The Obvious

Threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of two of our closest and most faithful allies, Canada and Denmark, makes me sick. It's repulsive. It's dishonorable. It's also incredibly stupid, but I don't even care about that. Stupid can be mended. Dishonor is forever.

(I don't often talk about daily politics, because others are so much better equipped and more skilled at it, but occasionally it's worth saying the obvious in so many words. My penchant for the long view and the global picture might give the impression that I think that immediate and local issues are unimportant. I don't, at all; I'm just particularly inept at addressing them. But when silence might be taken for complicity, I do think that someone with a public platform, however tiny, ought to speak up. So I might begin the next few blog posts with little statements like this.)

------

It does feel ridiculous, cultivating myself while the country is wrecking itself, but what else am I to do? I must work on something, and I’m the only thing at hand. We are just at the beginning of a cascade of crises, and the only thing I’m sure of is that more will be required of me, in the new world: that there will be less room for self-indulgence and self-pity. People urge me to go easy on myself, and while I appreciate their compassion and benevolence, I think they’re wrong. What I need is to go hard on myself. I have piddled away much of my life going easy on myself.

And behind it all, the Good of the Neoplatonists, the Nature of the Stoics, whatever the hell it is: that without which nothing actually makes sense: that which dissolves whenever you look at it directly and try to put it to use. It will not be used.

Humility is the hardest of the virtues. To do the work at hand: here, now.

-------

When I was four years old, my parents took me to Disneyland. Underwater in Captain Nemo's submarine, I looked out through the portals. Monsters of the deep were everywhere. A shark lunged at the window; I was terrified. My mother tried to reassure me, saying, "It's all right, Evan, it isn't real." Then a giant squid attacked us; my father said it also wasn't real. At this point, my parents tell me, I looked up and asked, "Are we real?"

-- Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter 6

Replegándome

Closing in on myself, like those tiny white blossoms of miner’s lettuce at nightfall. This, here, now: studying, thinking.

Global neoliberalism has run itself into a ditch: offering people absolutely nothing larger than themselves to be part of, to cherish, to be proud of, was a strategy that was bound to lose: though it didn’t do it before trashing most of most people’s virtues. So we get these ugly, crude fundamentalisms, that would laughable if they were not so capriciously destructive and cruel. The idea that there’s anything “medieval” about Isis or White Christian Nationalism is absurd. They are wholly and distinctly modern, the responses of people emptied of virtue and starved of meaning. I know, I sound like one of their theorists when I talk that way. Still. If you don’t offer people anything substantial to eat they’ll chew the bark off the trees. There’s nothing surprising about it. What’s surprising is that we’ve wobbled along so long in this country without disaster.

It’s all very well to talk that way, of course – satisfying and invigorating, clears the pores – but it’s bombast. The florid language is a tell. And what it tells is that I myself only very dimly suspect and guess at what that larger thing is: I have nothing satisfying to offer anyone. People who vaguely assert a higher power are more definite than I am: I immediately frown and think: “just one? Higher than what? Is it, are they, on my side? Distinct from me? Does it, do they, subsume me, or participate in me, or divvy me up so that bits of me serve as poker chips in unguessable games?” This is not the stuff that religious refuge is made of. I have nothing to offer, there.

But anyway, my duty vis-à-vis it, and/or them, seems at this point pretty clear to me. I have no persuasive skills, and nothing to persuade anyone of, anyway. “They also serve who only stand and wait”: well, I hope so, because that appears to me to be my job. Or at least, to stand and listen, to wait and watch.

I guess the dignified way to say that is “he spends his days in study, prayer and meditation." That sounds respectable; way more respectable than it feels.

A Lamentable Case

Well! So far all my struggles are for naught. I have neither straightened up nor flown right; I am fat as a goose prepped to provide foie gras; I am impotent, anxious, tired, and unkempt. My beard straggles and my hair lurches over my collar. A lamentable case.

On the other hand, I am more or less over my cold (how can you really tell, when you’re so systemically inflamed?) And I should be able to take up exercise again. Start over again. Again.

