Soft Stone Face

The way that all things, future and past, are now being swept into a timeless cyberspace present, I figure that my next novel, #5, might as well be posted online, as it develops . . . as it morphs up from the past, leaps out of my mind onto the keyboard into electronic eternity. 

Here is  beginning of first chapter:

“Over here, by the pathway, please, George, let’s see what it looks like, right here” she commanded. Leona pointed earthward and stepped away. 

Carrying the angel between their outstretched arms, her two dutiful gardeners performed the deed, easily.

“Hmm. . .” she intoned, considering its position in her front yard. She gazed at the statue for a moment. “Have a seat on the porch. Take a break. I need to think about this for a moment.”

George and Willie were only too happy to accept her gentle command.  And so they did. Leona walked out to the front edge of the yard, to get a street view. The angel—pudgy little darling that it was—she had encountered in an antique shop in Charleston. After a moment, she walked southward on the sidewalk, toward town square. A block away, she turned back to have a look from the block-away perspective. But Leona knew immediately that that distance was not to be the determining factor. Her little angel was just too insignificant, too miniscule, from that distance. It would have to occupy, by its placement, a more commanding position in her cultivated arrangements.

Arriving again at her front yard, Leona spoke across the scape to her twice-blessed handyman-gardener. “George,” put it there, in the middle.”

George set his cup aside, lifted himself from the front-porch rocker. With Willie, they traipsed down the four steps, along the sidewalk. Lifting again the angel, they carried it the sixteen-or-so feet to the yard middle. Arriving there at the appointed midpoint target, the two ole codgers paused. George set his eyes on his employer again. 

“Yes, that’s it. Perfect. Thank you.”

Lowering the angel to earthward brought down upon the ages an ancient legacy. But who knew?

A hundred years went by.

***  Walking past that familiar old white clapboard mansion, Noal paused for a moment to ponder, for the umpteenth time, the soft stone face of an angel. 

Back in the day, a hundred or so year ago, Leona Baresford—enterprising lady that she was— had been supervising the arrangement of her life-project, Mountain Aire Homestead. She had instructed  gardeners to place her angel in the front yard, in the middle of the front yard. 

Whenever Noal would amble by the angel, he could not help but retrieve in his mind some age-old memory. Whether the flicker was his own imagination, or some ancestral snippet, retrieved from some person, place or thing of long ago, maybe even far away , he had not yet determined. But hey, who knows about such things? Maybe someone, somewhere, Moses? understood. Noal was still trying to figure it all out. 

Maybe the angel, or the idea of an angel, had drifted down from heaven. God forbid that it might have trummeled up from the nether regions.

But hey, it doesn’t really matter now. That must have been in a time so long ago, and originating so far away, that he could assign, in his mind, no time nor place for it. 

Noal had never seen a real angel anyway, so how could he know? He was not even certain that such a thing as an angel exists. I mean, he had been taught, from an early age, that there was such a thing as an angel. It was known to be the celestial being that had stood, with its angel-twin, just outside the gates of Eden after Adam and Even had been banished because they had screwed up when they heeded the counsel of that frickin’ ole serpent who had been hanging around trying to stir up trouble before he finally managed to bust through the Elohim omnipotence with his apple trick.  

Now the guard angels had been assigned from on high. Their duty was to prevent Adam and Eve from getting back into the special venue, wherein they had been birthed into the physical world, but then later ejected,  in a time so long ago and oh so far away. 

Yes, so long ago, and so far away, in a garden far, far away from this place that— were Moses himself inclined to give an account of it— he would be perplexed re the manner in which he would—or even could—document the official, historical account of what is happening here and now in America, as if it were even relevant to what was happening way back when, back in the day, in the mists of antiquity. . . (to be continued.

Glass Chimera

Peace and Safety Falling Apart?

Ole Will Yates thought the world was falling apart

back in ’21, it was . . . twentieth century version

after the Big War erupted with an Archduke start:

a royal assassination provoking Kaiser incursion.

But even before that, poet Arnold had feared 

denizens of 19th-century struggle and fight

as industrial might was violently gear’d

for restive armies  clashing by night.

Yet we all know a poet’s just the fool on the hill

crying useless tears for our human condition

And yet we see and we lament them still

as we homo sapiens go cranking our 21st edition.

