12/11/2025

 Thursday, December 11, 2025

1925 Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Quas Primas

1961 President John F. Kennedy provided US helicopters and crews to South Vietnam

1983 1st visit to a Lutheran church by a pope (John Paul II in Rome

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:25.  14°, wind chill +1°, high 23°.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at  a.m.

Night Moves is a 2014 movie co-written and directed by Kelly Reichardt.  I watched it yesterday and, as I have with other Reichardt movies I've seen, I enjoyed it though I'm not sure why.  No one could ever accuse Reichardt of hurrying the pace of her movies.  They are slow, very slow.  They have little dialogue, very little.  But her films give viewers a sense of being there, being with the characters as they live each moment through the film.  In Meeks Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, the 'action' in the film seems mostly to be Michelle Williams silently, slowly, and deliberatively walking toward her goals.  In Night Moves, we mostly study Jesse Eisenberg's face as he prepares to and then carries out a crime, and then lives with some consequences of bombing a dam on a river in Oregon, as a protest and an assault on technocracy and modern life's effects on Nature.  The story has a Crime and Punishment quality to it, a mystery about how Eisenberg will resolve the quandary he's in after the crime and the ending isn't very satisfactory, with me expecting a Raskolnikovian finish, but I enjoyed the movie anyway and want to see some more of Reichardt's work.

Further to yesterday's thoughts on our Imagined Democracy.  Why didn't I think of Ned Beatty's great speech to Howard Beale in Network?

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! . . .

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, riyals, rubles, pounds, and shekels. [Today we would add euros and  crypto currency.]

You get up on your little twenty-one-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There are only IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.  [His list seems kind of quaint today.  What huge entities would we add today? from Silicon Valley?  from Wall Street?  from China?]

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.   

The following is copied from my journal one year ago today.  The reference to my goyishe yahrzeit candle moved me to seek again the date of death of my friend David Branch, this time through ChatGPT.  Success finally: March 19, 1999, age 53.  DOB November 29, 1945, not much older than my mother when she died at age 51 

I'll light a candle for . . .  In Caitlin Flanagan's essay about Seamus Heaney, she wrote: "I’ve been a Catholic since my baptism, but the only Catholic tradition I remember my father handing down to me was lighting a candle “for the dead of the family.” Catholicism provides you with something no rational approach to the world ever will: a cosmology of intercessors and saints. It’s a religion that acknowledges, openly and from the very beginning, that faith itself is a mystery. Walking out of that graveyard left me with a bleakness, but I didn’t have time to confront it, because I was already entering the church so that I could light a candle for the dead of my family.

 During Kitty's last years, she suffered from insomnia, or perhaps I should say she experienced insomnia.  She never complained about it or let on that it bothered her even though he beloved doctor kept her from napping during the day.  She would wake up in the middle of each night and move from her bedroom to the guest bedroom and read a book or watch Rachel Maddow or another program on the TV.  Each day after I woke up, always early, I would start texting her for our daily conversation, knowing that she was already awake.  Though she never complained, I felt bad that she was up alone every night.  I sent her a red votive candle holder and a box of 12 (or perhaps 36) votive candles, the kind that we were both very familiar with because of our years as Catholics.  I asked her to keep the candle in her guest room and to light it when she was up in the middle of each night as a sign that I was with her in spirit.  Later I purchased a candle holder of my own and a supply of votive candles.  I would light a candle each morning in the predawn hours when I was awake.  I called it my "Kitty candle"  and I suppose it is indeed my way of lighting a candle for my beloved sister.  I tried to find some history on this "I'll light a candle for you (or for a deceased, or someone who is ill, whoever or whatever) tradition among Catholics, but couldn't find anything.  What I did find was lyrics sung by the Welsh soprano Natasha Marsh to the theme for Schindler's List, "I Won't Light a Candle."

