Hopeless Causes, Claretians, and Charisms

'La caridad me urge, me impele, me obliga a gritar.' -St. Antonio Maria Claret

'You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.' - St. Bernard of Clairvaux

'To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.' - St. Teresa of Avila

'Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword; wear humility rather than fine clothes.' - St. Dominic



With all that being said, in regards to my statement in the last post about there being no one-fits-all spirituality, I do not mean to say that some truths cannot be universal, nor either that admiring and utilizing elements of other traditions is inherently wrong or fatuous. But trading one inadequately-investigated tradition for superficial adherence to another, one set of misapprehended truths for another yet more confusing system, is every bit as goofy as Chesterton makes it sound. Familiarity is a no more sufficient basis for renouncing a spiritual tradition than it is for divorcing a spouse or vowing never again to read Dostoevsky or eat ice cream.

Augustine defended his use of Plotinus by likening it to the Jews taking the gold out of Egypt, and varied things from different sources may have especial resonance to individual seekers. What is necessary when confronted with all these sparkling jewels is a determined refusal either to make lead out of them or to appropriate what seems convenient or commonsensical while gravely mistaking its essence.

In that vein, there are as many different spiritualities available within Catholicism as there are Catholics. John Dunne, John Dear, John Main, and the fourteenth-century Dominican John Tauler have not only the same name but a shared focus on contemplation and meditation that would not be entirely unfamiliar to a real Buddhist. Martin de Porres, Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Antonio Claret, Cesar Chavez, Jean Vanier, and Simone Weil can give anyone a good start who wishes he could combine his love of the poor and the suffering with his love of God.

And this is where the saints come in. There are two primary ways to look at the saints. One is as Friends of God. They did so well in this lifetime that they have God's ear in the next, so while you are praying to God directly that the Red Sox please, please, please take the pennant this time, you can also suggest to St. Jude that this may be the sort of hopeless case worthy of his attention as an advocate. If you are struggling in school, you can ask a brilliant scholar like Aquinas to help you along, or you can petition someone who battled the same challenges to at least give you the courage to keep plugging away diligently.

The other way to see them is as Heroes for Grownups. Saints can indeed be intimidating: they were saints, after all, and we are probably not. But each is as memorable for what he or she overcame as for what s/he accomplished, and meditating on those struggles is often where we can gain the most. They were also individuals, with distinct tendencies and temperaments, walking very different paths toward union, and just as we feel greater sympathy toward particular people we meet in daily life, so, too, will different saints' stories seem more or less apropos of our own journeys, strivings, and weaknesses.

I don't know why people are scared of saints. I think particularly if we refuse to idolize them, to make them into something they were not (i.e., perfect), we can see in their examples how far a small, flawed, and eminently human being - possibly a human being who shared some of our own fears and failures - can get in this life by not letting those fears and weaknesses surmount him.

Mustangs, Ministers, and the Misery of Politics

Like you, I'm often scared of religious people. They can be arrogant, preachy, narrow, provincial, and very, very poor listeners. Perhaps also like you, I often find academics to share many of the same attributes. Both groups also tend to associate solely with their own kind, which does little to broaden either their experience or their perspective.

In between are people who can combine rationality with spirituality, and who are possessed of a faith profound and vast enough to encompass new facts and new experiences: life, in other words. I was unexpectedly impressed with the Orange County pastor, Rick Warren, who is apparently very famous and hosted the question-and-answer session with the two presidential candidates. I admit that I didn't watch the whole thing; I'm going to have to do it in parts, since politicians scare me more than anyone else. But here is a guy whose whole life is built around his faith, who brought his little church up from meetings at local public high schools (Go Mustangs!) and other such buildings to the fourth largest church in the United States, who is an evangelical, for Heaven's sake - and who asked about the sanest question I have heard anyone ask a candidate.

He put the question the following way: 'A lot of good legislation dies because of partisan politics and party loyalty keeps people from really putting America’s best first. Could you give me an example of where you led against your party's interest ... and really maybe against your own best interest, for the good of America?' While every overpaid political 'journalist' unceasingly strives to provide the gossip-hungry public 'news' of candidates' 'flip-flopping' with as salacious a tone as if they were announcing yet another politician's sex scandal, any sane citizen realizes that as facts change - be they borders, heads of state, environmental conditions, social problems, diplomatic relations, demographics, economic conditions, or anything else within the purview of a aspirant to high political office or a lowly voter - our position on those facts might be a more sensible one were it to take into account that they no longer mean quite what they once did.

Let us take an avowedly religious person. He or she believes that some values and acts are always absolutely good, and likewise that some things are always wrong. His or her choices are thus always far more restricted than someone for whom all categories are, at least in theory, potentially fluid. But in even in this case, which I hold up to be the most rigid stance politically - even from this most rigid perspective one thing could have been right under previous circumstances and now completely indefensible ethically. Ergo, it's not 'flip-flopping,' but serious consideration, reflection, and analysis of facts. If Geo. W. Bush were to say in light of current circumstances that when he met with Putin in 2001 he should perhaps have been wearing his bifocals when he 'looked the man in the eye... and was able to get a sense of his soul,' I would be grateful for his new more reflective and less hasty analysis. I might think he was rash, gullible, or arrogant as regards his earlier pronouncement, but I would not impugn his current stance on the basis of its divergence from his previous statement.

So, that an evangelical Christian, the sort of person many people perceive as being the most inflexible, the worst at listening, and the least amenable to cooperation, should suggest that in the execution of the office of President the good of the country might conceivably at times trump strict adherence to Party loyalty - well, it fills me with the sort of faith, hope, and goodwill that I usually only experience while crying during films about brave dogs or talking beavers made for third-graders.

Mud Floors, Tibetan Sephardim, and Tuscany in SE Jung Guo

In other news, I had an absolutely lovely conversation tonight about (what else?) theology (with a friend soon to depart for another hemisphere.) He gave me a book which was absolutely perfect in many ways, not least of which is that it is entirely relevant to a rant I have not yet given into, since I'm terribly lazy and would have to buy another little easel in order to have three books propped up around the little laptop in order satisfyingly to vent my spleen.