Back in the day, hitler tried to kill all the Jews

But our guys dismantled his high-tech murders

So the children of Abraham could surely refuse

to be driven like sheep by swastika’d herders.  

Then Rachel, weeping for her children,

came fleeing, eluding that holocaust;

but along came hamas with hisbollah kilndren

to renew ancient grudges of battles long lost.

So what beast that had blown out in a Berlin bunker

while Allies liberated the Brandenburg plaza

could fire up fresh holocaust through a hisbollah junker,

slouching through tunnel trickery to Gaza

And what beast? that had blown out from a D-day bunkered,

could now be slouching toward our Capitol dome

while the chief maga magus of magaworld  hunkered 

in the Offal with dinner while insurrectionists roam?

It has happened before. 1939.

Smoke

Those Times for Rhapsodies

For such a time as that . . .  a time of recovery, a time for digging out of  Flanders trenches, a time to recover innocence and confidence, a time to relocate peace and hope, a time between two world wars. . . ’t’was a time for jazz,  a time of Rhapsody. 

You see, a funny thing had happened on the way to America. . . so much of our celebratory American rhapsodizing had been conceived, years earlier, in Russian angst and trouble. 

George Gershwin’s father and mother had gotten out of Russia by 1895. They had managed to elude Russian antisemites and make their way over to that classic destination where the tired and weary huddled masses of the world were still yearning to embark, New York.

Sergei Rachmaninoff had been born in Russia in 1873, but had managed to leave that tempest-torn nation in 1906. By 1918, the end of World War I , the composer/pianist had made his way to the land of the free, the home of  brave immigrants.

In such a place as this: the United States of America, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue came gushing out of New York potentialities in 1924.

Ten years later, 1934, in a Baltimore opera house, sounding forth from a Philadelphia orchestra, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini broke through  Depression era gloom to shine a fantastic theme, even in the midst of darkening shadows of Euro-fascism. 

Now, here in America, we can still hear those crescendoing hopes and dreams, which had been pounded out by the insistent keyboarding of musical masters Gershwin and Rachmaninoff back in the day. They had risen out of orchestral celebrations back in that old terrible time, almost a century ago.

Gershwin, pictured, recorded on piano with Northwest German Philharmonic, Rhapsody in Blue:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egsBu3B36KU

Rhapsody in Blue, New York Philharmonic, Bernstein:         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH2PH0auTUU 

Rhapsody on a Paganini theme: Sofia, Bulgaria Philharmonic, Georgii Cherkin pianist:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpg_RW6FNug

Smoke

Shelter at Samos

EuroRelief operates refugee camps on the Greek islands, Samos and Lesvos, although they are quite near the coast of Turkey. Samos is near Ephesus, and also near the isle of Patmos, if you catch my drift. 

Several years ago, our daughter worked as a volunteer on Lesvos. Now she is doing a stint on Samos. Here’s a pic she sent of the library there, where she’s been reading to the kids: 

. . . looks like the librarians there could use a little help. We’re glad our daughter is there to read to the kids.

She reports that the camp on Samos was built a few years by the Greek government. That new camp replaces an older one that had proven too small to accommodate such a  steadily expansive flow of people. The refugees who are fortunate enough to get to the island are striving to find a place to stay for a while, or to settle into. 

This situation is, of course, no small problem. Facilities at the camp are sufficient for temporary support. But of course, this work tending a constant stream of refugees requires a constant stream of financial support, as well as a steady stream of volunteers. Our daughter reports:  

“A bunch of government agencies and NGOs got together and designed what they thought might be the idealized way to manage the crisis and provide humane housing while also just…keeping things organized and …contained. If the budgets had continued and the programs had not simply faded away, this would indeed be an idealized way to handle thousands of refugees.”

But alas, budgets, like you and I, do not last forever. People there who are able to get to the next level of forward progress typically find a way to get to Athens. . . or somewhere. So then what? The Greeks cannot employ them all.  Do they find a way to wander beyond borders. . . to other Euro countries? or even beyond?   If you can think of a way to help, perhaps you will . . .

https://www.eurorelief.net

This report reminds me of some words from Matthew’s gospel, chapter 25: “I was stranger and you took me in . . . hungry you fed me.”

Say what, Jesus?. . .     You heard me; read the Book … sermon on the mount. It’s not rocket science. Oh, and while I’m thinking about it. . . Blessed are the peacemakers.