Saturday! Without a meeting with Jarrett, who is in Mexico City. So all the day’s resources are free. We can do what we like.

I think we may need to stage all these changes, Monsieur le Favier. Pressure at all points is not working here: it’s only making you fretful and petulant, and threatening even those things that were secure (morning back exercises and broccoli, for example. Heaven knows back trouble is not going to help you at this point, you foolish old Hechicero.)

The constant stream of appalling political news does not help, of course. But presumably that’s a constant from now on: if things get better eventually, it’s unlikely to happen during my lifetime. So forget about the daily news. If you think about political life at all, think long-term. Think of what needs to be cultivated that can be passed on to future generations, so they can build someday. Not habits of outrage and rumination, that’s for sure.

Recall, my dear Lord of All Creation, that you are not yet retired: you have no more time or resources at your disposal than you have had these last twenty years. So maybe ratchet back the expectations a little?

There is something missing from the program, and that missing thing, maybe, is company. Maybe you need someone to read the Phaedrus with. Alas that Portland State has no Classics! What the hell kind of university has NO classics department? That’s nuts. But anyway. All in good time.

For the moment, I think we need to set a schedule and timeline for this restoration-and-improvement program. And the first projects, quite obviously, are the intertwined projects of re-establishing our exercise and re-establishing our food regimen.

Note well, young Favier, that it will only take two or three days of eating sanely to feel much better. You won’t get skinny in a couple days, but the inflammation will subside, as will the self-disgust, almost immediately. You won’t have to fly right for months and get to 170 lbs before you feel better. You’ll feel better almost at once.

So I think this is the February project. Eating and exercise. You already laid out in detail the eating. Just follow that, and track your numbers. Two weeks from now you’ll know if you need to change something. (Change the meal timing slightly, though, to a 12:30 lunch and a 5:30 dinner; the former times were too early.) Ask Martha to hid the candy dish.

And now, we just restart the exercise program, but with the reps set back by ten or fifteen percent. We are not focused on gaining strength or muscle bulk at ALL, right now. We are just restarting our program, and it would be fine if the reps were cut in half. In fact, it might even be wise to start with extravagantly reduced reps. Say two thirds. If that really leaves lots of slack, we’ll take it up soon enough.

So February is the diet-and-exercise project. Nothing else needs to happen this month. March can be the month in which I open a second intellectual front, or quit all social media, or whatever it is I do next.

This would have worked last time, if I hadn’t come down with that cold, if Martha had not done her Colorado trip, if she had not been so anxious. It’s time to stop pretending her anxiety doesn’t affect you. It affects you deeply.

But my point at the moment is simply: there was nothing at all wrong with your program. That’s not why it derailed. So you’re not being Pollyanna, in trying to start over. It’s reasonable to expect it to work.

February 2025, the month of restoring the diet-and-exercise regimen. Go, sir.

Circle

Well. A new day, bright outside, dark within. "Put not your trust in princes," says that most cynical of texts, but we do, even when we think we're not. Till we come to the end of the paragraph and suddenly fall down the stairs of a blank page. 

A van drives by, its running lights flickering oddly, rhythmically. Is that a thing now? I become every day less at home in the world. A mercy, I suppose, designed to make it easier to say goodbye. "I have had my world as in my time"; but now it's not my time, and I have become insubstantial, transparent, barely sustaining enough gravity to haunt my own house.

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me," says Richard; since we were speaking of princes. But -- enough of all that. It's time to shut this book. The circle is closed.

----

So now it's time to cast loose: nobody is going to accompany me on this trip. A thing I was prepared for as a child, but forgot in jostling flattery of adulthood. Age brings, in this respect anyway, clearer sight. And really, I'm ready for it.

