How Long, O Lord?

 

It is very early in the morning of the shortest day of the year, and  I am awake with my second cup of coffee.  My nearest neighbors are a flock of assorted birds, and their assertive rooster woke me, and my moving activated my 'smart watch' which told me that it was nearly time for Legacy Icons to stream Morning Prayer, so I thought, why not?  Television church always seems a bit odd to me, but it's an odd time and it has been another odd year.

So, I boil water and light a candle and hear psalms and troparia and a story of yet another virgin who wa martyred rather than let herself be defiled and a sermon about Elias and his prayers for drought and rain.  I am still a little punch drunk from having watched what has become my favourite Christmas movie,  Alfonso Cuarcon's adaptation of P. D. James' Children of Men.  I had first watched the movie in 2007, when it was first released on DVD.  Remember DVD;s.  They were a miracle that arrived soon after the radio.  I recommended it this year to a friend to watch as  the perfect movie for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, but he thought he might have to work that night, so we watched it on the Fourth Sunday of Advent.  When first I saw it, in bucolic Eureka Springs, the Seige of Seattle seemed like a fiction, and the Plague that had occupied the Earth by 2027 did, too.  Now, not so much.

Morning Prayer hurries along, as is normal in Orthodox services, a practice I still find a bit odd.  Is there really a great reward in heaven for him who can read Psalm Fifty the Fastest?  And then I listen to a video of Olafur Arnalds' Morning Sessions II.  Somehow I am shocked that Arnalds has become grey-headed.  How is it possible?  How long, O Lord, have I been enjoying his music, which is certainly as effective prayer as Elias'  How is it possible that already fourteen years have passed since I first watched Childreen of Men?  How isit possible that it is already another solstice morning, another Feast of St. Thomas, which only yesterday I celebated in the snows of Santa Fe.  I t was the deep midwinter of 1991, and I was taken with all things Celtic, and so we said the ThomasMass outside, processing a deep trench in the snow around the altar of cold stone, claiming the record for the coldest mass ever celebrated  intentionally  in Santa Fe history, before breaking fast at Pasqual's.  We of course prayed for peace.  Now eveyone from that little congregation is grey-headed or lying under the snow in that church yard where we had processed..

Arnalds at the piano seems like a grown-up Schroeder and I think that every Christmas is a Charlie Brown Christmas and that the question is always How long O Lord?  How long before we childen of men lean to number our days and apply our hearts to wisdom?  How long befoe we children of men might know the things which belong unto our peace?  Still, it seems, they are hid from our eyes.  How long, O Lord?  How long?

On Being a Whited Sepulchre

 December has arrived again, and with the making of lists of biggest hits of the year.  Certainly the thing that hit me the hardest in 2021 was the corona virus.  In March I did not expect to live to December.  I didn't expect to live to April.  In April, I was still feeling pretty uncetain about my suvival, and it was the end of May before I was convinced that my survival might be a good thing.

One of the frequently asked questions on Facebook and such is, if this were the last day of yur life, what would you do?  I hardly ever consider that question seriusly, but just think that I would go on doing what I usually do.  I am, not unhappy.  I am seldom ever even grumpy--although there wass that one afternoon last week .  . . .

But over the months since March that I have come to consider bonus months of a sort, I have begun to consider that question more seriously.  And I realized that I had become a sort of whited sepulchre.  For those of you dear readers who aren't familiar with the image, it is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, where Jesus says:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulches,which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within fullof med men's bones, and of all uncleanness.'

Now, I ain't claiming that I appeared beautiful ooutward ot other people who saw me, but I was pretty happy with my life when I looked at it.  Indeed, I was practiving all of what in traditional morality were considered the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.  Not so noticeably that I considered myself a grievious sinner, mind you.  I wasn't as [choose a sin] as someone I knew.  Besides, these attributes which were once considered sinful--that is, damaging to our personnages, to our souls, have become in contemporary society virtues.

Part of my wake-up call,  so to speak, was the attitude my friends had towards my illnesses.  I sawy illnesses because the United States had just gone through an election, and I voted against the party most of my good liberal friends thought would be the salvation of the country.  And they spared few opportunities to tell me that they thought I must be crazy--is this gaslighting?--because I had erred from the true faith.  Well, the party of light won, and nothing they have done has made me wish that I had voted for them.  Rather, they have just reminded me of the implications of the name Lufifer.  My regret is that I voted at all.  I regret that I got distracted from working on my own thoughts and actions and lgave energy to what is basically a cock fight or a pit dog fight Then  during the months that I was so ill from the virus, those same friends who were so anxious to convince me that I was mentally ill with wrongthink almost never checked to see how I was doing in my fight with the virus.

In the long run, however, I consider having had a fight with the virus to have been a blessing, because it reminded me of what St. Paul had said about our real fight:

'we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.'

We all will die. If I had died in March, the world would still  sing the carols of the  Adventt and Christmas seasons, stay up and drink too much on New Year's Eve, complain about the cold and slush of February and hardly notice next March that I was no longer posting cat photos on Instagram or writing occasional contrary blog posts.  But . . . .(Am I making a New Year's resolution?  I don/t make those.  But this is a sort of Advent resolution, and much of the western Church considers Advent the start of a new year, so . . . .)  But I hope during the months remaining to me to pay mor atttention to how I live, to recover the order of my life that I once followed, an order or attention and prayer that was designed to keep me connected to the earth and to the seasons, to my fellow human beings and to the other creatures with whom we share this earth, and to the One who created all of us, all creatures great and small and all creatures, as Monte Pythom reminded us, 

'all , things dull and ugl, all things small ad  squat, All things rude and nasty  . . .'

We are all in this together, and I am convinced that the tradition of the Orthodox Church is correct, that what one of us does affects us all/  There my be victimless political crimes, but there are no victimless sins. And so, as is the practice at Vespers in the Orthodox Church, I ask you, my brothers ad sisters, to forgive me, for I have sinned.

Always I Begin Again, Being a Slow Learner

 

My home town had a second rate college, which brought a lot of folks who might otherwise never show up in such a place but who couldn't quite manage a job in the ivy leagues.  Such folks often seemed like 'characters' to us 'normal' folk.  They tended to do things like drive Volvos and entertain strangers, and the town's gossip was juiced with stories of their activities.  One of the characters was the wife of a professor from Louisiana, up from the shores of Lake Ponchetrain to the hills of Crowley's Ridge.  I remember her name as having been Mylie, but that might be wrong.  