But, now I will feel impelled to buy my little easel (is it truly an easel? I don't think so; I don't know what they are called, but people who collect things with cats on them use them to display plates with either state insignias or details of Botticelli's greatest hits printed in Fujian) and tell you what the Dalai Lama had to say about 'Tibetan Buddhists' raised in Farmington in a John Main Seminar in the '80s or '90s. The Lama, not the Farmingtonians. I don't know that many were raised in a John Main Seminar. But I am open to possibilities. Not to mention, in the distant future, good nutrition.

In the meantime (not to hold all 7.3 of you in too-great suspense), here is how John Dunne, who is neither John Dear nor that John Donne, weighed in briefly - and similarly - on the issue: 'I think of a Sufi sheik I met on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem who told me and the two young Israeli women who were with me, 'Go deep in your own religion.' Okay, fine, I already know which book I'm trading him. But God bless those Sufis, eh? Here is the spiritual work one Naqshbandi master gave to an aspirant: Pray nothing, think nothing, say nothing, but 'Oh, God,' all day every day. When the disciple came back saying he had succeeded in that task, the teacher told him no longer to speak it, but to breathe the prayer in his thoughts, to think and feel nothing else but 'Oh, God; Oh, God,' all day. After internalizing this, after training his spirit to unceasing dhikr, one day a loose beam fell from the roof of his house onto the pupil's head. The blood that dropped to the ground spelled Allah on the mud floor.

'Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal -

Tout ça m’est bien égal.'

So, my car got broken into last night. Now, when I say 'broken into,' I'm not being entirely accurate: I don't lock this car, on the basis that the window that would be broken in a break-in would be worth more than the rest of the car. Moreover, I don't need to lock it since I store my gold bricks and rubies elsewhere than in the mighty Mazda. And the stockpile of untraceable semi-automatic weapons? The hundred-pound cache of smuggled drugs? Elsewhere, too. There is not much in there to steal, most particularly since we're not in Oregon, where the stack of empty Diet Coke bottles might net up to seventy-five cents at the recycling station.

That fact notwithstanding.

They did steal a little cheap clip-on light from the visor, a hair clip on the same visor, a car cellphone charger that probably works when used in a car with a working cigarette lighter, one pair of pointy, high, terrifyingly green pumps in a size suitable only for me (in a fiercely festive mood) or an eight-year-old Miss Cutie Princess pageant contestant in Little Rock, and maybe about $1.75 in change. I imagine they were shocked and angry at their lousy prize package, because they also stole one-half of a few pairs of shoes, including a charming but too-tight-even-for-me set of size 4 1/2 loden-green wedges. Since I can only guess they have as much use for single shoes as the original owner, I have to assume the intent was solely to wreck someone's day.

What is goofy about this (in addition to the idea of any chucklehead thinking my dodgy, unlocked hatchback a good choice for plundering) is that just last night I thought to myself how long it had been since my car had got 'broken into' last, and I also thought about thinking about moving some of the shoes back into the house into their little shoe homes. But my arms were full of Diet Coke and dim sum at the time, so I decided to do the thinking later.

What is also goofy about this is that there were some perfectly good single-serving maple syrups and hot sauces in the glove box they showed no interest in. Not to mention the almost-entirely-full box of Red Vines, black licorice style.

The Sickness Unto Death (Not.)

And, lest you all think I am so holy and attuned to the wishes of my brethren that I am going to follow this gentleman's urging and end my life because I don't like Billy Joel, here is my reader's guide to the personal weblog, or at least to this one, and here is where I (uncharitably) address prospective and actual readers' concerns over the quality and content of this thing. I know I'm not Proust, but unless you have the very worst teacher in the world and this blog is assigned reading, it's kind of unskillful to waste time pouring out hatred when you can just click a button and go elsewhere. It does seem a bit silly to read stuff you hate, doesn't it?

Nanny Bloomberg

I do have more important things I could talk about; why, tomorrow I hope to sharpen about 30 knives for a meal program I volunteer at. However, this story from the 19th in the London Times (go down to the penultimate bullet point) about a memo distributed to Bloomberg's London staff made me a) cringe and throw up a tiny bit in my mouth and b) wonder whether James in the Tokyo office has likewise received such a thorough explanation of the precautions to take regarding the use and proper stewardship of plastic water bottles.

What it neglects to address is what staffers are to do if they own a permanent marker themselves.


"'These bottles are yours to look after and as stated in the original message, you will only get one,' it says. To ensure 'your bottle does not go walkies and [you] are drinking out of your own one and no one elses [sic]' it might be an idea to mark them with your name. 'There are permanent markers in the stationery cupboards you can use.'"


Anyway, James is the one I got this gossip bench from:

The Bidding Starts at $.99! (act now?)

From EBay:

'Description

This is a one of a kind Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus Cheetos! See how she is holding baby Jesus and looking down at him. It also looks like an angel. Depends on how you look at it. Now is your chance to own this rare and unique religious collectable! Approx. 1 1/2 inches long.

Good Luck and Happy Bidding!'

Kaneohe, HI

But Mochi Doesn't Wear Loincloths!

I have only two things to say.

One is: 'Diplomacy is not synonymous with talking,' and the other is:

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Diplomacy ≠ Talking? Diplomacy ≥ Talking? Diplomacy < Talking?

Alright, children, bubble tea is not synonymous with tapioca; religion is not synonymous with faith; politics is not synonymous with guanxi; and cole slaw in Kotzebue is not synonymous with Matanuska Valley cabbage. But I would expect to encounter a fair bit of the latter in any of these cases should I find myself confronted with the former.

I understand (perhaps) (in the most gracious reading) that what Ms. Rice meant to say was something like 'Diplomacy is not coextensive with talking,' mixed with a more minatory something akin to 'We have reconceived the notion of diplomacy such that a range of things from threats to preemptive strikes can now be put in the overlappy middle bit of a Diplomacy/War Wenn diagram.' She just didn't think Americans would understand 'coextensive,' 'reconceived,' or 'Wenn diagram.'

