The Gift

Everyone received a gift. On the way
Home from the hospital, you left yours
On the bus. Or handed it to a stranger,
While you buttoned your coat.
When you looked up, it was gone.
Or perhaps they watched after it for you.
“We’ll give it to you when you’re ready.”
But though you waited, are still waiting,
You’ve received nothing. Perhaps
The absence of the gift is the actual gift.
Perhaps no one else received a gift.
But you can see by their smiles and tears,
By the lyric lift in their faces,
By the absence in your own.
You can see what you do not have.

Always to be seeking, a step out of time,
There must be something, you say,
Something all others don’t seek.
Is this your gift?

Man never Is, but always To be blest

Oh, happy day! Callooh! Callay!

I truly believe Pope’s words above, as epitomized by the 1980’s button — ah, buttons were all the rage — advising “Jesus is Coming! Look Busy!” And just as we await eternally the life to come where all will be made right, so there are certain events which I look to only with a vague affirmation that possibly the world could stand on its ear and cease functioning as it has for millennia, but — as Ring Lardner pointed out — that’s not the way to bet. Among those occurrences which occupy that dreamed of Utopia where things ‘Are the Way They’re S’posed to Be’, I include the repayment of forgotten debts by absent friends, having someone call me to report they’ve found my wallet/phone/iPod, and having an internet company respond to a customer service feedback. I should preface that last by saying that when money is on the line, I think the departments in the various ecommerce citadels swing into action to provide ‘Excellent’ satisfaction, as they hope you’ll point out in the survey as you leave the site. But, when you’re dealing with a freebie, it is hard to hope for any response, let alone fulfilment of all our dreams and aspirations in the advent of the Kwisatz Hederach! But wait, I think I’m overreacting…

Suffice it to say, a tiny while back, I added the Visual Bookshelf app to my ‘Facebook experience’ — and had fun pretending I was a terrific literary light. Then I made what, in retrospect, is a completely erroneous decision; I read the LivingSocial.com Website and followed their instructions. Now, what I read (which may be different from what they said, of course) was that I could register there, link my account on livingsocial.com to that on Facebook and the two accounts would be sync’d as one. I imagined myself using a new iPhone app to merrily enter books of childhood, book of late adolescence, books of early senescence into my phone, where in the magical world of wireless technology, it would be sync’d to my Facebook profile and my friends and their friends would be astounded by the sheer volume of crap I have read. Well… It did not work out that way.

What actually happened — don’t stop me if you’ve guessed the ending here, I should have seen it coming too — was that my new LivingSocial.com account ate my old account like Chronos devouring his children. Four hundred and forty-eight books, eleven reviews (including some “SuperReviews!” — gotta love those gold stars!) were gone, and I was left with the same message on both FB and LivingSocial.com: “Enter your first book!” Sigh… Well, the effect was to shut down the limbic system in charge of entering mindless information on mysterious Websites. I feared that my breathless prose had breathed its last (a good example of why this was a baseless fear). I scrambled to rescue from the virtual flames of LivingSocial’s book-review-burning my praiseless prose — examples of which now adorn this page (if adorn is the correct word). I was able to find my old reviews, though they were now credited to “Anonymous User”. This was utter indignity, stripped of my authorship and my prose, it felt as if the books themselves had been ripped from my very psyche.

Well, I do not want to prolong the agony of suspense which I’m sure you find yourself sweating before as the crushing tale captures your mind like Lautremont’s fetid breath across the bar, so I will tell you what I did next. Not immediately — first, you cry — but reasonably soon after; I poked around on the LivingSocial.com site, looking for anything like a FAQ, etc., etc. Finally I found a “feedback@livingsocial.com” email in the contact section (if there was a “Contact” section, my memory is fautly at this point… Probably my grief…) and sent another hopeless missive like Job’s plea to an uncaring God for an advocate before the Master of the Universe who can make the flowers bloom and all that, but who also is sometimes thought as not having the best customer service. (Hey, I didn’t write the book. I’m just sayin’…)

This was some time ago… I was on the other coast of this great continent, and Governor Sanford was just returning from another hemisphere. Times were simpler then, but even so I gave the chances of a response to my email as between that of me winning the lottery (I do not play) and all the molecules in the room suddenly rushing under that chair and dropping it the most boring person in the room (the old Physics Advent… still waiting). I had given up, though occasionally I would check on “Anonymous User” to see if he’d added any other ‘must-read’ reviews (he hadn’t), and to watch him fall in the overall rankings (still in the top 10k, though).