One day Mylie heard a knock at her door and opened it to find two nicely dressed women whom she had never seen befoe.  'Oh', she said. 'Do come in.  I've just baked some cookies and made a pot of coffee, and I'd love to share them'.  The women came in, and it is reported that the conversation centered at first around cookie recipes and then wandered to other topics, before Mylie remembered her manners.  'Oh my', she said. 'I've quite forgotten to ask you why you're here'.  'Well, we've come to ask if you're a Christian.'  'Oh my.  Of course not.  That would be much too hard, but I'd love to meet a Christian.  I've never known one.  Have you?'

Or, as Chesterton said, 'Christianity has not been tried and found lacking.  It has been tried and found difficult'.  I'm writing on the First Sunday in Advent, when the traditional epistle reading admonishes us to 'walk honestly, as in the dyay, . . . not in chambering and wantonness, . . . But put . . . on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provisions for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.' I am enjoying a cup of coffee and listening to gentle Icelandic piano music as I write, fulfilling some of my minor lusts of the flesh.  I'd best not recount my stories of chambering mentioned earlier in the epistle. 

Now, most of the time I make no claims to be a Christian nor do I aspire to be one.  I have had episodes of such desires and claims, but they seem  much too pretentious in the long run.  I have spent some time as a fairly serious hermit, and it was actually a very pleasant life, but one that got swallowed up somehow in my desire to understand the world around me.  I was distracted not by drunkenness or chambering but by quantum physics and Google.  Nor do I find what calls itself 'the church' to be much help.  I mean, these days putting up a sign seems to make people a church, with all the attendant tax adantages thereof.  Only the strictest orthodox Christians seem to have a real claim on having 'out on Christ'.  

And yet, each Advent I back slide.  It's the music, mostly.  Each Advent I think I won't but I do listen to the music of English choirs singing the antiphons and hymns of the season, and I listen to English voices reading the ringing passages of Isaiah, which were I to quote on Facebook might get me banned for not following community standards, and I am a kid again, coming out of the west front of the church on Christmas Eve, having heard the song of the angels and now finding tthe deep mid-winter.  I want to move to Durham and live in a cave and visit the shrine of St. Cuthbert.  

Do I 'believe in one God, the father, the almighty, &tc.'?  Well, of course not.  I mean, why would the creator of the stars of night bother with one specific tribe of wandering Aramaens and one maiden in a small town on the edge of the empire.  Why did some other gods reveal themselves to the wanderers of Australia?  It makes no sense.  

And, of course I do.  Because it's a good story, because one needs a context from which to consider events, because even though  I was raised in a very watered-down part of the tradition of the western church, those bits of tradition would serve me as herms on a path to try to find the older and deeper traditions of the church, leading me (finally?--I'm not dead yet) to orthodoxy as much as one can find it these days.  

Because the image of the king, the sovereign, in today's Gospel is much more appealing than czars and presidents or congressses, all of whom seem to want to fleece their flock rather than to abide with them in the fields.  Because in today's gospel 'thy King cometh unto thee, meek' but then 'went into the temple of God, and cast out all of them that sold and bought in the temple'.  

Because I love the story of St. Seraphim and the bear, and living out here in the pretend woods I like to think I might have a similar life.  

Because I like to think that if the cousins George and Nicholas had been kings of the sort in today's Gospel, they would not have sent their soldiers into the fields of Flanders to slay one another, although of course I don't know of any king except in today's story who wouldn't act like those most christian cousins.  

Of course I will get over it.  I will make the mistake of hearing some contemporary sermon in which the highly-paid priest tries to remake Christianity in the image of his own political party.  I will see how much more excited good christians are by the Super Bowl than by the Incarnation.  I will then spend the next eleven months again as a cynic.  Cynicism is after all easily confirmed by the data.  But for a month, it will once again be my 'care and delight to prepare [myself] tp hear again the message of the angesls; in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in  a manger.'

The Things We Lost

 

Despite having followed all the CDC guidelines, and hardly ever interacting with any other human beings, I had the distinct experience of the Virus.  I  lost f March. April was a time of recovery so slow I wasn't completely convinced that it was recovery.  May was the first month when I began to feel happy that I had survived instead of wondering whether it would have been more pleasant to have died.  And even now, five months later, I am just recovering something like my pre-plague stamina,  I am still suffering from a pretty serious bout of Deep Vein Thrombosis, a condition I had avoided for nearly two years, and which I now wonder will be my new normal.

I know therefore from personal experience that the virus is not a hoax.

But.   I am writing this essay outside of a coffee shop that I once would visit nearly every morning,.  Now it is still closed for inside seating.  At the beginning of the plague year, I continued to come every morning because i wanted to support the business.  It's owned by a young  family with two children, and the place has what I suppose most succcincttly can  be called a good vibe.  The owners don'tt know when that will change.  They can't find staff for more service.  

The coffee shop is at least still open.  Many shops in my little are gone.  No more bagels with the picnic tables by the round-about with the view of the port and the mountains.  The bagel shop was one of the first to go.

I am not a bit follower of conspiracy theories, and yet . . . . It was Barach Obama's buddy Rahm Emanuel who said that no good crisis should be wasted.  And there were calls from such folk as Klaus Schwab who hoped the pandemic might be an opportunity for a reset. And it is yet to be seen whether the United States and other governments who have offered to be the 'saviors' during the crisis will be able to pay for their help.   Another round of 'free money' is going out to families with children.  I can't help but wonder what country those children will live in as adults.

Now, full disclosure of my latest status a a pariah:  I have not been vaccinated.  I don't know whether having had the virus has given me as much immunity as would result from the jab.  And I can't find any consistent data for the likely effect of the vaccine on my DVT.  I feel that there was so much disinformation from 'experts' during the early days of the plague year that I no longer am willing to believe anything they say.  

The virus probably cost Trump the election.  People made fun of him for saying things that he admitted were just guesses, or something he had heard.  It certainly didn't seem to me that such statements were very good actions for a head of state.  But the same people who made fun of Trump clung to the statements of the 'experts' who were also just guessing, but without the honesty to say so.  

I have often, during the plague year, thought of the Bastille song, The Things We Lost in the Fire.  I have no idea what the results would have been if the  'officials' had told people not to panic, bu to go on as much as possible with business as usual.  But somehow I doubt that the results would have been worse than they are now.  I suspect the economy will recover sooner than will trust in experts.

