“Do you know where Light comes from
and where Darkness lives
So you can take them by the hand
and lead them home when they get lost?”

___________
CODA
From the poetry in Job 38-42… Yahweh demanding that Job stop muddying the issues, and instead, get back down to the basics of life, to what has majesty and magnitude… instead of ‘living by rumors.’

Sara P., YouTube Film:

Today is Pangea Day, a global event dedicated to bringing people together through film. With its eclectic mix of movies, live music and passionate speakers, Pangea Day aims to help us see life through the eyes of others. There are live events taking place right now in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.

But don’t worry if you live far from any of these cities or couldn’t make the actual festivities: On today’s YouTube homepage, you’ll find a sampling of the 24 short films being featured in the Pangea Day program. Selected by Pangea Day’s international competition from over 2,500 submissions from over 100 countries - many of which came from YouTubers heeding last year’s call for entries - these films inform and inspire, and provide a taste of what this event is all about.

Barbaro. Now Eight Belles.

My father comes from a place where the old men and old women still consider horses to be gods who came to earth.

In Hungary, every tiny village had a council of elders: the old men in their szurs, long wooly white shepherd’s capes, the old women in their red boots with the black heels, the fine leather pleated and stitched with red thread all the way up to the knees… the old men who smoke pipes with drawing bows 18 inches long… the old women who if need be, could still swing up into the saddle of a stamping stallion…

These one of a kind people, these last-of-their-kind people in our family, say this about horses: “Never force a horse to run relentlessly, for a horse is made of Love and Courage on four legs …

…and the horse will literally love you so hard, it will run its heart out for you until it is dead.”

This is not just a saying. The old ones are serious. Descendents of the Huns and Swabians, the horse tribes of mountains and plains, they have their own ancient forms of knowing.

The old people have another saying, jokingly said…but not really:

–“You want to know the secret of the determination of the Hungarians? They are in all their dreams, fully human, and fully horse.”

–”You want to know the secret of the determination of the horse? They are in all their dreams, fully horse and fully god.”

In the United States this weekend, at the Kentucky Derby, a horse race of long standing… Eight Belles, a filly, was running against the boys.

Coming out of the race, she suddenly dropped her heavy body to the ground. Two broken ankles. She was ‘euthanized’ where she lay.

From a piece by Beth Harris: Louisville, Kentucky.

“Winning jockey Kent Desormeaux and Big Brown galloped by Eight Belles in her waning moments.

“This horse showed you his heart[Big Brown], and Eight Belles showed you her life for our enjoyment today,” he said. “I’m deeply sympathetic to that team for their loss.”

Big Brown, the favored horse, had won the race.

But so much was not won. So much that is not about horse races and horse owners, but about Equus, the god of the horses…

Those as ancient as the Greeks, but unrecorded by stylus, are said to have held that the god-horse, the king of the horses of heaven, arrived on earth when time was still only fog… that the godly horse arrived on earth with the silver reins made of nebula on him, and with the bit made of stars in his mouth.

He who is known by many ancient names, came in order to teach humans the beauty of the world beyond their small and squalid ways of life.

Thus, the oldest Hungarian horse people say the horse god came to earth out of

Read the rest of this entry »

I think of one thing over and over.

The caskets. Those very few photos and brief film clips of the caskets.

That Rumsfeld and others said no one could see, look at, photograph, no, no. no. The caskets coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be viewed. Some horrible something will happen… we cannot say what

I wonder, since a cell phone user photo-filmed the hanging of Saddam after the entire event was declared off-limits to the press.

I wonder, since paparazzi with lenses longer than their arms, take thousands of unflattering photos of film stars half naked behind the sheer curtains of their own homes.

I wondered, since Michael Moore convened with a student at Columbine to secretly film everywhere inside the high school after Frank deAngelis, principal of the school, had absolutely forbidden any press, cameras, or media of any kind from entering the building for any reason. The “nobody gets to film in this school” footage of every nook and cranny of Columbine was carried in long sequences in Moore’s film, Bowling For Columbine.

Thus, I have wondered how it has been that the press in the USA was told ‘no film’ of the returning heroic dead. Are we to really believe that our courageous in-close press, just like obedient children, caved and said, “Ok, as you wish”…? And that was that?

Why have we no renegade film of all aspects of our dead? Why have we so little play of film from vet hospitals in the States, and near none except a phony ‘rescue’ of a female soldier from hospitals in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why do we have so very few stories of the Iraqi families, the Iraqi refugees, the people who have literally tried to walk with their children and a few days food, out of the fire zones?

Why do we see no long and episodic stories about the children of fallen soldiers? Why do we not have interviews with any of the old people from Afghanistan, from the USA, the ones who say exactly what they think, and without muffling their true thoughts?

Why have we no nightly paraplegia report? WHY are commentators still calling human beings, sons and daughters, “troops?”, as in “Tonight, two troops died.” How did language about the loves of someone’s life come to be named as units instead of souls?

