Asleep
I fell asleep standing up
Leaning against the shelf
Books as pillow and pillar.
Too tired to be uncomfortable
I felt at peace.
I should have moved
To a chair, to bed
But that was beyond me.
Besides, the books will cover me
If I get cold
Soothe and comfort me
If I dream badly
Catch me
If I fall
Asleep.
Three Silences
Keep silent outside
Though inside
The conversation never ends.
Keep silent inside
Though distant whispers
Try to engage you.
Abandon silence
Where everything
Is said and heard.
The Round Trip
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
Heart Sutra
The trip to Emptiness took hours
Or was it days or years
I can’t tell.
The ticket was lost
(Just misplaced it turns out)
The line for security was long
ID shown
Pockets emptied
Shoes off.
They took my bags apart
What’s this?
What’s this?
Once I put it all back together
And got on the plane
The flight seemed like every other
The seat
The blah blah blah
The shuttle to the hotel.
In the room on the table
A local magazine called Emptiness
On the cover
A picture of the city
That could be any city.
On the desk a welcome note:
“emptiness is form”
I lay down
And fell asleep
And woke up.
Or was I still sleeping?
Or had I already returned?
Coffee Paradise
The coffee’s not making itself
Arriving on its own
No cook or chef
No waiter or waitress
No server or servess.
The discipline of
Water pot
Grounds and heat
Is good for you
Poor stir press pour
Mindful walk
To kitchen and back.
But where is the angel or
The winged cup
This is a morning
For that lazy heaven.
He might have said the c-word. Or the p-word. Or any of the other bad words he knows. Instead he said that the U.S. doesn’t need Europe or NATO. That he was going to steal another country’s oil. That the free press is an enemy of the state.
Whatever he says, officials are busy telling the world that Donnie doesn’t mean any of it. That he doesn’t understand what he’s saying. That he’s basically a good boy.
Except…
Donnie is not a junior high school kid. He’s a grown man. And the most powerful grown man in the world. And, as far as his limited knowledge goes (he may not be the brightest in the class), he means every word.
Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
New York Times
This news is not surprising, which itself says something. But even though it is not surprising, it still manages to catapult us into some cosmic surreality where all of previous history seems to be a long preface to the fantasy novel that follows—and is still spinning out. Except it is real.
How real? How surreal? Just read that sentence again. And again.
Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
American citizens have long had to respond to threats from without and within. From the outside, enemies of the state. From the inside, enemies of the state. Sometimes those enemies were very real; sometimes they were merely props in political and geopolitical theaters of intolerance and hate.
In times of crisis, real or imagined, ordinary citizens can be asked or expected to serve as the eyes, ears and hands of law and order—in both democratic and authoritarian societies. There are fine lines between being a patriotic informant, a spy on your neighbors, and an active accomplice and collaborator.
A current exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration & Complicity in the Holocaust:
Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration & Complicity in the Holocaust addresses one of the central questions about the Holocaust: How was it possible? The central role of Hitler and other Nazi Party leaders is indisputable. However, the dependence of these perpetrators on countless others for the execution of Nazi racial policies is less understood. Within Nazi Germany and across German-dominated Europe, circles of collaboration and complicity rippled throughout governments and societies wherever victims of persecution and mass murder lived.
Some Were Neighbors examines a variety of motives and pressures that influenced individual choices to act. These influences often reflect fear, indifference, antisemitism, career concerns, community standing, peer pressure, or chances for material gain. It also looks at individuals who did not give in to the opportunities and temptations to betray their fellow human beings, reminding us that there is an alternative to complicity in evil acts—even in extraordinary times.
Studying the unknowable. Speaking the ineffable. Explaining the unexplainable. Why go there?
The reason is simple some. It is the clichéd reason that climbers give for scaling the most challenging mountains. Because it is there.
For many others, who find mountain climbing an unnecessarily arduous, dangerous and time-wasting pursuit, there is an answer too. Because it is there. That is, there is the unknowable, ineffable and unexplainable, and the sooner you have even a slight familiarity with this phenomenon, the more realistically humble you will be about what you can know, say and explain. Even if you only amble in the foothills, when you look up to the impossibly high peaks obscured by clouds, you will know you are small. Maybe you walk on and up, maybe you don’t. But just the acknowledgement is something essential.
#ReverseforKindness and Art Insurgent as Advertising See
Among many famous dystopian novels (Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.), 1984 has currently risen to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. But the book to really read is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America: A Novel (2004)
In this alternative history, one of the world’s biggest celebrities surprisingly becomes the Republican presidential nominee and defeats FDR in the 1940 election. Charles Lindbergh, a known Nazi sympathizer who wants to keep America from fighting Germany, is a friend of Hitler and an enemy of the Jews. And he is President of the United States.
Here are just a few reviews:
“A terrific political novel. . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review
“Roth’s most powerfrul book to date. Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting, imaginative and utterly–terrifyingly–believable.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish–and also funnier and more bizarre–as is goes along. . . . [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” –The New Yorker
“Ambitious and chilling. . . a breath-taking leap of imagination. . . . The writing is brilliant.” –USA Today
“Intimately observed characters in situations fraught with society’s deepest, most bitter tensions. . . . Too ingeniously excruciating to put down.” –Newsweek
“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic novel can take them. . . . Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it. . . . A fabulous yarn.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review
