw two Cedar Waxwings high in a bare tree. Just the two. It’s a very pretty little bird, always looking very well groomed. They were chatting away up there, too far away for us to hear what they were saying.

(Admission: This pic is not mine, but was pilfered from the internet.)

Their natty appearance is striking in comparison with the crow, for instance, which often looks as if it just got out of bed and hasn’t checked out its look in a mirror yet.

Actually, the bird in the photo closely resembles me this morning, when I found my mirror image especially unkempt. My hair was so vaguely directed that the only way I could orient myself as to front vs back was to look for my eyes.

(This pic isn’t mine, either)

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When my kids were in their teens the original and only true version of MTV was on screen in our home as soon as the sun came up. I couldn’t avoid being somewhat up to date on pop musical trends because the station was always there playing in the background to educate me. Life was good, but then MTV lost its mind and never came back.

Music videos are still out there, of course, but you have to go looking for them instead of having them curated for you and served up with a golden spoon. (Sigh). Once in a while one comes along than is really moving, like this anti-war and reflective tune by the group Green Day, 21 Guns.

The title refers to the salute given by an honor guard, as at a funeral. When the group’s album American Idiot went to Broadway as a musical it didn’t do so well, and was shelved after a run of just about a year. This is that Broadway cast, doing the best song of the bunch. On a video where these beautiful people will always sound just as good and will never age.

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My ear worm this morning is not a song, but a poem. It is Invictus, written by William Ernest Henley. It was one of those short writings that I was encouraged (forced, cajoled, pressed, threatened) to learn by rote and later to regurgitate in front of the class. Which I did. Rote memory and regurgitation were specialties of mine back then.

At the time I thought the poem overblown. “Who talks like that, anyway?” But I have been tenderized by life and find that I am more susceptible to things of the spirit because I have had ample opportunity to observe their importance. Or, more to the point, what their absence can mean to the soul of a person or of a nation.

Rather than blow any further smoke, I present Invictus to you. There is no need for you to memorize it. No test looms next Friday. It’s just a handful of words that I have carried in my head for a very long time.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears.
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

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Today I think that it is a pretty awesome piece of overblown. If I am not the captain of my soul, I think that I am at least a deckhand. Let me add this song by Bruce Springsteen, who I think is basically echoing some of the sentiments of Mr. Henley. I could be wrong about that but I’ll let The Boss tell the story.

Tougher Than The Rest, by Bruce Springsteen

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Amy Tan has written a book which is a journal that she kept of the birds she saw in her backyard. At the time she was a novice birder, and she decided to learn the art of sketching those birds as she journaled.

Since I have the drawing skills of a moribund slug, I am envious. It all takes me back to second grade, where the best artist (far and a-way)among my classmates was Geraldine Hong. I never handed a paper in if it was going to immediately follow one of Geraldine’s. Dreadful were the comparisons back then, and my talents haven’t improved in 77 years. When I finish a drawing even I can’t tell what it is.

The book is a delightful read, the illustrations showing the improvement in her artistic skills over the several months that the journal covers.

Now, if you are Amy Tan, an accomplished writer and you travel in elevated creative circles, you do get help along the way from scientists, artists, and the author of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds, David Allan Sibley. Not too shabby.

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From The New Yorker. A subversive cartoon.

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