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 Monday,  November 28, 2022

In bed at 9, up at 5, 3 or 4 pss, no alcohol.  500 CC vs. 1200 night before.  26 degrees out, high of 42 expected, frost on the ground and the trash cart.

Through my window I see good neighbor John McGregor out for his early morning walk, breath looking like steam in the cold air, shaming me with his discipline walking schedule, he and I both born in 1941, he carrying the mark of his childhood polio.  John gets as far as County Line Road before turning around and heading home, his discipline yielding to his good judgment.  He'll be out again as soon as his breath doesn't condense in the cold air.

Early Morning Reading  Dexter Filkins book reviews in The New Yorker, 9/13/2021:  Did Making the Rules of War Better Make the World Worse?  "On the evening of March 9, 1945, the United States sent an armada of B-29 Superfortresses toward Japan, which for months had resisted surrender, even as a naval blockade brought much of the population to the brink of starvation. The B-29s were headed for Tokyo, and carried napalm, chosen for the mission because so many of the city’s inhabitants lived in houses made of wood. The bombing ignited a firestorm that sent smoke miles into the sky; the glow was visible for a hundred and fifty miles. In six hours, as many as a hundred thousand civilians were killed, and a million others were left without homes. In the words of the raid’s architect, Major General Curtis LeMay, the Japanese were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” Five months later, the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered." The American government rewarded LeMay by promoting him to lieutenant general and then full 4 star general and making him commander of the Strategic Air Command where his bellicosity became a bit of a problem, encouraging the bombing of Russian missile sites in Cuba over JFK's embargo/blockade strategy and bombing North Vietnam "back to the Stone Age" rather than LBJ's strategy of restraint.  He ran for Vice President on George Wallace's ticket ('Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever). "But the real origins of our predicament, Moyn says, date to the outrages of the Vietnam War, including the My Lai massacre and the devastating bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia, where napalm was routinely deployed."  Part of our campaign to win the hearts and minds of the peasants who we forced to move into 'strategic hamlets' before we bombed and burned their homes.

Flannery O'Connor

I watched again a PBS American Masters feature on Flannery O'Connor.  Somehow I missed it when it first aired on 3/22/2021.  Earlier today while working in the basement, I pulled out my copy of the book containing most of her letters, The Habit of Being.  It was there I years ago discovered her wonderful statement which rings so true to me: "I don't know what I think until I read what I say."  It's the process, the exercise of writing that forces us to clarify our thoughts, at least as best we can.  Talking comes easy for most of us, words coming out of us without too much thought behind them.  Putting thoughts into writing, putting them down on paper, forces us to look at them and wonder whether they are true, or at least defensible.  I can't say I am all that into O'Connor's writing, at least the novels, but reading her letters brought me closer to her and her groundedness, a groundedness that I've never quite been able to find.  She was a true,l blue Catholic and it shows in the letters.  She sparred with Mary McCarthy over transubstantiation and the "True Presence": "Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."  Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.  Favorite story by her was "The Displaced Person" exposing the murderer in all our hearts.  Other great thoughts from her letters:  “I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.” and “Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me”

She raises in me the same questions as Reinhold Niebuhr, how can such good, gifted, brilliant people believe in God, but they very clearly do. “Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.” 

Pain is back, yesterday and today, despite no coffee, soda,or wine for a week.  Scary.