So nowadays we have these international relief agencies working mightily to assuage the world’s refugee problems, and we have governments and other agencies struggling to find a buck or two to lend their support.

We have another daughter who works with  Samaritan’s Purse, an international relief agency:

All that to say, there’s a lot going on in the world. We all need to do our part to lend a hand, or a buck or two, or whatever is necessary to keep people sheltered, clothed and fed and thereby. . . to keep our peace from falling apart, if such a thing is possible.

Glass half-Full

Going Viral

Going viral, going viral! 

send Viral right over  

Web viral, Web spiral

send Viral right over! 

So they tell us on the Net

This little thing’s the best thing yet!

There we are on  Pavlov lab of Web

Lemmings on the precipice being led

Going viral, going viral to the moon

Acting fast, don’t be last! spend it soon

Eyes and fingers dancing to the tune

Surfers drifting on the swells of rising moon

While sunbeams gleam in celestial array

To brighten children at playground play

Here we contend in the grand worldweb fray

What viral wave did we catch today? 

I don’t remember.

What did the online spark  render?

Well . . . I can tell you this.

This latest deal—I did not miss.

I caught the swirl just as it was going viral!

Just before it went down in the world wide spiral.

But now, upon reflection. . . maybe I been took.

Guess I’ll go read a book.

Read a Book?

The Jackson Legacy

My childhood was spent in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950’s.

Back in that day, life was different in the Old South. 

I mean, it had been less than a century since President Abraham Lincoln had stood in the Courthouse door and declared that the rebel southern states would not be allowed to separate themselves from this Union just because they so stubbornly insisted on keeping slaves. 

During the course of that ensuing war, the Civil War, known in some southern quarters as the “war of northern aggression”, our Union Army had defeated the rebel insurrectionists and delivered this nation back into the hands of President Lincoln and back into the legacy of American Liberty and Justice for All.

A century later, as I was growing up in Jackson, Mississippi in the ’50’s, there was an American patriot, Medgar Evers—who had joined our US Army during World War II, and had defended the free world against the hitler nazis in Europe. After World War II, Medgar then returned to his home in Jackson, where he prolonged his fight for Freedom by leading his black brethren toward voter registration. This was during the pointy-headed, fiery cross terrorism of the jim-crow South. But Brother Medgar’s defense of freedom was tragically terminated when when he was shot dead in his own front yard in Jackson because he was guiding his brethren black folk toward voter registration. (I later wrote about that in my novel, King of Soul).

That honky capitol city of Mississippi had been named after President Andrew Jackson, who had served as US President from 1929 to 1837.

A century and a half after President Jackson, along came a civil rights fireball, Jesse Jackson, whose bold activism at North Carolina A&T University—just down the road from where I live—was laid into the foundation of the 20th-century American Liberty project, back in the day, 1950’s-60’s, when I was coming of age. 

Now, as I grow old, 72, along comes the Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who stands up for the grand Liberty legacy of Jesse, Medgar and many other profile-in-courage Americans who defend our American civil rights against the slings and arrows of outrageous magamaniac abuse. 

So here comes Justice Jackson, defending the preservation of our American liberty against the onslaught of magamania and the fairytale notion of  immunity for chief-insurrectionist trump. She poses her probing question in this week’s trump-immunity Supreme Court hearing. Justice Jackson asked the maga lawyer: 

“If someone with those kinds of powers (immunity)—the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes . . . I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into. . . the seat of criminal activity in this country.” 

My objective here is to express appreciation and moral support for Justice Jackson, whose insightful probing proves that she is still dedicated to the cause of Justice, while others of her privileged Supreme Court colleagues seem to be striving pretentiously to protect the fairytale privileges of the chief insurrectionist  instead upholding protection of our .Gov of the people, by the people and for the People.

Keep it up, Justice Jackson– your vigilant protection of American Justice! 

King of Soul

I Yam the LawFuss

Veteran Federal Judge Michael Luttig has compared the Supreme Court’s recent trump-immunity session to Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned.

Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas have demonstrated that they are living in a dream-world of hyper-theoretical Law while. . . in the real world, trump is on the edge of scuttling away from his disastrous January 6 declaration of war on our US Constitution.

Those four Justices’ insensitive preoccupation with theoretical precedent-setting—instead of administering Justice to arrest and punish trump’s criminal incitement— brought to my mind an image of John Lennon’s “walrus” metaphor in his weird song, “I am the Walrus.”