And more power to her: we don't. But I assume the esteemed Secretary did fairly well on her GRE, and even if it were more years ago than her youthful looks would imply, putting that zingy soundbite in the lamentable form she chose makes one want to ask, 'If not synonyms, then what are they? You've juxtaposed them; it seems you've counterposed them. Now tell us the nature of their relationship, if it is not one of synonyms. Diplomacy is to Talking as _________ is to what, Ms. Rice?'

To help her and us out, here are some choices of sample GRE analogy questions from this site.

COLOR: SPECTRUM::

a. tone: scale
b. sound: waves
c. verse: poem
d. dimension: space
e. cell: organism

HEADLONG:FORETHOUGHT::

a. barefaced: shame
b. mealymouth: talent
c. heartbroken: emotion
d. levelheaded: resolve
e. singlehanded: ambition

SEDATIVE: DROWSINESS::

a. epidemic: contagiousness
b. vaccine: virus
c. laxative: drug
d. anesthetic: numbness
e. therapy: psychosis

I don't want to sound unduly cynical, but I suspect Ms. Rice is hinting that for the departing administration it may be that

diplomacy: talking :: gladiator: kagami mochi.

'Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.'

So said the epicure Brillat-Savarin, and while an ontological argument based on that aphorism would be hard to sustain in many quarters (or so I pray, at any rate: the idea of my body decomposing into lardons of cured pork and boxes of Good-n-Plenty while the walls of my veins leaked Barolo and Amarone into the velvet walls of my coffin strikes far more terror in me than the normal image which -disturbingly, perhaps - doesn't disturb me in the least), and the more transcendent aspects of his musings on gastronomy and gourmandise are equally unsuited to the realities of our present world, the above quote, read entirely wrongly, of course, and viewed through an ethical rather than aesthetic lens, is what I want to get to here today.

(Update 06.12.08: That was really all one sentence. Someone, save me from myself.)

People like to think of globalism as a brand-new phenomenon. And I will admit that with the population of the world so much greater than ever before, every nation or region has a greater impact on others: I have more people producing more waste over here in country X, so there is a greater chance of some of it reaching you in country Y, for example. But the Chinese have been a global power for millennia, over land and by sea. The silver in Chinese coffers plundered by the British opium trade and subsequent wars and concessions was largely from South American mines, while the tea that the British came to love was, as we all know, an ancient part of Chinese gastronomic culture. Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy, and the cotton plantations of the southern United States arose to fill the growing gap between India's long history of production and current need, while the US is now poised in coming years to become the leader in 'hauling coals to Newcastle' quite literally -- not to mention the huge markets of China, India, Russia, as well as many smaller countries in the developing world.

So.

It may have been the case before, but now that the stakes are manifestly higher we admit it more readily: we are all in this together. Even George W. Bush has come to acknowledge that, at least as far as the ozone layer is concerned, human beings can have some kind of corporate and individual impact on the world as a whole. And I believe that food, our use of it, our approach to it, our taking it for granted or choosing to be deliberate in our choices, can be a significant aspect of living up to our values.

Every left-leaning, bunny-hugging simpleton will recite the evils of McDonalds anytime there is a perceptible lapse in conversation. And, in the Northwest at least, anyone desirous of impressing upon his audience the virtuousness of his life and lower intestine will not fail to (re-) state (the obvious:) his unswerving allegiance to the aisles of Whole Foods for all his home cooking and (natural) grooming products needs.

But in the same way that my sending a check every once in a while to Mercy Corps or the Red Cross does not confer something akin to proactive moral immunity, a lifetime's absolution, or mean I thus have carte blanche to perform human sacrifices or set the neighbor's house on fire because I did good elsewhere, trusting a preacher, or a friend, or - for heaven's sake! - a retailer, as gatekeeper for all our individual, specific ethical choices sells our own conscience and powers of rational contemplation short. There simply is no one guidebook containing every possible moral conundrum an individual can face in the moment. And I think that before we can get to 'we are what we eat' in its moral sense, we have first to accept that we are what we do, overall. We are the choices we make, the mistakes we regret, the issues we feel compelled to stand for, and the hand we do or do not offer a suffering soul.

How this all ties in to food, not to mention my enduring and recurrently proven faith in the human voice coming through miles of wires and anonymity and preconceptions, and not forgetting, as well, my own well-deserved humility and willingness to put crow in cream sauce on my own dinner menu when appropriate, will have to wait until next time, as this preamble to what I intended to say is already too long without even having a body yet!

Lesbian Flavored Yogurt: The Sixth Horsewymyn of the Apocalypse?

In Greece, when you go to a regular neighborhood market looking for yogurt, you choose between the texture/thickness of the yogurt, and the type of milk. Perhaps at a chain supermarket you can get some wacky sugary ones from Sweden with berries in them, but there is not a whole aisle devoted to 533 different varieties as there is here.

And I for one am sick of yogurt. I am sick of there being 533 kinds, I am sick of wanting the taste of yogurt and then being unable to find a yogurt-flavored yogurt, and I am sick of the ads with the poorly-substantiated claims for the yogurt that makes your bowel movements 'regular' and likewise for the other yogurts that make you lose weight.

But I am utterly at my wits' end with the ostensibly unending, years old series of ads for yogurt in which two vapid bints staged in various social situations attempt to one-up each other in tiresome encomia to their favorite bacteria-laden dessert brand. Throughout the years, after a first unwitting encounter with this ad, I have taken what precautions I can not to hear any version of it. However, like so many others, I am human, too, and I recently heard and saw what I imagine to be the newest incarnation.

Here the hideous duo are kitted up in over-the-top stereotypes of the Bad Bridesmaid's Dress. After looking this ad up in an attempt to find some of the actual dialogue (in lieu of watching Lifetime programming for days on end hoping for a chance to see a commercial I don't want to see), I learned that the African-American component of this unctuous couple is famous for being, and playing, a lesbian, and thus some of her lines can be read as in-jokes to those in the know.