Why have we war, without SEEING it? Why do we have war without HEARING IT? Why do we have war without FEELING it, and daily?

Asleep. Not by self will. Put to. Put to sleep. By others… by their removing all stimulus to our senses… our senses being the only ways we have of perceiving the world and its condition… and what we ought, or not do, next.

Images and sounds and smells and voices and memory are what keep us awake; hunger and thirst for meaningful story keeps the mind alive with new ideas and promotes action.

Without the close-in, hidden stories, the opposite occurs.

Removing images, sounds, smells, voices, words, cries, and memories is precisely what puts a people to sleep, causes them to fall unconscious. And remain that way. And meanwhile, whomever suppresses the vital ‘inside stories,’ runs the show. The entire show.

A show without critics, without onstage voices. A show with an audience spellbound only because they’re tied into their seats while blindfolded and rendered deaf. In this show, there are endless numbers of actors shuffling across the stage and out the back door into the ‘theater’ of war. All the action takes place there, out of sight and hearing of the audience.

And, I still think of the caskets. I ask myself, Have we time-warped to living back in old Soviet Russia? where no person is allowed to take a picture of a titmouse or a telephone pole for fear of being arrested because, “It is forbidden. And, we cannot, will never tell you why.”

And I am still asking what happened to the close-in tellers, the journalists who have power and contacts and resource… and guts… enough to peer in, pry into… and pour the ‘real deal’ stories back out to us.

Saying all the mainstream media moguls have pulled back on financing their investigative reporters is not good enough. There are mavericks everywhere. Something else is wrong. Something else.

I only know this: Coming from a country that was constantly over-run by one marauding tribal group after another during its several thousand year old history… my old country father, Jozsef Pinkola used to say…

“To blind the people, you only have to do one thing:
Kill all the storytellers.”

With its perpetually (and historically) rocky relationship, the Arab and European worlds have seldom met in a peaceful manner (or without suspicion) during the past half a millenium ever since the downfall of the Moorish civilization in Spain. In this context the on-going London Book Fair, with the “Arab World” as guest of honour and Arab writers present in force, provides yet another opportunity to build a bridge between the two worlds.

The Independent writes: “Imperial bureaucrats, soldiers and scholars on one side; radical nationalists, pious militants and oil-rich oligarchs on the other – all have had their various axes to grind, and to wield. Now, perhaps, the writers of the Arab world can begin to find a voice in the West again. It’s always easier to love distant stars when they can shine, plainly and legibly, on the page in front of us.

“The (London) fair will be the culmination of a long-term plan, steered by the British Council, to forge firmer cultural bonds. And, although he comes from far beyond the Arab world (and writes in English), the Afghan author Khaled Hosseini’s double coup in topping the UK charts both with The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns has helped to put a spring in the step of everyone who wants to widen the readership for literature from the Middle East and North Africa.

(The Kite Runner novel was the third best-seller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan. It’s been published in 38 countries, translated into 42 languages, turned into an Oscar-nominated movie – and sold more than 10 million copies — one of the publishing industry’s greatest success stories. Now the search is on for the next big thing to come from the East. The Kite Runner is a 2007 Academy Award-nominated film directed by Marc Forster based on the novel of the same name by Khaled Hosseini (click here for more…)

“In the Gulf, lavishly funded new competitions such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the ‘Arab Booker’) and the Sheikh Zayed Awards have signalled the intention of the emirate of Abu Dhabi to build up its name as a global centre of culture. Not to be outdone, and fretting perhaps at its current reputation as the world capital of bling, neighbouring Dubai begins a new literary festival next year. Also in Abu Dhabi, the Kalima translation project has launched an ambitious, state-financed programme to bring, at the rate of 100 per year, classic and contemporary books from around the world into Arabic for the first time and to distribute them across the region. ” More here…

I lived in London during the mid-1970s. I extensively covered there a major “World of Islam Festival” for The Statesman newspaper in India. The festival was opened by Queen Elizabeth II. “As far as anyone can remember, such an attempt had never been made before—and probably could not have been. It is only recently that one civilization has been capable of looking at another civilization objectively, rather than as a potential rival or convert. Read the rest of this entry »

AP says today, a new/old photo has surfaced that shows Scripps-Howard war correspondent Ernie Pyle dead at the side of the road in Japan in 1945. There is much to-do in the big newspapers today about this memorial photo of a dead war writer. But no image of the photo yet. It is being held somewhere by someone until… what? enough money, enough positioning. Whatever.

To me the iconic photo is the one of Pyle alive, as the photo below shows… and the photo of the elegant, battered tool of his trade as shown in the above photo comes in second. But, I digress.

The road Ernie and the small contingent of solders had taken that day back in the spring in 1945, had been swept of mines. Many G.I trucks had ridden over it safely. Just six days previous, President Roosevelt had suddenly died while still in office. His corn-fed Vice President, Harry S. Truman had ramped up everything in himself to try to take a wheel a million times larger than he. Germany would surrender and ‘the war’ would be declared over another 20 days hence. The end of ‘the war’ in Japan would take another three and a half months to close.

