Reflections: The First Day of the Rest of My Life

Today is the first day of my retirement from Ohio University, where I have been working for the last 23 years. I don't know if I should be celebrating--even though there is a pandemic raging--but I'm not.

I find the loss of the illusion that holding down a job put me in control of my life and destiny is disquieting. There is fear that the pandemic, which has shut down most businesses, thrown millions out of their jobs, and caused the stock market to tank, will permanently cripple the economy, so that my pension money disappears even before it ever started. 

And, since Laura graduated in December and went back to NYC, I am now completely alone all day, every day. I have no one but my cat, Mona. She is a blessing, but not much of a conversationalist. I am too radically introverted to go out into the world and interact with strangers, just for the sake of some social intercourse. 

So here I sit, silently worried.

Because of the pandemic, should I need help, my family would not be able to come to my aid. Never have I felt so alone. 

And it has only just begun.

Reflections: Senility's Revelations

FINALLY

Observation outlives
comprehension;

Desire endures beyond
function;

Existence outlasts
credulousness.

Amen.

Reflections: This

When I realize it was love that turned into this, I'm quite certain that "this" is hell.

Reflections on the Elections: Hillary vs. Trump

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If I were a Hillary supporter, I would very much hope that the Donald isn't somehow disqualified as a candidate, because I don't think she could beat any normal Republican candidate at this point. My God, she's barely staying ahead of Trump.

 "At least she's better than Trump" becomes inoperative if Trump is suddenly gone.

Which is to say, they'd better stop merely attacking Trump and start convincing people that Hillary is actually a good choice on her own merits.

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Reflections: Reading Mirabai on a Cold Winter Morning

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The temperature has risen, from the 1* F. that I enjoyed in taking out the week's trash, to 3*. The radar map discloses that we rest on the edge of another large field of snow, moving to the east. Relentless winter marches on. I read Mirabai in a warm room, while faithful Feather sleeps nearby.

Friend, I see only the Dark One --
a dark swelling,
dark luster,
I'm fixed in trances of darkness.
Wherever my feet
touch soil I am dancing --
Oh Mira sees into the darkness,
she ambles the back
country roads.

~ Mirabai (Tr. Robert Bly)
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Reflections: Vicious Cycle

 

It is the self-righteousness of the self-righteous that blocks them from the conscious realization of their self-righteousness. In that condition their egos have no recourse--in trying to construct a workable reality--but to project their faults onto other people; only this allows that self-righteousness to survive. It's a problem.

 

 

Reflections: Horror and Its Promptings

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Yesterday, the morning of December 14, 2012, a young man in Connecticut murdered his mother. He then drove her car to the elementary school where she had been a kindergarten teacher. There, he murdered the principal and five other adults. He also murdered twenty children. Most of them had been in his mother’s class. It was horror, and the wanton TV Eye of this brutal nation had one more crashing, collective orgasm, teased to new heights of ecstasy as, bit by tongue-tipped bit, the story was breathlessly delivered, retracted, revised and salaciously licked onto the camera’s lens by ranks of comely stringers; for, if it bleeds, it leads. The president performed our public penance with a becoming degree of difficulty. I gave him 8.5 out of ten. A governor spoke. Ranks of cops were implored to deliver just one unit more of their arcane syntax. Preachers and priests were interviewed, and psychologists in the hire of media outlets solemnly offered professional wisdom, for free, to a gasping nation, now grieving in the afterglow.

Yesterday also, I discovered a poet, new to me; a Welshman named R. S. Thomas. Here, from the collection, Later Poems 1972-1982, is the second piece:

PETITION

And I standing in the shade
Have seen it a thousand times
Happen: first theft, then murder,
Rape; the rueful acts
Of the blind hand. I have said
New prayers, or said the old
In a new way. Seeking the poem
In the pain, I have learned
Silence is best, paying for it
With my conscience. I am eyes
Merely, witnessing virtue’s
Defeat; seeing the young born
Fair, knowing the cancer
Awaits them. One thing I have asked
Of the disposer of the issues
Of life: that truth should defer
To beauty. It was not granted.

It was a long, sad day in what has so very suddenly been revealed as a long, sad life. The third poem in the Thomas collection is:

THIS ONE

Oh, I know it: the long story,
The ecstasies, the mutilations;
Crazed, pitiable creatures
Imagining themselves a Napoleon,
A Jesus; letting their hair grow,
Shaving it off; gorging themselves
On a dream; kindling
A new truth, withering by it.

While patiently this poor farmer
Purged himself in his strong sweat,
Ploughing under the tall boughs
Of the tree of the knowledge of
Good and evil, watching its fruit
Ripen, abstaining from it.

###

[ insert ‘What a long, strange trip…’ here ]
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UPDATE: It is now being reported that the murdered mother was not a teacher at the school where the shootings took place, and may have had no formal connection to the school at all. It is also reported that the guns used in the massacre, or at least some of them, were purchased by the mother. All of this does damage to the symmetry of the story, as it was being reported last night; but it is what it is.