I am neither in the know nor in the care because these ads are wretched and unwatchable. Extradiagetical biobits cannot redeem their inspidity. I would still know nothing after seeing one of them about what sets this particular yogurt apart from similar brands or styles except that a lesbian who plays a lesbian on television got paid to wear a puffy dress and say vapid things about it. I do not surround myself exclusively with lesbians, to be sure, and I have not attended an unusual amount of weddings, I confess, but my (admittedly limited) experience and keen intuition tell me that lesbians are no more likely than any other subset of wedding guests to sneak away from the festivities with a friend to eat yogurt.

I realize it is just an ad. I realize the point of the ad is to make me want to eat their yogurt, not to present an accurate 30-second snapshot of American suburban reality. And I further realize that 99.9 percent of all catered or preplated food little resembles, in taste, texture, or even color, the freshly-cooked dishes it vainly attempts to duplicate or evoke (take that, Herbfarm, you pretentious, hideously-decorated, lukewarm-food-serving, taco truck without wheels!).

I know all that. When I went to a music conference in BC for the arts council in my town I lived on Pellegrino, Diet Coke, minibar Jelly Bellys, vodka gimlets and sourdough rolls for four days, because the thing went on all day and all night and there was no way to leave the hotel. And whether it is a conference or a wedding or funeral, I would never eat my one-of-three-thousand tepid chicken breasts over stale brown rice with a day-old shallot-dill sauce. However, I would also not tuck two yogurt containers and spoons in my purse so that I could invite my best friend out to the veranda for curdled milk with high-fructose fruit compote while everyone else was drinking enough and having a sufficiently festive time dancing and congratulating the happy couple not to trouble themselves overmuch about the realities of catered food.

But let's say I were the sort of person destined to find the hidden pain in every experience. I know the food is going to be wretched, I know I'm going to be petulant, and I don't want to risk ruining yet another social occasion for my significant other. The hosted bar alone may not suffice; perhaps I'll get violently drunk like the last four times and tell the hosts just what I think of their elastic chicken breasts and scorched sauce.

No, this (ridiculous and entirely implausible scenario) calls for forethought. I eat a bit in advance and tuck a tiny treat into the handbag, perhaps. A treat, ladies and gentlemen, not a one-cup serving of nonfat bacterial cultures. Yogurt is not a treat. In this country it is punishment food for people who think they are fat.

The risible point of this and other equally cloying ads is that by adding loads of sugar and a portion of denatured fruit, the punishment food becomes a pallid - but good enough when you're starving yourself! - simulacrum of the sort of foods that always have a lot of sugar, as well as flavor, texture, and fat. The consumer buys the 'lemon meringue pie' yogurt because she has resolved to deny herself lemon meringue, and all other pies, cakes, tortes, and pastry, until she has lost a certain number of pounds. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for those of you who hadn't realized it up to this point, there is no transubstantiation involved. It's really still nonfat sugared yogurt - and it's really still crap.

Nonetheless, here are some of the sighingly orgasmic, fatuous (mmmm, and - hamfistedly ironic! Get it: not catch the bouquet? I'm a lesbian!!!) sighs of the two bridesmaids as they curb their hunger and sartorial angst with spoonfuls of Lactobacillus and Streptococcus:


"This yogurt is not-catching-the-bridal-bouquet good."
"It's burning this ugly bridesmaid dress good."
"It's getting out of these uncomfortable shoes good."


I'm in too much pain to delve into why one of them should be so disturbed by being paired with an usher shorter than she is; clearly the job description must be a more, em, encompassing one that in the past if physical compatibility is such a large part.

...like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling space and heaven

'Other states indicate themselves in their deputies, but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors; - but always most in the common people. Their manners, speech, dress, friendships; - the freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the picturesque looseness of their carriage, their deathless attachment to freedom, their aversion to everything indecorous or soft or mean, the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one State by the citizens of all other States, the fierceness of their roused resentment, their curiosity and welcome of novelty, their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy, their susceptibility to a slight, the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors, the fluency of their speech, their delight in music (the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul), their good temper and open-handedness, the terrible significance of their elections, the President's taking off his hat to them, not they to him, - these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.' --Walt Whitman

I am seeing less and less unrhymed poetry in this terribly significant election as it continues. I admit that for a while I was almost excited; it felt not unlike a sporting event, albeit with rather grave stakes: so many strong candidates, shoo-ins Giuliani and Clinton toppled or well-matched by underdogs, a seeming unusually rich diversity of candidates, all in the midst of two wars, a nascent recession, raging global anti-American sentiment, a tormented and much-reviled administration, and the mortgage crisis and falling housing prices simultaneous with soaring fuel and heating costs.

Not to be glum, but the fact is I don't think anyone is up to the task. Not the candidates we have, nor anyone else. However, the enormity and variety of these and other problems at least serve to illustrate the scope and difficulty of the challenges awaiting the next sworn defender of the Constitution, while the risible pettiness of so many campaigns thus far demonstrate how little suited to the task are the candidates, the two viable political parties, and the campaign system.

To begin with, apart from Ron Paul and John Edwards (and may God bless both of them and grant us a future in which we will have more Candidates with Individual Platforms), and bracketing John McCain for the moment, the nature of the system, or process, has ensured that our selection at this stage of the campaign consists of candidates trying to prove that they are the most Republican of the Republicans, or the most Democrat of the Democrats, as those terms have come to be understood in recent years. Not only does this result in exhausting recitations of party platitudes, but we are also subjected to brain-numbing internecine schoolyard taunts as candidates for this insanely demanding position attempt to persuade us not that they are agile of mind and able to rise to new challenges with brave, fresh ideas or established, proven strategies (knowledge of which gleaned from long immersion in world and American history and political science) -- but that whatever fresh hell emerges during their tenure they will not be blinded by global or domestic realities and instead reliably make decisions based on what most conforms to current Party ideology, and damn the torpedoes.

Kim Jong-Il would be proud.

This does not solely result in a lack of choice (who are these candidates? what do they really stand for? what would they say were they allowed to be candidates, rather than merely apparatchiks? alright, fine, I guess I'll vote for the one with better hair), but as well an acculturation to it, a (tragic, really) resigned sense of This is how it is, then, I suppose...