So it was a fantastic blessing — hmm… yes, I’ll use the word; something this rare might be considered a miracle, but I’m not one to jump to conclusions without less sleep than I got last night — a wonderful blessing to find that once again, I and my books are reunited. I never received a direct email response from LivingSocial.com that I’m aware of (perhaps new spam filtering caught that because it didn’t look like the many concerned folks worrying if I can possibly satisfy a woman), but then again, I’ve never gotten a direct ‘Here ya go!’ from heaven-sent prayers either. I do know, in my heart of hearts (whatever that means), that I have been answered, that the jagged cliffs have been made flat, that the prideful have been humbled, that the reward of the righteous is not ashes and pain, that… Well, suffice it to say, I have my account back. Now to open up that iPhone app and see if that breaks it all over again.

Lethargy

Asking for help is losing
The game we played in past lives is present
For a moment, although heartache
Argues otherwise

Unprincipled babes devour the mother, the carcass
Reeks of boredom. Night severs the ties
Of day repeating the phrases given
By angels. My flesh, so weak, denatured and dried
Like buffalo skin in a matchbook,
Files away the long silence and hopes for nothing.
A new dawn never breaks, only the same as before,
A lethargy of sad smiles and regretful embraces.

If she wakes again, if a smile escapes before the silence,
If maudlin joggers pass this house with eyes fixed
Upon the moist asphalt. Were there ever houses like ours?
Walls for windows and no doorways of steel,
Pray for someone’s soul, they may need it before
The end. Mine, paper thing of dubious worth,
Lay near the stairs before I imagined learning
Not to miss the pain and loss.

Hours of ashes, the embers dead before us,
A rain-spoken benediction which arrives
Too late. Empty in speech, words flow a river of nonsense,
And devour time wasted by homeless actors.
If wickedness could claim this abandoned parking lot,
Where grasshoppers weave the only dreams,
And proselytize again the empty eyes of the despairing,
Then an end might be made. Ruined meat
For hungry souls, but to sate was never our hope,
Only to silence the barking madness.

Make of It What You Will

Laughing at the paradigm of elephants, my throbbing kneecaps speak of the pain and suffering of the great angels we have heard on high. No more time for this sacred pretence of dreams, the latter-day thrombosis is felled with two strokes of the upside-down cake. Pelicans on patrol keep watch on a quiet city, though troubles have been known to eclipse both sun and moon in the before times, in the bad times. Latest news from the front leaves no doubt. We must all be ready to stand and defend our freedoms or the enemy within will consume us in her sweet, oh, so sweet madness.

Later the time started setting back two principles upon which we can all agree. This place is a shambles. No parking tickets can ever make up for the joy left unlived behind the clover on the soul patch of the giant goddess who rises from the oatmeal in the morning. No doubt that’s the way she intended it. All powers and praises to the stations of the cross. If any man here has left undone business before him, let him speak now of the ocelot’s ramblings in the city of the dead.
For time will spin backwards until the eterminty of silences bows down at her feet like an octoroon gamboling before the pool hall, though neither pool nor halls frequent this quaint little village as they did formerly. A fishing expedition with dynamite and the repressed dreams of salmon falls by the wayside as our guide seeks some semblance of dreaming stumps from the blasted land before us. In the distance, small gunfire craters disturb the pastoral beauty of the scene only with their unblinking gaze and the severed limbs of professionals who no longer practice their craft. The pronoun is rather late to the game, finding its way into the otherwise sound processes which have been hallowed since time immemorial, though those, too, are not so seeming as once they were before the breakfast of the gods on the day Valhalla rose and declared itself sleepy from the constant bickering of travel. No suitcases before them, they plunge mightily into the abyss of savings, never to return, at least not in this timeline.

