I AM NOT FORSAKING THIS BLOG!HOW COULD I? IT’S MY BABY, MY OBSESSION, MY VEHICLE FOR TRYING TO BE RELEVANT TO SOMETHING, MY OUTLET FOR MY HYPERGRAPHIA.

I LOVE THIS BLOG AS IF IT WERE MY OFFSPRING (I guess it is).

However, I need to do some silliness. I’ve got to lighten up a little. So I have started a new silliness blog. I’ll keep writing here, but I’m going to have some fun, too.

I’d be gratified and pleased and happy and cuddly and joyful if you too a look at the silliness once in awhile.
The URL is:

http://mesenescent.wordpress.com/

The name is: me, senescent
“Senescent” means getting older, as in “senile.” It’s all humorous (I hope) stuff about an old guy of 68 getting older day by day.
THANKS FOR LOOKING!

All states use favourable interpretations to justify their own behaviour in legal terms, but victorious states are in the enviable position of being able to hold their defeated enemies accountable for violating the rules of just war and to dismiss those allegedly committed by their own citizens (1).

For one week I have been trying to finish this writing.

I cannot.

Usually I have a focus (if not a clear thesis) in mind when I begin. The writing may or may not be logical or coherent, but at least I know how the ideas fit together. Oh, I have a focus, and idea that I want to write about, but I have neither the factual knowledge nor the writing ability to make it happen.

The first morning I was in Jerusalem (after arriving the evening before and being hustled off to the hotel) in the summer of 2004, the group I was with drove to a hill overlooking the city for a view which shook me to the core of my being—and which this morning, nine years later, still causes an acute physical response of revulsion when I think of it. Looking down one direction we saw the devastation of a neighborhood destroyed to make way for Israel’s Apartheid “separation barrier”—the hideous and immoral wall Israel has built to imprison and humiliate Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

We were also able to see the initial stages of the Apartheid highway system snaking its way through all of the Israeli Occupied Territories of Palestine. This is a system of highways from city to city—but much more importantly from cities to illegal Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank—which only full citizens of Israel, that is, non-Palestinians, are allowed to use. One must have the proper license plate available only to full citizens of Israel in order to drive on these highways. If one is a Palestinian and needs to travel outside one’s hometown, one must take unimproved side roads, and must usually pass through road blocks and checkpoints.

Israel justifies this two-tier system of travel by declaring it necessary to keep the residents of “settlements” (by international law and, in some cases, by Israeli law, illegal settlements) safe from the indigenous Palestinians who might wish them harm. In actuality, of course, the system is designed to privilege the “settlers” (squatters?) over the people whose land has been confiscated to create the “settlements.”

Because I do not know how to complete this writing, I will simply copy here some rather long quotations that give background for what I would like to say.

Once again from Talai Asad.

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass points out that the peace accompanying an occupation is really dependent on war. Every citizen of an occupying power, she insists, whether military or civilian, who moves or settles in occupied land does so on the basis of privilege arising not only from the initial act of violence but also from its continuous presence. Speaking of Israelis on the West Bank, she writes:

We have the privilege of hiking in Palestinian areas to our heart’s content,
of buying subsidized housing for Jews only on the lands of Bethlehem,
of raising cherries and grapes in the wadis of Hebron, of quarrying on
the mountain slopes, of driving on roads whose land was expropriated
from the indigenous inhabitants for public use. . . . The regime of travel
permits that has been in place since 1991 deprives all Palestinians of
the right to freedom of movement in Israel while the system of roadblocks
limits their movement in their own territories (2).

Hass thus distinguishes the peace of Israeli settlers from the continuous state of hostilities on which the occupation rests, emphasizing the necessity of the latter for the former. The intermittent acts of open violence, whether performed by Palestinian militants resisting occupation or by the Israeli army protecting the settlers’ way of life, are merely epiphenomena within the structure of peace-war (3).”

I found Asad’s article in a library database search for material to continue my writing about Hebron. I know my experiences there and in other Palestinian cities, but I continually read articles to gain understanding of the issues of the Israeli occupation provided by scholars specializing in the subject.

I was particularly searching for background material on the presence of such groups as the Ecumenical Accompaniers of the World Council of Churches who send highly-trained observers to points of conflict in the Occupied West Bank simply to be with Palestinians. They are particularly useful for walking with Palestinian children from homes to schools in areas where settlers or the IDF might try to intimidate the children.

Through a process of searching databases for articles that I thought might help me to understand the charges and counter-charges of “terrorist” actions in such situations, I found Asad’s article. I will print one more fairly long quotation from the article.