But Ernie Pyle had only heard that maybe Germany’s surrender was imminent. And he continued to write notes like these, which are from his journal, to my eye, blood poetry, bone poetry… viz:
Read the rest of this entry »

In our family from the Swabian side, was told an ancient story about a dark and wicked force called the Erl König who lives in the hollow woods.

The Erl King is a soul stealer, a bloodless, malevolent and claw-handed creature who thieves the minds and hearts of humans so they become hollow like the withered woods… and the Erl King himself.

…. The Erl King makes certain that human beings can no longer think of the world, and can no longer consult with nor hear their rational souls,

but now, can only carry the most deadened and pretend ideas of pleasure, finery and false triumphs… these pursuits bringing all to dead and naught.

Listening to the current President’s ‘State of the Union’ Address last night, and seeing the applauders, was like listening to a naive child’s Wish List… after the Erl King had stolen everyone’s mind;

…The President’s speech Santa-Claused in every sugary, long range miracle imaginable– for the right here and right now. Full funding for all matters of wars. Cures for all economic, social, and physical ills. Laying of ghosts. Asking that old wins, some real, some dubious, be shined up bright, now and forever, in his own name.

And to seal that long scrolled list… the toy-soldier promise of Yahweh-like retribution in vetos… if the gifts he demands do not materialize. Right now.

In developmental psychology, we’d call a long wish list like the President’s… one that insists a perfected world can pretty much be created within the next few weeks ‘if Congress will only cooperate with him,’ … “magical thinking.”

“Magical thinking” is a kind of thought process, that when weighed against reality, makes the ‘thinker’ (when they are adults and no longer children) seem addled rather than insightful.

Many love and are loyal to the current President, and there is no doubt that he carries a certain Wild West kind of charm; there is no doubt he can be moved to tears; that he loves his family; and no doubt that he has had a plan.

All the more reason to be made sad by what ‘hollow woods’ it all has come to.

Those who are prescient say the Presidential election of 2008 is the most important of any, ever.

I’d agree and only add that we cannot afford to squander opportunity to elect a leader who can truly think, instead of mimicking our current leader… who too often appears to offer us what I’d call, ‘thinks he has never thought.’

Is there a new leader riding hard toward us who has successfully passed through the hollow woods? Is there one Read the rest of this entry »

In the spirit of the holiday season, I am inviting nominations for the “Top Ten Fibs of 2007″. There are two categories in the competition: “Presidential Candidates” and “Best of the Rest.” Post your nominations in the comments section or use the “Contact the Fact Checker” form. Also feel free to cast a non-binding vote for your favorite fib. The deadline is Friday, Dec. 28. A panel of crack Fact Checkers will select the Top Five Fibs in each category and post them online on Monday, December 31. We will also make a Geppetto truth-telling award in the “Presidential Candidates” category.

To kick the competition off, here are some early nominations (in no particular order):

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The New York Times: A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma That Transcends It

In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at Heschel — his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet — and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel that there was no food to be had.

In response, according to a new biography, “Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972” by Edward K. Kaplan (Yale), Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?” Perhaps, she admitted. Well, then, Heschel said, if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”

She shot back, “And why should I?”

“Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.”

“What favor did you ever do me?”

“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.”

And after the woman’s burst of laughter, food was quickly served.

The Night of The Shattering Glass, otherwise known as Kristallnacht, took place November 9, 1938, marking to that date, the most widespread attack against Jews in peacetime Germany and Austria.

In France, two days prior, a 17 year old Jew had shot a German embassy staffer in retaliation for the egregious treatment of his father and family at the hands of Nazis in Germany.

Hitler seized on that event as opportunity to enact his long planned desire to destroy Jewish houses of worship and the Jews…. parnasah, their ability to make a living.

Thus, on that night, Hitler unleashed his most psychopathic and hate-gorged minions to loot and burn any and every Jewish community in Nazi territory. 267 synagogues were plundered of sacred Torah scrolls, the hand-built temples torched.

100 Jews were murdered whilst trying to defend family and property. 7500 Jewish shops were looted of valuables, left with every window shattered and all remaining fixtures despoiled and set afire.

The Nazi government said the Jews had brought this down upon their own heads, and ordered them to pay one billion marks for the murder of the Embassy staffer in Paris.

The Jews were also charged six million marks to pay for the Nazi’s destruction of their own shops.

Shortly afterward, 25,000 Jewish fathers, rabbis, brothers, sons, students, poets, farmers, sweethearts, and bridegrooms, were dragged from their families, farms, and off the streets.

They were forced to Nazi slave camps, never to be seen again. It was the commencement of an ancient evil, but on a new, relentless scale.

The Nazi plan: To extinguish entire cultural groups, but first to coerce them to become a wage-less workforce for the state’s purposes, until these innocents, unable to work any longer because of starvation and torture, were murdered where they lay.