What an Odd Thing Is a Life

 

Today would have been my mother's  97th birthday, so today seems  a good time to think about her.  Of course, the memory is an odd faculty, and I can never be sure what is real and what is memorex. Besides, and this is one of the odder things about my memories of her, we had very few conversations from the time I started to school until she was a little younger than I am now. She was in failing  health and I moved back in with her to try to take care of her.  I say try, because I could see no reason she shouldn't be enjoying life and she was looking for some reason to die. 

 For about a five year period, I would go back to Jonesboro to find her not eating, and I would start cooking for her and trying to take her places, but she would say that she had some sort of deadly disease, and she wasn't afraid to die, and that she didn't want  the treatments.  She would eat less and less until she really did feel sick, and then she would decide that maybe she should get some treatment.  So, we would go to the doctor, who would say there was nothing wrong with her except that she was starving herself.  And she would start eating again, and feeling better, and start going out.  And she would tell me there was no reason for me to be there, and kick me out.  So I would go about my life, my now rather segmented life, which mostly consisted of kayaking explorations, until I got a phone call from either her or my brother asking me to return.  (I bought my first cell phone so I would be available on more or less 24 hour call.)  I think what happened is called rinse and repeat.

In retrospect, I think she would have been happier had  I just left her to starve the first time  But during those period when I was saying 'just one more bite', I learned for the first time really about her early life.  It was a much more impoverished life than I had ever imagined.  One easily forgets how recently electricity and indoor plumbing had come to rural Arkansas, or even to some of the towns.  It made sense of mother's delight in keeping the temperature at about 80 in the winter, when she wore summer dresses, and around 55 in the summer, when she piled on sweaters.  And why washing her children was almost a fetish.  She had grown up with no cooling, and wood stove for heat and cooking in the the kitchen, and baths in a tub in the back yard or the porch.

She was very romantic person, and also a sort of fatalist.  She believed that each person had one true love. For her, that person had been my father, who was two years younger than she but who had been accelerated in school.  He had a car when he was a teenager, even though it was a model T Ford, and he had seen her when she and her family first moved to Jonesboro.  He told his friend was was with him in the car as they drove past mother's house with outdoor plumbing that she was the girl he would marry.  And he did, in the midst of World War II.  He was sent to the Pacific, where he probably would have been killed during the invasion of Japan since he operated some sort of top-secret radio/radar apparatus that would direct landing ships, but the bomb saved him.  He returned to San Diego, where my mother was waiting for him in a boarding house full of navy wives, and where I was conceived in December of 1945.

As far as I know, her (their) marriage was pretty near perfect.  I never heard them argue, although she would get angry over his flying and pout for a few days.  I could hear their passionate making up through the air conditioning vents.  She found her dream house, with total climate control and a steady stream of ever-changing decor, he started a successful business, they had three sons, &tc.  Then my father managed to crash his airplane and kill himself.

Then began a very difficult time in her life, although I hardly knew of it.  She was having much more trouble with number two son, my brother who was four and a half years younger than I, and who was very disturbed by our father's death.  But she never really spoke about it, and I was off at school, thinking about my own imagined future as whatever it was I was going to be if the Vietnam War hand't entered the mix.

Oddly enough, since my mother didn't want to let anyone think that my brother was mentally ill, or perhaps because she didn't, she took a job after my youngest brother was out of the house and married off, as a recreational director at a mental health hospital.  There, her co-workers set her up with one of the staff, a man younger than she from Paragould, the town where she had been born.  There was some sort of party, and they arranged that mother and Alex would end up alone at the end of the night.  Not much later, they were married.  Alex was a much less interesting person than my father, with no hobbies that took him away on hunting trips or into the air.  It was a pretty placid affair, one that mother enjoyed after some rather tumultuous years with my brother and his problems.  Then Alex died.  

One of the reasons she had married him, she would tell me later, was that she was sure he would outlive her.  She didn't want to be widowed again.  When he died, she kept a photo of him beside her bed for just a few days, and then replaced it with one of my father.  She had divorced Alex, she told me, because he had died on her.

During the years that I was basically prolonging her death, I kept trying to find things that would amuse her.  Glenn Miller and Andrews Sisters recordings, for instance.  (She wore her hair in an Andrews Sisters style nearly until her death.)  A video player and Mickey Rooney and James Stewart movies.  And I bought a laptop and a subscription to Arkansas Net.  She was a little bit curious about the laptop.  I tried to explain the growing wonders of the world wide web to her, encouraging her to explore the world beyond her bedroom and Lazyboy.  Could she see the Officers Club in San Diego, she asked. The young Google brought up photos of a newly-restored San Diego Naval Station Officers' Club. Yes, she said.  That's it.  She remembered being surprised that Cokes cost twenty-five cents.  What else would she like to see?  Nothing. That's enough.  That't what it was like.

Mother never quite forgave me for not being a daughter, a status she had expected for her second child.  She had been very devoted to her mother and wanted a daughter who would have the same devotion to her.  She seemed a bit embarrassed that her son was shopping and cooking for her.  Eventually she hired the daughter of a friend to do those chores, and she would even occasionally go to the store with her.  But she was putting the meals, uneaten, in the garbage.  We never quite noticed how odd it was that she always took out the garbage herself, given her usual difficulties with such tasks.  We should have seen the clue.

Each bout of starving herself made her weaker, and eventually she moved into a nursing home, the only one she trusted, where she had for a while been on he staff.  Sometimes she thought she was still working and would start to run the charts and prepare meds.  One morning in February of 2003, she was in the hospital from a fairly minor procedure and the nurse brought her breakfast.  I don't think I will eat again, she said, and with those last words, turned towards the wall and died.

Life on the Web

 

A few moments ago, I looked up from my computer screen to see a little, nearly transparent spider hanging on a bit of web in my window.  It had been a rather average morning in my little tin can I pretend is a space pirate ship, the Arcadia.

While still in bed, I had reached across to my bedside table and wakened a tablet to read the blog of a friend who teaches history in North Carolina and who has similar interests to mine, but who also has more discipline, since he blogs every day.  Often I find them a nice way to get my brain and body adjusted from what may be dreaming to what may be the  real world. Then I opened GMail to see if the USPS had made any progress on delivering an EBay order which they have been holding hostage for more than two weeks.  It was beginning its sixth day in Chicago.

I then asked my Google Home Hub, which I call Toshiro because that's the name of the space pirate Harlock's sidekick, and who is the literal brains of the Arcadia, to play some music while I made coffee and poured a bowl of raisin bran flakes.

But while I ate my cornflakes, I turned again to my tablet to watch videos about architecture, specifically spaces nearly as small as my tin can.

