Childhoods' ends

It's nearly November, the Month of the Dead in some calendars, and therefore it seems a good time to ponder the meaning of life and everything.

When I was a very young child, I was a cowboy. I wore cowboy boots, and carried a six gun. It was a cap pistol six gun, of course. The best one I ever had I was given for my fourth birthday, because it came with chaps and a vest. Indeed, my fourth birthday may have been the best ever. We lived next door to Mrs. Dodson, the world's greatest cake maker, and she made me a birthday cake with a cowboy whose lariat spelled out happy birthday before circling my name.

That cap pistol was probably the most effective I ever had, as well as being my favorite. Just like I had seen Gene Autrey or Roy Rogers do on my grandparent' TV, I jumped out of a tree and hit another cowboy, one of the Barkley boys, whose grandmother lived across the street, on the head, knocking him out cold. Cool. Of course, none of the mothers agreed.

Alas, the cap gun of the four-year-old me, despite being my favorite, was not entirely satisfactory. As often as possible I compared the cap guns and archery sets--I liked being an Indian, too; young boys often have multiple personalities--at the dime stores. We were blessed with both a Woolworth's and a McCrory's. My first allowance was 25 cents, and that introduced me to the difficult first world problem of choosing how to dispose one's disposable income. Twenty-five cents would buy both a movie ticket and popcorn or Jujubes, or it could be saved to buy some truly wonderful new kit for the wild west at one of the dime stores.

The ultimate cap gun technology, which required quite a lot of savings, even when my allowance was increased to 75 cents a week, was the Mattel Fanner Fifty. At first, it was just a legend, advertised on television. Then one of the boys who occasionally met up at the Donut Shop on Flint Street actually had one. I don't remember now who it was, but he let us touch it. I had to have one. The Fanner Fifty was much more realistic than the run-of-the-mill pistols that used roll caps, because it had a revolving magazine with six shots, just like real revolvers. Then you had to reload. Now every shot had to count.

The limits of my imaginary west came each day when, alas, my mother would call me in for the night. She frowned on cap guns being fired in the house.

Over the years, my favourite imaginary personhood would evolve. The young cowboy was replaced by the young scientist. One of the big advantages of that persona was that after a day of making field trips to Christian Creek or neighbors' gardens, I could then do experiments until that terrible time when my mother made me turn out the lights.

Over the years I have been a historian, an amateur mechanic, a potter, a priest, a kayaker, a hiker, a monk a physicist, all of whom have collected the ephemera of their trades. Untold trips to the stores that replaced Woolworth's and McCrory's have again and again forced me to make hard choices. Even though the amount of money I have allowed myself to spend on new toys has varied from time to time from $10 a week to $100 a week or $1000 a week, there have always been new wonders to peak my interests. Often I have had to decide whether I would prefer a new toy and making coffee at home, or waiting a week or a month and having coffee at the cafe.

Although I have had many collections over the years, I have never considered myself a very serious collector. When my interests have moved on, I have found it easy to disperse one collection to make room for another, usually selling things cheaply or giving them away rather than taking the trouble to realize a profit or even minimize my losses. It's never been the cap gun or the microscope or the snow shoes that I have valued, but the experiences they have allowed me to enjoy.

Now that I am old, the world I enjoy exploring is rather different from the muddy banks of Christian Creek, and some would argue is less real. I don't think it's any less real at all. The Christian Creek of my imagination was much more important to me than the red clay and sewage of reality. The world of the internet lets me explore much more widely than I ever was allowed to do as a child. In junior high, the boys in the two houses to the east of ours and I tried to dig to China. We failed. Now I have friends in China who send me photographs of their adventures there every day.

Still, I like the toys that allow me those adventures. BestBuy and Amazon have replaced Woolworth's and McCrory's, but the fun of exploring, of trying to decide how to spend my 25 cents, has not diminished. I still have to choose from the bounty that seems renewed every week. But in my seventy-first year, it seems November comes around more quickly than ever before, and I am aware that all one's childhoods do end. My mother will not call me in, or tell me to turn out the light, but death will. I do not think it is the one who dies with the most toys who wins, but the one who enjoys his toys the most.

Running away again, always Wanted to. What Am I To Do? Can't Help it.

