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.

Voices Behind

It's just going to be a longer journey than you thought, that's all. Soberly watch the omens, make all the due sacrifices, know that you're paying debts incurred by the jealous spouse of God. Make mistakes: of course. But when the messenger speaks clearly, do what he says.

What else is there to say?

Well, this, of course. If you're not founding Rome all you're doing is ricocheting around the Mediterranean causing trouble. Do you know what Rome will be? Of course not. Then how do you know what the hell you're founding? You don't. (Okay. Class dismissed. That didn't take long.)

What we keep coming back to is that if we are to be something more than we are, we don't know ahead of time what we are becoming. We aspire to be better, but one of the things we aspire to be better at is knowing what "better" is. If we already knew, we'd be done. 

There's this caul of falsehood over my face. The wrongness that comes between me and the world. The doctrine of original sin has been in great disfavor all my life: but it was a hell of a lot better than the doctrine of original worthlessness that has replaced it. If you're not uniquely worthwhile now, always already, you will never be worthwhile. You or anyone else. Asking the question creates the answer, and the answer will always be "no." 

Bah. Enough of this. This is all trampled ground in late summer: the dust rises from our feet. Stop being stupid. Use the brains God gave you, boy. 

The wind blowing snow off the mountain top; the little tarn, voices behind.

The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood

A half moon low in the south: why so low? I don't think I've ever understood quite why the moon wanders so far from the ecliptic. Or does it? Maybe I'm just not minding the swings of the ecliptic. But sometimes the moon is high, way high, and sometimes low. As tonight. Mid-August, not particularly close to a solstice; it seems like the moon should be riding a middle way, not tangled in the trees of the flats south of Burnside. I'll have to look it up. But not now.

Now: that rounded chip caught in the trees, ivory-yellow. Diana. Σελήνη. Me he quedado mirando a la luna, a través de las finas acacias. And yet.

Feeling age pull at me, feeling the waste of my strength. I'm exercising a little again, going for little walks. Still feeling fragile, easily irritated, easily tired. What troubles me most, of course, is not having a lingering illness: it's discovering that the reason I haven't had a lingering illness before now is not that I'm a special person, who just doesn't put up with that sort of thing: it's that up till now I've had a nice run of dumb luck. in point of fact I'm just a regular person like other regular people. 

In Searoad an Important Man from Salem comes to a little Oregon beach town and takes a room at a hotel that has been mostly booked up by -- according to the side of their bus -- "The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood: A Christian Community." He views them benevolently, but as the weekend progresses and people in town repeatedly assume he's one of them ("Your party is on the patio, sir") he gets less and less happy about them. Le Guin didn't go in for humor much, but it's deftly done.

Well. Let's call it a night, Dale. Here's hoping for another run of luck, eh?

Morning

Phew. Difficult time in Eugene: I didn’t know Dad knew so little about Mary’s suicide. We were so bad at communicating in those days, and so wrapped up in ourselves. I spent most of my time with my head down nursing dreams of grandeur, to be played out in distant lands far from my family, among the houris of paradise, where none of this would matter. Maybe I’m unfair (I’m certainly unfair), but I don’t miss the young man I used to be. And to be trying to communicate now, with my broken voice and my deaf ears, what I didn’t even know well fifty years ago! Christ.

Still a new day comes. A fresh cool morning. I climbed the ladder by the garage and popped my head up to look over the roofs and the tree crowns at the wind dancing, and that was a thing worth doing.

If I could hold in my mind just for a moment how fast this planet is really spinning, and how fast it’s whirling around its star, my hubris might be torn off in the wind of its passage. Or loosened, anyway. So I like to imagine.

Piggie-Wig

Glittering leaves: high summer: sheets rigged to keep the sun off the windows: watering the trees. In this tender semi-rainforest we stand a heat wave as if it was a seige of nomads: surely they’ll go home soon? They can’t live here.

I mostly keep my counsel. My thoughts are deep undersea, moving in the guck of the sea bottom. I had thought I must review God’s resume and curriculum vitae before doing anything so outlandish as praying: but of course that’s backwards, stupid evangelical stuff. Why would I accept him without knowing him, and how could I know him but by listening to him? So I try from time to time to listen to him. Or “pray,” in the queer Christian terminology. I don’t particularly want anything from him, at the moment. I want to know what this thing is, that I am part of – liegeman of – perhaps the ears and eyes of. Asking favors strikes me as presumptuous and premature. And if I were to ask, it would only be that I learn better to how to listen; and I doubt there’s an reply other than “listen more carefully; listen more often.”