And therefore we just live with it, and sooner or later we won't know any better. We listen to the Democrats one by one say universal health care is nice, and we let each Republican in turn assert that his respect for life is greater than that of all his fellows. And neither getting inner-city children liver transplants nor preventing suburban pregnancies from terminating has anything to do with the other 9,000 components of the job.

And this is a job, after all (megalomania and messiah complexes notwithstanding), and one that, moreover, involves a great deal more than thumping a pulpit. One that, indeed, will necessarily involve a great deal of ratiocination, negotiation, argumentation, and diplomacy. That we have a Constitution as well as separation of powers and a great big elected legislative branch means that this country cannot be run by the Old Testament, or Sharia, or the Klingon code. Some acknowledgment of this fact, a nod here and there to the (political?) realities of politics and governance, not to mention the nature of a republican state, would go a long way toward lessening the resemblance of most candidates to lip-synching monkeys.


But this stultifying sameness, this need for all serious contenders to prove themselves the most rigid Party Man, stifles true debate. The sole perceptible difference between Clinton and Obama at this point appears to be that Clinton is a white woman and Obama is a black man. Under ideal circumstances, that would be a less than convincing pitch in either case. Sadly, however, because it is all that we have, that means we get to base our Democratic-candidate analysis and decision upon which hairstyle we would prefer to look at for four to eight years. Clinton's has more room for variety, and not merely in terms of cut but potentially color, as well, so that is well to bear in mind. As for the Republicans struggling to convince us that the one time they casually dropped the the word 'choice' in 1972 they were really referring to the embarras de richesse at Baskin-Robbins, the one-upsmanship is equally otiose.

Two results come to mind: one is that due to all the ludicrous ideological sniping and personal insults we are confronted with a constructed antagonism between all same-party candidates until the end of the Primaries, at which point two of these hitherto (radically, as we were told incessantly) incompatible individuals will alter their rhetoric entirely and embrace each other as long-lost clan brothers, devoted adherents to the same glorious cause momentarily blinded by other concerns now forgotten.

The second nausea-inducing consequence of this doctrinaire, blindly party-centric approach to promulgating and maintaining a 'platform' is the apotheosis of rigidity. Any candidate who has reconsidered, moderated, or changed a position is lambasted - regardless of issue or consequence - as alternately traitorous (to the Party) or (the lesser charge) weak-willed, a 'flip-flopper,' insufficiently prophetic or, more accurately, too willing to take changing circumstances into account. In other words, circumstance, fact, geopolitical knowledge, the Constitution, wisdom, and the long- and short-term good of the country should not determine policy: Party doctrine must.

To my mind, however, the ability to consider new facts and developments is an asset; what comes of utilizing this skill can be good or bad, but of itself and independent of consequence it is a virtue and a blessing. Certainly changing course radically is not always the best option, but neither is sticking to a course of action or a mode of thought when it is patently not working. What does work is being able to choose among various options, and that possibility is predicated on being able to think, consider, analyze -- something apparatchiks are not paid to do. I used to believe in Santa Claus, and I used to wear footed pyjamas. I long ago changed my position on both, and I have never since awakened of a morning filled with regret or self-loathing over being weak willed, reckless, or capricious from having altered my stance. In the best of all possible worlds, political candidates and elected officials would be granted similar permission to evaluate, assimilate, contemplate, and apply new information as they see fit --and be adjudged on the consequences of their decisions rather than being pilloried for the audacity of daring to think.

I'll Take Sanity -- and Make It a Double.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed the hiatus as much as I have. I will no doubt get around to what I consider Grave Issues soon enough, but for today I have only the following lament, regarding the presidential primaries thus far:

It is, as is frequently the case, that people are idiots. Women vote for Clinton, African-Americans vote for Obama, people who like Chuck Norris support Huckabee, fundamentalists are scared of Romney because he's not their type of fundamentalist, and people under sixty are scared of McCain due to his age.

All of it boggles my admittedly weak mind: it has never occurred to me that the paramount considerations in my deliberations about candidates' suitability for the job should center around selecting the person who looked most like me, wore the same sort of undergarments as me, observed the same rites, or had a similar background. I for one don't care in the slightest if the winner is someone with whom I fancy I would enjoy riveting conversation over a glass of wine (or, in the case of Huckabee and Romney, over root-beer floats at the ice-cream parlor). (And, of course, in the case of John Edwards, pin-shaped bottles of domestic beer at the bowling alley on Rock-n-Bowl Nite.)

After all, this isn't an election for Student Body President. It is, or at least should be, a quite serious decision. We have seen the sorts of things that can go wrong. And yet, for the position of Commander-in-Chief of the sole (for now) remaining superpower, Baptists are voting for the Baptist, Mormons are voting for the Mormon, and people with wombs are voting for the Mom in the group. The job is so much larger than Roe v. Wade, creationism, or immigration; it has an enormous international, and diplomatic (well, ideally) component, as well, for but one example, and yet it seems the bulk of the populace is treating it with approximately the same level of deliberation, soberness, maturity and dispassion as would be required in deciding which of the Village People is their favorite, or whether Angelina Jolie or Gwen Stefani is hotter.

I realize the field will be narrowed later, but if it is narrowed by these sorts of emotional, juvenile, fatuous decisions, we will deserve whatever we get -- and that four years could be even longer than the last eight.

My spectre around me night and day

Like a wild beast guards my way...

Dost thou not in pride and scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn,
And with jealousies and fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

There are various reasons I don't own a cat. One is that my bed does not have a roof.

To a cat, however, it looks like it has a roof, because it looks like it has sides, due to its having curtains where sides would be on the sort of thing that has them. Consequently, when the neighbor's cat comes over, he (or she: I have no idea), being a cat, frequently wants to get onto the nonexistent roof, and to accomplish this jumps from the low chest, to the tall lingerie chest, up the curtains, and then, using the tops of the curtains and his claws, inches his way - precariously and flattened out because there is about an inch of clearance - to the far end, from which he still believes, until he gets there, that he can leap to the top of the armoire.

Since he in fact cannot, he instead just sits there, discomfited and increasingly petulant, until I put on a padded suit, goaltender's mask and gloves and reach to get him down.



A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime. -Mark Twain

Your Tuscan Holiday Awaits. In Fredericton.