Near Oswiecim Poland, the Nazis ordered more heatless barracks and factory halls built. Less than eighteen months after Kristallnacht, this death camp, called Auschwitz, was fully packed with blameless souls who were rendered into a river of blood. This flood of humanity was bled out day and night without cease for the next four years.

Kristallnacht stands as one of the central flashpoints… one so large that for those who had the eyes or heart to see it, it could be registered around the world. It was Kristallnacht that catalyzed the Nazi’s spreading stain across Europe and Russia.

The sick psychological ideas underlying the arsons of Kristallnacht leapt from dry mind to dry mind until the malicious ideas caught on that mental tinderwood in each man’s darkest mind, and there, broke into flame, fueling ever more death.

By 1938, Dachau had already been rendering human bones and blood for six years. Now were added six more houses of slaughter in Poland alone, including Auschwitz.

In the years prior, Hitler had ordered Germany’s doctors to euthanize tens of thousands of German children, Jews and non-Jews alike, who were in some way lame or halt, and that ‘operation’ was carried out in full, emptying sanitoriums and orphanages even as many German physicians protested vociferously.

But, death and disposal of ‘inconvenient humans’ had become not only the pattern of the collective unconscious of a nation, but an insatiable hunger. The legends of the vampire do not spring up from a soul being lost.

The oldest vampire legends spring up around those who have murdered, and thereby a ’switch has been thrown’ in them; they developed a blood lust to Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps you grew up in a small town like I did. I keep up with the local newspaper even though I no longer live in that little still semi-rural backwoods burg, population 600, with a struggling city nearby that is still going through the tailings of its own version of ‘the rust belt.’

You might remember my article about the good old guy who made tin can scarecrows and drove around with them in the front and back seats, delivering them to various small truck farmers. He got stopped on the toll road for carrying too many passengers at one time (all the scarecrows had hats on their 5 pound bucket heads.)

You probably remember the recipe from my hometown newspaper for fresh-ground black pepper oatmeal to strengthen your health, and the advice on how to pick the blueberries before the birds do, and how soybeans are down, but corn is up.

You might remember too about the sad parents this summer who lost their children when the kids dove from the jetties into Lake Michigan and hit sand bars instead open water, breaking their necks and dying. The legislature is thinking of banning diving from jetties. Since I was a child, every summer there have been deaths from jetty diving by people who don’t know the ways of big water and rush into it all too soon.

Also this time of year, for decades beginning in the 1930s, townspeople who had made the 200 mile round trip to Chicago often brought back this one issue of the Chicago Trib for these two pictures (see the masthead of this article) of Indian Summer that ran every October without fail… up until a couple years ago.

The artist of “Indian Summer” was an Irishman born in the late 1800s, name: John McClutcheon. My dad couldn’t read, but he always thought he could ‘read’ pictures out loud. It took me years …until I learned to read in grade school… to realize that Dad was making up the dialogue to the Sunday ‘funny papers’ when he ‘read’ them to me.

He did the same for these two pictures of “Indian Summer” that ran in the Trib every year. For years I thought he was reading the words under the picture. But, he wasnt. He was making it up out of whole cloth.

This is what he ‘read’ to me: He said that long ago, new people came to this land, the wood and lakelands, but there were already people here, an old old people. The original people were called Indians. Just like in Hungary which had been run over by Huns, Hapsburgs, Turks and others over the centuries, Dad said the Indians were run over too. Run over and run over til there were hardly any left.

But, he said, like the Hungarians, the Indians knew corn and wheat. The Indians knew about seeds and trees and important things like about singing and dancing and drinking and smoking. They knew about the best of life, hunting and gambling and music and love of horses… that Indians were just exactly like Hungarians, good people.

Dad would point to these two colored pictures in the Chicago Trib (a full-color picture in a newspaper back then was a wondrous thing) and say that we just had to see that no one can wipe out a people like that. They come back. People who love and live like that… You cannot kill them. They come back.

See, he’d say, there are the corn stalks all tied together, but really, the spirit of the corn is the true home for people all across the world. The simple seed keeps even poor people alive. The seed is the thing that makes ten of itself for every one of it you plant. All you need is one seed, to keep coming back and back.

That’s how Dad ‘read’ the pictures to me.

Tonight as I was writing this for you, I wondered why the Chi Trib wasn’t running “Indian Summer” any more. In my research I found that some thought the story that had traditionally accompanied the two pictures, was racist.

Read the rest of this entry »

WAYS OF LEARNING…

I’m teaching myself to draw because I would like to be able to draw some ideas I have for editorial cartoons… some sharp and hard-hitting ones, I hope. I met a young guy at the camera store recently who is going to art school.

How I envy him; to have teachers to help you, tell you, show you, let you in on some of the ’secrets’, some of the simplified ways of proceeding that are effective, leave you be; to have time, to have that setting in which to work; the rays of comradaries with others who are wide open. It all sounds so wondrous even with the usual petty jealousies and egos sometimes permanently attached to air hoses.