We suffer less and less well than our ancestors, distanced from both the pangs of regrets and the red time of mother’s hemorrhage. The seascape littered with floating corpses of fish and porpoises leave us hollow, though only a fragment remains of the song sung at our birth by the great sky and the dark night that swaddled us into this mangy world of depression, recession, and desperation. Later on, things got solid again, but the change had come and no time was left to recapitulate the somber madness of the initial spark of joy and meaning that ushered us into this plane. We slowly make our way back to the car, happy to be once again on solid ground, though our moral convictions strain against this oh so golden lariat. Justice? Nay, say rather that a band of black-haloed angels went out into the night to wreak vengeance for the epistles left unread and the roads not taken, though it seems they lost their way mush as I do. No answer cries out through the night, though the ravening dog’s spittle bespecks the landscape of the lonely moors, we find no parallel tracks to assay in the undying, unwinking night. If ever there were to be a search for missing children, this valley has claimed them all, named them all, and no more account can be had of leftover spunk and sweat besides the lazy creatures which feed on the charcoal bricks of former souls left for dead by the highway. It may be that their remains are a lost chance, or a chance meeting in the parting ways of sunshine and night. Will it ever burn as blackly as that morn when the sun stood green before the world and he turned to you and spoke the magic words you so longed to hear, words which now you cannot remember, even at the cost of your immortal soul?

Nothing Bad to Say about Benedict Arnold

A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity
by Ethan Allen

A seminal work in U.S. patriotism, Ethan Allen’s Narrative rings with vibrant ardor for Liberty and the nascent United States. He despises England — as a country — as much as he loves the cause of American freedom. Though not without its faults, Allen’s tale sheds light on the fervent philosophy which supported many who supported the cause of the Colonies against the British. While he elides over his breaking parole, and losing a command — he is, after all, quite the egotist — his fierce determination to maintain his poise while in captivity, and his cunning (no doubt self-serving) tales of oneupsmanship while in gaol both ring true and join a wide literature of American derring-do and cleverness under pressure. His declartion of francophilia is also part and parcel of his times. 150 words for a 124 page book? (I have the American Experience Series edition) Allen’s book serves a good immersion in the zeitgeist of the Revolutionary War. And — even better for a prospective student — it is fast-paced; a quick read. Beware his egotism, though every factual matter which could be checked has held up under scrutiny. Beware too his naturalistic view of religion, if such be a bugbear for you. But do bathe in Liberty taken at its flood by this true American hero.

(This is my original quickie review for Visual Bookshelf; I’ve copied over those reviews here, for reasons I may blog about in the future…)

(My Original Review of Secrets of the Tomb)

Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power
by Alexandra Robbins

Robbins’s book isn’t terrible. She reveals some of the banal truth behind the seemingly sinister facade of the Yale “tombs” in her sometimes rambling work. But her own sips of secret society Kool-Aid are obvious; her stated thesis is that “Hey, Yale’s secret societies aren’t all that bad” (well, that’s how I’ll state it for her). No surprise, since she rarely passes up an opportunity to mention the fact that she, herself, has been tapped for (and accepted) membership in another of these most elite groups. Many interesting details are revealed. Former Bones members apparently gave her much information that provides the meat here — and reveals Skull and Bones to be neither completely sophomoric nor a sinister cabal. But the prose drags often — especially when she traces the Bones connections of Bush 43, as well as when she can’t help but rattle off 29 names in a row while listing the attendees at an Allen & Company ‘retreat’. Perhaps that last sentence was written for one of her earlier magazine articles upon which this book is based; it certainly reads like ‘by-the-word’ writing. But Robbins is most painful to read when she stops reciting facts and tidbits from her interviews, and proffers an opinion or a conclusion. Take for example, this statement from the penultimate page of _Secrets_:
“The secret society allows us to believe that things don’t just happen: genocide isn’t just caused by one crazy individual, presidents aren’t just assassinated, family political dynasties aren’t just born.”
Belief in secret forces does have the effect of providing meaning in what seems otherwise a chaotic world. Using conspiracy ideas as a lens through which to see all political events does create a simplistic reductionism that is to be scorned. But — leaving aside the murdered presidents for the moment — to take Robbins’s examples at face value, she seems to say that “genocide is just caused by one crazy man” (I’ll assume the individual she’s speaking of is male, as are most madmen) and that “family dynasties just happen”. This is as simplistic — moreso! — than the silly ideas of the weak and deluded that she clucks her tongue at. So, in conclusion, _Secrets of the Tomb_ has some interesting factoids and a little bit of history, as well as much needed anti-venom for the poisonous barbs of the paranoid, but is ultimately a porr substitute for a well-reasoned work on the “Hidden Paths of Power” of the subtitle. Read it for the gossip, not for its absent insights.