As I chewed and sipped, my mind wandered from the images of a kit house in Sussex to my next YouTube video.  The missing package is schedule to be the star of next Tuesday's release.  

Having completed my potentially messy activities, I reconnected the keyboard to my tablet to write my morning journal entry.  As always, I looked through my recently downloaded or photographed images to see what I might want to include in today's journal entry, and it was then I realized where I was, where I am.

I am, like the spider, suspended in a web, the web of  noosphere, a concept made famous mostly by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a vision of the future that has become my present.

 Looking back in my journals from four years ago, I found myself moving from Port Townsend, where the tin can is settled in the cedars and firs, to the Ozarks, where I would be surrounded by maples and loblolly pines.  (I am going to post this photo of my next door neighbors when I lived in Eureka Springs because I like the sound of loblolly pines so much:)

What happened, that I am back in a tin can amongst the firs and ferns?

Well, several things, of course. I lived for about eight weeks in a beautiful yellow tent that I called the Versailles, under a maple tree, in the back yard of some friends in Fayetteville while I looked for the perfect place to resettle.

The tent had a fan, and lots of windows, but it was just too damn hot for a fat old man who rides a bicycle.  I took a bus to a train, and the train to a ferry, and I came back to Port Townsend, where it was cool.  But the real reason, I suspect, is that I had subconsciously realized that I lived more on the world wide web, as a minor ganglion in the  nervous system of he noosphere, than I did in either Arkansas or Washington.  Before climbing out of bed, I received and reacted to information from another human in North Carolina, and traded information with another human in Spain and one in Texas.  

The noosphere is  actually, if T de C is at all correct, a really new deal, although it is just also just a continuation of the sort of the evolution of how data is organized that has gone on since the big bang of the creation of universe.  It is easy to notice the glitches, fake news on Facebook and shit-posting on Twitter, for instance, without noticing how huge the change that is taking place will be and has already been. To take those glitches as representing the noosphere as a whole is like condemning the biosphere if one stubs one's toe on a tree route.

I am a fat old man, who has no or at least few illusions about the innate goodness of us humans, but who is nevertheless optimistic, at least about the possibilities.  I am acutely aware of how different my 'golden years' are from those of my grandparents, but I am also acutely aware of how much that difference is still unevenly distributed, as William Gibson noted.  Along the way to writing this rather lengthy and rambly blog post, I found this essay that I thought might be worth sharing.  Among other things, the authors show us how far we still have to go before Teilhard's vision is realized.  Meanwhile, I'm enjoying having lived long enough to have at least a glimpse of it.  My router takes me places, and brings places to me, that trains, planes, and automobiles can't.

Everyone Needs a Hobby, I Guess.

 For a while I had a YouTube channel called FOM+T (Fat Old Man Plus Tech), which I enjoyed doing and which, after maybe two years, had nearly 400 subscribers.  I had posted a few videos to YouTube over the years randomly,  but I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts on the contemporary world, a world I think was pretty well described sixty years or more ago by Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  So, encouraged by a couple of friends, I bought a cheap tripod to hold my phone and started a new adventure.  What I had to say about the modern world, that the modern world is pretty much the same as it's ever been except that we're on a time line with an exponential curve, and that can be disconcerting, really didn't take too many videos, and I started delving into the popular genre of unboxing and review videos.  Now, I like a good bit of kit,

so it was convenient to have an excuse to buy some of the big and small new things and to share my thoughts and feelings on camera. It was a pretty laid-back channel, with coffee and the occasional cigarette disrupting the seriousness of it all.

Then came my adventure with the virulent virus, and I spent hours lying in bed thinking I was thinking although mostly I was delirious.  When I read my emails or journal entries from those days and nights, I can't recognize what I was writing as English.  But I thought I was re-evaluating the things in my life, and I filled a big box with stuff that no longer served me.  For the most part I was right about those things, although the friend who was taking the stuff to the free store pulled a few things out that she knew I would regret losing, and she was right.  I won't miss the boots that were too small.

One of the things I thought I would quit was my YouTube channel.  After all that time, I still didn't have even a thousand subscribers.  I had made only about $5 with the Amazon Affiliate Program, and I thought that if I quit YouTube I would have more time to read and write and draw or something, to do things that were more 'productive'.  So I deleted the Fat Old Man and his Tech unboxings.

Except, I didn't find the things I did instead to be more productive.  I made a rather desultory blog about some of the folks I have known, a project that is a result of the memories I had while I was under the spell of the virus.  I have drawn a bit more.  About reading, I guess McLuhan was right.  I do still read, but I spend more time watching videos of authors discussing their ideas, a medium in which I can see their faces and hear their thoughts directly.  And, I found that my ponderings as I prepared for a video were some of my most productive times, even if no video resulted.

So, I have forgiven myself for not being a wonderfully serious and productive fat old man and accepted that is alright to make videost that are less than Fellini quality if I enjoy it as a hobby. 

 I have a friend who makes furniture from discarded lumber as a hobby.  His hobby is more useful than mine, I suspect, but his takes up more room, and I live in a tin can.  I like to pretend it's a space pirate ship.  Waking and sleeping delusions get confused in my old mind.  So what?  You're only old once.

Crazy Irish Monks

 

Not all of my peregrinations have been on foot, following the example of St. Chad.  Twenty-one years ago today, someone who now seems like another person in another lifetime naively settled into a 15-foot long skin-on-frame kayak and started what would be a three-year-long exploration of the waters of Northwest Washington.  That person, whose descendant is writing this story, had no idea what he was getting into as he began a journey that would go from Anacortes to Seattle and Olympia and Port Angeles and Neah Bay and parts of the west and south coasts of Vancouver Island and past the submarines to the end of the Hood Canal.

The voyage started innocently enough, as many voyages do, in an armchair with a book.  The book was Tim Severin's The Brendan Voyage, and the earlier version of me was intrigued, to say the least.  I had begun to explore rivers by kayak, inspired by Rat in The Wind in the Willows, which is certainly one of the best books ever written.  I had paddled the Rio Grande and the Chama and a few other rivers in New Mexico, and many rivers in Arkansas, including the entirety, almost (I skipped parts of the impounded lakes and a bit of the lower river where it is contained by levees) of the White River, one of the most sacred rivers I have ever known.  I would almost certainly have had a wonderful life if I had continued to explore those streams.  But the idea of going forth on the salt in a skin-on-frame boat was romantic, and I found online a crazy German-American, Ralph Hoehn, who imported Pouch kayaks.  They are narrower and more manoeuvrable than the more famous Kleppers, and faster. They're not so fast as the 17- 18-foot fibreglass boats that are also very popular, but at 15-feet, Brendan, as I called my soon-faded Pouch, had a hull speed I could maintain, and skin-on-frame boats are also more compliant and less tiring in rough water.  I paddled that little wonder as many as 55 nautical miles a day, and we went through some very rough water together.