I begin with the point that the law of war that provides the authorization of ‘just war’ does not consist of a clear set of rules but a language for interpreting and arguing about bloody conflict. David Kennedy, who specializes in the law of war, has elaborated on this insightful idea. All states use favourable interpretations to justify their own behaviour in legal terms, but victorious states are in the enviable position of being able to hold their defeated enemies accountable for violating the rules of just war and to dismiss those allegedly committed by their own citizens. Liberal democracies do not do this brazenly because they are states for which ‘respect for the law’ is fundamental. They use the language of law to interpret the rules and their proper application. . . what we call war is ultimately brute force and not authority that is decisive, even if that force is argued for in a legal language. (4).

The Apartheid Wall and the two-tiered highway system in the Occupied West Bank are justified by Israel in legal language to “hold  their defeated enemies [Palestinians] accountable for violating the rules of just war and to dismiss those allegedly committed by their own citizens {the “settlers”].

I do not know how to continue this writing. I will provide links to two articles about the situation and simply stop rather than coming to a conclusion. You may draw your own conclusions.

Link one.
Link two.
One more comment: the second link explains the use of US money to build the road system.

_____________ (1) Asad, Talal. “Thinking About Terrorism and Just War.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23.1 (2010): 3-24. (2) Asad quoting: Hass, Amira. “Our violent presence.” Ha’aretz, 19 February 2008. [Ha’aretz is a Jerusalem newspaper with wide circulation.] (3) ibid. (4) ibid.

A city trashed. Photo Copyright Keith A. Smith, Holy Land Enterprises, LLC

Then Abraham. . . said to Ephron. . .“ I will give the price of the field; accept it from me, so that I may bury my dead there.” Ephron answered Abraham, “. . . a piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver. . . Bury your dead.” . . . Abraham weighed out for Ephron the silver that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites. . . So the field of Ephron in Machpelah, which was to the east of Mamre, the field with the cave that was in it . . .  passed to Abraham as a possession in the presence of the Hittites. . .  Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah facing Mamre (that is, Hebron). . . The field and the cave that is in it passed from the Hittites into Abraham’s possession as a burying-place (Genesis 23:12-20 NRSV).

The Palestinian city Hebron is known as the City of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs because tradition holds that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are buried there. The cave where they are thought to be buried is the first property Abraham, Patriarch of the world’s three great monotheistic religions, owned in Canaan. The site has apparently been revered for three millennia.

I have been in Hebron twice, each with a group of Americans traveling in Palestine and Israel in hopes of discovering the truth of the situation “on the ground.” I have seen the graves of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. The graves are enclosed by the Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi, the Sanctuary of Abraham Mosque. The mosque is one of the few places I have felt Rudolf Otto’s “idea of the holy,” or the “numinous.”

The Mosque is of vast proportions. To reach the entrance, one must walk beside the fortress-like wall of the enclosure constructed at the order of Herod the Great. So one is immediately taken away from fiscal cliffs and the Super Bowl and other ever-present distractions.  A wall parts of which at least were built 2,000 years ago. It gives one (this one at any rate) pause.

One removes one’s shoes to enter the mosque (unless one is part of a group of a dozen or so Israeli Defense Force soldiers in full uniform with assault rifles slung over their shoulders come to—to what? learn about Islam? practice finding terrorists?). The tourist, the curious, the faithful—even the soldier—all are welcome to wander, to explore, and eventually to find the monuments to the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. Descriptions and histories and travel guides are readily available online.

Depending on one’s biases, one can find descriptions that do not mention the mosque, but only the graves, or one can find descriptions that fail to mention the importance of the site for millennia to the Jews. Or one can find histories that glorify the Crusaders who took the structure back from Islamic forces or the Islamic forces that in turn took it back from the Crusaders. The cave and the surrounding property have changed ownership (or at least possession by force) many times since Abraham bought it.

The history of Hebron and the surrounding (graciously appealing) hillsides is complex, both unsettled and unsettling. One cannot say simply “these people” or “those people” are the rightful owners. One can say, however, in the modern era of the (worldwide?) acceptance of political self-determination for the people of any nation or society, the forceful taking of land and cities is unacceptable. Abraham the stranger bought the land; he did not take it by force.

The Idea of the Holy

No party in the millennia-long wars/battles/conflicts in the area is blameless. In 1929 Muslims massacred many of the 750 Jewish residents of the city. The British, who were “mandated” by the League of Nations at the time to control Palestine, moved the surviving Jews away from the city. On the other hand, in 1994, a Jewish settler, Dr. Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in the Sanctuary of the Patriarchs. Many histories of the struggle over the territory are available online. This writing is not intended to be historical (1).

The current ongoing crisis began in 1968 when a small group of Jewish settlers moved into an abandoned hotel in the center of the city. Since that time a total of about 800 Jewish settlers have moved into the heart of the city (a large settler town has been built on the outskirts of the city). This small group of settlers has made life miserable for the 170,000 or so remaining Palestinians (mostly Muslim) in the city. The Israeli Defense Force stations nearly as many Israeli soldiers there to protect them. Since there is no strong government aside from occupation forces in most of the West Bank, the military has become the de facto government, an occupation force without clear responsibility to either the government of Israel or the Palestinian Authority.