And while we are on the subject of appalling taste, I would like to go to Tuscany for a moment, if you don't mind. Not the real Tuscany, of course, but the false, 'fauxed' Tuscany of interior designers and housebuilders and underpaid furniture painters in China.

I am not certain when this started, as I am a delicate soul and try not to notice things that will wound me. I still remain unaware, for example, that people use bed sheets sewn from tee-shirt material. But it has been going on at least a few years: the first 'Tuscan Square' restaurant cum 'Tuscan Lifestyle' shopping plaza went up in 1997 in Rockefeller Center. And I don't fault Americans or anyone else for wishing they had more time to sit around drinking brunello and eating good olives. It's just that they don't actually live in Tuscany, and that drywall from 1997 made to look like cracking marble or rotting lumber is still drywall from 1997. (Notice in the decorating example left that the ceiling has been painted, as well, to make you believe you are simultaneously outside in the Tuscan sun and inside a 'Tuscan' dining room with real faux masonry!)

One of the problems with attempting to copy something is that you are unlikely to get it right. Think of any number of 'period films' and you'll realize it's not just a matter of adding in a few Studebakers and bakelite phones, but being able to resist, as well, current fashions in such seeming minutiae as eyebrows, lip shape, location of hair partings, and how to line (or not line) eyes. A film made in 1984 about Joan of Arc or Marie Antoinette will always look like a film made in 1984. Likewise, you're not fooling anyone with your 'Tuscan villa' in Manitoba or Missouri.

Nor do I understand why someone would wish to try. On the one hand, if I am overtaken by the urge to stay in an Alsatian chateau, that urge is predicated on the Alsatian chateau being in Alsace. Not in Edmonton, and not in Buenos Aires. As for 'Tuscany,' no amount of 'timeworn' copper pots, 'sun-drenched accents,' hideous pre-cracked 'majolica' knockoffs, 'Old-World' murals of grapes and vineyards, dining tables that 'cleverly' incorporate wine racks, or wooden beams 'aged' by having the gardener beat them with tire chains are going to evoke anything other than sadness and dyspepsia in a reasonable person.

On the other hand, there is a persistent belief here in an inexorable correlation between price and worth. I remember someone proudly and wistfully showing me a pre-aged, pre-yellowed, 'crackle-finished,' 'French Provincial' (I think, although it is easy to get these things wrong, and, frankly, I tried not to look at it too long) formal dining set he was soon to need to replace, once his estranged spouse's boyfriend's wife was completely moved out of her residence. 'You can't imagine how expensive this was,' he whispered as his hand caressed its 'crackled' corner gently, believing (quite reasonably, under normal circumstances) that only with this knowledge would I be able fully to appreciate its 'timeworn,' 'Old World' charm, and grasp by extension the measure of the sort of man willing to lay down thousands of dollars for a Sino-Gallic gamboge monstrosity such as this, with its premature patina so skillfully achieved through the meticulous application of coats of various subtly contrasting tints overlain with caustic solvents and a gloss finish by 75-cents-an-hour artisans in Guangdong.

Clearly, his revelation had a rather different effect than that intended. Nonetheless, I cannot help hoping I am not alone in this, that someone else, wherever he may be, finds the existence of a series of tract homes (with 'old world charm' and 'individual Tuscan flavor'!) called Toscano as odious and incomprehensible as it patently is. Not to mention the 'Tuscan' salt shakers, 'Tuscan' latrines, and 'Tuscan' condo kitchenettes one cannot help but encounter no matter how assiduous or numerous the precautionary measures undertaken. I am starting to feel as though I am living inside an Escher drawing of a purgatorial pizzeria in which each step I take leads me not to a door, not to respite or sanctuary, but to another stairway up to another 'marble'-columned, plastic-grape-arbor-festooned, trompe-l'oeuil toilet-wall mural that doesn't trompe anyone.

And if anyone has the vaguest notion what the following sentence means, I'm all ears. I, for one, have never hid any gold in any of my 'furthermost crevices', and I shudder to contemplate the day when that would seem desirable or well-advised: The earth's hues in ranges from blistering yellow like the sun itself to the concentrated gold's like those she hides in her furthermost crevices are used throughout this theme.

'Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.' Just don't say that in the Ladies' Department.

Tonight I watched a very pleasing movie in which Anthony Hopkins plays what would otherwise be my deceased stepfather were the character concerned not based on another real dead person. It was The Fastest Indian, and I had wanted to see it for a long time, not least because Indians are an integral part of my Ideal Man, the bench-pressing, PhD-in-theology-holding, sartorially scrupulous polyglot with a distaste for 'comic opera' matched only by his weakness for Sephardic love songs. Although I had in mind more the kind you can sit up on, and have me ride pillion.

That fact notwithstanding, we ate raviolis in a lovely intense red sauce and drank a deep Umbrian with an extremely sweet and fancy dog. All, I suppose, that was missing was the motorbike ride, but it is approximately one degree Fahrenheit outside, and thus prohibitive of fahren in anything without a roof and sides, and anyway even though I had wanted to buy one last year I didn't. And with platform shoes having once again gone the way of the seersucker suit, I suspect my chance of reaching the ground at stop signs has come and gone.

The only downside to the whole thing was having ruined a dress I have never worn. Somewhere near the 'vanity,' which is also the clothes-steaming zone when it needs to be, a tiny bottle of carrot oil had disgorged itself all over the floor. It being a long dress, I first dragged a bit of the ends in the oil unknowingly before lifting it into proper steaming position. Following that, and still not knowing what I had already done, I dropped it, halter back, ruching, tiers, and all, straight into the viscous orange puddle.

While on the one hand I am not the sort of girl who becomes unduly attached to material things, and have in fact rid myself of nearly all of them more than once and some of those times quite wittingly, in this case I am genuinely a bit distressed. Not only had I never worn it, not only did I feel I had an occasion that suited, but the dress alone was something. Firstly, it was satin, and secondly, it was olive drab. To me, that is akin to having an Amarone in one hand and six canelés in the other with a vat of almond cream on hand just in case, while one nice someone massages my feet and another pets my (silky when in its rare natural state) hair.