Little did I know that what I had thought would be a vacation of a few weeks would lead to years among the firs of the edge of the world.

It would be nine centuries before any other Europeans would cross the Atlantic.  Some say Brendan and his companions were looking for 'the Isle of the Blessed' or even the Garden of Eden, but even though I found several very blessed isles in my imitation of Brendan and it might be argued that I live in a very edenic garden, I prefer the story that he set forth just to see what was there.  There has certainly been a lot to see out here in the corner of the country.

Will I ever go back to Arkansas' rivers?  Well, I don't really expect to, but I ain't dead yet.  If I could find another red boat, a Wilderness Systems Shaman like the one I paddled the White to the Mississippi,  I might be lured to go forth again.  There ain't nothing so good as messin' about in boats.

Searching for lost times.

I don't usually share my journals, but this seemed like a good post for Peregrinations, and I was too lazy to write it up any other way.  So:

I was up past my bedtime last night looking at YouTube Videos of places where I spent my life in the past.  Rivers.  Mountains.  Monasteries.  Many of the videos were made by  idiots, people who made no effort to learn about the places they were videoing, but at least the visuals were good.  Although one video of hiking along the Buffalo River Trail, was kinda pixely and green, I choose a screen catch from it of the waterfall that was for years my favourite rettreat and camping site for my journal, because it kinda shows how such memories work'.  

The best videos were of 'natural' places.  The Buffalo is still green.  The Chama is still brown.  The Edisto is still black.  But Christ in the Desert has been improved beyond   belief. The austerity of the desert has been replaced with garish 'icons'.  But they are not icons, they're bill boards.  I remember being shocked when Philip,  the abbot by the time I got there, and someone who had and has had a very different vision from Aerled's, started using a little Mattel keyboard to set the pitch for the chants.  Lore and I were both appalled.  Now there's an organ.  Everything is much more normal, and there are solar panels everywhere.  Sheep are back, which I find particularly nostalgic.  I can't believe I gave the poncho that Aerled wove for Lore to Cassidy for his baby.  Oh well.  YouTube says Signma males value their friends.

The challenge for me is to make sense of how much I have changed.   The changes pretty much parallel what has happened at Christ in the Desert.  I ordered a tent yesterday.  The temptation is to move back into a tent, with candles for light and maybe just my phone and a solar charger  But then there's my OV-Z.   Where do I draw the line?  Do I need to draw a line?  

The rivers lookedt the same in the twenty minutes or so of YouTube videos,  But iI know from even the short time I spent on them that they are always changing.  I was particular intrigued by one White River video of the upper river, between Boston and Fayetteville, where there has been very little effort of control it.  I hadn't ever seen anyone else on that stretch of the river, which is a meandering  and wild thing.  Lower down, beginning at Lake Sequoia in Fayetteville, we feeble folk have tried to control it at least since the time of steam boats.  Our efforts are often washed away.  Actually, they are always washed away, if we could only see them from a longer time scale.  The Bull Shoals dam, the levele at Augusta,  the lock and dam at Montgomery Point where the sacred White River joins the Mississippi, all these will be washed away. They have no choice.  Time, like an ever -rolling stream, bears all its sons away.

Those structures along the sacred White River may have a consciousness that I don't understand, and they may think they have some choice in how they spend their time. before they join the flood of lost times. I (cue Puck or Zorba) think I do.

Thirty or so years ago, when I spent time at Christ in the Desert Monastery, there was no electricity.  The guest rooms had wood stove and kerosene lamps.  On winter evenings in room 6 of the guest house, I would shiver as I wrote and drew in paper journals. Winter Matins in Nakashima's austere church had only one lamp in a corner.; one of the monks threw another log into the wood stove to mark the hours.  There were no solar-powered electric lights on the cliffs above to compete with rosy-fingered dawn, mirrored on the sandstone. There were no clumsy attempts at iconography on the walls.  It was Christ in the Desert, not Christ in the Glam.

Now I write about those times on a computer, and think about sharing my thoughts about those times on the internet, and I wonder two things:  whether I would really gain anything by trading  my computer for ink and paper in an effort to regain the sort of wildness of a river without levees and dams; and whether the real attraction I find thinking of those times past is that then I still thought I had a long future.  Were I forty-five again, and going to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, it might seem just as magic as it did in 1991.  And were I forty-five again, I might find the changes just as disturbing when I reached seventy-five again.  

I would love, I think, to be able to go back to the Monastery and talk to Father Christian, one of the monks who was there at the founding,  now the abbot, and ask how he feels about the changes, but I  probably won't.  I no longer have a car, and I'm too old  to hitch hike from Santa Fe to north of Abiqui and then to walk the 13 miles along Forest Road 151 to the bell, which I could pull to summon the guest master.

Oh well.   Please, pass me a madeleine.  

I need to be nagged, it seems.

 It is a lovely and soft and warm and sunny April morning and I am having my second cup of coffee after a little walk in the early light.  It's part of my learning to live again in what I call my post-plague life. I, alas, had a very close encounter with the Virulent Virus and I am more or less learning to walk and talk again. Sometimes my eyesight is still a little fuzzy, which may be part of the reason the morning seems soft.

How did I, who lives out here on the edge of nowhere and never sees anybody up close and who hasn't been in a crowd for years, catch the plague?  Well of course the obvious answer is that I breathed in some of the little beasties, and they found my lungs a happy home and soon I was coughing and sore all over my body and had a fever and could hardly move.  But there is I think a more important reason, and that is not so much the availability of the virus as the unavailability of human interaction linked with a general languor brought about by the lock down.

