Skalduggery

Something from David

I was dropping by for my daily dozen and ran across THIS at Responsibility. As it turns out, Xerox has a nifty little website that sends cards to our troops.  It’s so easy a caveman could do it – so drop by and choose a card, a greeting, and send it along.  As Tom said at Responsibility, “If you have a blog, post this.  If not, send it on to your address list.  Someone who is away from his or her family at the Holidays will appreciate your efforts.” Thanks in advance for the cheer and good spirit you’ll bring to a person far from home.

Cheers all.

Fogarty Creek

I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to post this here, but I wound up getting a bit of a challenge from an online buddy about my poetry – having to do with claiming to be “The Skald,” an Icelandic warrior poet. This photo essay and poem don’t really use any kennings or skaldic poetic techniques, but it is at least a poem 😉

Aiden the "Cool"

In terms of “creative writing” I’ve not written anything at this new Skalduggery yet, and a combination photo essay/poem seemed just the ticket to get started! I’d like to write something easy, but not so straightforward, something simple, but not uncomplicated – just something that has at least a little meaning. Try not to take this in the traditional “confessional” vein, but rather a blend of fact and fiction that describes a time with my grandson.

It would be easy for a person to say that I am afflicted with a serious anti-authority  complex…. Well, screw them; it’s great to be right. The real problem is how difficult, painful, and downright mystifying I find human relationships. Mostly, I pretty much suck at relationships and have fought with, argued with, or disappointed virtually everyone I know and most everyone who tried to be my friend… and yet, I still have a few friends.

It is not difficult for me to think that I am a failed son, brother, husband and father, a mediocre sailor, poet, writer, and artist, etc. ad nauseam…. Well, screw me; get over it. I take the advice I’ve given my children; “keep on breathing and keep on trying, just keep breathing in and out.” The real difference here is that my children are succeeding – they are the blooms in this desert around me.

Aiden the Agile

I can also imagine myself at the Benedictine Nursing Center, warehoused, waiting to die and desperately trying to wring some meaning from what has passed for my life. I worked at the nursing center for a short time on the Alzheimer’s/Dementia Unit while my grandmother was a resident of the facility. It became unbearably easy to weep for myself, for those I cared about, and those I was caring for – to weep for that THING we all have somehow lost forever and cannot hope to find.

Before one thinks this is some pessimistic exercise in futility, or a wallowing in self-pity, remember what I’ve told my children – “you are still alive, breathe in and out, be that courageous person that continues to breathe.” Even though depression, anguish, or despair may influence everything around you, EVERYTHING else is still out there – all of those small and good things. To me, this sentiment reflects my geography because this is so much like the Pacific Northwest! “OF COURSE it’s cloudy, but OOOHHH, look how the sun filters through the clouds and trees!” So then, I’ll breathe in and out and do my best because I’ll be in the ground soon enough.

Why the long schpeel? Because I don’t make real friends easily, and that history is important for my little poem about my grandson!

Things a Little Boy Can’t Say

Aiden Completes the Log Walk

The ocean splashed and crashed
His little voice away, and I,
Just feet away,
Boomed my voice’s harsh sound that bound
His little body to the spot almost daring him not
To move toward the edge of Fogarty Creek.

His eyes, yearned to yearn –
His thoughts sought to seek an explanation
For wanting to want so desperately
To get his feet wet in that cascade of wild water…

And in he stepped,
Through my warning, and
Straight into my anger –
Soaking his shoes wet with it.

“WHY?!”

His eyes yearned, then teemed with tears,
His thoughts sought and failed to find an explanation
For his body’s unthinkable betrayal of desiring

To desire to sneak
Those sneakers wet.

My anger dissipated on the drive home –
The shoes were none the worse for wear –
And after dinner, while playing with his Legos, he said,

“Grandpa?”

A Gift From Aiden to His Mother

“Yes?”

“Will you play with me?”

This was not forgiveness.
This had nothing to do with a young boy’s utter inability
To say what he most needed
To say
That day.

This was not adult explanation time.
Explaining something to a boy that needed no explanations
About my unjustified anger.

Where?

You see, there ARE things a little boy can’t say –
But not for want of trying.
There are things an old man CAN say, but
Ought to try not to…
So he will hear a simple offer of friendship.

“Grandpa?”

“Yes?”

“Will you play with me?”

“Aiden, there is nothing I’d rather do.”

Though he didn’t understand my watery eyes,
I’m pretty certain he understood my answer to his question,

“Why?”

“Because it is great to be breathing!
What a wonderful thing it is to be
breathing and alive today with you!”

Cheers all!

Powder and Grrr

He lived a hearty fourteen years. I found him in the dumpster outside the Benedictine Nursing Center in Mt. Angel. It’s been a very fun life to watch play out in the span of my own, and one that touched me daily – so I figure a small eulogy is in order.