I first ran away from home when I was nearly five. It was a classic trip. I gathered my belongings in a red bandana, tied them to a short bamboo pole, and started out, heading west. Southwest, actually. I got to two blocks south and five blocks west and decided that by then I must have been missed enough at home that my mother would properly appreciate me. (I was suffering from the coming of a baby brother.) When I returned home, I had not been missed at all. She had assumed I had been playing behind the garage, which was where I often hung out to make bombs to prepare for the defense against the coming invasion of Jefferson Avenue by the Soviets.

In those days Jonesboro, Arkansas, was called by the Chamber of Commerce 'The City Ready for Tomorrow'. It may have been ready for tomorrow, but it never seemed to me quite ready for today, so much of my life would be spent leaving and coming back tomorrow to see if it were ready. First I left for Memphis and Chicago and Memphis, to attend school and to teach school. But I was stricken with parenthood, and returned to Jonesboro so the offspring could enjoy being grandchildren. The grass, however, remained greener on the other side of the Mississippi. I returned to Memphis for more education and more teaching. From Memphis I would venture forth to Santa Fe and then to Charleston, both of which I enjoyed very much. (I just realized I have not discussed my Charleston sojourn in this little narrative, an omission I shall try to correct.) I would return to Jonesboro yet again, in episodes described in this blog as 'Hills of Home 1 &2'.

In 2001 I would run away from Jonesboro yet again, this time to the Northwest, and much farther than two blocks and five. As I was packing to depart for an undecided destination, which needed to have water and mountains, I received a letter from a friend I had met in Santa Fe who was now living in Seattle.  Come to Seattle, he said. I would like it, he said. There are water and mountains in one convenient location, he said. I did. He was right. Some of my adventures in the Great Northwest are described in a blog bit I wrote a while ago. It is not, however, the adventure of coming up here to Washington State but the complex feelings I have come to have of home since moving here.

I have been an inconsistent Cascadian. When people ask me how long I have been in Port Townsend, my current home address, I can truthfully say 'since 2001', since that was when I first washed up upon these shores. But, even though I have come to love this area, I am an inconstant lover. I have twice gone back to the Ozarks for visits that always turn out to be longer than expected. Sometimes I say that the Ozarks are my wife and Cascadia is my mistress. Both are beautiful. The truth is, however, that the Ozarks are a little too torrid for me in my old age. The temperatures there in the summer often rise to levels at which old people are advised to stay inside. I have become old people.

The most significant difference in my old age running away from home from my four year old's running away is the method I now use. In my romantic view of myself, I am about to run away on my bicycle.

Or perhaps I will take the wheel of a dragon boat, and go forth once more upon the seas.

But the reality is that more often than not, except for a few excursions by bicycle, usually day trips, my window on the world has become a screen connected by long strings of binary numbers to a universe far bigger than the 2x5 grid of my childhood or the longest trips of my adulthood.

It is true that I conceive of that screen as the ship of a space pirate At one time I would have--indeed did--dismiss such conceptions as falling short of reality, of being delusional. But it also true that my web surfing has taken me to experiences at least as profound as any I have had on mountains or the sea. (I called my previous Chromebook the Silver Surfer.)  

There is, I suspect, a very valid reason that all of the people with whom I was sharing the beach yesterday were holding a small screen in their hand. Were they running away? Perhaps. Perhaps some of them were unhappy at home, feeling as unappreciated as I did when I was four and had to share my mother with a new brother. But it seems just as likely that they were running towards a bigger world, a world that is not ready for tomorrow but is tomorrow, ready or not. 

What I am pretty sure of is that I do enjoy the varieties of ways I now have of exploring the world. I'm not ready to give up my bicycle, and I am considering buying another kayak. But I also enjoy wandering around in Google Earth, and playing a sea farer in The Legend of Zelda Windwaker, and I ain't ashamed to say so.

I'm Voting Red (at least this week)

I'm voting red this week, not in the sense of republican rather than democrat, but in the sense of LG rather than Samsung. This little essay is an amplification of a response I posted on an old friend's Facebook page. She asked, 'Where's the real presidential candidates?' I said, 'Doing more important things than circus acts'. I thought I might explain.