Jesuits On The Run

God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
by Alice Hogge

Alice Hogge’s book reads like a hagiography of Henry Garnet — nevermind that he was never beatified, let alone sanctified. The subtitle both reveals and elides the actual subject(s) of the book. Though indeed _God’s Secret Agents_ is the story of “Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests”, the Gunpowder Plot is ancillary to the main action. The first two-thirds of the work is a powerful, well-sourced description of The Mission, the Jesuit project to continue Catholicism in England despite the laws that made it criminal and the political opportunism that weakened the One True Faith over the last twenty years of the 16th Century. Though Hogge is careful to portray both the powerful faith of the English Catholics as well as the realpolitik that drove their oppression, her sympathies are obviously on the side of the Catholics caught in a Great Game between Britain and the Spanish, French, and Papal forces. The nobility of her heroes — Garnet and Gerard and Campion — is limned in every paragraph, while her objectivity sometimes seems forced as she writes, for example, of Robert Cecil’s surprising tolerance in his private letters at odds to his political invective against the Romish Church. The book hits surprising doldrums after Father Gerard’s escape from the Tower of London in 1597, as the author has to somehow traverse the next six years to finally arrive at the foothills of the Gunpowder Plot. The death of Elizabeth seems to cast a pall on the narrative as well, and Hogge’s lively tale of priests on the run becomes a fairly dry exposition of Catesby’s plotting and the tenuous, ambiguous connections of Garnet to the same. The use of these connections by the Government to destroy The Mission almost utterly is a foregone conclusion, and the book limps to a close like Frodo and Sam wending their way to Mount Doom. For all that, this is a very good book; the descriptions of the ‘hide holes’ constructed for the Catholic ‘Resistance’ are worth the price alone. Just don’t read it expecting to get more than a quick overview of the Gunpowder Plot (which is all it deserves, after all). Hogge’s work, instead, portrays the perilous world of the distaff faith, detailing the passions and tough moral choices that created the world in which Guy Fawkes could contemplate his terrible vengeance.

A Difficult Spot

As if the appliances didn’t demand more and more stories though I’m sure they’ve heard them all a dozen times or more, the toaster pops out a request for a story about Lady Lydia. “Please!” he says, “a Lady Lydia story?” But there’s always something else in the way. Today it was a pogo-stick and a garage full of pancake batter. The river of trolls that migrated from the northern mountains finds sweet solace in the maraschino cherries stored in the cupboards above the washer. Having sat through the Christmas season unused, it was surprising how much fight they had left in them.

It’s not a dream she had. Not a waking reverie of castles and clouds that sustained her across the many lonely days. For sustained she was not; her evil bargain no bargain at all. Doomed to each day forget once more the revelations of the night before, and slumping cold-shouldered into the uncaring grey world of dawn, to lose the heart anew. Each day’s dawning sounding the knell of a graveyard elegy, with its poetry removed and a checkbook in its place. And as if the cement walls were not solid and solemn enough, even the dreams grew ashes and confused and pointless, no safe harbor for the wracked wreck of lives not worth living, and not worth leaving.