But, my life has been different, more like the tsiganok road, the gypsy scholar. I have learned, mostly on the far back wall in my cave, most often in the tiny spaces I can pluck, pry from life, like picking time out of the tight corners of a walnut shell, for writing, for thinking, and especially for receiving thought and image and dream.

Tonight, I thought I’d share some of my struggle to learn this latest imperative; to draw; because I think there are a lot of peeps like me; who have heavy commitments of family, elders, animals, children, grandchildren, work, community, activism, and marvel sometimes to find one can actually make progress while riding a merry-go-round forward for miles and miles.

Somehow this week in addition to all other commitments–and learning to draw—and fix a broken faucet– I’m trying to get my ‘early flu shot’ because I’m considered in the ‘fragile group,’ which I hate mentioning even to myself… I was born with what used to be called ‘delicate health.’ Except my wings are broad and strong. Mostly.

So, here’s my plan for learning to draw. First, I’m cutting out pictures of different ‘types’ of cartoons/ drawings to try to get an overview of the stylistic field. I admire Ralph Steadman’s ink splatted cartoons; he was the editorial cartoon artist who accompanied/illustrated the madman Hunter S. Thompson in Gonzo. I like Ben Shahn and Speigelman’s Maus I and II.

And then there are the cartoonists who are lesser drawers to some extent, but who carry consistent sharp messages, like Oliphant. I notice that sometimes the message is greater than the draftsmanship and sometimes the draftsmanship is absolutely angelic, but the message is just eh, so-so. What would it be to have talent at both, I wonder.

Talent; one of the best definitions I know, is that talent is what comes easy. In which case I have no talent for anything, except possibly loving. I don’t recall anything else coming easy. I’ve had to work as hard as and sometimes harder than most to do elemental things, like learning to spell, to read, to write.

A few years back, I taught as an artist in residence in an elementary school and came across a teacher teaching ‘invented spelling.’ Wow, it was exactly my kind of blue highway. The emphasis was on the kids learning to write their stories instead of focusing on spelling the words right. Their parents, the teacher told me, often complained that they couldn’t read their kids ‘invented spelling.’ But I could, and realized I was a genius at reading such things. The weirdness of dyslexia will do that for you.

This teacher by placing emphases on storytelling and not ‘correct’ form, was allowing the songbirds to fly free in the children’s’ minds without putting harnesses on them and limiting their wingspans. I expect children who grew in this way, unencumbered by forms smaller than the vast well they were drawing from…though they would learn to spell correctly eventually, will now for all of life know what comes first in creative life is the story first, the tiny barricades and curbs to ‘standardize’ it, coming, most often, second.

Seeing the children take such joy in writing and illustrating their stories, again, made me wish I and others of my generation would have had that too. Instead, many of us were sort of all weirdly folded and stapled, before we could ride a bicycle; trees are always green and brown and never blue, never purple. But they are, I would protest, deep in the woods the bark is purple in dusk and the film under the bark is shiny silver.

But no. We’d not be having any purple or silver trees, or as I once drew, a red-headed friend with orange, and green fire in their hair. ‘That’s not real,’ said my teacher. But she must have forgotten that when you sit behind a red-headed child and the sun hits his hair, his whole head jumps into tiny rainbows on fire. So utterly awesome.

So, each time I draw, I still first have to drag aside all those lead curtains dropped down over the child artist, ones that fill the mind with endless questions of propriety rather than questions of wonder. However, I am making progress, I think. I now make Read the rest of this entry »

Wasn’t television supposed to be The Universal Storyteller? Back in the 50s when televisions were the sizes of refrigerators and Univacs were the size of three room houses… television…. It was so promising wasn’t it?… education for everyone, the egalitarian programming of television would become ‘the electric storyteller’… a set of endless wisdom books inside the box.

Like a book, the many leaves of Television would magically flutter open, coming to life across the screen by simply plugging the cord of the mysterious box into an electrical outlet.

We would be engaged by Television.
We would be educated.
We would be lifted
and we would learn useful
and important things.

…but the reality was, we would become television’s roadkill, and yet, as though television were an electronic drug, we would become zombie-ized by television at the same time, increasingly being led around by its timing, not our own, its demand that we be present before its one glass eye at the appointed time, night after night.

Regarding ‘brainwashing,’ it is advised that to disturb the captive’s sense of time, to disorient them accordingly, is the direct way to control them.

As TV programming deteriorated into ‘son of clone of the already cloned’ many of us began looking like Death driving a sofa through the living room whilst eating saltines and peanut butter… and watching a pale blue glass screen flicker in time with our heartbeats. We found less and less jing in the deal.

Why did those in charge of content think we could never get enough of the TV spilling out insulting women who surely seem to have stingers growing out of their rear ends … and their poor husbands who are ever harangued about being too slobby, inept, stupid and disorganized… and their children who appear to be pretenders to the throne of ‘tiresome scathe.’