However, the most egregiously grievous wrong of this entire bout of hideous misfortune is that the bloody thing fit! Normally I am reduced to tears in dressing rooms, save for those rare occasions when there is an exhusband around to ferry ever-smaller sizes back and forth so that I don't have to skulk to the rack in longjohns and choler, and to remind me soothingly that I'd be just fine in Laos.

But this dress wasn't like that. It wasn't one of the sort that make one feel guilty for never having topped 92 and usually hovering around 89. No poor tailor was ever going to be begged and bribed with chocolates to tear it apart and take five sizes off it. It fit, and as well succeeded in making me look nearly lady-shaped. The ruching around the hips even gave the clear suggestion that I had some.

It didn't use to be this way, you know. When I was in high school and college I could buy clothes and not have to donate blood plasma to pay my tailoring bills. Then, the weight of the average American increased, and kept increasing. And as clothes companies do not exist primarily to keep me looking nice, but rather to turn a profit, clothing sizes have increased to accommodate demand. US sizes are about six sizes larger than when an attempt at standardization began in the Forties and Fifties.

Another factor is 'vanity sizing,' and this area is problematic for me. I have empathy for someone not wanting to buy something labeled size 20, assuredly, but when a renamed 10 becomes a 5, and an 8 or 9 becomes a 3 (which used commonly to be the smallest size), what becomes of the 'real' 5s and 3s? Well, some, it seems, become Zeros, and others become Double Aughts in a fit of blazing, indecent numerical fatuity, while others just slide off the grid. There isn't a woman's line that offers pants to fit me, and while I've taken to wearing children's jeans, because I've taken to wearing jeans in the first place out of despair and necessity, there are times they won't do, and one can't very well pair a gabardine jacket and silk shirt with pink corduroy Winnie-the-Pooh pants. The alternative is no less unthinkable: I don't aspire to be a World-Historical Figure, surely, and I doubt Hegel would have even liked the dress, but as Mark Twain admitted, Naked people have little or no influence on society. They also get burned a lot while cooking.

You Can Take the Barolo Out of the Piedmont

But you can't take the limestone out of the nebbiolo. Nor can you, even as a human with a great, hulking, ponderous mass of a cerebrum, it seems, rid yourself entirely of what you once were in order to make way for what you would become. All our stories, all our remembrances, our bad mommies and doting daddies and every dance you were never asked to and each imperfect dismount and second place in debate because you only slightly screwed up the Jefferson line are there, somewhere, even when you imagine you are thinking of nothing at all except the mesmerizing horror that is the infield at the Kentucky Derby. They lie around lurking like recessive genes, just waiting for their one brief instant of relevance, to turn some unsuspecting fetus' right eye blue and leave the left one brown, or cause you to say No instinctively when reflection and analysis might have allowed for more than a few shades of gray.

So it is that I predictably turn to poetry to try to get at the nuances of what I might be feeling, for example, or that someone else consistently knocks himself out in squash when he fears he would otherwise be knocked out by something less manly. Where we start to bump up against the things we'll later be banging our heads on if we're not careful is where I try to intuit what you mean by 'squash' and you wonder what it is that Farrokhzad has that you don't.

The answer in either case is usually Nothing and Stop Being a Fatuous Boob, but we can't know that if we stay mired in our own heads. Someone observing me or listening to me is always going to filter what I do or say through his own experience. What might to me feel like the knife-edge of recklessness might to him seem dull and commonplace. Other things might be boring to me while appearing to him frighteningly exotic. And I seem to you perhaps apathetic and restive when I'm really just shy, as I meanwhile tire of what I see as your brittle callousness when you're actually struggling madly to know what to do...

People have gotten tripped up with me when they, in thinking I have so many words at my disposal, believe each one always must be the fruit of exacting, deliberate selection. This puts an undue amount of exegetical weight on 'nuts!' when I drop my keys in a puddle. It also makes it hard to talk crap, which is frequently necessary and often welcome. There is also the problem of the 'literal reading,' which can be done with some books but no persons, since you cannot know what precisely one individual construes as the difference between 'languid' and 'languourous' in the privacy of his own head.

You need, in other words, Context, which only comes over time. I know when an exhusband is being snarky about something in a friendly way, and I also know when he means he really does hate something in the depths of his heart. I know which friends are not disingenuous in embracing ostensibly contradictory opinions and which ones have an unambiguousness of speech that William Penn would covet. Not knowing them, one might think their apparent frankness were there to mask actual doubt -- but it's not; they know what they think, and they say it.

Which brings us to Dating, and why one sometimes just has to cry in bed. I am strongly of the opinion that neither party can give an adequate representation of what he or she is actually likely to bring to the hypothetical relation they are in theory potentially considering as a possibility. Everything relevant comes later. Well, almost: as I have lengthily and tediously admitted earlier, I do understand some people's need for leggy honeyblondes, divinity-school dropouts, effete flutists and partners who iron their socks.

But bracketing all that, or else assuming those factual and obvious criteria are met, the stuff that would constitute the soaring and glorious bits of the relationship once it was not hypothetical cannot be glimpsed over coffee, or even between heady sips of an unfolding Piemontese red. One can't know the depths of a lover's solicitude until it has been evoked. You simply cannot have a discussion about Potential Solicitude - in the main because there is no such thing. A former lover finally got me to the point of intimacy with a cogent and convincing argument that this was something we should no doubt know about, something that would prove quite relevant, and we weren't going to know anything about it, whether it worked for us or not, until we actually undertook it. It wasn't especially romantic, I admit, but there is little about romance that is -- until you get to that point where it all is, where you are routinely overtaken by love because your husband is brushing his teeth, or switching to fourth gear. And of course, if you get to that point, you come to the stunning realization that you no can longer care that he doesn't iron his socks.

Because Underneath ,You Feel Pure Permanence

I don't think most people know how to be in relationships. I don't believe most people are, in their hearts, really looking for something huge and overpowering, something not merely substantive, which is unusual enough itself, but transformative. Love can do that, can change us immeasurably for the better, but one has to be opened to it, one has to accept the vulnerability that is both a prerequisite and a consequent of real love.