In my 'normal' life I go out into the big world every day, and hang out at coffee shops where I can sit in the window and watch the beautiful people go by while I sip my espresso.  During the lockdown, all I could do was buy a paper cup of not-very-good drip coffee and take it far away from the other people, ugly or beautiful.  In my 'normal' life I ate out a lot.  I'm lazy, so when I remodeled my little tin can nearly four years ago, I just didn't put in a kitchen so I would never have to clean a stove again.  During the lockdown, what food that was available to eat out was over-priced--I mean, the restaurants still have their normal expenses--and in styrofoam containers with plastic forks.  So, gradually, I went out less and less and became lazier and lazier, often just having cold cereal for brekkers instant ramen for dindin.  But for most of the Covidian Captivity, I still got in a bit of exercise every day.  My smart watch, an LG until last January and then and Apple Watch for two months, would nag me into just moving another thirteen minutes and nine seconds to close some wonderful ring for another merit badge.  Annoying, but probably life-saving.  And then I got tired of all things Apple, and I sold the watch.  And no one nagged me to go that extra 267 yards.  And it rained.  And I quit my usual  walking circuit of duck pond and building sites  and probably even worse, I quit riding my bike to buy more Cheerios and ramen, because of the mud, and took the bus.  Which is probably where the virus found my lungss.

So, post-plague, I have a nice bright new nagger, a made-in-China TikWatch something or another.  And it nags me delightfully well.  This morning, no sooner had I finished my first cup of coffee and eaten my Cheerios--Cheerios with bananas and cranberries and cottage cheese and milk--but it told me it was time to move around a bit.  So, I went out into the top of the morning and walked  .45 miles and enjoyed the budding plants along the way.  

I do not intend to host the Virulent Virus or any other inconvenient disease again if I can help it.  And since I am by nature a lazy bum, I will put up with a bit of nagging along the way.

Is good the enemy of the best, or is more the enemy of enough?

 

Please bear with me as I share a very first-world problem.  But since you, my constant readers, almost certainly share in my first world, I hope for some understanding.

My dilemma has its roots in my starting a YouTube channel.  A couple of friends thought I had something to share with the world, so I eagerly agreed.  What I had to share were the insights I had gathered many years ago from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  Material for maybe five videos, which I more or less made and which quickly gathered me maybe eleven subscribers.  And then I fell into the black hole of unboxing.

I think I started with a video about unboxing the unboxing phenomenon.  And then I actually started unboxing stuff.  I dare not add up how much money I spent (look at it as stimulating the economy, stupid) buying stuff I didn't really need because it would make videos.  I even unboxed books, but of course it was the unboxing of electronics that, over maybe two years, brought me about 350 subscribers.  And a good YouTuber who follows tech has to keep up with all the developments on all the major platforms, right, so soon I had a pile of devices all nicely unboxed and videoed and stacked.

Now I have long been an Android kinda guy.  I guess maybe because I'm old, since it seems that teenagers only buy iPhones, but whatever, I thought I should try the most orthodox of Android experiences and buy a Pixel Phone.  But when I got to the store, I didn't like the way it felt.  What I did enjoy in my hand was a shiny new iPhone, which I bought in projectRed, fighting aids and my own prejudice against all things Apple in one convenient purchase.

So I explored the iPhone, and--more unboxings--all the wonders of the 'Apple ecosystem'.  I must confess I liked something about most of the devices except the MacBook.  It was a pretty little thing, but to someone accustomed to using a Chromebook, Mac OS just seemed a clutttered fuck.  I sold it.  But as time went by, I found myself feeling that the Apple devices were using me rather than my using them, and because all good YouTubers have at least two phones, I bought another Android phone, a nice and inexpensive LG Stylo 6.  Short story short, within a month I had sold all my Apple devices because I really preferred having electronics that work for me instead of my working for them.

And I have loved using the Stylo 6. It's a little slow opening the camera app, but no slower than the time it took to remove the lens cover on the Nikon I had when I was a 'real' photographer.  It has kinda big bezels, but they allow me to get a good grip on the phone without instigating something happening on the screen.  And the LG done gone and gone out of the smart phone business.  I haven't felt so orphaned since Saab got bought by GM.  

Enter the first-world problem of choices.  (One of which I confess remains ditching everything electronic and moving into a cave with one big book and maybe a small bear.)

Unfortunately, caves are relatively hard to find on-line and new electronic wonders are easy, so I was seduced by T-Mobile's offer of LG's ultimate phone, the Velvet, for half-price.  I pushed all the little buttons, and now it's on its way to my little tin can in the woods.  It was like offering an Edesel lover a 1961 Edsel for $1000.

But I am feeling like a traitor to my faithful Stylo 6, which is not nearly so flashy as the Velvet,  nor will it likely be supported for so long, but which has been my faithful friend in sickness and in health and which does everything I  ask it to do and it's paid for.

Which finally, constant reader, brings me to my point, if I have one.  Why is adequate not considered sufficient?  Or, to put it in McLuhan's terms of our devices as extensions of ourselves, why, when I am perfectly adequately extended by my Stylo, which is a bit slow and dated in appearance, but which more or less matches my sitz im leben, want to put on airs with a stylish and flashy Velvet? Or, to put it in Toffler's terms, am I just feeling too much future shock?

It is of course a small thing, this deciding whether to accept delivery of a  new phone or to keep the old wineskin.  But it is, I think, an example of the sorts of decisions that make living in the first world so stressful.  Do any of you constant readers know of a good cave, preferably with air-conditioning and high speed internet?  I have a nice big book.

Back to the Woods

 

For many years I did not vote in elections.  My motto was that it just encourages the sons of bitches.  And, I think that every choice one makes is a vote, often about things of more importance if of less pomp that voting for a president or some other claimant of power.  For most of the past twenty years, I have lived more or less as a hermit in the woods, something of a madman, and concerned with things fringier than politics.  I have occasionally offended someone, mostly by rejecting the gospels of Gene Roddenberry and Christopher Nolan.  Mostly I think people were amused or confused at best.  Presidential candidates seemed to me to be twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum, and I expected that none of them would do anything particularly good, and I could only hope that they wouldn't be too bad.  For politics I had little to no passion.

In 2016, it became more difficult to ignore the commotion, as the two major parties nominated one person disqualified and one unqualified for office, or so it seemed to me.  I public supported Gary Johnson, and even registered and voted.  Living in a firmly 'blue' state, it mattered little for whom I voted, since the outcome was strongly Calvinistic.  I was fascinated by how much vitriol my choice received.  I was told that I was all sorts of things other than a free moral agent, who could make a fool of himself if he wanted to, but only in the prescribed ways.  I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected.  He had seemed like a bizarre cross of Il Duce and Oliver Hardy.  I suppose that what I had been missing was how many other people have as little faith in politics as usual as I have, and the politics of Trump was not usual.  

Slow forward to 2020 and the democrats nominated folks with even less qualities that I admired than they had in 2016, and I made clear why I found that saddening, and admitted that I would vote for Trump., who also had few qualities that I admired, but who had dropped (relatively) few bombs  He was no less a buffoon, but he had not done the horrible things I had been told he would do.  I was still allowed the satire of having a holy water pistol, and I still had my mostly useless Obama Care.  But.