Did we ask for that, really? Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe your grandmother is like mine; they see the world with ‘other eyes.’

My grandmother would sometimes say upon seeing the glee in her little dog’s eyes when she returned home: Dogs are heart medicine for humans. Other times when her butter yellow canaries would sing and sing just because the sun rose, she would say, Birds are heart medicine for humans. But then, when her kitties would adorn various kitchen cupboards to help her cook by waving their tails like pendulums, she’d say Cats are heart medicine for humans.

I was thinking of this, because a friend who is so ill, has an oncologist who understands the grandmother/ grandfather wisdom… and lets patients lie in big green vinyl recliner chairs wearing their living kitty mufflers, kitty aprons, and kitty head warmers during IV chemo.

Blessed oncologist whose chemo rooms are like a menagerie. When I’ve been there for my own infusions… another story for another time, I have a recurring anemia… the most unusual thing is that the dogs lying against people’s legs or lying quietly in laps, and all the kitties are on a mission; no fighting goes on there, no scouting for mates, no being sidetracked. Each creature, fully present to their person. It must be so: Creatures are medicine for their humans.

We’ve got Mother’s Day, whether every mother is ‘good enough’ or not. Same, Father’s Day. But no Cat Day. No Dog Day. No Bird Day. Some of the very few creatures on earth who will try to uncritically stay with us no matter how weak, how strong, how strange, upset, preoccupied we act, no matter what.

So two stories, each mythic in its own way; they are from two different cultures where many people are still fighting, arguing and hating one another over a war that occurred 67 years ago. But also their two cultures despite all else… have a great unifier: their shared love of cats, large cats called tigers, and smaller tigers called cats.

The first story is a true one that came in a news release from China some time back.

The Tigers In the Temple

Walking fully grown tigers on a leash is all part of a day’s work for a group of Buddhist monks who have taken on the task of protecting the endangered animals by offering them a home within the walls of their temple.

The sanctuary is run by head monk Phusit Khantidharo, who insists all 10 tigers living at the Pha Luang Ba Tua temple in western Kanchanaburi province in Thailand have adopted peaceful Buddhist ways.

“We are a big family here and we live together, not just with the tigers but many animals,” said Phusit, sitting cross-legged on a rock surrounded by five large tigers that take turns to affectionately nuzzle up to their saffron-robed master.

The tigers, with names like Storm, Lightning and Great Sky, live among monkeys, horses, deer, peacocks, geese and wild pigs in a scenic gully where they are free to roam and feed during the day.

Visitors to the remote temple, about 200 kilometers west of Bangkok, are invariably stunned by the sight of the monks frolicking with tigers as if they were ordinary domestic cats.

One monk, who weighed less than half his furry companion, was bold enough to crouch down and mock fight with the big tiger, which gently lunged back with its deadly claws retracted.

The monks have documented the personalities of all the big cats in a booklet with profiles varying from “likes to be a star and loves showing off” to “pretends to be tame and gentle but will bite.”

The first tiger was brought to the temple in 1998 after being injured by a hunter, but died within days.
Soon after, two very ill cubs arrived with large knife wounds in their stomachs. Inexperienced hunters had tried to cut them open and inject them with the preserving agent formalin in a bungled attempt to stuff them for a collector. Read the rest of this entry »

The concept of the coincidence — like bumping into a long-lost friend on the street whom you had dreamt about the night before — has undergone a metamorphosis of a sort as my dotage approaches. I have come to see these “events” as being more predestinated than merely coincidental. And usually for a reason.

So it was when I brought home two movie DVDs the other day that I pretty much had chosen at random from a selection of nearly 4,000 titles.

One movie, Everything is Illuminated, had caught my attention because it stars Elijah Wood, he of Lord of the Rings fame, and I was curious to see if he had the chops to act outside of his rather limited role as Frodo Baggins. (He can.) The other movie was Wondrous Oblivion, which I picked up because I liked what little I knew of its story line: Gawky English schoolboy is tutored in the finer points of cricket by a Jamaican neighbor in 1960s London. I also had heard that the soundtrack was really good. (It is.)

Not to give away the plots, let alone the endings, but the “coincidences” between these two coming-of-age movies are fairly amazing.

Everything is Illuminated is a 2005 release based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s autobiographical novel and was directed by Liv Schreiber. The story: A young and neurotic American Jew (Wood) travels to the Ukraine to try to find the woman who saved his grandfather from a Nazi massacre during World War II. With the help of two locals – a gruff old man who is seemingly anti-Semitic and his disco-dancing grandson, as well as the old man’s show-stealing dog – they locate the woman living in a cottage in a sunflower field after myriad adventures accented in hilariously fractured English. The old man turns out to be a Jew who survived the massacre and the ending is, to say the least, bittersweet.