A sponge fell between the stove and the counter. Left alone it sat cataloging the dusty, hair-wrapped small change and food jetsam beneath the stove. A pen cap lay mute under the gas line, its dead gaze fixed forever upon the tube above. The sponge imagined that back in the darkness, away near the floorboards, past sticky dusty unknown masses, imagined she saw an old, once shiny key. Though she knew it must only be another coin dropped carelessly to roll behind the stove, she pretended it to herself to be a long-lost key. Would it ever be found, to unlock friezes painted in Atlantis millennia before? And every day, in her dreaming, the dust settled on her porous surface and soul, until one day she dried completely away, leaving only her filthy abandoned shell, still staring at the ill illuminated shadow that might have been a key, but that was almost certainly a wayward coin.

Conspiracy Theorists Believe In God

We take as today’s text some sentences from the fourth paragraph from the end of Secrets of the Tomb, a fairly meaningless work (you can read my micro-review here), but in the closing lines the author, Alexandra Robbins makes some statements that illustrate the illogic of most conspiracy theorizing, both pro and contra.

“However sinister the notion of an all-powerful secret society might be, the existence of a Skull and Bones also brings us some measure of relief. The secret society allows us to believe that things don’t just happen: genocide isn’t just caused by one crazy individual, presidents aren’t just assassinated, family political dynasties aren’t just born. Even chaos, the society’s conspiracy theories tell us, has causality. The secret society — like the power of the elitist, old-school colleges, the small groups of mogul networks, and the political dynasties — survives because people like to believe that seemingly random events are orchestrated by someone or something in control. … Perhaps one of the reasons people are so fascinated with conspiracy theories, particularly the far-reaching networks associated with secret societies and old-school power, is that they need causality in much the same way as they need a God. People’s need for the Skull and Bones conspiracies to elucidate an underlying order is similar to the need for relifion to explain death and purpose. Underground control suggests order and order implies reason. Explanations, however implausible are somehow reassuring.”

I’ve mentioned in the aforementioned review how distasteful the ‘logical’ argument being made here that genocide is just caused by one madmen; Robbins replaces the mysterious causality of conspiracy with not only an uncaring randomness in the universe, but a febrile, insanely powerful randomness. “Well, too bad that one guy, all alone and unaided, caused the Holocaust. What can you do?” and the shrugged shoulders get back to their place at the grindstone…

But what really interests me here is the synonymy between Conspiracy Theories and religion. Weak-minded people believe in these crazy things, she seems to say, because it gives comfort and meaning to their otherwise random lives. I can see her point. If I imagined myself a pinball being slapped by the random flippers of chance, I too would search for some explanation, “however implausible”, to assuage my fear of the haphazard bolts of force which seem otherwise to lash out at me and my world without cause or reason. These fables (conspiracies and religion) are the solace only of those unable to stomach the harsh, chaotic reality of the world in which all real men and women live. Not only that, but this desperate longing for meaning is the true source of the awful power these weaklings fear: “political dynasties … [survive] because people like to believe that seemingly random events are orchestrated by someone or something in control” (my emphasis). Apparently, if Conspiracy Theories did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

So we are left with Hobson’s choice: either we are deluded into believing in secret forces in the universe behind every rock, chair, or tomb; or we rationally realize that the secret forces feared by the masses are actually called into being by the hoipolloi’s selfsame fears. The closed universe closes in tighter, as conspiracies provide an order that does not exist, and God explains away death “and purpose”[?]. And, Robbins does not go on to say, belief in the superiority of those who “see through” such chimaeras goes a long way to explain away any disparity in wealth and access to power. Reassurance is only for the weak; if you can live without needing solace, power will surely follow you all your days.

A new hope

Once again taking up pen to virtual paper, agonizing over the first scratches against the unforgiving blankness of the truest messenger of God, we prepare anew to launch into the black seas this small craft. Too little for true sailing, yet disdaining to hug the shoreline, we take bearings a last moment, and then set out…