Powder and Lladro

The doc said that “leapers” like Powder tend to have their hips fall apart on them, and certainly, by the end of his life he was hobbling around the best he could. My incredible wife carefully switched his diet from crunchy to soft as he started losing his teeth, we had a bit in common Powder and I… Today, partly because of an infected scratch, but mostly because he was getting to the point that it was difficult to eat and drink, we took him to the vet and put him down. My wife, my youngest daughter (now almost 21), and myself watched as the vet used anesthesia to put him to sleep, to drift off to he-man cat Valhalla. We all cried like school girls… which is ok for my wife and daughter, they were once school girls. Couldn’t help it, I hated to see him go. Though he didn’t die in battle, he was quite the warrior… and he was mine.

I think, in order to open this blog with my “Hello World” post, I’ll re-post one of the more popular posts from the old Skalduggery. There is a reason for this other than laziness – it establishes, in a small way, some of the values I cherish.

Christopher Hitchens, in the first article of a series of three, rages against and castigates the very likes of God and religion. These articles are excerpts from his new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I can’t help it, I like the guy. He’s an obnoxious iconoclast – but he THINKS. Can’t say that I agree with him on any of a number of things, but there are several elements of this first installment that I do agree with. However, like one of the respondents, not only is there plenty to disagree with, there is much about religion that has produced some of the best in humanity. “When atheism becomes as intolerant as fanatical religion,” perhaps it’s time to take a step back and watch what spews out of one’s mouth. I believe the respondent had the right of it:

…just because religion is conducive to intolerance and bloodlust, Hitchens the belligerent warmonger proves that atheism is no guarantee of benevolence. Certainly Stalin and Mao found other ideologies to justify their appetite for destruction.

Trotskyite that he is, I’m certain Hitchens will excuse atheism and blame the evil Stalin and his perversion of an ideology… mmm, what’s that? Hitchens Is Not Great: How People Poison Ideologies.

Blech.

Why the commentary on Mr. Hitchens? Because he attempts to marginalize another, much more humble person I admire. C.S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man to address a subject that my friend over at The Coffeespy  and a friend at work have knocked around. To use Lewis’s phrase, we in the West are raising “Men Without Chests.” This discussion might seem a little convoluted, but please, bear with me here – it will come right in the end.

Lewis performs a critical analysis of a school text book as launching off point for a defense of objective values, what he in shorthand, calls the Tao. Throughout the book he uses principles from the Tao, but as he makes clear, this is a word he is using to represent more than the Chinese concept:

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and super cosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.¹⁷ ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’¹⁸ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.¹⁹

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’ (Columbia’s put the book online).

Where Lewis uses a text book on literature to demonstrate that modern man is losing the understanding that there is a real objective value system, I would quote a single passage from the actual Tao. However, before I do, one of his examples is straightforward; the notion that a particular vista is sublime. The literature textbook tries to inculcate in the student that this simply means one has sublime feelings about the scene in question. Lewis, rightly, identifies that as an absurdity. If a person were describing his feelings, then certainly the sentence might start “That makes me feel…”

“That vista makes me feel sublime.” First, sublime means “so awe-inspiringly beautiful as to seem almost heavenly” (Encarta). It’s an adjective not a feeling. Lewis rightly points out that the emotions one experiences are virtually opposite of the descriptor itself. If one says an ocean view is sublime, it is not because one feels awe-inspiringly beautiful – the emotional correlative is veneration or humility. The scene inspires AWE. More than that, one is saying that the scene is worthy of veneration. Through a long, but entertaining and educational argument, Lewis connects this codswollop to the death of courage as virtue, in fact, to the death of the civic and cardinal virtues.

Now then, the easy way is the way, in the Tao:

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is morality.

When morality is lost, there is ritual.

Ritual is the husk of true faith,

The beginning of chaos (Tao te Ching, #38).

Our culture progresses into idiocy for lack of that central organ in man, the chest, which is atrophied by the very cowards who cut their own hearts out. Lewis reminds us that “the head rules the belly through the chest.” The head representing our reason, the belly our appetites, and the chest – “The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal” (Lewis, 1943).

I love poetry, especially poetry that inspires awe, celebrates courage, fidelity, loyalty, and so many other virtues associated with the chivalric code. Most recognize Tennyson’s noble 600 in the Charge of the Light Brigade, and sometimes people recognize at least a part of Ulysses. Each celebrates various virtues. Lewis finds the fact that these authors of the literature textbook are called intellectuals intolerable:

The operation of The Green Book [the literature textbook] and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius [the authors] could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful (Lewis, 1943).

I’ve spent too much time harping on a pet peeve. I’ve been reading books on the CIA, John and Robert Kennedy of late, and I think they were perhaps the last of the liberal Democrats I admired. RFK seemed to recognize the decay CS Lewis identified and set on our dinner tables. RFK’s “philosophy, which he urged on others and truly tried to live by himself, was: we may be doomed, but each man must define himself anew each day by his own actions” (Thomas, 2000, p. 22). I think we’d find far fewer traitors in our midst should we define ourselves anew each day by our actions. I’m a retired sailor, so I’ll sign off with a final note from Ulysses:

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

                Alfred, Lord Tennyson