First, the context of red versus blue. I once was a serious Samsung fanboy. I more or less accidentally replaced my ancient Nokia flip phone (you remember Nokia, the not socialist company in not socialist Osmoo,Finland), with a Samsung phone which had some features I wanted.  It was a great device. Since it ran Android, I called it R2D3, and it served me faithfully for years. I bought all sorts of other Samsung devices, talked friends into buying Samsung devices, and gave lots of Samsung devices to kids for Pangur Ban Learners. I jokingly said that I was sending Samsung so much money because I wanted them to be big enough to buy North Korea.

Then one spring day, I accidentally drowned my second Samsung phone. AT that time, I still liked Samsung hardware, I was ready to ditch Touchwiz. I bought a LG Nexus 5, and peripherals. I bought a NVIDIA tablet because I was by then hooked on pure Android. A few months ago, I gave away my last Samsung device, a really great little camera, to a good home because I wasn't using it.

I have devoted two paragraphs to my conversion from blue to red to illustrate how painlessly and peacefully change can happen. I had voluntarily joined team blue, but they didn't try to shame me when I went to team red. Two clicks got me off the Samsung mailing list. I voluntarily gave money to two giant Korean corporations, who in return provided me goods and services. They are two of the giant pan-national corporations that have changed the way I interact with the world every day, and which I see condemned in a lot of my friends' posts every day.

Compare this situation to the present american presidential campaign, the circus acts.

In ring one, the leader 'republican' candidate is accusing the second place dude, the son of a Cuban, but born in Canada, of not being a real American, and therefore not really eligible to be president. I am writing this essay on a Chromebook that I purchased from a corporation of which you may have heard. It was founded by the son of a Cuban. It is called Amazon. I have spent a few hundred dollars with Amazon this past week, because Amazon allow me  access to goods that are not sold in small sea-side artsy fartsy towns catering to tourists.

In ring two, the democratic president has just ended a trip to Cuba, for which the republican congress has criticized him not just for talking to communists but for not worrying enough about ISIL, which some consider a byproduct of one of their own programs.  Although the trade embargo against Cuba has long outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any, the congress is not likely to end it any time soon. Meanwhile, two friends from college, one of them a son of Michigan, one of them a son of godless Russia (you know: Russia before Putin but after Nicholas) are looking for ways their corporation might bring real connectivity with the outside world to Cubans. Don't know their company? Google it.

In ring three, the democratic candidates for president are using all the doublespeak they can muster to pretend to be in favor of privacy while still letting the government snoops know everything about any of us at any time. While they posture as protectors of the people, and while they are even mouthing good things about gay rights, the gay ceo of the first or second most valuable corporation in the world is actually standing up to the government about privacy: Apple's Tim Cook, who someone called yesterday 'the president of the world'.

I think there is real change happening, and it is happening because people are cooperating to work with each other. They work in corporations, so they can have enough concerted money and minds to effect those changes. But our participation in those changes, despite what we may claim on Facebook, is voluntary. Samsung don't require me each year to pay them any percentage of my income at all. That is a monopoly reserved to the governments of the world. I don't have to use a smart phone. I could write this essay on the back of a napkin with a pencil and mail it to the local newspaper.

An example, perhaps, of a sideshow, but one I, as someone who has been involved off and on over the past seven decades in efforts to educate myself and help others educate themselves, is how corporations' efforts to improve education compared to government programs, a topic that is a big part of some of the candidates rhetoric. Both Bill and Melinda Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are heavily involved in trying to figure out how to improve education. Consider, for a moment, the Zuckerberg/Chan approach. They fund experiments which may be adopted by a school system if they desire. Rather than legislate what must be done by everyone, they suggest programs that might be expected to work. It's easy to abandon what doesn't, and try something else. It's pragmatic and flexible, and I suspect much more likely to be helpful than massive reorganizations like'No Child Left Behind' or 'STEM'.

I will conclude by suggesting that the world is in a situation as crucial as any since the Thirty Years War. I see Citizens United v. FEC as parallel to, if not Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, then the Augsburg Confession. We tend to forget that it was only four hundred and fifty years ago that the Peace of Westphalia forced acceptance of the concept of national sovereignty that is now being challenged by corporate sovereignty. It is of course really too early to predict the outcome of the current struggle, although I firmly believe the forces of history are on the side of the corporations, and that rather than lament change, we try to understand it. In that sense, I am voting with those who want to see outsiders in power, with those who are bring about real change, and  I am quite happy to see them remain outside the government.

the hills of home.2

After some excursuses, it's time to become more linear, or at least as linear as I may be. My surprise sojourn in Jonesboro deserves more than the simplifying five paragraphs i wrote before, but now, fifteen years later, I suspect I have corrected my memories to make my time there more heroic than it really was. But still I'll try to describe my capture and escape from the mother land.

