Tuesday, March 21, 2023
In bed at 9, woke up at 4:10, and lay back down and up at 5:25, roaring tinnitus, a dull brain 'came to' around 6. 33℉ outside, high of 42, cloudy, wind NE at 8 mph, gusts up to 18 mph today, the wind chill is at 26. Sunrise at 6:53, sunset at 7:05, 12+11.
Bad start. I mistakenly threw Geri's chicken soup into the garbage disposal this morning. I was doing my usual early morning clean-up of the kitchen, filling the dishwasher, tidying up, handwashing wooden handled knives and pots and pans. There was a large stock pot filled with liquid on the stovetop and I mistook it for a pot that was soaking while awaiting washing so I started emptying it into the garbage disposal. By the time most of the broth was down the drain, I realized it the the soup Geri made yesterday. This was a very bad way to start the day, reminding me of the time not so long ago that I emptied muchof my beef stock for my borscht through a strainer into the garbage disposal, forgetting to have a pot underneath to save the stock. I feel terrible about this both because of the lost effort Geri put into making the soup and because of what it suggests about my head, mistakes, confusion, executive function, cognitive decline, and dementia. Not good.
LTMW at one male goldfinch on the niger feeder, about 3/4 turned a beautiful yellow gold. his contrasting wings black with the two bright white wingbars.
American failures in my lifetime have included Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Should I add Saudi Arabia and Israel? Pakistan and India? Much writing recently about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, notably by Tom Nichols and David Frum in The Atlantic. They both supported the war and Frum was one of the writers of GWB's now infamous 'axis of evil' speech. Nichols defends the decision to go to war for regime change but admits the 'good cause' was woefully executed and a failed mission. Frum seems to reluctantly admit that the full-cale invasion of Iraq in 2003 was "not wise," but he is far from ready to call the war a complete shitshow. It's hard not to conclude however that the widespread revulsion throughout the world and in the US over the war contriubted mightily to GWB's successor BHO's unwillingness to respond militarity to Russia and Syria crossing his "red line" with chemical weapons in Syria and to Russia's seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014. And now of course we have the invasion of all of Ukraine with no clear end in sight and the world on edge. Thank you, Messrs. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al.
Reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I remember reading reviews of this novel when it was published and intending to read it but I never got around to it. I finally bought it on Kindle with the Audible feature though I've been retricting myself to the Kindle version. The trouble with Audible is that the narration goes too fast. I'm a slow reader and always have been. I used to feel like some kind of failure back in the day when 'speed reading' was all the thing. "I read 3 books every week!" as if that were a good thing without regard to comprehension, stopping to think about what you've just read, highlighting passages to come back to, etc. A lot of what I read I read slowly, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by wond, wondering about meaning, connotation, nuance, sometimes even syntax. No Evelyn Wood for me. I'm only 1/8 of the way into the book so far, at a point where the narrator/protagonist says he thinks his wife was a person 'the Lord' would have liked to have spent a portion of his time in this life with. He has the same thought of his grandfather. each having "an earned innocence." An interesting thought, who did Jesus choose to spend time with and why? Not much is said about his family after he began his 'public life,' the life recorded in the Gospels, other than his brother James, an apostle. Mary Magdeline of course and Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus of Bethany. Who else? He apparently had a lot of 'disciples' but how many friends? Why was John 'the beloved' so special to Jesus? In reading Gilead, I find myself asking the same question I ask when reading Niebuhr or Flannery O'Connor or any other theist, especially Christians: how is it that they believe in God? What kind of understnding do they have of God? Eternal, out of time and space? All-Good, All-Loving, All-Powerful? Creator of Good and Evil? All-Benevalent or Mean Prick?Knowing what we do or mankind and our history, of the cruelty and indifference in us, we who are made 'in the image and likeness of God', what does that say of the God who made us? Theodicy, how do they deal with it? The Gilead narrator mentions all the soldiers at Fort Riley Kansas who died of Spanish Influenza and how did God allow all that death and suffering. He wrote a sermon about it, about how the flu was a sign of God's displeasure, a punishment for the war and a way fo sparing the dead soldiers from killing and having to kill. All of it of course is poppycock, made up out of whole cloth, based on nothing but the narrator's own imagination. And faith that surpasseth all understanding. Church people or God people do a lot of 'reading into' situations how the situation somehow reflects "God's will" or "God's plan." We of the 'lost souls' crowd, we unbelievers or heathens, can't buy into it. On the other hand, I suppose i do believe that each of us has to find and give some meaning to his or her life and to the happenings in it. In some ways, each of us spends a lifetime doing just that, attributing meaning or significance to things that have no meaning, no significance. Am I remembering correctly that that is what Existentialism is about, at least in part, existence preceding essence and all that. We want to be saved from The Absurd, from Angst, Dread, Chaos. For most of us, the answer is God, the Savior, the Redeemer, the Alpha and the Omega, our Source and our Goal. For Freud and heathens, God is a fantasy, created by us and our cultures to protect us from fearful realities. It's no wonder that modern Existentialism flourished after the two world wars in the first half of the last century, after Dachau and Auschwitz and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How does one believe in an All-Good, All-Powerful, All-Loving God after all that? Does it all depend on how we conceive of God? I think two poems by the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, a favorite of mine since my college days. First, God's Grandeur:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
Here's a lovely passage in the letter old, dying John Ames writes to his 7 year old son: "I'm writing this in part to tell you if you ever wonder what you've done in life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been a good child to an old man in a shabby little town you will one day leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you." Indeed, if only we had words.
Another: "There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't expect to find it, either." John Ames, the Existentialist!
Another: "A man can know his father or his son, and there still might be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."
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