Wondrous Oblivion is a 2003 release written and directed by Paul Morrison. The story: Eleven-year-old David Wiseman (Sam Smith) is the son of German Jewish émigrés and had a grandparent who died in a Nazi death camp. He is crazy about cricket but no good at it. When a cricket-loving Jamaican family moves in next door in their poor and prejudiced London neighborhood , David is drawn to father Dennis (Delroy Lindo) and daughter Lilian (Yasmin Paige). He ends up being caught in the middle and has to choose between fitting in with his bigoted white neighbors and class-conscious school chums or standing up for his new friends. David, as well as his parents, do the right thing and the ending is, to say the least, quite sweet.

Well, you coulda knocked me over with a feather.

This is because the coincidences between these two very good (if not brilliant) movies are deep and both offer the same rather profound lesson: From the clash of cultures and prejudice can come understanding and comity, virtues that are in notably short supply in today’s screwed up world.

Turn off the stove. Turn off the TV. Take a blanket. Go outdoors. Walk to the place you can see the sky with the least amount of city light. Lie on the ground. Look up into the darkest part of the sky. Tonight you will see as many as 60 meteors an hour flash through the night sky.

The old people in my family, say this is the Sky Smithy hammering on the iron anvil. She is shaping raw silver buckles for the saddle straps of the Night Horses. They are the ones that pull the sun up from under the dark earth every night.

Usually invisible to humans, tonight you will see the sparks flying from her forge. The silver buckles must be made ready before first light… The mother of all, the Smithy of Heaven, will hammer and shape the silver. Her muscled arms will strike and strike with her great hammer, and the sparks from her labor will fly all through the night.

These meteor showers are called The Perseids, named after the mythic hero Perseus. And, the lost story that hardly anyone remembers is this one:

In the late Greek stories, Perseus was sent to retrieve the Golden Fleece which was being secreted by the writhing snake-headed Medusa, she who could turn a human to stone with her insane stare alone. The Gorgon monster Medusa was filled with the black poison of war and warring. She had no rational nor peaceable mind left. All humans feared her and would not go near her.

Except for Perseus, who confronted her with a large mirror, that reflected her evil face back to herself. SO startled was Medusa to see her own vicious and blood lusting face in the mirror, she was momentarily weakened. Then, Perseus unsheathed his sharp sword and slayed the mythic monster.

We have, so many of us, for years now, wandered from war to war. I count seven domestic wars in my lifetime, and two more I met in Central America. What can come, we ask ourselves, what can come for us who seem to be under the will of a force that inhales our money and our young, and exhales war.

Whether we are at war inside, outside, here, over there, whether war is brought on without our will or by our assent, or brought on by our own naiveté, lack of experience, slowness to record the underlying motives, quickness to be hungry for heroism… what can come in these times, especially as a ‘good enough for now’ nourishment for the soul?

Perhaps you’ve wondered who or what are those Night Horses that the Sky Smithy fires the metal to make the tack for the saddle… the saddle that rests on the spine just right, the bridal and bit that are not made cruel, for the horsemen, the horsewomen have faith… that the Night Horses know the way…

To slay the Gorgon; there’s an interior and psychological meaning to much of myth-making; often recording in the stories the weakness and strengths and strategies we might take to mend ourselves, or to restore vision. The instruction, if one could say, the ancients were writing to us who live here in the future, the instruction they may have given us in Perseus’ myth, might be this: To not fight evil by exhausting ourselves with railing only, but to also hold a mirror to it, so that it can dread itself with complete alarm for a moment…

and then to strike, whether with a votive or a vote, with an inclusion or an exclusion… regardless, to sever the evil thought system from the evil system of actions… to make certain the monstrous cannot act ever again.

Perseus was exhausted by his labor. But his mythic story, did not end there. The Medusa whose blood, even a drop, was said to poison any man who touched but a speck of it…. Thus, as she was slain and fell, from her blood, sprang an amazement. Instead of a cloned monster like herself rising from her blood, the great white horse, Pegasus; the winged being sprang fully formed from her blood.

Pegasus, one of the many winged horses who lives to be consanguineous with humans, to help them remember themselves. Out of evil, in the moment of its dying, springs the quintessential Night Horse who knows how to tow the sun back up from under the dark earth again. And again. And again.

It is not too much to say that such a being as Pegasus, such a force, such an attitude resides in the psyche, in us, and for us. In a world that ridicules soul daily, and scorns the reach of the soul that resides in each person, each in his or her own way… tonight, in the dark sky, you will see the Sky Smithy fashioning the silver buckles for the saddles of the Night Horses… the mares and stallions who all these eons, despite all else, now matter the difficulty, no matter how exhausted, no matter how bewildered, the great winged Night Horses still ride strong. They know the way.

Thee, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is your hometown like mine? Strange and sweet in its profound oddities?

Perhaps you remember the piece I wrote on TMV a few weeks ago that was big news in my hometown newspaper … it was about the man in the wheelchair who was at a gas station just across the road from where I grew up.

