all is tender and mild

At times, a surprising clarity.

“I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page,” said Anne Carson to Will Aitken in her Art of Poetry interview, which was published in issue no. 171 of the Review. “It is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.”  (--from Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry, Interviewed by Will Aitken, issue 171, Fall 2004)

Watching season one episode ending of "House" -- he is playing piano, a meditative rendition of "Silent Night."

It occurs to me that current spiritual/meditative inquiry and scholarship looks to silence/stillness as foundational to an essential concretion of urgrund reality in human experience.

I look up lyrics and get a semiotic glimpse of word/reality so often blurred by unreflective familiarity.

Silent 

Holy night

 

Calm and bright 

All is

 

Tender and mild

The peace of

 

Heavenly

Sleep

Sometimes there is a call inviting a descent into the interior of logos where resides the energy of origin re-constituting itself (Itself) in constantly new creation and meaning.

Perhaps a transcendence beyond our religious encasements of the emergent birth of what is our referent experience.

It represents a gratitude of attention.

Something worth paying.

about 4.3 billion years ago

That’s a long time.

The Earth is thought to be about 4.54 billion years old. Along with other planets, the Earth was born in the early days of the Solar System, which first started forming about 4.6 billion years ago.

By about 4.3 billion years ago, the Earth's surface had cooled enough for water vapor in the atmosphere to condense on the surface, leading to the formation of oceans. Volcanic activity, which was more widespread at the time, released gasses that shaped the early atmosphere. Life emerged around 3.5 to 4 billion years ago in the form of simple, single-celled organisms.

The Earth has probably been as we know it today — with recognizable continents, oceans, a hospitable climate, and diverse life — for the past few hundred million years. But it continues to evolve through its own gradual tectonic and volcanic activity, and through the more rapid effects of climate change.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/how-old-is-the-earth

There’s a lot to dig up. 

A lot. 

when cars are in repair shop

spend less

on cars

don't go

anywhere

such an expense

automobiles

stay home

read books

walk,

take naps

noble peace prize 2024

Seems right. 

The two American atomic bombs that were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed approximately 120 000 people. A comparable number died later of burn and radiation injuries. It is estimated that 650 000 people survived the attacks. These survivors are known as Hibakusha in Japanese. 

The fate of the survivors was long concealed and ignored. In 1956, local Hibakusha associations along with victims of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific formed The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, shortened in Japanese to Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement soon became the largest and most widely representative Hibakusha organisation in Japan.

Nihon Hidankyo has two main objectives. The first is to promote the social and economic rights of all Hibakusha, including those living outside Japan. The second is to ensure that no one ever again is subjected to the catastrophe that befell the Hibakusha.

Through personal witness statements, Nihon Hidankyo has carried out extensive educational work on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. Hence the motto “No more Hibakusha”.   

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2024/nihon-hidankyo/facts/

Is right.

And nuclear weapons are savage and inhuman.

Jamais plus! 

p.t.barnum know how often they were born

Woodward put out an interview with Trump from the 1980’s.

Give the real estate hustler turned politician credit for finding the deficiencies in the American system of politics and exploiting them for his own benefit. 

Used to see this in street corner hustlers in Brooklyn growing up. Savvy and menacing. "Suckers," they'd say.

I'd cross the street. Same as I do now with this guy.

renaissance

Yuval points out that there is no longer any private moments, what with social media, AI, gotcha agents, or vile companions. https://youtu.be/7r5lw3jPrUk?si=xvG0FIypgJkiru-Z

Gordhamer tells of a teacher suggesting the reason for meditation is “to know your own mind…for the sake of all sentient beings.”

Excuse me for a little while. 

I’m going down into silence and stillness.

See you there.

non è vero — rupturing reality — the false

 Let’s give it a name,

This new practice of untruth —

Let’s call it non è vero

“It isn’t true” — it is not —

Like non-Being, it is not

as a fool lives does this fool

 Happy doing zilch

Reading and writing, days drip

Into each other

Joy of being nobody

With nothing to say or do

walking thirty years, murrah building

 Backhoe scratches soil

Walking snow bowl parking lot

Oklahoma bomb

peace is cheap, requiring the disuse of technologies of violence

If we lack the moral or spiritual impetus to embrace and insist on peace, is there not someone who might convince us that peace has an economic value it would be foolish to ignore?

War, of course, is very profitable. 

If one is not convinced of the inevitability of war or of war as a necessary and acceptable solution or of victory as a final good, then one may notice that the only real winners of these industrial wars are the war industries. One may notice that in the background of these wars of national defense are people for whom a war is a part of business, the payoff of an economy in many ways violent even should there be no war. And then one may begin to suspect that peace may be so little a matter of political interest because there is no money in it. War clearly is good for such an economy as ours, but who is investing in peace? Peace is in many ways a bargain for mere people and other creatures and the earth they inhabit. But peace is cheap. It requires the disuse of technologies of violence, of which the misuse is preferred by the people who count. 