The mother land has many delights, not the least of which is crepe myrtle in hard winter light. There seemed no reason not to be happy back in the city ready for tomorrow. I came close to buying a house, but it had sold just before I called about it. It was a wonderful house, one for which I had been part-time gardener one summer while I was in high school, with french doors opening onto a bricked patio lined with privet and punctuated with crepe and hyacinth and roses. But, I suppose, one really can't go home again, even though that's where my body would wake up every morning, in the bedroom of my later childhood.

A general clue about my time there is that a friend from Santa Fe often tried to convince me to leave, saying than when I was in Jonesboro, I sounded suicidal. Perhaps this was projection, as he often talked about suicide, but it is true that moving back to my childhood bedroom did feel rather like a massive fail. The motive, of course, was to try to help my mother, but I'm not sure if children really can help their parents. Despite the fact that it seemed to me that I was completely rearranging my life, mother's own need to feel that she were still independent made the situation touchy. Both of us were seeking an illusion: I wanted my mother to do things that I thought would restore her health, which she was not interested in at all; she wanted to go gentle into that good night, a thing which is not always possible if one ignores one's health.

So, I did the American Thing. I bought things. First, I bought books. Amazon not having come into their glory, I would oft walk to Hastings and buy books. Books about Arkansas: The Fish of Arkansas; The Birds of Arkansas; the Newts of Arkansas; William Bartlett's Journey. And, books about kayaks, so many that now that I live in Port Townsend, I am disappointed that the Maritime Collection of the Carnegie Library has almost none that I had not bought and read in Jonesboro. Oh, and I bought Kayaks. At first, I bought a couple of inflatables that I could carry in a back pack on my bicycle, but soon another purchase allowed me to cart around hardshells, and I had as many as 13 kayaks. I bought, you see, the ultimate badge of normality: a car. The purpose I told myself was that I could take mother about more comfortably than in her ancient Nissan whose air-conditioning had become a distant memory. But it also was an escape capsule. I could fill mother's larders with the foods I thought she would eat, cook them and basically spoon feed them to her, and she would feel well enough that she would kick me out. I would escape, either to the Ozarks or to Santa Fe. Sometimes the escape would be for only a day. Sometimes it might be several weeks. Then the phone would ring--I had now entered the cell phone age--and mother, if things were not too bad, or my brother if things looked really dire, would tell me that probably I should come back.

When I could, I went kayaking. It was  surprisingly delightful to explore the waters around Jonesboro, especially the Cache and St. Francis Rivers, which, except for occasionally fishing on the St. Francis, had just been things to cross quickly on the way to 'real rivers'--the White or the Mississippi or the Arkansas--all of my life.

Paddling through the Cache cypress knees in a sit-on-top kayak was as good as a trip to Jurassic Park. I remember particularly one magic morning when I rounded a bend and many of the branches of a large cypress became great blue herons and glided off into the mist. I considered starting a business, and eco-touring company that would explore the lands and waters of the Mound Builders, who had made their homes here before catching small pox and dying. I worked on a business plan, consulting with all the organizations which were cropping up to encourage tourism along Crowley's Ridge and the Great River Road. It seemed that I would have plenty of customers, but they would be rich Germans, because they were just about the only ones, except for a few Japanese photographers,  interested in the Mound Builders. After coming very close to ordering the kayaks and mosquito nets to start things up, I decided I didn't want to spend my summers with rich Germans in Indian costumes.

In the next installment, I run much farther away from the homeland than I had expected to do.

A River Runs through It: my Life as a Stream

I am writing this amidst the turmoil that surrounds an ISIS bombing in Paris, which has seemed to generate as much interest in the social media sphere as anything since 9/11. How long it will be important in the public mind remains to be seen. But today, it's the thing to think about. For a few days I had been thinking about how to write about the White River, and going through old photographs to choose one for this post was rather amazing. Living life one day at a time, it never seems much happens. Looking back at a big chunk of life, it seems a blur of activity and change. I'd like to look that that blur through the sometimes clear, sometimes murky waters of the White River.