Not that it's a simple trip, or one to be done all at once. It will be as halting and vacillating as all my voyages. And I won't really be alone. That's just the way they talk, forgetting their wives and children and servants, while they're strutting on the stage and monarchizing. That's another thing to be done with, that negligence, and taking mercies and kindnesses for granted. I've always despised those people who declare "everyone dies alone!" -- who then proceed comfortably to a well-attended hospital bed thronged with nurses and anxious dependents. Yah. What the hell are you talking about? You don't know crap about dying, or about solitude.

-----

You will understand, I hope, that I'm not talking about dying. Well, yes, I was talking about dying, but that was just an automatic association of ideas, No, I'm talking about wandering in the hills for a little bit, about the sunrise and sunset, about the quarter moon glimpsed over the housetop. 

Okay, Enough for now. Lots of love.

Third Day

And again, so far so good. 

Grateful this morning for Matute's magnificent Gudú. I just reread the scene in which Predilecto is sent to spy on the children, who discover him easily and pull him into their play, out of bonds of time. The immense sadness of leaving that, and forgetting that: tiptoeing out of the room when they have all fallen asleep. She's so good about forgetting. The epigraph of the book:

Dedico este libro a la memoria de H. C. Andersen, Jacob y Wilhelm Grimm y Charles Perrault.

A todo lo que olvidé.

A todo lo que perdí.

-----

I dedicate this book to the memory of H. C Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Charles Perrault. 

To all that I have forgotten.

To all that I have lost.

Victoria Moul notes that ". . . anyone whose primary interest is literary is likely I think to reach a point in life after which most of your, let’s say, “top quality” literary reading, the really transformational stuff, is re-reading. When this point occurs surely varies and in a second or third language one might (happy thought!) never reach that point. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that any fairly committed reader of literature gets to this stage, in their mother-tongue at least, somewhere around mid-life."

Certainly this is true for me, and so the gift of Matute is doubly precious: it is both a transformational experience, and utterly new to me. It's new even in the simple narrative sense: this is the first time in years that I've read a narrative and genuinely not known where it was going. I read with some bemusement all these spoiler warnings attached nowadays to discussions of even the most formulaic fiction -- in fact, especially to the most formulaic fiction. Do you people seriously not know what's coming? That's just weird.

A long-spun tendril of cloud in the winter sky: and the morning backing in slowly, returning to the world.

I wrote a post about political hope the other day, and un-published it, because it made a claim of fact that I couldn't immediately back up, and I will not add to the noise and confusion, if I can help it. But in fact I am more hopeful than I used to be, in a number of ways. I may resurrect a more thoughtful version of that someday. Or perhaps not. Coming to terms with the new political reality is something we all have to do, but I am uneducated and naive about these things -- for one thing -- and for another thing, I think we are likely to be out of power for a good long time, and time invested in following the minutiae of U. S. Federal politics, by amateurs, is probably time wasted. I applaud those fighting the desperate rear-guard action, but someone also needs to go ahead and prepare the refuges we will take. I may be better suited to that task.

Anyway. Lots of love, dear ones. 

Second Day

So far, so good: but the first day, when the impetus is strongest, is easiest. The second and third days are generally the most precarious: and there's lots of destabilizing events coming along. Still, woke this morning with a grateful sense of peace. I will try to remember that, when besieged by false promises: the promises of this discipline are scant, but they're kept. 

-----

Why, I wonder, have the words fluvial and lacustrine never won currency in English, when so many other French/Latinate adjectives have swaggered into the language and made themselves at home? But it's a river boat and a lake house, never a fluvial boat, never a lacustrine house. Maybe something about the water generates a stubborn Dutch homeliness.

-----

Fog this morning, and a damp cold that seeps into the marrow. We're at the wicked time of the year, hovering around freezing, inviting ice storms. If I had an amulet against ice, I'd wear it. I have a large tolerance for most of the weathers and natural mischances of the world, but I don't like the ice, as I don't like the wildfires. You should be able to walk on the ground and breathe the air.

Wobbly and Out of Control

Hah! Well, no wonder I was feeling like everything was wobbly and out of control. Everything was wobbly and out of control.

