These two photos of my wife on our 10th anniversary trip - and two Bob Dylan songs for captions - break it down for me:

"I heard the deafening noise/ I felt transient joys/ I know they're not what they seem/ In this earthly domain/ Full of disappointment and pain/ You'll never see me frown/ I owe my heart to you/ And that's saying it true/ And I'll be with you when the deal goes down" - Bob Dylan from "When the Deal Goes Down"

"You can touch and twist/ And turn two kinds of doorknobs/ You can either go to the church of your choice/ Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital/ You'll find God in the church of your choice/ You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital/ And though it's only my opinion/ I may be right or wrong/ You'll find them both/ In the Grand Canyon/ At sundown" - Bob Dylan from "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie"

I’ve previously written on “When the Deal Goes Down” as the perfect love song for my wife here. She anchors both of these photos – and experiences – as she anchors my life.

And with a tip of my hat to NPR’s wonderful Tiny Desk Concert series. I never miss a single one.

I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011, from his last interview.

I wrote this poem while sitting through a church service in Tonga, at the Siasi Uesiliana Tauataina (Free Wesleyan Church) in Fakakai, Ha’apai.

“Sky-burster” is the literal translation of a word in Tongan (palangi) meaning foreigner - so named because, according to legend, the first foreign visitors to the islands materialized as if from the sky and were initially presumed divine.

Embedded after the poem is a short clip of Wendy and I going to church on the last Sunday before we left to return to United States, a country that feels like a bastion of secularism compared to Tonga. I wasn’t entirely sure that the video camera was appreciated, so for the short bit of the characteristically bombastic sermon that I recorded at the end of the clip, the camera is in my lap.

Sky-bursters, a poem

Under  the Southern Cross/Fixed before they imagined a sacrifice upon it/Congregating to observe transplanted traditions/Built over the graves of cannibal ancestors/Passing around the blood and the body/Take and eat, they do in remembrance.

Children cry over symbols of the sacrifice/Men, their fathers, unashamed to weep aloud/ Being dazed from a root they dug from the mountain/ A mystic cone that shakes and spews from somewhere deep, untouched/ Unearthed then crushed and mixed with water/ Take and drink before the drinking of the blood.

The narcotic grog contents peace passed understanding/ The ranting channeler of a top-hatted fiery fisher-of-men/Who cast in deep waters long ago beneath the Southern Cross/ And hauled up a prodigious load of souls/ Who have never yet been conformed into fishes out of water.

And the conjured sky-burster mixes with the unintended conjuring of others/ Native species long assumed buried with the cannibals:/ The spirit shark devours the secret breakers of taboos and 10 Commandments/ Bush devils haunt around gaudy quilt-strewn mounds/ Flying foxes, the spirits whose names have been forgotten/ An ancient throb seeps from holy liturgy/ And women rise from timber pews to flaunt a carnal plenty and raw nature.

Between the rote liturgies and shallow legacies pries the old, proud cannibal/ Who gnawed the energy of the spirits of the enemy/ And did this in remembrance under the Southern Cross/ Which is a bit crooked after all/ And might be and always have been/ An X that marks the spot in the sky/ From which old spirits burst again upon the scene.

I joined most of my family in Dixon, Missouri for a Thanksgiving reunion. My grandmother lives in a nearby nursing home and several of us visited her there.

She has been slowly losing her mind for several years. She has not been herself for a long time, and I am used to that. But I’d never seen her in a nursing home before. It was a shock to me when I first saw her being led, shuffling down the hallway, to greet us. She was never an excessively cheerful person but, more than ever, some essential spark of her person seemed missing.

She did seem to know us, though, even if it didn’t matter that much to her that we were there. And though she usually had a vacant look in her eyes, she remains capable of focusing and responding, as in the picture above. And she still looks beautiful to me.

Self portrait #1

In honor of my daughter’s 3rd birthday (which is today), I publish a selection of photographs she herself has taken over the past year.

Sylvie very deliberately sets up frames; and for every dozen or so pictures she takes, she usually takes one or two that are genuinely interesting. Cameras have a way of becoming involved in and altering subjects; but there is very little of that phenomenon in Sylvie’s photography. As she toddles discretely around clicking open the shutter on the various tableaux that she, for whatever reason, finds compelling, she offers a truly unfiltered view of her universe, and from her consistent vantage of about two and a half feet above the ground.

A quotation from Montaigne’s essay “Of the affection of fathers for their children” that I happened to be reading this morning as I make my way through The Complete Works (interpolation and emphasis, my own).

A true and well-regulated affection should be born and increase with the knowledge children give us of themselves; and then, if they are worthy of it, the natural propensity going along with reason, we should cherish them with a truly paternal love; and we should likewise pass judgment on them if they are otherwise, always submitting to reason, notwithstanding the force of nature. It is very often the reverse; and most commonly we feel more excited over the stamping, the games, and infantile tricks of our children than we do later over their grown-up actions, as if we had loved them for our pastime, like monkeys, not as men [and women]. And some supply toys very liberally for their childhood, who tighten up at the slightest expenditure they need when they are of age. Indeed it seems that the jealousy we feel at seeing them appear in the world and enjoy it when we are about to leave it makes us more stingy and tight with them; it vexes us that they are treading on our heels, as if to solicit us to leave. And if we had that to fear, then since in the nature of things they cannot in truth either be or live except at the expense of our being and our life, we should not have meddled with being fathers.

A bonus quotation from the same essay that strikes me as being well ahead of its time on the matter of corporal punishment. Writing in 1578, he said:

I condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul which is being trained for honor and liberty. There is a sort of servility about rigor and constraint; and I hold that what cannot be done by reason, and by wisdom and tact, is never done by force [...]. Leonor [...] is over six years old now, and has never been guided or punished for her childish faults [...] by anything but words, and very gentle ones. [...] I have seen no other effect of whips except to make souls more cowardly or more maliciously obstinate.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson from his essay “Circles” as quoted in a review of American Nietzsche, a new book that explores Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, and, regarding Nietzsche’s diverse popularity in America, explores the question: “What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?”

I’m really looking forward to this book.

Bonus discovery: To ready myself for this book, I decided to reread Emerson’s “Circles.” I spotted this in the corner of one of the pages of Google’s scanned edition of Emerson’s Essays: the fingers of the digitizer.