So. It’s been a long time, longer even than it seems.

An old man – a man my age, I mean – stopped by my table at Tom’s, and laid a hand on my arm. “I just wanted to tell you how happy it makes me,” he said, “to see you praying and studying your Bible in the morning.”

I do say a brief prayer over my breakfast when it comes, but it’s a Buddhist prayer, because those are the only ones I know. I suppose he thinks that any Greek must be the Bible; actually the passage I was working on was a dumbed down paragraph from Herodotus. But he had gone off again before I had really come all the way up from my study-trance. And anyway, correcting him seemed idle, or even churlish. Do I know that he was wrong?

Last night, Ellowyn having become fretful, I picked her up and danced with her under the enthralling ceiling fan, and sang The Owl and the Pussycat to an improvised tune:

They sailed away for a year and a day
To the land where the bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a piggie-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose!

She always likes the advent of the piggie-wig.

This, and That

But my question, the linchpin question, is, "will I come through for myself?" Am I actually on my own side? Can I rely on myself to defend myself and protect myself? Because there is a Gollum portion of me that believes that it can hide, and survive in the wretched dark on cold fish, and by throttling the occasional goblin imp. I have betrayed myself, at critical moments of my life. I can see my way to doing it one last time, and I very much do not want to end my story this way.

You see, this is why the Food Thing has been so important to me: it has been the most basic and chronic betrayal of myself. When in stress and doubt I would hide, and let myself down. Let the Dale of the Sun fend for himself, let him be fat and ridiculous! I was going to hide in the dark, and eat, eat until my mouth was raw, eat until my belly was swollen, eat whatever ever I wanted and never stop, not for him, not for anyone.

But we are not two different people. We are one person, in the light or in the dark. That's why the food thing is important. And though the solution may look like simply thwarting and oppressing Gollum, it must not actually be any such thing. It has to be bringing him gently into the light, reminding him of flowers and grass and sunlight, reminding him of when he too had a family, and listened to wonderful tales out of the South. 

We are not equals. I must be the master. Because I can see him clearly, but he can't see me clearly. Because I can say, "this is enough: this is due proportion." When I let him misbehave I am letting him down, as well as myself. He can't look after himself, not really, though he doesn't understand that. 

---

"There is one God, and his name is Allah," one of them said; and the old man answered, "maybe there is only one Kindred, but there are many people." The roses came back and gave me their scent, yesterday. White roses. If there's not room for them, what is there room for?

But anyway my time for disputation has come and gone. One God or many, my life is His, or theirs. Little noises come piping from our mouths, for a little while, and a wind bends the roses. It's not my part now to quarrel with anyone. And anyway, I only ever quarreled in my head: I taunted my phantasmal enemies, while I grovelled in front of anyone real. It's time to admit that courage has never been my strong suit. Nor do I think I would have done much good, if I had had it. The first struggle is to see things clearly; swinging wildly at shapes in the dark was not going to help anyone.

The Dalai Lama said it was best to stay within your own tradition, "if you could": I used to take that to mean I should be a Christian, if I could, but of course the tradition I was raised in was not Christianity, it was Nothing, the religion of furtively snatched treats, and my god was the Self I was going to be someday but somehow never quite got around to being. Heya! Enough of that. Square One is a fine place to be, if you don't fool yourself into thinking you're somewhere else. Times of collapse are times of beginning.

I used to think that I would figure the world out, and establish a solution, and then impose it -- by force of my brilliance, I guess; that part was always a little hazy -- and the stupidity and hubris of that idea, the revolutionary's idea, has been late in appearing to me. The thing to do was to talk to people, and to come to a common understanding of what was wrong and what needed to be done. That would actually be a political life. Issuing manifestos and marching in shows of ritual (or real) violence is actually about as apolitical as you can get. Politics is talk. It's talking with people you don't understand, and people you don't agree with. It's listening. It's making yourself vulnerable to your neighbors. It's something I can't do. Heya! Enough of that.

So what now, you little rootless last-gasper? Do you go to that little Orthodox church, where the people are so benighted as still to think that a church should be beautiful and services should be reverent? Do you go to that Episcopalian church, where awkward people are actually trying to be nice (in a clumsy and ineffective fashion) to the unfortunate? Do you go to that Zen temple up the street where they take silly Japanese names and dress in weird overalls and take it from the top, all bald heads and rationality? Do you walk under such stars as still can be seen through the city glare, and chant heya? Hah! You don't know. You're hopeless. Go home.