When I was a young child, the White River was a gateway to a world of wonders. At Newport the wonder was the engineering of the bridge across the river. Newport was just south of the White's juncture with the Black River, at Jackson Port. It would be geologically more accurate to call this part of the river the Black. Whatever one calls it, the river here is big, a thing that often floods many square miles of its low lands. The bridge starts abruptly at the edge of downtown Newport, at a right angle to the main street, and soars above the warehouses and train tracks below. There is of course a modest warehouse for the Bunge Corporation, whose faithful servant the river has become.

At Calico Rock, the wonder was of a very different sort. When I was young, there was still a current-powered ferry across the river, and on the town side was sold the best ice cream in the world: Yarnell's. The water then was so clear that it seemed only inches deep. Every rock and sand grain was clearly visible from the ferry. This was a mountain river. There were still few areas of the Ozarks with electricity or paved roads. My family kept a 1947 Ford to make trips to the Ozarks, because it had more ground clearance than the cars of the 1950's. All of this would change after the construction of the Corps of Engineers Dams for flood control and power generation, like this one at Bull Shoals.

At Batesville, the mountain river became a lowland river. leaving the Ozarks for the Delta lands through which its water will flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. But it is not a gentle change. At Batesville there is a dam and lock, and the water, especially if the  big dams upstream have their gates open, roars over the concrete wall, past the lock that was built for steamboats and finished just as the railroad also was finished. The dam and the two more above it were never used, but never removed. Built as aids to navigation, they remain as hindrances to navigation. Batesville also held the wonder of a white sand beach. My friends and I were often very sunburned by the weekends at this shore. It was really a sort of  miserable place: the sand was burning hot and the water, coming from the 300-ft depths of the high dams upstream, was freezing cold. But we all felt like Tuesday Weld and James Darrin when we were there.

As a middle-aged adult, the river opened more wonders to me. I explored its entire length by kayak, or on foot, starting in the Boston mountains where it's just a road ditch beside Arkansas Highway 16, and ending on the white sands again  where the White and the Arkansas Rivers join the Mississippi at Big Island.

Now where the rivers meet is one of the most amazing dams of those on the White River. The picture at the top of the page is of one of the abandoned dams along the river, this one an old power generation dam at Fayetteville. Like so any of the dams on the White, it has been left in place long after its original 'purpose' has become obsolete. The Montgomery Point Lock and Dam, in the next picture, has had a rather different history.

Again and again the floods of the Arkansas or the White or the Mississippi have torn away the efforts to control this important river junction. The White River actually carries more water more reliably here than the Arkansas, so there is a canal for traffic to move from the Arkansas to the Mississippi. Low water on the Mississippi means sometimes there needs to be a lock so boats can make a transition in controlled circumstances. Sometimes the water is so high in all the rivers that the weir needs to allow boats to pass over with with a 12 foot clearance. Montgomery Point is a wonder of a different sort, an engineering wonder which is not yet fully tested.

It seems to me that much of my life has been a series of interactions like those of men with the White River. I work on projects and build theories that are obsolete by the time I've finished them, but which I hang to even though they are now just in my way. The biggest problems tend to overwhelm my solutions, and those ideas I value now may not be adequate to allow me to manoeuvre through the turmoils of today, let alone those ahead. There was a time in  my life when I scorned all the 'improvements' men had made to the White River, and I tended to scorn much of modernity, thinking that, like the clear water at Calico Rock my five-year-old self saw, the past had been easier to understand. When one's own life is in turmoil, it may be hard to recognize the structures that, like the levees and locks on the White River, prevent even more destruction. On may wish to deny that one's mistakes ever happened,to deny that one spent years building a structure that never served its intended purpose.