So. For the food:

Breakfast is the Spanish omelet: leave half the hash browns. (And if the omelet is ridiculously huge, as it was today, you can leave some of it on the plate, too. But you never *have* to leave any of the omelet.)

Snacks available but not required: one apple and one banana.

Lunch is salad and 2/3 glass bowl of soup, and you must begin it by 11:30.

Dinner is salad, and 2/7 of a packet of ground 93% turkey, prepped with a big spoonful of olive oil, and 450 grams of potato, and you must begin it by 4:30.

In two weeks we'll know if this is a weight loss regimen or not: there's no need to guess. The numbers will tell us. At the moment that question is of no interest whatever. The first project here is simply to get aircraft out of its tumble and under control: nothing good happens until that has happened.

You may have to ask Martha to hide that white candy dish.

Throw out the rest of the bagels, unless Martha wants them.

Ipse dixi.

-----

For the exercise:

Okay. I must work out 4 days out of 7. An easy mnemonic for that while I'm working 3 days per week is simply that any day that is not a work day is a workout day. But really I want the basic pattern to be upper body day, lower body day, rest day. With some latitude: sometimes no rest day, sometimes two rest days. But never three rest days in a row, and always, if I'm looking backward six days and see only three workouts, I'm due to work out. (This sounds much more elaborate than it is: in practice it's pretty simple. Upper, Lower, Rest.)

Until I get the cardio where I want it, I'm going to stop increasing the rev lunges when I get to two sets of 30 reps (each side) at 5 lbs. (Which is nearly where I am? I think?) The cardio is going to stress the knees: I don't want to pile too much on them.

The cardio is actually the focus: building back the stamina I lost to Covid last year. The program is going to look like this: 

To begin with, short walks every day that is not a lower body day.

Every week, increment the walks by two, where an increment means taking no walk to short, or short walk to regular walk, or regular walk to long walk.

We stop this progression when we're at a weekly regiment of daily regular walks and two long walks. We might or might not at that point progress the long walks, or we might just go back to increasing the weight on the rev lunges. Leave that decision for when the time comes. 

So we're starting at 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5

We're going to 2 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 2 = 16

At +2 per week, this will take five and a half weeks. That seems about right. We should get there around the end of February.

Ipse dixi.

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For the study: yes, you want to be doing BOTH the Spanish and the Greek. And maybe you can do that. Maybe it has to wait until you're no longer working at the Foundation. Maybe it doesn't happen at all, because time and attention are not infinitely elastic. Just relax and get over yourself, young Dale. It is not the most important thing. It is far more important to be doing hard and interesting reading, and to write stuff that is worth reading. THAT is what you actually want to do. The languages are tools for that, not ends in themselves. (Well, actually they're ends in themselves too, and always have been, and always will be: but you don't need to be doing two at once if it just. doesn't. work. Twenty years from now you'll be stone cold and in the ground, Mr Favier. None of this matters THAT much. It is now required of you that you a) get a grip, my good man, and b) relax and give yourself a break. Yes, both those things, and yes, this is a contradiction, and yes, you're just going to have to deal with it.)

New Year's Day

Sly the winds that wrap around
flew the tremor underfoot
scree the love that shifts and shoots
and all these things forgotten.

Tell me, of all the prophecies you've made,
how many came to pass? You are doing nothing
but chewing the chalk of your old classroom,
laboring over lessons too well learned.
How wrong do your masters have to prove
before you give them up?

Stutter and rattle of flags in the wind, and
rotten cloth tears from the pole;
older than we hoped
and younger than a new mouse
naked in the nest:
we have three days. Use them. 

Olvidado Rey Gudú

The Goblin and the Magician have been directed by the Queen to remove young Prince Gudú's capacity to love, since it constitutes an unacceptable vulnerability:

Then the Goblin very carefully took hold of the boy's head and blew on his forehead, which opened with the sweetness and gentleness of a flower. He did the same to his breast, and when the heart blossomed, the Magician deftly closed it up in a chalice, transparent but strong.