He wheeled himself in front of an idling 18 wheeler rig whose driver did not realize he was there. The big semi started forward, and the handlebars of the wheelchair stuck in the grill of the truck. The semi headed onto the interstate and rolled at 55mph for over five miles with the man in his wheelchair stuck on the front of it, before the police pulled him over…

Miraculously, the fellow in the wheelchair was still lodged in the truck’s grill, and the road-rider was unharmed. Several other drivers on the road rolling in the opposite direction had seen the man in the wheelchair fastened to the truck’s grill like some kind of bizarre hood ornament, and they thought they were hallucinating. Well, in the midst of their self-same hallucinations, several called the state patrol. You can imagine how those conversations went.

After it was all over, honest to gosh, the young man in the wheel chair said to reporters, “It was a nice ride. I wasn’t scared.”

Ok, so, that will prepare you for this next. I grew up in a rural area in a village of 600 people. Our town was about one mile long and 5 street wide with a US highway and a railroad track running through the middle of it. About 30minutes away was a larger town which still prints a daily newspaper. Yesterday, the headline was, Rain Heading This Way. Yes. It was.

Also on the front page yesterday was a story about how the green beans are not getting enough moisture and farmers are concerned. There was also a story about a shooting at a road house, a murder over gambling debt, and the mysterious disappearance of graveyard vases.

Interpretation: Surrounding is still farm country and the farmers need the rain. Corn was NOT knee-high on Fourth of July the way it was supposed to be. Green beans will turn out bitter if they don’t have enough water. Rain is a BIG story therefore. There are gambling dens and roadhouses all up and down the backwoods, and for whatever reason, people pack heat; some people way back there still sit on their porches with shotguns across their laps.

The graveyard vases were made of metal, and there is a ten-finger discount going on amongst itinerant homeless men who troll for metal to turn in to recyclers for money . Um, well, sure, we can give you fifty dollars for them there 102 funeral vases. Just found them, did you? Ok.

But here the story I really wanted to bring to you… like I said, if you, like me, come from a small village… ‘depiction is often stranger than fiction’ as in the following story. It is 4-H fair time back home right now and… look, I am pretty sure the guy being interviewed might have been an immigrant, or English not his first language, or syntax was just weird for a moment there, or the reporter omitted a clarification… but it’s your call… If it’s dehydration that was the problem, that’s one thing, but if it’s merely being ‘that way,’ geez, maybe all of humanity is endangered… and we all need to be ‘relaxed’ more…

Here you go:

Pig At Fair Dies Because of Stress
Tribune Staff Report
— A female Grand Champion pig that died at the 4-H Fair was not neglected, but probably died because of a high level of stress.

The gilt, or young female pig, was found dead in her pen Tuesday, said St. Joseph County 4-H Fair Board Director Lee Slavinskas.

“Earlier at the show, she was showing signs that she was stressed, and we relaxed her,” he said. “She was in heat, which puts a lot of stress on their bodies.”

According to fair veterinarians, Slavinskas said, the animal was not diseased nor carried an infection, so there isn’t a risk that other animals will become ill.

“All animals are checked when they’re brought in,” he said. “That animal got as much attention as it possibly could have gotten.”

To combat the heat, topping 90 degrees the past several days, the pigs are given plenty of water and have fans blowing on them constantly. 4-H leaders walk through the livestock barns hourly to make sure all the animals are safe and comfortable.

Pigs don’t perspire, Slavinskas said, and many animals are cared for better at the fair than at home.

“These are not household pets … she was a champ and sometimes, unfortunately, (death) happens the week of the fair.”

A wealthy, privileged, Brown alum–who is Black–notes the abiding truth of race in America. No matter how rich you are, no matter where you live, no matter what you do, if you’re Black, you’ll be treated Black.

But I’ll pose his question to the rest of y’all. Any White TMV commenters who come from economically privileged backgrounds, who attended elite universities, who have no criminal records and have committed no crimes, who have a respectable job, who are, in short, among the nation’s top-tier: how many times have you had a gun pointed at you by an American police officer (federal, state, or local?) with threatening intent? My tally is zero.

Of script-breaking and violence prevention.

Surviving in a growing climate of violence, aggression and competition is becoming a big challenge in the contemporary world, especially for children. So how does one retain one’s sanity?

It is always heartening when one hears about innovative methods to overcome the odds. And here comes the news about how Yoga is gaining in popularity among school kids ranging from four-year-olds to 12-year-olds in Britain.

No routine/classical Yoga for children. They are being taught yoga postures, breathing and relaxation techniques through adventure stories that capture a child’s imagination. And the results are encouraging.

“Everybody get into the lotus position…. A business that brings yoga to primary schools around the country is yielding startling results - quieter lessons, better test scores and more confident children,” reports Julie Ferry in The Independent.

“YogaBugs is a company that has trained more than 1,100 teachers in their dynamic yoga programme…Through government initiatives like the School Sports Partnership, these teachers are now seeing around 40,000 children a week take part in lunchtime and after-school yoga clubs, which aim to improve fitness, flexibility and concentration.”

For details please click here…