I suspect it's easier for the river. It seems to have no purpose except to move to the sea, at as close a speed of 10 meters per second per second as the terrain will allow. But even the river is slowed by the stuff it picks up along the way.

yet another excursus: the one, the many, and love

For many years my Sunday afternoon reading discipline was The Song of Songs. I collected translations and editions of the book, which  is one of the most unusual in the canon of either Jewish or Christian scriptures. God is not mentioned. Rather it is a passionate love poem with very physical imagery. There were many rabbis who opposed its inclusion in the list of sacred books. Others claimed it is the holiest of books, an attitude which has prevailed, so it is read on Pesach. Since for Christians, every Sunday is a little Pascha, it seemed perfect reading. Although there are nearly as many interpretations of the book as there are readers, from it's being a purely pagan love song to a sublimely spiritual paean of the love of YHWH for Israel or of Christ for the Church, they almost always agree it describes each character's yearning for the other. (Although if one takes seriously the image of the Church as the body of Christ, it gets complicated.)

Confession:  I wrote those words about a month ago, and rested from all  my work. Then I rewatched the Wachowski's Matrix Reanimated, with its struggle between the one, Neo, or Mr. Anderson (the son of man) and the many, Mr. Smith, and I thought I should blog on.

The question of whether there is one or many is one of the most fundamental, and recurring, problems in our understanding of the universe. One god or many? One brotherhood of man or many races and tribes? One source of everything, or random emissions from random black holes? The tradition in which The Song is preserved covers both possibilities. First comes a creation story in which the gods (elohim, a plain as day plural that gets called a plural of majesty, like the royal we, to save monotheism) create mankind, and  then follows one in which YHWH creates Adam, the earthling. One creature who is neither male nor female, or both male and female, and who gets divided to make a suitable helper for the 'him'. After that there are two, and Eve is the mother of all.

Whether we agree with the adequacy of these origin stories or not, some sort of parallel versions of them continue to be trotted out to explain our origins. The most popular now is the Big Bang, which more or less follows the order of Genesis's first account, if not its timing. Evolution rather than particular creation provides the birds of the air and plants of the field, and humankinds, with a variety of 'hominids' arriving from time to time, but with us, the Wise men, prevailing. Still, it seems we cling to the hope at least for one original parent, whom we have now called Lucy, the African Eve, from whom all of us are said to have descended. And we hope to find one Theory of Everything.

Tina Turner wisely asked, 'what's love got to do with it?'. It is the role of love in the chosen purpose or destiny, of Neo in The Matrix Trilogy--and the Wachowski's don't make it clear which is the correct situation--which reminded me of the complexity of love. Neo has a lover, Trinity, and in the Platonic sense they each must have something the other wants to acquire. Yet each dies for the other without knowing how their love will be rewarded. Then they revive each other with a kiss, like YHWH breathes into the earthly one, the Adam, who becomes a living soul. Perhaps if Neo will just return to the source, all will be well and all will be one. But there's a difficulty with oneness. It's what we often seek, but it also can bring loneliness, even in or perhaps particularly, in marriages. In God's Trombones, James Weldon Johnson's retells the second Genesis creation story and gives God a motive, something that isn't found in the original text. God says, 'I'm lonely--I'll make me a world.' In the Christian tradition, the world, or at least mankind, doesn't take to being merely a creature, and the rest of the story, as represented by Johnson's following 'The Creation' with 'The Prodigal Son', is about God's efforts to reconcile the world to himself.

But must one be lonely? Must one feel that there is some other person necessary to make one's life complete? Maybe my upbringing was unusual, but that is the idea I was taught, not just by my mother's firm conviction but by nearly every movie I saw or book I read. It was the idea I accepted until I spent three years mostly wandering around in a kayak, not thinking explicitly about much of anything except what I needed to see in the wind and the waves if I were not to drown six miles from dry land. I never thought about learning anything from my adventure until it was over and I was sitting in one of those circles of getting-to-know-each-other that were so popular in the Pacific Northwest in the early 21st century. I told the folks what I had been doing, and 'the facilitator' asked, 'what did you learn?'. Without thinking, I answered, 'we're all one'. Not red and yellow black and white folks are one. Red and yellow folks and starfish and corn are one. Black and white folks and orcas and seagulls are one.

It's been a long time since I watched Matrix Revolutions, so I don't know what Neo decides as he approaches satori. And I don't claim to be approaching satori. But I think my quick answer and Johnson's poem have something important to say about the most satisfactory sort of love and why it is often so disappointing when love is directed to one person. God didn't say that he would make him a man. He said he would make him a world. I didn't think of the world as one in a separate way. I came to think of it as an us, and that we are one. There is, in this worldview, no other. That there is an other is an illusion. There's just us here.