The boy's forehead presented dreams of horses, a great coarse red sun, a clash of swords, and a poplar tree rocked by the wind. "Nothing dangerous," said the Goblin. "Say, while we're at it, shall we take out anything else? Intelligence? Innocence?" Suddenly the Queen felt a great grief, and covering her eyes with her hands, burst into tears. 

"Enough," she said. "Enough. That's fine."

Well, I'm loving this novel. 

Hurry

It's going to be brute force for a while; forcing the solitude. Slowly, as if moving a huge weight, I close the laptop. At some point the mechanism (which I've never discovered) engages: the light clicks off when its face is an inch or two from its chest. It doesn't want to go. Beyond hearing, it keens and moans. It summons the dead, and they cluster behind me. How can you shut down the whole breathing world? What will be left if you do? A full hour later than I'd planned; now I am going to hurry to get my evening things done, setting up hurry for tomorrow morning, hurry for the day, hurry for evening, hurrying forever and never getting anywhere. Stop, you've got to stop, you old fool!

I woke this morning to surprising light. "The moon must be nearly full," I thought. I padded through the half-lit house -- I never turn on lights first thing in the morning, if I can help it -- and went to the window. There was a gleam in the cloud cover to the west: as I watched the full moon's disk slide into ghostly view, and recede again. It was gone, but the whole flannel of the western sky was soaked in moonlight. I could see well enough to start my day. Still: compromised by last night's hurry. Today will be hurried and incomplete, like all the other days. For God's sake stop, Dale. Get a grip.

But I hurried again to get ready, left my morning stretches and breathing undone, scrambled to get out of the house before the morning traffic. If I leave at 7:00 it takes ten minutes to get to Tom's; if I leave at 7:15 it takes half an hour. Long enough for even an aged fool, wagging his beard at the steering wheel, to realize that driving like this is madness, participating in the bonfire.

But it's the only piece of reality I have hold of, these mornings; I'm not going to loosen my clutch on it. I can sit there and work two hours. Real work. The rest of my day dissolves in a meaningless ebb and flow of hurry and avoidance, one driving inevitably to the other, both pushing toward a mindless stupor. Yeah. Whatever I was born for, it was not for this. 

I must go at it blind, my fingertips searching for any unevenness that might give purchase. I'm not special; I'm not alone. We're all doing this. You can hear the rattling buzz of the snare drum, if you listen for it; the beat of money pulsing through the economy, of coffee pulsing through the veins. It has its own agenda. Its fingers are delicately searching in turn for my weaknesses. Its fingers are not as strong as mine: but there are more of them, and they never rest. 

Believing In

C. S. Lewis was a glib son of a bitch, but he nailed it when he spoke of how disastrous it is to embark upon believing something "not because it is true, but for some other reason." The existentialist project as conceived by Camus strikes me as simply impossible. Certainly impossible for me. "I'll just decide that all people are important, and then they'll be important because I have decided they are important, and their importance will sustain my devotion to them --" No. No, the whole thing collapses under the slightest pressure. (for example, what the hell is important about some of these individuals? Not much that meets the eye.) For exactly the same reason, I am not going to be a Christian without a good reason, no matter how much a life of service and devotion appeals to me. (And I have always recognized that I am a servant, by temperament and inclination.) I would become a Christian simply and only because I thought it was true that Jesus was the unique human incarnation of the one God. Full stop. I'm not going to believe it because it's pleasant (and anyway, it's terrifying, if you take it seriously) or because it will make me mentally healthy. I don't know how other people are built, but I'm simply not built for that: I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I believe things that I think are true. 

Once upon a time I believed in the metaphysics of reductionist materialism. What's real are subatomic particles, and they bang into each other in deterministic ways, determining what the atoms do, and that determines what the molecules do, and that determines what cells do, and that determines what creatures such as us do, including -- somehow -- generating subjective experience and a sense of self, at some arbitrary threshold of neural complexity. Okay, well, maybe. Maybe free will is a delusion. Maybe subjective experience is a delusion: some people argue that, though it's a rather desperate move. I think it's more likely that what seems obvious is actually true: that we have intentions and make decisions. I suspect that even cells have intentions and make decisions: that mind and life are coterminous. This is I guess some kind of pantheism. It doesn't particularly leave me "believing in" God, which is a formulation that I suspect is self-subverting in precisely the same way as the Existentialist project. A God you have to "believe in" is not much of a God.