 

Should we not ask if war imposes any cost upon the war industries, or upon any industry to which war is profitable? In time of war mere people are expected to put their lives at risk. This is taken for granted; it is normal. But in recent years I have been asking people who ought to know, including an army general with whom I spoke at some length, if during a war it were not normal, as a part of patriotism, for the great corporations of national defense to reduce their charges for weapons and other products sold to the government. Not one of my witnesses so far has ever heard of such a sacrifice. No, war is the business of businesses immune to the penalties paid to war by citizenship. To further baffle us there is the international arms trade, which conducts itself according to the rules merely of business in the interest merely of business.

(--Wendell Berry, Against killing children, https://www.christiancentury.org/features/against-killing-children) 

If we are only able to calculate worth by material possessions and monetary accretion, surely some genius could reconfigure our economic monopoly on value and worth into some new humane and divine ledger of meaning and purpose, imagination and compassionate being that insists on life and beauty, joy and well-being as a new currency of existence.

what-is taking place between us

 it might be simple

that which is between us is 

god -- step out, be home

on learning where god is

Then Doris brought up

Martin Buber's "I-Thou" -- ah --

it is the nuptial,

God is in-between, middle

process/presence in/through us 

when border collie/st bernard dog teaches

 In his dream long barks

He never barks when awake —

There it is — our grace

Wake up, wake up, look around

Silence, stillness, these fierce acts

rewriting the bible

 Speak for yourself, don’t

Pretend you’re God condemning 

Everyone — own it

Your smallness, dislike, anger —

Be yourself, not biblical

our destruction of children

Here's how Wendell Berry begins his article:  

Soon enough, and somewhat to my surprise, I have become an aged man. For many years I have been an advocate for the good and goods in which I have invested my heart. I am a patriot but not a nationalist. Since the Vietnam years, I have opposed our wars of national adventure, and I have opposed the extractive industrialism that passes with us for a national economy. I have opposed the dominant attitudes and technologies by which we are destroying, and have too nearly destroyed, the economic landscapes of our country, our country itself, our land. The different manifestations of our destructiveness are all parts of one thing: a global corporate economy concentrated upon the effort to turn to profit everything that can be subdued to its methods. Whatever cannot be made directly profitable—the lives and needs of children, let us say—it ignores and thus draws into the vortex of its destruction.

And so, as a “late” essay, I want to address a problem, in fact a disaster, that I have not heretofore said enough about: our destruction of children. We of the United States of America have now grown accustomed to the killing of children. We still regard it as sensational, with a remnant revulsion; it is often a “news item.” But sensation wears out fast. The roving eyes of the media hesitate a due moment over the current sensation and hurry on to the next. Perhaps experts may devote an article or column to the matter, but they also must hurry on, for disasters continue to happen, child killing is only one of them, and all must be given their moment in the schedule of sensations.

(--from, Against killing children, by Wendell Berry, in The Christian Century, October 2024)

Here's me, as happy he's still writing as I am disturbed about that which he writes. 

the laying down of being

 He said we are mind with a body.

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being.” (—Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

I am outside, being looked upon.

I am being, looking in at who I am becoming.

If you see me, anywhere, do say hello.

I’m likely to look past you, but do greet anyway. 

enter the house pappagallo

I listen to Speaker of the House being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC this recent Sunday.

He had trouble saying anything about what he actually heard.

A nation of school kids and impressionable adults have scarce models for accurate or critical thinking. 

Instead, only, like Speaker Johnson, a pappagallo without substance or ability to speak on his own.

The mantra of his master: Repeat after me!

the need to choose well

 What could love possibly say to the callous and untrue assertions of Donald Trump, his family, and his running mate Vance, that the democrats are responsible for the assassination attempts against him and that they, the democrats, are still trying to murder him.

Dangerous and deranged.

His demolition words.

And all anyone can do is note it, repeat it, say how terrible such perseverations and lies are to the psyche of the nation.

It doesn’t only elicit anger and disappointment at the fundamental depravity of an attempt to promulgate violence and civil war, it evokes deep sorrow at the attempt and the belief that lies and blatant duplicity have any legitimate cogency in a civil society.

I reject such rhetoric.

It is not good versus evil.

It is the longing for truth versus the lust for lies.

We must choose well.

seeing nothing other than itself

 When the inner and

The outer no longer see

Anything other

Than Itself in the mirror

It is said God will appear

francis & enso, during octive