Wait - what ?

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Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness. - Elena Ferrante whiskey river

Virginia Sterrett (1900-1931) :: Illustration from The Arabian Nights ,1928

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Instinct and study; love and hate; / Audacity—reverence. These must mate, / And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, / To wrestle with the angel—Art. — Herman Melville (1819-1891) “Art,” Timoleon, Etc. (1891)

(…) the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

soli :: @solisolsoli :: balance by mendezmendez

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Anne Lamott 

CHILD’S POSE

In the natural, visible world, it all looks hopeless to my tiny princess self..

Small things are disappointing—I can tell we are on the cusp of mealy peaches, it being mid-August.

Miserable things abound—the weather forecast predicts weeks and weeks of heat still to come. This is so wrong. I am not exactly wedded to being beaten down on by the sun. Whoever is in charge of such things should cut off all sweltering days on Labor Day—“All right, everyone, you’ve had your little fun. Now go inside and pick put a cute sweater.” But no. The devil is sitting in the shade these days.

Sorrowful things: We have a slo-mo human tragedy unfolding in my family, like you may very well, too, because, not to repeat myself, but the world is too sad by half. You get old and it feels like there is a sniper in the trees some days. Respecting their privacy, I’ll just say a relative is staying with us while he receives brilliant medical care.

And five alarm fire things: 82 days till the midterms, which our catering cart stowaway is working to skew or cancel, and everyone is busy elsewhere with last ditch vacations and school starting up. I want to rouse everyone into action, like Jason Robards out on the New York City street at dawn, in “A Thousand Clowns”, urging his neighbors to come out for calisthenics. But we are worn out by the heat, and busy. Simultaneously we note that life is so time-consuming, and not much seems to be happening.

So why do I feel breezes of hope? Go figure. It’s not Julie Andrews running on the hillside in The Sound of Music. Mine looks more like a creaky person getting down on the floor and going into child’s pose, the folded position in yoga where you stretch and curl back into a restful origami shape, almost a fetus. A huge, ploppy fetus, head bent to the ground, resting.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t yoga, although I have certainly meant to for the last ten years, but I do rest in the Child’s Pose at the gym, after I dutifully do my two saggy, trembly planks. Looking at me from outside, you might think I am bowing down or surrendering, but the opposite is true. I am protecting myself, finding a moment’s refuge, thinking small, and gearing up.

Small hope means that I not go crazy with the craziness around me, that I keep centered, ish, enjoy what I'm given. I recognize the madness out there, take deep breaths and try not let it strangle me.

Complaining aside for the moment, I have hope that the summer is right on schedule. Even though it is the only season I could do without, the earth can’t. It needs the pollination, all those decomposing dead plants and flowers getting recycled into the soil for the next generation. The horrible insects are spreading pollen, burrowing, loosening the hard earth, recycling, feeding all the guys we actually like—birds, butterflies, bees.

I watch my family and closest friends take care of our ailing person just down the hall, and this fills me with the peace that passes all understanding. I experience utter amazement at our species’s capacity for tenderness, resilience, and generosity. My husband and I forgot to make a dinner plan last night, and then out of the blue—if you believe in out of the blue—a friend texted that she was headed over with low-sodium green chile stew and cornbread for our person. A sick person cannot possibly polish off a soup pot of stew, so we all sacrificially pitched in and helped. Our person ate two bowls, patted his stomach.

Love is sovereign here.

I have hope in God, in Goodness, in Good Orderly Direction, in Grace Over Drama, in Gus, the Great Universal Spirit, and in the ACLU. I send them money to fight Trump’s efforts to mess with the elections. This action gives me hope, as do his polls, worst of any president since Richard Nixon’s in the days before he resigned. Overcome by the vapors, and his own inflated reputation and intellectual limitations, he has the soul of a trapped rat, tiny pink eyes alternately flickering with evil, and closed dreamily in slumber at the Resolute Desk.

A lot of us are in child’s pose these days, waiting for the quiet blessings of autumn, but people who do not take time off from fighting the good fights are engaged, are focused on the right things — local elections, state elections, congressional elections, door to door canvassing where they can meet independents. The Resistance is alive and kicking, with some obvious problems—divisions, fundings, etc. When my son was ten and we were driving to my weekly teaching gig, he asked why my students even wanted to write. I said it was because we all have a creative spirit buried in there past the to-do lists and bad self self-esteem, and it wants expression. I told him that writing can help us make sense of ourselves, help us understand the human heart, and life.

“Oh, I already know all about life,” he responded. “Pretty good; some problems.”

Bodi Frendberg

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I was faced with either surrendering my freedom in advance or risking losing it in the worst ways imaginable. One thing that makes people crazy is being told that the experiences they have did not actually happen, that the circumstances that hem them in are imaginary, that the problems are all in their head, and that if they are distressed it is a sign of their failure, when success would be to shut up or to cease to know what they know. Out of this unbearable predicament come the rebels who choose failure and risk and the prisoners who choose compliance.

Ascending Subway Stairs, 1970. Harold Feinstein ‎ #photography.

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Stewart Henderson I Believe I believe propaganda is idealogical Valium Propagandists are mynah birds, Excellent mimics But don’t expect them to say anything original. I believe in doubt I believe doubt is a process of saying ‘Excuse me, I have a question.’ Propagandists hate questions and in so doing detest art. I believe in art. [from “In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World” Pádraig Ó Tuama]

Félix Vallotton, The Rising Tide, 1913

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Regarding the reported situation in the USS Lincoln Strike Group:

All you have to do is look to the leadership. The Commander-in-Chief, the Secretary of WAWR!, the Secretary of the Navy, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Chief of Naval Operations, NONE of them, not one, has faced the nation and said: "These are disturbing reports. The safety and wellbeing of our personnel is top priority. We're looking into this and will take immediate corrective action as necessary to ensure military personnel are being taken care of."

Instead, drunken bum Pete "Callsign: Blueballs" Hegseth called the Lincoln's crew and their families "liars" and told you to ignore them.

This is also where I remind you that it was only five months ago USS Gerald Ford and her strike group reported similar abysmal conditions, and worse, during an extended 326-day deployment. Once they returned to homeport, you never heard another word. No follow up. No explanation. No corrective action. Nothing.

This is likely the new normal.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Next time, it's enemy action.

"The simple step of the courageous individual is to not take part in the lie."

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Otto Greiner / 'Studie Ruderer' / circa 1900

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Often we think that we do not know enough to be able to teach others. We might even become hesitant to tell others what we know, out of fear that we won’t have anything left to say when we are asked for more. This mind-set makes us anxious, secretive, possessive, and self-conscious. But when we have the courage to share generously with others all that we know, whenever they ask for it, we soon discover that we know a lot more than we thought. It is only by giving generously from the well of our knowledge that we discover how deep that well is. -Henri Nouwen