The result is a city where fewer than 1,000 citizens control, harass, and make the lives of 170,000 both miserable and economically nearly nonviable. The IDF maintains such tight control over the city that it is virtually impossible for the Palestinians to carry on a normal life of commerce, education, or community. Main streets are barricaded, businesses in the settler neighborhoods are closed, and life is in many respects at a standstill. The settlers are free to come and go as they desire, and while they “routinely harass Palestinian residents and the tension sometimes erupts into violence, the IDF has succeeded in its immediate goal of avoiding large-scale bloodshed” (2).

As I wrote above, I sensed the numinous in the Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi. I am not given to “religious experience.” Before I visited the first time, the group I was with had walked around the barrier of the street pictured here. There were no soldiers that day, but their presence was (is) everywhere. The edge of the building on the left is a home the IDF has commandeered for a lookout tower to guard the ancient Jewish cemetery below. The buildings on the right are Palestinian homes to which the owners cannot drive because of the barriers. This is life in the city.

In commercial districts in the midst of which settlers have their enclaves, the Palestinians whose shops and homes remain find it necessary to cover the streets with netting to catch the trash the settlers routinely throw out their windows to harass and demean those below.

Yet the life of tradition and prayer continues in the face of impossible disruption. The Palestinians live—at least those I have met in Hebron in two short visits—in constant turmoil. While their society is being crushed, they persist, not with what we might call heroism, but with a simple (often grim) determination. The Palestinians who remain in Hebron (the 30,000 or so with means to leave have done so) go on living. I don’t know how.

. . .goal of avoiding large-scale bloodshed?

They live in a city that has literally been “trashed” in the name of—is it the name of religion, of culture, of hatred? The IDF occupying force’s “goal of avoiding large-scale bloodshed” has come “at the cost of turning a holy city into a moral obscenity” (3).

That a current visual symbol for an ancient city of reverence for followers of three faiths is a net of trash is grievous. My personal experience of the numinous at the ancient place of reverence was not some mystical experience of the presence of God. It was having already experienced the mystery of the resilience of human life—the mystery present there for millennia.
_____________

(1) Those who want a full understanding of the roots of the crisis, see Chapter Three of Colin Chapman’s. Whose Promised Land? The Continuing Crisis over Israel and Palestine. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002.
(2) “Postcard From Palestine.” Nation 291.18 (2010): 8-9.
(3) ibid.

(Note: this post is not an indication that I have forsaken the writing about Palestine that I am doing. I simply had to say this today.)

Every gay American born before about 1955 must have—like me—wept at the words we heard today in President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address:

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law–-for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. . .

Until today I would never have dared to hope for such words on such an occasion. For those of us who grew up before Stonewall (1969), we are now not only “out of the closet,” we are now (almost) into the fabric of society. We have carried the burden of being “other” for long enough, for too long. I cannot express the physical sense of relief I feel—to say nothing of the mental and spiritual sense approaching ecstasy.

I had to buy flowers—I treat myself to flowers regularly on special occasions or when I need cheering up. I bought the gaudiest, loudest, most blatantly (perhaps even artificially) colorful bunch Kroger had for sale.

I intended to have a full-sized picture of them at the top of this post and simply the President’s words. As I put the flowers in the vase, I remembered the picture on TV of Antonin Scalia sitting behind President Obama.

I left the vase of nearly dried up and dead roses I bought a week ago behind my colorful bouquet.

Remember, our journey is not complete. Antonin Scalia has already announced in public that there is no question how the Supreme Court must decide the California Proposition 8 case: the writers of the Constitution did not have gay marriage in mind, so it is un-Constitutional. The California proposition stands. That a Supreme Court justice can announce his views on a case before it is even heard is unconscionable. That Antonin Scalia is the most influential member of the court means our journey may not be completed any time soon. The dead yellow roses are very much in the picture.

Palestine. My writing has changed in focus.

That’s not quite true. For many months I have written about my process of aging and about my own struggle to find meaning in the face of my (fast approaching) death. No, I am not in any immanent danger that I know of. I am simply 68 years old, and anyone my age who does not attempt to discover for herself what she finds to be true about the end of her life is living in la-la-land.

HOWEVER, I have realized that discovering the meaning of my life and death lies not in worrying about what will happen to me, but in returning to my youthful radicalization regarding injustice. I came of age in the late ’60s, a liberal nonconformist whose thought was shaped by the Christian world view of such people as Martin Luther King, Jr. Need I say more?