And of course that is terrifying. It is totally unlike our normal interactions, which are based on suites of deliberately congruent, affected manners, dictions, postures, appearances, that correspond to and flesh out whatever role we are enacting in that context. This isn't base or even dishonest: on the one hand, we really do need the second cellist behaving like a cellist during the symphony and not a botanist or ironworker; and on the other, he really is a cellist, as evidenced by the presence of his chair in the pit and his bowing of the strings. That isn't disingenuous; it's getting the job done!

But maybe it is the difference between a Bach fugue and bebop. Precision, order, the beauty of the work found in its elegant mathematics, in its stolid girders, right angles and re-bar, in perfection of Form above all else, as against the piercing, unutterable glory that can come only from leap of faith compounded geometrically by subsequent leap after leap after leap -- all these being, not 'explored' in a self-indulgent descent into solipsism, and certainly not 'reconciled' or 'rescued' once the head reemerges --no, not at all, but bared, freed, radically embraced, and then transcended and born anew, via that selfsame melody that could always so easily enslave a pedant or fundamentalist.

So I think it's a big deal, Love. I have difficulty understanding shopping for it, I admit, and I get prickly thinking of the people who don't bother to reflect on it and its significance, especially when they do already, or could if they expended effort, live inside it. I think it takes work, yes, but so do wine and music and childbirth, and yet people keep doing those without saying Wait, I need some Time to Listen to 'Self' in the middle of a bloody solo or parturition.

When you are in love, when you cherish someone, you honor them. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. According to Thomas Merton, at any rate, and I agree that Love is indeed that elegantly simple, and that boundlessly rewarding. Still, it requires effort, requires temperance; and that miraculous, supple, and overpowering solicitude born jointly of eros and agape can only exist where there is sufficient maturity, wisdom, and openheartedness to allow its first seeds to grow.

I think where that sort of genuine and mature love is present, there are lines not merely inconceivable, but impossible, to cross. It's quite easy to see why kvetching about 'never getting any' to your hot boss or flirty assistant is risky, but while it may not be a Gateway to Sin! in everyone's view to lament someone's weight gain, odd facial hair choice, lack of understanding, bad habits, or emotional issues to friends, it nevertheless creates a rift. It lets someone in where they shouldn't be, between the man and the woman. It also keeps those complaints or critiques closer to the front of your mind, even when it's just you two. Joe from the pool hall is right there, in bed with you, with his I-Hear-You-Man comments from yesterday about his wife's growing middle as you run your hands up your wife's now-size-40 hips.

We are conditioned that, to a certain extent, articulation makes it so. Nearly all of our experience is filtered, necessarily, through language. This is why people do affirmations. 'I am good. I am strong. I do not eat Snickers.' Imagine if instead of desperate, last-ditch efforts at 'I love my husband. I love my husband. I love my husband' we had the wife daily complaining to her girlfriends about his stutter, his pot belly, his skin condition, and his lack of sexual skill. And, as we all know, our friends can be relied upon to take our side in such things. It is rare indeed for one of these sort of confidants to interrogate the speaker, ask him why it is he would want to say such disrespectful things, what it is he is really feeling, whether he understands that speaking out of class like that is going to leak a poison in and keep all those things in his mind.

I cringe when I hear such things spoken by people in a relationship -- and we hear them all the time. If it is one on one, I at least have the liberty and the opportunity to ask the other sorts of questions, the sort that can go somewhere, the sort that can open the person's heart rather than seal it shut for good -- but so often people just spout this crap, and don't care who hears. And then someone else commiserates, and tells private details about his partner. And then I perhaps know more about the state of his relationship than his spouse does!

Meanwhile, I am course am thinking You bloody idiots: you have someone who loves you! I am not speaking here of abusive things, or of gambling addictions, or infidelity. Instead, it's stupid, quotidian annoyances, or habitual ways of doing things regarding which the individuals' tendencies and preferences are at odds. Or, of course, pot bellies, skin conditions, Comfortable Shoes, fatigue at sex-time, and, simply, two people who were once together, engaged now in building up separate lives, deliberately or indeliberately. After a certain point, the fissure is irreparable, and if not 'Man,' then surely man's ego, has rent the two solidly asunder.

I have a stance, as well, partly ethical, partly aesthetic, part pragmatic, and part just Healthy Living, that distills down to wait and see, I suppose. A few bucks lost here and there at the race track is not the same as the mortgage payment going to the bookie. An otherwise shockingly thoughtful anniversary gift ordered too late for timely arrival is not the same as spending that anniversary with another girl in a hotel room. And, again (this is the pragmatic angle, I suppose, mixed in with the ethical), if you spend all the time collecting notes on what is not perfect, that, my dear, is what is in your head. Not the moments of beauty, not the act of deep tenderness, but the why-didn't-he-X-when-I-felt-sure-he-would? And if you take all those to your friends, because they're all clustering around your brain making you sick because you chose to focus on them and now can't think of the other things, after your iteration of all his/her failings, what do you think they will say? What average friend ever counsels, Yes, but she's so.... Or, But those are trivial, and look what he does when.... Or, Work on it, work on it, work on it, and keep your love for that person always in your mind?

But perhaps that is what distinguishes Love and friendship. Friendship so often concerns itself with reinforcing the status quo, with affirming assumptions rather than challenging them, by 'supporting' the friend in the least difficult, most prosaic ways. Love, by contrast, keeps always one hand outstretched to the Divine and the other gently opened to the beauty to be found here. It is the turning of the Mevlevi, the name of God ceaselessly on the lips, each step and every breath a rupture and mediation between the ineffable and the temporal.
Love seeks alternately to veil and to transcend the less savoury aspects of what we see in this pathetic, finite moment, pointing always to the grander vision that lies beyond. It reaches, challenges, wounds, elates, soars. Love never disappoints, although it sometimes kills.

I know you touch so fervently because the caress preserves,/because the place you cover up, O tender ones,/doesn't disappear; because underneath, you feel/ pure permanence. Thus your embraces almost promise you eternity. -Rilke, Duino Elegies, 'Second Elegy'