So I have used Lennon’s poetic framework and bizarre imagery as  framework to compose a new diatribe . . . as present-day protest intensifies nationwide to shock those four insensitive Bench-sitters into an awareness of what is going out here in the real world.  Out here in the hinterlands that stretch from sea to shining sea, we citizens are expected to live according to the Law of the land and we expect our presidents to do the same.

    If you are an ole boomer like me, perhaps you imagine the original “tune” as you read:

They are they as we are we as we were once together.

But See how they speak like babble from a gavel see how they pry

We crying.

Sitting in the Courtroom, waiting for their word to come

Corporation mag-shirt, judgy sludgy bench blurt blurt!

Judge, you been a haughty bench  you let your grace expire

I am the edge-man; they are the sledge men.

I am the LawFuss! , goo-goo-ga shoo. 

Misters sitting judge-men, lumpy-dumpy-rumpies in a row

See how they judge like lucy with a grudge see how we cry

We crying. yeah we be crying.

We crying. yeah we be crying.

Yellow legal custard, dripping from a dread judge eye

Crabby like a dishrag, perpendic’lar pressrag

Ahoy, you spin a haughty furl, you let your briefs droop down

We be the Edge-men; they be the sludge men; goo-goo-ga shoo.

We be on a Justibus yea yu yu so crude we d’do-do do feud wit yoo!

Expert textbert crawyer lawyers!

Don’t you know We People  cry at you?

See how you judge like robes fulla  grudge, see how u spin

We crying.

Maga-mentry trumpsquirts, climbing up the Cap’tol Dome

Now jukamentary pen-gun adjudicating bucksboss drone

Your honor shoulda seen them kicking ole Abe Lincoln

I am the dead-man they are the dread-men

I am the LawTrust. Do-do-yu rude while we d’du du du feud

wit’ yu, what’s it tuya?

Glass Chimera

That Time That Was

There had never been anything like it in history . . . until it happened:

America, in victorious optimism after that “Second” world war.

I mean, the “First” world war was just a warmup apocalypse for what came in 1939-45.

It seemed, in the ’40’s, that the krauts had not learned their lesson, which they should have learned in 1918. Two decades later, the Beast spirit took a hold of a lunatic corporal who dragged the world, for the second time, into hell-on-earth for half a decade. 

Then our guys, under the leadership of Eisenhower, Patton, McArthur and thousands of other brave soldier who went over to the Continent of our cultural heritage and ran them third-reich nazis back into their holes, in the ground or into the judgements of History in a Nuremberg trial and, and . . .

And then, there we were sittin’ on top of the world, “one nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All!,  victorious from Normandy to Potsdam to the Philippines, all the way over to Pearl Harbor, where, for us, it had all started on that fateful day of infamy. . . back in ’41 it was. And then four years of hell on (European and Pacific) earth. 

And then it happened happened: The Golden Age. California! Hollywood, Broadway, batons twirling in the air on Main Street from sea to shining sea. . . Ike, TV,  Davy Crockett, Micky and Minnie, Ozzie and Harriet, Superman, Elvis, Nat King Cole, Louie Armstrong, Motown,  Kennedy: “Let them come to Berlin”. . . to see the difference between the way WE do things and the way THEY do things! Later, Reagan challenged Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall.   And then they tore down their damn wall.

With a little help from the Brits we discovered a new strain of English poetry, set to the thumpin’ beat of this new thing called Rock ’n Roll, which the Fab Four had borrowed from our good ole boys . . .

Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, reflecting ancient African strains of laboring black fingers  a-pluckin’ the future of popular music out of a six-stringed, woman-shaped box with a hole and a neck on it, vibrating blue notes sung and plucked by the field-worn magic hands of many a long-gone Miss’ippi sharecropper somewhere down in the delta.

And then, and then, after the big war . . . as brother Don sang it. . . “there we were, all in one place, a generation lost in space. . .

Space! Imagine that! John Glenn . . . Neil Armstrong,Yeah! I remember!

America! We hardly knew ye!  Oh, wait! You’re still here. Let’s celebrate, American style! Wanna dance?!  Get started with kingofkungfu!