The first time I traveled to PALESTINE was with a delegation of THE FELLOWSHIP OF RECONCILIATION in 2003. I went because I had begun to be somewhat possessed of the idea that what we as Americans were led to believe about the Palestine/Israel “conflict” (what a ridiculous word for the reality) was not merely incomplete but was dead wrong. My participation in the delegation opened my eyes to the greatest injustice I know of.

I have been once more to Palestine in 2008 with a group mostly of Lutherans from Texas. Seeing Palestine from that different perspective gave me a more thorough understanding of what I had learned before.

In 2006 Will Pryor, Democrat of Dallas, ran against the immovably ensconced rabid conservative Republican Pete Sessions to represent my neighborhood in Congress. He gave a campaign speech at SMU, and a friend of mine, Joyce Hall of Pax Christi, and I attended. After his speech we approached him with questions based on our travel in and study of Palestine/Israel. He could not, although we knew most of his political ideas closely represented ours, hear us. He told us he had already spent an day with a delegation representing the Israeli lobby and he knew all he needed to know about the “conflict.” Even a highly educated, successful, and well-known attorney running a hopeless campaign against an entrenched incumbent received indoctrination from the Israeli lobby in how to think about Palestine.

The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem

That this continues to be the norm in American politics (or should I say public morality?) is, for me, far worse than distressing.

For the past three or four years I have retreated from active participation in politics of any kind, and that includes my activities on behalf of the truth about Palestine. I have been emotionally unable to be forceful about any “public” matter for two reasons: my own peculiar physical/ emotional make up (I’m not afraid to be honest: overwhelming clinical depression), and MORE IMPORTANTLY, my total devastation about and alienation from the processes of American democracy and justice because of the travesty of the convictions in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas.

I’m not certain what has called me back. The reaction of gun owners to President Obama’s call for regulation of firearms? The recent anti-abortion rally I could not escape in downtown Dallas? The realization that Sodastream, a company which by international law is illegally located in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, will reach tens of millions of people with its ads during the Super Bowl? All of these are inter-related. I don’t know. But write I must.

This writing about Palestine will be from my heart. If there are factual errors, anyone is welcome to correct them in comments on my posts. Otherwise, these posts will be simply my very personal cry for justice for the people of Palestine — and, as a result, for the ability of the people of Israel to live in justice and peace.

The title of this page, by the way, is a Biblical statement about Hebron in Palestine. See Joshua 14:15.

The United States’ support of Israel—as anyone with eyes and ears can plainly tell—has created one of the three or four most oppressive regimes in the world.

If I were being deported and had no choice where I wanted to go, North Korea would be place I would least like to end up. Then perhaps Azerbaijan. Then perhaps Singapore. And so on. But second or third from the top of that list would be Palestine.

Actually, Palestine would be my absolute first choice because—starry–eyed liberal that I am—I would hope to go there at least to be able to observe, if not be a part of, the eventual liberation of the Palestinian people, freed either to create their own state by removing the illegal Israeli settlers from their land, or at long last making Israel into a democracy by attaining full citizenship and immediately becoming the majority in the country where they already live.

I have never used this blog to write about Palestine and my love for that country. This is the beginning of my use of this blog for that purpose. It will take me some time to get materials together to present in logical forms, but I will soon begin. My photographs from my trips to Palestine, for example, are on thumb drives that I will have to find and organize to accompany the postings I will write.

For right now, I simply want to pass on the URL for a video I believe to be one of the most important documents I can share with anyone. It would be my hope that it would go viral – although I know it won’t. It’s about a company that will be airing commercials as a Super Bowl sponsor.

It is grotesque that tens of millions of people will see their commercials and not have a clue that the company is built on land that “settlers” from Israel have taken illegally from Palestine. That tens of millions of people will see the commercials—and be led to believe this is good, wonderful, God-inspired capitalism, that the Israeli’s have made the desert bloom or some such travesty of thought—is depravity. That Americans will rush out to by a product of Occupation, Oppression, and the only Apartheid regime left in the world is grievous beyond words.

So I hope you will watch THIS VIDEO and be prepared to read my forthcoming postings about my experiences in Palestine.

My late partner’s great-grandmother

Today is a day of deadlines for me.

I must return a paper to my insurance agent to complete the coverage for my new car (a spiffy, sporty 2012 Honda Civic two-door coupe). I must submit to the university a ridiculously complicated, detailed, impossibly arrogant and meaningless “assessment” of the efficacy of my teaching. I must do my yoga practice in class at the Dallas Yoga Center— I must pay for the six-month renewal of my membership. And I must attend one of my regular twelve-step meetings and meet with my sponsors in two of the programs, one before and one after the meeting.

At the suggestion of one of those men, I am attempting to read Eckhart Tolle. Before I say anything else, I must say I find a wonderful and most likely self-defeating irony in reading a book—an activity of the mind, and the mind alone—whose major premise is apparently that

. . . the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it (Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: a Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 1999).