Sometimes when I close my eyes, I hear you call my name
Even though I watched you go, I know I'll see you once again
The day will come when all my prayers come true
So I won't light a candle yet for you
No, I won't light a candle yet for you

In my heart, I still believe I'll kiss your face once more
Since the day you went away, I've kept your memory by my door
Knowing that you'll soon come walking through
So I won't light a candle yet for you
No, I won't light a candle yet for you

Every tear I will not cry
I would save till I need you
Every hope that will not die
Keep me strong till I see you

Yesterday I swore I saw you reaching for my hand
Then you begged me 'please, forget me'
But how could you understand
That letting go is the last thing I could do?
So I won't light a candle yet for you
No, I won't light a candle yet for you
I won't light a candle yet for you

I'm a big fan of candles of all kinds, but especially of church-y candles that remind me of my childhood and attendance at St. Leo church for masses, confessions, benedictions, 40 hours of adorations, and private prayer.  I'm not sure of how much of a believer I was in those days, but I was surely a member of the Irish Catholic tribe and, like my confreres, I was "tattooed in the cradle with the beliefs of [my] tribe."  To light one of the candles in the sturdy wrought iron candle rack, we were expected to drop a dime or more into the offering slot to cover the cost of the candle and some profit for St. Leo (or Msgr. Malloy, our pastor.)  Candles can symbolize so much. The transience of life, remembrance, celebrations, light in dark times and in dark spaces, unity and community as when crowds all 'light up' together, mental and spiritual enlightenment, and transformation as a candle's wax changes from solid to liquid to gas.  I light a votive candle nightly as my night light.  I often light another one in the early hours when I'm up and alone before daybreak, my "Kitty candle."  I have my goyishe Yahrzeit candle that I light on the anniversaries of the death of people close to me, my parents, Kitty, Tom St. John, and Ed Felsenthal.  Now I need to add Aunt Monica and cousin Christine.  If I knew my Uncle Jim's date of death, I would light the candle for him, too,  He was so good and nurturing to me when my father couldn't or wouldn't be. I would also light the yahrzeit candle for my friend David Branch, but I can't find his date of death on the internet.  It's a disappointment.  He was a good friend who died much too young, a candle in the wind.  I miss him and would like to honor him with my yahrzeit candle.  Is that silly? Ridiculous?  I don't think so.  It is those who remember who are blessed with the memories of the one in whose honor the candle is burned.  Burning the yahrzeit candle can stir up all sorts of memories and emotions - love, gratitude, loss, and regret.  Those memories and emotions are important guides to identity, character, and self-understanding.

LTMW at the tray feeder, I see three house finches, two females and one male.  Earlier, there were three mourning doves there.  A gray squirrel feeds on the ground.  I put out an abundance of sunflower and safflower seeds yesterday afternoon, knowing it was going to be bitterly cold this morning.  Recently, I've learned that the mourning doves that I have long regarded as gentle, docile creatures can be pretty nasty in asserting pride of place on the tray feeder.  Another innocence lost. 

A reminder that ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE TO THEIR PEOPLE, ours perhaps more than most.  In this morning's Wall Street Journal: Fed Chair Jerome Powell Says U.S. May Be Drastically Overstating Jobs Numbers- The country could be losing 20,000 jobs a month, Powell said, a concern that was part of the decision to cut interest rates, by Matt Grossman and Harriet Torry.  Excerpts:

Fed Chair Jerome Powell pointed on Wednesday to a job-market risk that economists have been worried about for months: Official statistics could be drastically overstating recent hiring.

Powell said that Fed staffers believe that federal data could be overestimating job creation by up to 60,000 jobs a month. Given that figures published so far show that the economy has added about 40,000 jobs a month since April, the real number could be something more like a loss of 20,000 jobs a month, Powell said.

In a regime led by a world-class liar, why should anyone believe anything said by his apparatchiks? 

Why keep a journal?  To record some thoughts worth thinking.  To record feelings worth feeling.  To record memories worth remembering.  To record thoughts unbidden and unwelcome.  To record feelings unbidden and unwanted.  To record memories unbidden and unwanted.