Glass half-Full

The Arcane Conundrum

Erotica is nice and surely will suffice

while Esoterica glimmers through History’s roll of the dice;

History’s luck of the draw rolls up random events

ever since our ancestors lived in tents.

Yet some ancient wind of prescient detection

seems to accompany certain adventures of erection.

As men’s adventures grow up and harden

children are born through woman’s garden.

All of which cultivates that famous spice of life

bringing relief from our long trail of strife. 

A tale is told, although I comprehend it not

Of how in ancient times wise men begot

a scriptive tale of what men forgot

As Life’s challenges demanded interventions,

men lost site of their best intentions.

Even so

on with the show:

as billy shears sang twenty years ago

Or whatever;

nobody’s forever.

But I digress;

now I regress.

As I was saying:

before the watchers’ braying,

People brought forth wisdom with invention.

although we know not their intentions.

Blake came along with a glimmer

as he did catch a signal from Swedenborgian splendor.

Nostradamus surely had an esoteric handle

shining brightly within history’s long-lit candle.

Some say his prescience was born of akashic wonder

even as his quatrains sounded historic thunder. 

Blavatsky’s illumination of those akashic glimmerings

seemed somehow to cast up of esoteric shimmerings. 

As knowledge grew and push came to shove

historians donned their analytical gloves;

Although the solid grounds of historical enquiry

don’t hold a candle to Esoterica’s querkic diary.

Perhaps the tale of the Western quest,

which expanded with each historian guest

Began with Enoch’s un-canonic book

by which he was permitted to look

Into the arcane realm.

Who’s at the helm?

Wouldn’t we like to know!

I don’t really wanna stop the show

so I though y’all might like to know:

What’s going on down under you?

is it old hat or deja vu?

Guided by the Captain of our Souls

or the Joker with a million holes?

I mean Blavatsky took the dark side

and as each traveler came along to ride

He or she had to decide

to accept humility or amp up pride.

This is no new thing, you understand:

whether to heed self-will or divine command.

What you do with what you know

to reveal for Lord or flaunt your show.

In days of Old, Daniel knew his own allegiance,

to discern the side of Watcher angels’ obeisance.

Whether the Messenger’s servitude was Light

or whether ’t’was of the darkened blight.

As for Nostradamus’ path of Bright or dim . . .

still trying to make up my mind about him.

Selah.

Glass Chimera

The Old Tree and the New Search

While I am getting old, we do have a granddaughter who is quite new (5) to this world. A few days ago, we were in Fort Lauderdale with her on a pirate ship.

Yes, a Pirate Ship is in the harbor there where you can cruise around for an hour and be amused by the monologue of Captain Black Sparrow and his sidekick Neverland Jack. It was fabulous. I wouldn’t trade it for a davy jones locker full of fake doubloons.

I thought about those two Pirates, because, as I was about to write this essay, which would be about springtime and an old tree that Tolstoy mentioned in War and Peace, I had to turn to Google for a reference or two.

So, there I am, one little googly pirate-plundering maneuver after another, trolling online  for some literary treasure of buried information . . . whereupon I was guided by Sergy and Larry’s magic wand to the information for which I was searching.

I found it in the New Yorker, Nov 2007, in an article, Movable Types.  In the course of his long article about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, James Wood provided an exact quote of the scene I was looking for. 

The snippet of memory in my mind that had propelled my search to this point of world memory was a scene in which Prince Andrei sees something very special (and this is the phrase I remember from the War and Peace move) a “tree with which we agreed.”

Here’s how Wood illumined Tolstoy’s twice-seasoned experience:

“ a great, gnarled oak, surrounded by trees already succumbing to spring. He (Prince Andrei feeling at that moment somewhat depressed) feels like the oak: it seems to say , “Spring, and love, and happiness . . . senseless deception!”. . . But,  returning a month later, he cannot at first identify the oak, because it has leafed out like all the other trees.”

In the story of War Peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, feeling defeated, had “agreed” with the old tree when it was hesitating to join in with the younger trees’ celebration of spring. But a month later, hey!, even old growths sprout a leaf or two (thousand) when spring time rolls around.   Life goes on, even when we get old and grumpy, haha!

So I did pirate the info and the quote from James Wood, who had discovered it buried in Leo Tolstoy’s masterful literary treasure. Such is the Search and the Looting of meaningful blog-prospects in our 21st century web of wonder. Read ’em and weep for appreciation!

Glass half-Full