I said I’m attempting to read the book because I am having a great deal of trouble with it. That’s not because of the book itself. I have trouble reading anything these days. I can’t concentrate, and almost everything in writing bores me. I also have a sleep disorder that causes me to fall asleep when I read—or is that a convenient excuse?

So I have deadlines today. Except for the yoga practice, none of them interests me in the slightest, and I will have to force myself to meet them. I know that, as a member of society and (to some appearances) a mature adult who can and does take responsibility for himself, I must do these things. It is the way things work. It’s part of the social contract by which we live. You do all of these time-consuming, meaningless, ridiculous tasks, and we will make sure you have food to eat and a place to sleep. We will provide you with freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. I know Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms well. The praying woman in Norman Rockwell’s depiction of them the government used to sell war bonds during the Second World War is my late partner’s great-grandmother.

You’ll notice I said “late partner.” He died. As did his great-grandmother. I assume she lived a long and life and died of natural causes. He, on the other hand, died at age 62 of melanoma. A horrible way to die. Eva Cassidy died of melanoma almost exactly seven years before Jerry Hill. He, an opera aficionado—a Wagnerite beyond good sense—became enamored of her singing of “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Her album The Other Side was on his CD player when I took it home from the hospital after he died.

Freedom from want?

Jerry was five years younger when he died than I am now. It gives one pause. One’s mind can scarcely—no, absolutely not—wrap itself around the idea of one’s death at any age, much less at a youthful (and he was youthful and healthy) age.

Lest you think I am once again fixated on death—will he ever stop writing about it? (probably not until he can’t)—I’ll remind you of my claim for this bit of argumentative rhetoric:

Except for the yoga practice, none of them interests me in the slightest, and I will have to force myself to meet them.

You didn’t realize this was an argument or that it had a claim.

It is an argument that I would like to be able to make without the voice in my head, without identifying myself with my mind. But, of course, I cannot, and if I could, you would not be able to hear it or read it or comprehend it.

Last night KERA TV in Dallas began airing the BBC series “Monastery” in which five unlikely secular men agree to live at the Benedictine monastery of Worth Abbey to explore the monastic life. I stumbled upon it quite by accident (following the program I was intentionally watching). I decided to watch it, an enormous mistake on my part.

I have written before about my experience of making a vocational retreat in 1992 at the Monastery of the Holy Cross, an Episcopal monastery in West Park, New York, directly across the river from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park. While I was there, I went across the river with one of the brothers to lunch at the rectory of St. James Episcopal Church, the Roosevelts’ church in Hyde Park, where the recipients of the Four Freedoms Awards are entertained. The rector told us about entertaining Paul Newman, recipient of the Freedom from Want Award a few months before.

Did I say everything seems to tie together, or are you simply beginning to get it?

The deadlines I must meet today are of no consequence, but I will meet them. They are of no consequence in any view of human existence broader than the office of a Nationwide Insurance agent. Most of our views of human existence are not broader than that.

I want to be quiet. I want to stop thinking.

Freedom from silence

About my death or anyone else’s. About whether or not my teaching will be effective during the semester that’s about to begin. About how to grow in relationship with my lover (I was alone—physically and emotionally—for nine years after my partner died, but that period has ended). About whether or not I believe in Jesus or care about the church. About the pathetic state of the oligarchy in which we live, pretending that it’s a democracy. About car insurance. About cleaning my apartment.

Eckhart Tolle prattles on and on to get his readers to think about not thinking. I don’t mean to belittle him, and I will finish his book. But the Benedictine brothers of Worth Abbey simply live in silence. They listen. They live in silence until the silence begins to take over their thinking. They don’t need Tolle, and they don’t need car insurance.

Somehow in the midst of earning a living, being in love, and trying to keep up with details like car insurance, I want to live in silence.

It is not possible. Or perhaps somewhere over the rainbow.

Too dark to see name

Much of the time someone who has been diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (neurologists use much more interesting names for the condition these days, none of which I can remember at the moment) thinks perhaps she’s merely crazy and has managed to pull the medical community into her bizarre mental world. Times like this, for example. It’s 5:11 AM on a Monday morning. I’ve been up for an hour. I woke up thinking about the writing I needed to do about the Brahms First Symphony—see my Facebook posting from yesterday. You might (rightly) ask what’s pathological about that? Seems like anyone who loves Brahms, who heard the First Symphony performed yesterday by the Dallas Symphony—a performance conducted by Pablo González, of whom I had never consciously heard before yesterday, played about a millisecond beat slower than any other performance I’ve ever heard, thus allowing Brahms’ music to breathe as I think Brahms ought to breathe—might wake up with the glorious C Major theme of the Fourth Movement still in her mind, wanting to write about it.