There are some obvious difficulties with this worldview. It means part of us have really stupid ideas and want to take really stupid actions, and they're still us. It doesn't lead to some sort of happy peaceful playground because we recognize that we're all one. Often it leads to acting on Jesus' admonition that if our right hand offends us, we should cut it off. But it requires we recognize that the hand we're cutting off is our own hand. We're put in the chariot with Arjuna as once again Krishna asks, 'who is the slayer and who is the slain?'. But this is my interpretation of life as a love story for the whole big bang. There are others.

An excursus: love & lust & such

A friend messaged me a few days ago. I had not seen her except on Facebook for nearly twenty years. She had found a trove of old letters and was surprised a bit, pleasantly, at how passionately we had corresponded, and disappointed that in the new era of 'social media' passionate friendships seem less likely to be expressed. Now we seem, she said, to exchange witticisms.

I responded that my love for her was undiminished, but that I hesitate to post intimacies in public. (Yet, here I am, doing just that.) She said that her friendships were as important and as sustaining as her relationship with her husband, although in a different way. I did not tell her that although I never expect to marry, and if I did it would be to a man, I was still a little disappointed that she had married someone else rather than pining away for me. That of course is a rather cruel attitude on my part.

Also I told her that I was about to write some posts about love and lovers, thinking at the time about an upcoming anniversary of the death of one of my most beloveds. But thinking around the topic has made me realize how complicated it is.

My love for my friend who messaged me was (is?) Platonic, but not in the sense that it was not sexual. Sexuality is much too complicated to make that assumption, and I certainly found her sexually beautiful. Rather it was Platonic in the sense that I saw in her some character I seemed to lack, but which I wished to possess. I suppose I thought when she married that she gave that quality to her husband.

I have another friend who describes himself as polyamorous. I chide him, gently, but honestly, that I think it's not polyamory that he supports, but polyconvoitism, lust for more than one person. Lust is so often, it seems, a more honest description of the emotion we call love than we want to admit, and not just when adolescent boys tell adolescent girls that they love them when they really just want to sex them.

It has been sad for me to observe that in many cases my friends who talk most about love in lofty terms have had the most disastrous sex/love partnerships. How to talk about this thing that is so central to our lives and which is usually assumed to be understood. Perhaps I can only do it anecdotally. So, here is some anecdotes about my 'falling in love' with the person thoughts of whom provoked this musing.

It was a late fall evening in the early 1990's, and I was at St. Bede's Episcopal Church in Santa Fe, preparing for a liturgical event to deal with the sense of loss and grief that the gay community felt from the failure of a gay rights bill to pass, a bill for which we had worked hard and which we had expected to pass. In the dusk I saw coming over a hill a person for whom I felt immediate and strong attraction. The figure, wearing a long black duster, could have been male or female, young or old, but something about the silhouette affected me deeply, in groin and heart and mind. The silhouette was that of a young man who was new to Santa Fe and had seen a flier for the event and had not quite known where St. Bede's was.

That meeting led to one of my most important, deep, and confusing relationships I had ever been in. It was not Platonic, in the sense that neither of us wanted to possess the other, and yet we shared more than I have ever shared with any other person. Despite that, as  I was wandering off for a little tour, having earned a bit of money from an art show, and Tom wanted to go with me, I sent him away. What was I thinking? Any way I answer that question would be speculation. We remained friends and lovers for another seven years, until he died of AIDS in 1999. 

The importance of our relationship was perhaps more evident to others than it was to me (perhaps to us). Both of us had other lovers. Once Tom and his new boyfriend came back to Santa Fe after he had made a trip back to his home state of North Carolina, and came by my apartment. They had just arrived in town, and had no place to stay. I said, 'stay with us', and Tom readily agreed. The other two parties, our 'current' lovers, objected vehemently. Later, after Tom's death, when I was visiting my mother, I found she had a photograph of him, which I had forgotten I had sent. She said how disappointed she was we had not stayed together longer, that from the photograph she had decided that he was an excellent person, and would have been very good for me, and why hadn't I brought him to meet her.

Ah yes. I had thought we would have more time.

(The photos are of two of the works  of an unknown <3 tagger in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a place I love but left.)