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.