Nevertheless, my intuition is that there is Something to which one can orient, that you can know "where" it is as a blind man knows where the sun is, and turn towards it. (This is a METAPHOR, people. If you don't know what a metaphor is, look it up.) And that intuition is based partly on the surprising intelligibility of the world. It's weirdly explicable. It has rules it plays by, and we can figure some of them out. And, as the Stoics maintain, you can line yourself up with it, and swim with its current, in which case you will be happy (in an ultimate sense, not to be confused with gratified), or you can struggle against it, in which case you will be unhappy, unlucky, clumsy, and conflicted. This being so, the most fruitful thing to practice is orienting to this Sun. Listening for it.

This will distress those who insist that you must know what something is before you investigate it, which is to say most modern people most of the time. How do we know, ahead of time, that what we are orienting to is The Good (a.k.a God?) Well, we don't. But if you agree that we are not now exactly where and what we want to be, then you have to give yourself permission to look for where to go and what you would want to be, in places that are presently unknown. (Once again, this is a metaphor, Deal with it.) And it is actually not that hard to tell, most of the time, whether you are orienting yourself more properly. Are you more unified, more graceful, more at ease, more effective? Someone who is oriented more properly ought to be all of those things.

Contraction

All this may be true: but most of it is beyond my reach, and would be beyond my reach even if I were not old and deaf. My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected it to look is not going to help matters. I'll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)

I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, "You can't make socialism without socialists." Likewise, you can't make democracy without (small 'd') democrats.

Such business as I still have in the world is the cultivation of democrats and the democratic virtues (which are, after all, just a subset of the virtues, period). The lamps may not be relit in our lifetime, or in our grandchildren's. I am sorry about that. It is painful to watch an old established democracy attempt suicide, and the slow motion slide into comic horrors, while we wait to see if the attempt succeeded, is not much to my taste. But you play the hand you're dealt.

Milton and World-Building

I have an old paperback edition of Paradise Lost sitting around, and I pick it up and read a page or two from time to time. Milton is one of the few acknowledged great English poets I've never taken a shine to. Nothing about Satan's grandeur appeals to me. If all the powers and potentates of Heaven and Hell have to do is make speeches of elaborate self-justification, then I'd rather poke along here in the middle kingdom and watch a beetle negotiate a tuft of grass. Who cares about all their bombast and swagger?

And then there are the weird discontinuities. The world-building, as kids like to say these days, is comically inconsistent and contrived. Having Death and Sin walk around with the same ontological status as Lucifer and Jesus, not to mention as the Creator himself? How is that supposed to work? The world dangling on a string? The invocation of a Greek muse on a Hebrew stage? And if Milton really thinks that this God is the creator of the world, and of himself, how dare he stuff His mouth with his own words? I mean that literally: you would think that even the most naive and unreflective of Christians would recognize that they're not up to writing a script for God.

Yet Milton is neither naive nor blasphemous in intent, and he's no teenager. He's a man who's taken enormous real risks and played a key part in the great events of his time. His learning is (a little too obviously) immense. What is he playing at?

---

I'm uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We're making them up. They're for visiting, not for living in.

---

Meditating on that, I realize that I'm engaged in the same thing as my children. I'm holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He's writing a poem, and he's drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he's not that arrogant. He's a man writing a poem, that's all. He's not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he's unsophisticated, It's that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.

---

I have Milton's Sonnet 19 by heart, so it's not true that he's never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I'm old enough in reading to know that its not Milton's deficiency but mine that I'm dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I'll leave the door ajar. You never know.