So that’s pretty normal, I suppose. But here’s why I tend to think there is some pathology present in what I do while Jerome and the cat and the entire city of Dallas (as seen from the floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides of his apartment overlooking Main Street, the Main Street Garden, and—among other things—the remodeling of the eight-story building of the North Texas University Center [formerly one of the great department stores of Dallas] across the street which is a beehive of activity when the rest of the world wakes up and across Commerce Street the other direction beyond the swimming pool of Mercantile Center where Jerome’s apartment is—the apartment complex remodeled  from the wonderful Art Deco building of the Mercantile Bank—the ten story building whose name I can’t remember and can’t see in the dark being rebuilt into another living space and across the street from that the old twenty-story (how many times would you have to count rows of windows to make sure you’ve done it right—I counted twenty times) Sheraton hotel standing vacant but in the first stages of being converted to mixed use, apartments and offices and commercial space) are still asleep. The need to write about Brahms is what woke me up. That may or may not be true. I was awake several times in the night—each time, by the way, thinking about what I should be writing at that moment but, fortunately, going back to sleep except at 2 AM when I got up and took an Ambien because I really, really, really did not want to be awake and sitting here writing at 2 AM because when that happens, I know what my world will be like at 2 PM—but didn’t get up until 4 AM. When the moment comes that my mind decides to be awake, I have no chance of going back to sleep until I’ve written whatever it is I’m supposed to write about. I wrote a long email a couple of years ago to Alice Flaherty, the Harvard neurologist who has TLE and wrote the book on the subject, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, and explained to her as best I could this pain-in-this-ass daily experience and asked if that fit her understanding of the “disorder,” and she wrote back a mercifully and—I thought—needlessly short answer saying simply, “That is the experience of most of my patients.”

The only problem for me with her book is that I am not creative. Most of what I write is just blather as you can tell if you are still reading. Sometimes I have an idea that I’ve cooked up reading something the day before or recently, and I can get through the idea more or less coherently, but my writing most often takes off in some direction that I would not allow my students to go in because ideas do not connect, and no one reading what I’ve written could possibly figure out how I get from one place to the next in my mind. If I were creative, I would have by this time—with all the palaver I’ve produced in my life—written the Great American Novel or something. But I have none of the writerly discipline that would take, and I’m not brilliant like Michael, my high school friend who might read this, so I really have no business foisting what I’ve written off on anyone else.

The Old Sheraton

Since September 19, 2009 (about 1215 days) , I’ve posted here 358 times, that is, I write a 1200-word post on the average of every 3.39 days. There are times when I post every day for a month or two and then there are times (such as the last six months or so) that I can’t post at all because I don’t want anyone to read what I’ve written. If you read this drivel very often, you might think there’s nothing about myself that I wouldn’t say in public, that is, post here in the guise of an essay. But you’d be wrong. I never post anything about my being in love or—well there are lots of things I don’t talk about. But 358 (this will be 359) in three years is pretty verbose.

So now, you see, I’ve written all of this in about an hour and a half. The first thing I do when I get up is turn on the computer, then turn on the coffee pot, then pee, then pour a cup of coffee, then sit down here (“here” is either at Jerome’s dining table or my desk wherever I happen to be that morning).Once in a while that’s all much too complicated, and I simply have to sit down here and start writing before I do any of those other things.

When a student balks at writing an essay of 1200 words (what is it about 1200 words?), I tell her it should take about two hours, and she looks at me as if I were crazy. And I tell her that I do it almost every morning, and she can see proof that at Sumnonrabidus.wordpress.com where I post an average of one in three of those writings, and not one of them has ever taken longer than the time between about 4 AM and 6 AM to write. Once in a while it’s longer if I for some unknown reason decide to revise or edit, but almost always it’s exactly the way it came out the first go ‘round.

A University Center

So here I am writing about the Brahms First Symphony because knowing that I had to write about it woke me up. It’s a little late to start—and I would have had to do some background reading to write what I needed to write, so I’ll simply quote something about it I wrote on Facebook directly after the concert yesterday:

Does one get to choose the music one hears through the white light at the moment of one’s death?

Here’s my request: The entrance of the principle C major theme in the last movement of the Brahms First Symphony!

I would prefer the Dallas Symphony performance from today conducted by Pablo González. He took the first two movements as slowly as they need to be in order to prepare the universe for the entrance of that glorious theme. Shudder!!! When my time comes I want to be lying on the floor in the middle of the horn section of the orchestra. I think I’ll go right on to glory now, as my Aunt Doris used to say.

I often include a quotation this long, but it’s hardly ever myself. Sorry.

comfort from things past

Amanda Redman is leaving “New Tricks” (BBC) as Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman. She has played the part for ten years. James Bolam, who played the part of Jack Halford has already left and has been replaced for the 2013 season. I haven’t been able to find out when the episodes with Bolam’s replacement will air on KERA in Dallas. The episodes now airing in Dallas are the 2012 series.