But I was amazed again and again by how people I had known for years began treating me.  They expected me to justify my every statement, claiming I was being mean-spirited or illogical or worse.  I had never thought of saying things like that about them. because they said they were going to vote for Biden.  About some of their conclusions, yes.  Logic is a fascinating method, having nothing to do with truth.  One can proceed quite logically from false premises and arrive at a completely valid but false conclusion.

Slowly what I have come to realize is that many people have replaced the sort of passion once reserved for religious beliefs with political passion.  When there is nothing left to render to God, everything is rendered to Caesar.  Personally, I have never been one to put my trust in horses, and I am still enough of a Christian or whatever to hope with Locke and Jefferson that governments are formed to protect our natural, god-given rights, not to decide which rights we are allowed.   But to be honest, I do pretty much whatever I think is right, without checking with the civil code.  I suspect that most of us actually operate on a day to day basis like that, occasionally speeding or committing some small act of sedition.  

The truth is I just don't have as much concern about politics as many of my friend have, and I don't find my time spent pursuing the nuances of politics rewarding.  In general I think the big advances in human achievements have come more often in spite of the state rather than because of it.  If any of my dear readers think I am wrong and want to prove me wrong, go for it.  But please be advised that I will mostly likely not read their arguments.   I am returning to spending my time pursuing the nuances of quantum physics and sacramental theology and other esoterica, like aged Merlin, although it is unlikely that I will be visited by Nimue.  Perhaps that's a pity.  I will continue to try to be amused by the actions of the state when I can not ignore them, recognizing that many of the Bard's best lines were spoken by a mischievous sprite.  Indeed what fools.

Meanwhile,  I can do perhaps no better than to share Puck's request for forgiveness, being so unwoke as I am:

'If we shadows have offended/ think but this and all is mended/ . . /If you pardon, we will mend./Else the puck a liar call./Give me your hands, if we be friends,/and Robin will restore amends.

Or, it may be that I am not a good fellow at all.  

Seregation is back.

I have been watching two sorts of time travel stories over the past few days.  The first is the second season of The Umbrella Academy, in which our intrepidly diverse family finds itself in the Dallas of 1963.  One of the family, Allison, is a black woman, and she quickly finds herself caught up in the racial division and unrest of the times.  She marries a man who is an organizer in the civil rights movement and takes part in a sit-in at a segregated restaurant.  She works at a racially segregated beauty parlor.  When the rest of her family find her and things get really weird, she finally tells her husband that she has come from the future, and that there really were going to be better times ahead.

The second is the rush to re-segregate as practitioners of right-think act as quickly as possible to segregate themselves from any suspicion that they were ever attracted to any idea except the official story, and to banish the tainted from any opportunity to spread their wrongthink.  (It's kinda like the scene in The Umbrella Academy when the hard-working white male who is doing what he has been taught to think is right by the morality of his fifteen minutes compares the lesbianism of the woman (I'm not supposed to say that actually, as the character to whom he is speaking, Vonya, is played by someone who self-identified as a lesbian in the first season, and since she was then a lesbian playing a lesbian, everyone was happy, but not she self-identifies as a homosexual man and has a male name in the credits.  And I thought what happened in the series was weird.)--anyway, Ray tells Vonya about hoof-and-mouth disease, and how any taint of it must be eradicated before it spreads to the whole herd.

One of the hefers to be killed first, if I may continue to use Ray's analogy, has been Parler.  Parler is (was) a social media platform sworn not to censor its users.  When it first started, I signed up, because I want to avoid living in an echo chamber.  I have 'friends' on Facebook with as diverse a range of ideas as Facebook allow, but I wanted to see what was happening elsewhere.  I didn't always remember to post my cat photos to Parler, but I did make an effort to copy every even vaguely political post I made on Facebook and to paste it on Parler.  In many cases those posts were quite critical of President Trump, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'the fucking moron'.  Such posts often got 'likes', even 'hearts', on Facebook, and sometimes reasonable discussion on Parler.  When, however, I would post something approving of an action of the fucking moron, or critical of President-elect Biden, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'Mr. Potatohead', I was called a variety of rude names by my good loving liberal, come-together friends on Facebook.  If I were to be taken to Room 101 and say that Parler is (was) a hate platform, I would have to say, at least until the rats were let loose, that O'Brian must have been thinking of Facebook.

The racial segregation of the 1950's is quickly being replaced by intellectual segregation.  Mr. Potatohead's cabinet is touted as being very diverse, but it's a diversity of appearances, not a diversity of ideas.  Of course it is not even discussed in anything like those terms by the faithful.  Just as many groups consider people of other races not to be human, the Party denies that anyone who disagrees with them can even be an intellectual.  At least that has been my experience.  After years of being considered an intellectual, I have lately been called just about every kind of stupid because I voiced my opinion that Mr. Potatohead is not worthy candidate for the presidency, and that Harris is even worse.

There is, not surprisingly, no room for nuance. (Cue the case of Brett Weinsten.) I have  made clear my opinions about the fucking moron's failures.  He was not someone I would have chosen for the presidency.  But now I am supposed to shut my mouth and say nothing counter to the wonders of the winter of our discontent made glorious by the rising of the son of Scranton.  

At least during the days of racial segregation there were efforts, at least in mid-nowhere where I grew up, to provide separate but equal accommodations for the race that wasn't quite human enough for common discourse.  So in mid-nowhere, the first ancient school building to be replaced with something modern was Booker T. Washington.  In the new day of intellectual segregation, those who are not quite human are simply denied any platform possible.

What could go wrong? (In The Umbrella Academy, segregated for years from the rest of her family, Vonya destroys the world.)

R. Mutt, Identity Politics, and Sexual Dysphoria

 

If you have been a faithful reader of this rambling since the beginning, or if you have dug through it to see  what indiscretions against the required thoughts of this fifteen minutes I have committed in my past, you may remember that forty years ago I chose St. Chad as my patron because he had been educated in a great tradition that was making way for the big new thing, and he made his way through the birth pains of an entirely new world.  In Chad's case, his education had been in the oral tradition of the Celtic monks, and the big new thing was books imported from Rome.  In my case, my education had been in the bookish tradition, and the big new thing is instant electric connectivity.  I am trying to make my way through the birth pains of another entirely new world, but the changes have been greater, as often have the pains, that I could imagine forty years ago.