Waking up Worried

I woke at four, worried that yesterday I had reassured my daughter about the political future badly and wrongly. No more sleep after that. I dutifully counted 150 breaths, in hopes that sheer boredom would get me back to sleep, but it didn't. But anyway I want to get up earlier, if not quite this early, so hey. Here I am.

I get so muddled nowadays, I have so many thoughts about the future, and sorting the true from the false and the useful from the useless is difficult, even before you get to trying to evaluate whether the problem might be thinking about the future at all. We're trained to think about the future as princes, and we are not princes. We are peasants, and we will take what get, and do our best with it. 

Being old helps a little, because I know now that almost nothing I was worried about forty years ago was the right thing to be worried about. We think we know way more about the future than we do; we're O so clever. "If things keep on going this way, then..." but things don't. They speed up; they slow down, they evoke overwhelming opposition; or they are fixed by "small hands that do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." Or they are swamped by things still worse and yet unimagined in the womb of time (but that is not one of the ways to reassure your daughter.)

Still, in the run-up to the disastrous election of 2016, though the polls were looking good, my heart misgave me. I was pretty sure Trump was going to win. And now though the polls put it a knife-edge, my heart is easier. I think this time he will probably lose. Which is evidence of nothing, of course. But nothings are sometimes the appropriate medicine for imaginary illnesses.

On the other hand, the bizarre fantasy entertained by both Left and Right in this country, that the opposition is somehow imaginary and ephemeral, and one good election will make it go away, is one of the main problems. We keep not really taking the other side seriously, because we're convinced that it's not really there, people couldn't really be so awful. Surely we'll wake up and they will turn out to have been just a nightmare? And surely we are not part of the problem, heavens no, our virtue is complete and perfect and the other side fears us totally, totally unreasonably.

I say that not because I think the sides are morally equivalent. I don't at all. But we are equally negligent of our political duty to engage with each other. We have already paid heavily for that, and we will pay even more heavily, because we have not the slightest intention of changing anything about ourselves. Anything. At. All.

Round Like An Orange

The toenails of the decades click on the oak wood floor:

they patter past the post, mortality set on "stun";

they'll eventually get the zoomies

and then your race is run.

The other day I learned of a new procedure:

they peel your prostate like an orange, removing it whole

rather than slicing it. I don't know how they get it out,

or if it leaves a hole.

The yellow leaves are brilliant in the sun,

the birch bark's white puts cadmium to shame,

the sky gets pale closer to the ground,

the tide runs back the way it came.

Flailing

Something very large and indistinct is moving slowly into alignment with me, so I'm sighting down its length. Or into its barrel. I'm not sure this thing will not blow up. I don't know what it is.

Still sick, perpetually sick, these days. My old ways of recovery won't do: I need to get rid of this visceral fat without doing a whole lot of exercise, and that means letting a lot of muscle go. Maybe I'll get to build the muscle back, and maybe I won't; but nothing good is going to happen until this systemic inflammation drops. If the muscle has to go it has to go. I need to get rid of this fat, as quick as I can.

It is an achingly beautiful Fall, this year, and I have barely seen it.

Why have I been so fretful and self-absorbed? Being sick does that to you, I guess. For one thing. But also I am more cut off from the world than I have ever been. Flailing in space like an untethered astronaut; every action its own equal and opposite reaction, summing to zero.

I fumble towards an idea of how I am in the world that includes the notion that understanding things may do some good even though it remains implicit and uncommunicated, but my materialism is so ingrained that there's not much traction there. What good does it do? I mean, there are side-glimmers, mistakes I don't make, injuries I don't inflict. Maybe. But the steamroller of Dickensian liberalism keeps bearing down on me: what good does it do? Where are the children saved from poverty, the tigers from extinction, the libraries from demolition? I'm just a black-robed priest muttering to himself in a dark place, grudging the virgins their sunlight.

Thus Dickens. Blake has another point of view: but then Blake was visited by the Christ in the morning, and drank God with his morning tea. I am a spirit of another sort.