I look forward with trepidation to the show without Redman and Bolam—I’d rather see it end than see it with new characters. The four original characters are perfectly fitted to each other and, regardless what Redman and Bolam think, I don’t think the plots have become “stale.” Perhaps when I see the 2013 series, I will understand. The probability is the show will end. And I’ll be sad to see it go (as I suspect millions of the over-sixty-five crowd will be).

As I wrote on Facebook this morning, even if the show ends, it will leave behind my current favorite song, “It’s alright, it’s OK, doesn’t seem to matter if you’re old and gray.” Dennis Waterman, another star of the show recorded the song which was written by Mike Moran.

“God, you look awful,” she told herself. “Old crone, with hardly a wisp of hair left, and those dewlaps, and those wrinkles.” Merciless she was. But there was also the pleasure of recognition. In the mirror she recognized her self, her life companion, for better or worse. She looked at this self with compassion this morning, unmercifully prodded and driven as she had been for just under seventy years. The sense of who she was and what she meant about her own personage began to flow back as she ran a comb through the fine childlike hair, hardly gray, and brushed her teeth—her own, and those the dentists had had to provide over the years.

“Damn it!” she said aloud. It meant, in spite of it all, false teeth, falling hair, wrinkles, I am still myself. “They haven’t got me yet” (Sarton, May.  Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1965).

I met May Sarton (1912-1995) in 1986, twenty years after she wrote Mrs. Stevens. I remember marveling then at the grace with which this 72-year-old (old, by my standards then) woman carried herself, and the energy with which she gave a reading of her poetry and short stories. Sarton must have been prescient because her description of the aging woman, written when she was only fifty-three, is—judging from my current experience—spot on.

May Sarton takes the same unflinching look at the process of aging in several journals of her experience. My two favorites are At Seventy (1984), and  Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (1993). I read both of them almost twenty years ago, I must say, before I had any idea what aging is all about. I am irresistibly drawn to her writing style, and—of course—I had met her, so it seemed I should be able to discuss her work. I met her at Salem State College in Massachusetts where I was an adjunct professor of music who had been recruited also to teach Freshman English. Her reading was arranged by the other (at least the only other of whom I was aware) gay member of the English Department. Sarton was openly out as a Lesbian.

An armchair of my father’s

As a gay man in America—especially one who was never slick-porn-magazine -pretty and who has never paid much attention to pop culture or the ins-and-outs of Hollywood and “Project Runway”—I have lived most of my life somewhat in terror of being OLD. You know, the “tired old queen” (an epithet I’ve heard gays use to describe someone in his forties).

That’s not exactly true. I really don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of me. That’s also not true, of course. I merely want to live my life as if it were true. When I am patently dishonest, I hope I can be honest about my fudging of the truth.

My terror at growing old has little to do with the fact that I am not a pin-up model and never was. It is about my inability to come to terms with my own mortality, an intellectual and what I suppose some would call “spiritual” dilemma of which I have been acutely aware since I was in my thirties. There are many reasons for my (perhaps) obsession with death, not the least of which is that “the afterlife” was so present as an idea and a reality in the community in which I was raised. And I never believed it. (It turns out that true orthodox Biblical Christianity doesn’t, either—but that’s a subject for another day.)

One way I have tried to come to terms with my acute awareness of my own mortality is to submerge myself in art and literature that deals specifically with aging—hence, my love of “New Tricks” and May Sarton. “Doesn’t seem to matter if you’re old and gray. . .” and “They haven’t got me yet.”

I also surround myself with things—things that comfort me because they come from some time before I was born and give me a sense of a continuity of existence. I know this is neither profound nor original thinking, but I need to inventory a few of those things.

New Tricks

A New England blanket chest, perhaps 300 years old left to me by my late partner. Hanging over it an antique mirror my late ex-wife and I bought at a forgotten antique store in Wisconsin in 1972. Two art glass vases of unknown origin I bought. And a photo album with pictures of such persons as one of my paternal great-great grandmothers—and a tiny piece of tatting someone in the family made.

A plant on the floor of my living room that grows from a slip of a plant owned by my late partner’s great-grandmother (who posed for Norman Rockwell). A small glass picture holder with a photo of my mother’s parents on their wedding day. A wooden armchair from my father’s office fifty years ago. A wooden chair from my great-grandfather’s office 100 years ago.

And then there are the plants. There’s the table, the lamp, other “things” I would not own were it not for the encouragement of my brother and sister-in-law and my inamorato who have helped me to live more in the present than I am wont to do.

As usual, I’m not quite certain of the point of this writing except to say I am sixty-eight (I know, if you read my blog, you’ve heard this before). However, I have an unusually sanguine understanding this morning. Thanks to “New Tricks” last night and May Sarton on my iPad, I’m thinking more nostalgically about finitude than normal. “It’s alright, it’s OK.”