My other guide,  Virgil through what sometimes seem eight layers of the inferno, sometimes Beatrice through what seems like at least potential levels of paradise, has most often been Marshall McLuhan.  I have tried to pay attention to McLuhan's advice that to understand the future, we need to look at art.  The past few days I have been reading Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, and I have come more than ever to appreciate McLuhan's guidance, and to realize that we indeed are living in Duchamps's 1917 future.

R. Mutt's Fountain was entered in The Society of Independent Artists' show that year at the Grand Central Palace in New York, but was never actually seen at the show.  Duchanp later said he thought that was the best thing that could happen to it. Duchamp was, or claimed to be, a fan of chance.  But Fountain was famous enough to be photographed by Alfred Stieglitz,  and 'duplicated' for the Tate Modern.  And in an interesting but perhaps prophetic twist, some critics have claimed that it was really the 'work' of an unknown female artist, because of course it must have been.  Duchamp said it could be considered art because he had 'chosen' it, but he signed it with a pseudonym because it came from the Mott Ironworks, and also because it was a kinda of play allusion to Mutt and Jeff, since Duchamp was tall and thing.

Whatever the origins of Fountain and the other 'ready mades' that made Duchamp readily famous, they made the way for an understanding of art as 'chosen' rather than 'made', of function rather than ontology, of accident rather than essence.  

There are few things new under the sun.  Christian sacramental theology had long worked with such changes in categories, changing the ontology of a man by ordaining him priest, changing the substance of wine to the substance of blood, even though the accidents remained the same.  Just as Christians had undergone a catechesis to be able to receive the sacrament,so art critics and collectors needed some initiation to understand the new art. Like theater, it sometimes required a certain suspension of belief.

Who now is an artist?  Some one who either makes or chooses art. (Duchamp abandoned art and played a lot of chess.)  I have had a little experience in this game myself.  For years I was a serious journaler, and I illustrated my journals with a lot of different media.  I usually worked in coffee shops, and people would ask me if I were an artist.  I would say, no.  But then I would occasionally want some money, and I would make 'art' and sell it as an 'artist'.  I'm no Duchamp, but he sometimes did the same thing.  And some of his works were done with the pseudonym Rrose Selavy, which sounds in French like 'eros, such is life.'  (Few things in my life have been so confusing as eros.)

The road from 'choosing' a urinal and declaring it art has had many branches.  Few are so weird as that taken by Gordon Matta-Clark, who cuts up buildings.  But we are in a post-modern, deconstructionist time, aren't we?  Or is it that we were until a few moments ago?

Once water becoming wine and urinals becoming fine art were part of a fairly small category of transformations.  But now one  pretty much choose to  transform anything with no discernible change in function.  I have friends who on Facebook are 'activists'; their activities consist of choosing memes to post.  In the new global village, tribalism is once again important, but people are no longer born into tribes.  They choose them. It's an odd thing that the tribes with the loudest chants are not those who add anything to the world, not the Mott's who actually make useful plumbing fixtures, but the Mutt's who make lists of the injustices their tribes have suffered, of signaling virtue by claiming oppression.

The more Virgil side of McLuhan said that in the electronic age we would once again become tribal.  It's, I suspect, rather dangerous to speak of tribalism glibly, since there have been and are so many complicated variations of tribes.  I don't want to be so presumptuous as many 'anthropologists' have been, but I would suggest that one of the major differences between electronic tribalism and pre-modern tribalism is choice.  One needed to be born into or adopted by the Ojibway, or at least that's what one of my favourite childhood books, Ojibway Boy, claimed.  I liked to pretend when I was ten that I was an Indian, but it was only a pretense.  No one would lose his job if he said that I wasn't a real Ojibway even if I chose that as my preferred identity/pronoun.  In the electronic age we choose tribes, often oddly enough on the levels of presumed oppression they have as their privilege. (Oddly enough, there was a bit of that sort of thinking in Ojibway Boy.  The Ojibways were oppressed by the Iroquois, and that seemed to make the Ojibway boy more noble.  I had hoped to find it and reread it, but it doesn't seem available at the usual sus outlets.) Alas,despite what some anthropologists have said about tribal societies, they are very often very warlike. Like deadly warlike. Like liking on Twitter or burning on Twitter warlike.  

Many folk claim that we now live in the world or Orwell's 1984. But Big Brother has been atomized, replaced by thousands of droplets ready to report anyone who lets his mask down, especially if that one is from another tribe.  Lilliputian fact checkers  made it a Brave New World.

And what a Brave New World it is indeed. Dr. Moreau would be impressed.  Now we not only 'choose' art, and 'choose' tribes, we 'choose' gender.  I am not in any way dismissing or condemning people who really feel that they are another gender than what they appear outwardly.  Indeed I have some very dear friends who are 'trans'.  But it is important, I think, to recognize that they feel their gender is not a choice.  But in the Brave New World, it is a choice.  One can choose a chemical concoction to become  whatever one wishes.  It brings a whole other level of complexity to the question of nature versus nurture, or of free will versus determinism. It makes for many interesting questions to ponder, among which is if a woman won the olympic gold medal for the decathalon in 1976.

According to some online sources, including history.com, 'Caitlin Jenner--who was playing as Bruce Jenner--. .  . [won] gold in the men's decathalon at the Montreal Olympics.  . . . The secret to Jenner's success was preparation.'

I included the part about Jenner's preparation because I suspect it points to what can so easily make our participation in the Brave  New World in which we find ourselves: a dystopia, guided by Virgil, a noble understanding from the past, rather than in a paradise, guided by Beatrice.  The past of Virgil has a sort of reality and universal accessibility that is not available for the potential future of Beatrice.  

While writing this I have had a conversation with  the parent of a young trans-gender friend who has always thought that his outward appearance as a female did not match his inward nature, but who is not anxious to add chemicals or surgery to the mix.  I admit to  having enough insufficient for much of an opinion about our brave new world.  I keep trying to look at that world from a variety of perspectives.  (Cue Cubism.) But if I have an opinion, it is that my opinion should not be forced on someone else.  I can see R. Mott's urinal as a urinal, and I can see R. Mutt's Fountain as at least one of the most important art works of the twentieth century.  This sometimes gives me a  tribal dysphoria for which I am poorly prepared.  Once again, the modesty of St. Chad, who did not choose to impose his privilege on others, nor to complain about the injustice imposed on him, seems to be as important a guide as any.  I might choose to be the Archbishop of York.  History might not even recognize me as the bishop of Litchfield.