Checking In

So I guess the three times I check in would be morning, afternoon (meaning not long after I get home, whether that's 10:00 or 4:00), and evening (meaning not long after dinner), and the idea of the afternoon and evening check-ins is to not get lost in the mindless repetitions for hours at a time -- not, anyway, until the constructive things are done. I don't tend to get lost in the morning, so that's more just a matter of getting out into the light of day and the air of the world.

I can invoke the divine double, if he'll show up. What would the angel bearing my semblance do? What would he feel and think? I don't need to do this alone, and I don't need to know what I'm doing. I can ask for help.

They can be very short walks: at this stage of my recovery, they should not be long ones. Hell, they can even just be standing out under the sky.

I do not need to know what should be done. My job is to find that out. I am groping my way: I don't know who I am or what my surroundings are: I'm blind. My light is spent. Pretending that it's otherwise is not going to help at all.

"And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless..."

The constructive things might be almost anything. Don't close that circuit prematurely.

Health

On an abbreviated evening walk -- all my exercise is abbreviated nowadays -- I took a leaf from OCD exposure therapy, and said, okay, let's just run with it. What if I never fully regain my health? What changes in my life? What adaptations do I make? 

And the answer was -- really not much changes at all. I can still do most of the things I do now, maybe less often, less strenuously. My life isn't predicated on robust health. And I'm not particularly invested in living twenty-five more years: having watched my father's extreme old age, I'm not all that enthused about spending a long time playing defense and waiting to see which system gives out first. I don't want my highest priority to be "keep this individual animal breathing." 

Not that I "believe in" an afterlife, or would find anything reassuring about the prospect if I did. Death as a candle going out has always struck me as something a little too good to be believed: a little too much of wish-fulfillment. Mebbe, mebbe not. But given that I'm going through that door eventually, willy-nilly, I do have some curiosity about it. I don't number, among my numerous faults, putting off the inevitable. What might one wake up to? If it's a clearer understanding of what one is, then -- bring it! 

So enough of all the histrionics. Most likely I just have a cold, and my lungs are a little damaged from Covid still, and I'll bounce back, just slower than I'm used to. 

September

So September, dearest of months, when the sweet rain returns and hope lifts its brindled nose! The sun slews round to shine straight down Burnside: driving away west from my house in the morning, I see a huge red orb in my rear view mirror (the fires aren't out yet), directly behind me. The promise and threat of the One, I suppose. How do I picture God? As that bloody orb: too bright to look at directly for long, but that by which everything else is seen. There, that's my theology, as far as it goes. I welcome the cloudy days and cooler weather, the veiling of the sun, as more suited to my weakness; but I don't entertain the delusion that I could do without it, or that my eyes make their own light. 

A scattering of airborne seeds, like baby dandelion fluffs, float over me when I'm coming home and walk back up the drive. And early in the evening Vega is still right overhead, still presiding. Yes. This remains my favorite month. I don't hate the summer any more, and I look forward to the cold and the rain less than I used to, but it's still, to me, the month of promise. It's the month I used to look over my new school books, and anticipate understanding new things and meeting new people (living and dead: new to me.) Mysterious names will fill with meaning; eyes will fill with light.

I go a little less in fear of saying what I've said before, I guess. I'll bang the drum I have, for the time given to me. Lots of love, you.

But What Is Piety?

The marvelous chutzpah of Le Guin, to finish her career by writing a novel celebrating piety for an audience teeming with libertarian tech bros and lefty utopians! My delight in Lavinia grows and grows.

And having just got as far as Book VII in rereading the Aeneid, I'm staggered by a) how faithful she is to Virgil and b) how faithful she is to Ursula Le Guin. Her conversation with Virgil is a conversation between equals. 

The model of the book, maybe, is the intimate conversations in the sacred grove between Lavinia and the sending of Virgil: a girl speaking on equal terms with the incarnate Western Tradition. Just a conversation, between a girl and a dying poet. 

Le Guin is aware, no one better, that he is dying, and that we need to bring his lares and penates to a new shore.

"But what is piety?" asked Aeneas.
That brought a thoughtful silence.