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it

When I research (I do not, in fact, research—I look for interesting stuff to read on some general topic I’m thinking about), I use a process I invented for keeping track of my findings, from which I must not deviate if I am to find anything a second time. Before Google and EBSCO I did nothing resembling research (except my dissertation—but that’s from the Dark Ages). Those two modern marvels have made possible my looking for both information and others’ thinking about that information.

My process is quite simple, but I must follow it exactly. First, I think up five or six search terms that seem likely to uncover articles pertaining to whatever I’m thinking about. I use EBSCO’s Academic Search Complete from the SMU Central University Libraries online databases almost exclusively. I don’t search the way my favorite university librarian, Rebecca Graff, teaches my students, but they do as she says, not as I do.

After I’ve invented my search terms, I set up the search – the way I do it, I’m likely to get 25,000 hits, which Rebecca says (and anyone with any sense would agree) is way too many. But mine is an addictive personality, so if one is good, 25,000 must be better.

It’s fun to scroll through 25,000 hits. When I find one that looks interesting, I open it. If it looks promising, I save it to my desktop – if it’s a PDF file (I can’t cope with HTML files). Then I find the proper MLA citation, create a “sticky note” in the PDF file and copy the citation (because I’m lazy and don’t want to have to look it up again).

I create folders on my desktop for all the articles I find in one day. And I have a few folders for articles on topics I seem to return to again and again. Topics such as “self-discovery,” “anger,” “Palestine,” “gay studies,” “the Grotesque,” and “Abraham Lincoln.” This is the stuff of my thinking life. It is totally disorganized, without focus, and leading nowhere in particular. Much of it I don’t understand. The scientific and medical journal articles I find are useless, as are most articles on literature (I have read precious little in my life).

I’m not a student of philosophy or of sociology. I know quite a bit about Christian theology, but I’m by no means a theologian. Most articles about music I can plow through even if I don’t know the particular work(s) under discussion. The sad truth is I know a little about many things but not a great deal about any one thing. That does not make me a “Renaissance man” or even a dilettante, but merely a dabbler.

. . .that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life

I jump unceremoniously and without the “connection” between ideas I insist my students make in their writing to a passage in an article I read yesterday.

The human brain is the most complex entity, for its size, that we know of in the universe, and for that reason we see it as a premiere expression of the central tendency toward complexification in our universe. We believe that explorations of the nature of our brain can help us better to understand “the ways things really are”—in our brain and in our world (1).

This is the sort of “academic” statement that loses me. The brain is the premiere expression of the central tendency toward complexification? The universe has a tendency to get more complex? Is that someone’s “principle?” You know, like the Bernoulli Principle, or the Coriolis Force, or the Doppler Effect?

It seems to me that brains function best when they simplify, not complexify (what a great word). I’m sure that’s not what A and A are talking about.  I know that, when I go looking for articles on a certain subject, I must reduce the subject to four or five “key words,” and that, unless I am rigorous in keeping to an almost mindlessly simple process, I am likely to lose track of what I am doing. I dare not complexify.

In order to keep my brain from atrophying at my advanced age and/or to ward off the Alzheimer’s Disease that seems to run in my family, I decided to read some of those complex writings on which we base our thinking both about ourselves and about our living together in society.

One of the topics of reading and writing for my classes is the “Gettysburg Address” (Abraham Lincoln). I thought I might read John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government because so many sources I’ve found through EBSCO searches indicate it is the source of Thomas Jefferson’s statement that “all men are created equal” (Declaration of Independence), which is Lincoln’s opening rhetorical salvo. I learned as far back as high school history that the Enlightenment thinking on which our Constitution is based comes at least in part directly from John Locke.

I got only as far as Chapter II, Section 6, when I stumbled on Locke’s assertion that

. . . though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature . . . The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason . . .  teaches all mankind . . . that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life. . . for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker. . .  sent into the world by his order. . .  they are his property. . . made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and . . . there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another. . . (2).

“Gee whiz,” I thought. This man whose thought had so much influence on our Constitution said no one has a right to “harm another in his life” because we’re all equal in our creation.

To my mind, in its inability to complexify, Locke means we have “not the liberty to destroy [ourselves], or so much as any creature.” My simplifying mind interprets that to mean, for example, that using a gun to shoot someone is antithetical to the basic thought that formed us as a people. For a simple reason: We’re all made by the same creator so we have no right to subordinate another and think we have a right to destroy him.

As I say, I can’t complexify. I can’t get my mind around all of the “yes buts” and other complexification I read from people like Wayne LaPierre. I’m a simple thinker. No right means no right.
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(1) Ashbrook, James B., and Carol Rausch Albright. “The Humanizing Brain: An Introduction.” Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 34.1 (1999): 7.
(2) Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Project Gutenberg EBook.  gutenberg.org. July 28, 2010. Web. 9 Jan. 2013.