Living With Intensity

It's possible to live with intensity for just so long, and then one must back of and take care of oneself. I hope somebody has told that to the taskmasters who run the network news media reporters. I feel sorry for those people.

I have to back off for a while now, to find some quiet places within myself. Balance is the order of this day.

Somebody forgot to tell that to Mother Nature, though. Outside we have the return of March, and of Winter. It's raining and cold and the wind is blowing so hard it blew down my hanging plant from the porch -- a new plant, pink jasmine. I went out and sympathized with it for a few minutes, making sure it was OK.

While I was out there, I had a couple of balancing-type thoughts that followed from what I wrote here yesterday. One was that I was unfair to my own ancestors by calling them "losers." They were poor people who had worked the land in Scotland, but had had their land taken from them by some English land reforms (I'm fuzzy on the details of my history, sorry about that), and it was no fault of their own. They went to Ireland and tried to start over, but did not fare well there either, and so came to this country and ended up in the Southern Appalachians. That's on my maternal grandmother's side. I don't think you can call anybody a loser who has failed to thrive through no fault of his own. America was founded, and populated, by mostly poor people, and it's the bullying rich who come up with labels like " losers."

The other thing I thought was that no matter what else may be thought of us Americans, we can't be faulted for lack of courage. The courage that it must have taken just to get here across the Atlantic to the New World in one of those tiny ships just stuns me. And the settlement of the West, no matter how crude the men -- and some of the women -- were, is also a record of immense courage. Yes, they were crude and cruel and killed Indians and slaughtered buffalo and created the whole cowboy mythos which today is NOT a good thing ... but they faced, and faced down, conditions that most of us today cannot even imagine. To read their diaries (the original sources) or good biographies of the settlers of the West is a real education into both the paradox and the courageousness of what it means to be an American at that point in time.

We are not all bad.

What We Have Wrought

I feel I should apologize for the errors in yesterday's post. I hit the publish button too soon, and when I tried to go back to edit I was for some reason unable to get there. I'm not great at the tech complexities of this blogging thing yet. I do know how to delete, but I decided to let it stand, errors and all, because even with the mistakes -- maybe especially with the mistakes -- what I wrote was truly reflective of my state of mind yesterday.

I'm a bit better today, thinking more clearly. Maybe I can type more clearly too.

I just posted a comment on Lionel Shriver's commentary at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, which related to what I'm about to write here. Shriver wrote a novel titled We Need to Talk About Kevin, which centers around a killer not too much unlike Young Cho. In her commentary she said she believed the videos that he sent NBC should not have been aired, and in fact if she could personally repress all knowledge of school shootings and shooters she would, because the publicity tends to engender more of the same. That is, to encourage copycats. In my comment I said I disagree with her, because I think we Americans need to be forced to see and hear the consequences of what we have allowed our country to become. Some of us have allowed, some of us have created -- but we are all responsible.

Yesterday I felt more than a tinge of despair over all this. As was evident from what I wrote here. Today I'm not quite so much despairing as ready to do whatever I can in whatever time I have left. But it's hard, harder than ever before.

My generation was hopeful, we started out optimistic about what we could do in America, with our relative wealth and our liberty and our democratic way of life. Some of us became diverted down the drug path during the 60s, but most of us remained optimistic even after JFK was assasinated, and then RFK, and finally MLK. I would add to that Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author who has now been very nearly forgotten; Merton was said to have died in an accident while on a world tour for peace, but I've always thought he was killed too, because he represented a reconciling element and he had the power of words and religion both behind him.

Needless to say, I am not optimistic any longer. I doubt any of us are. I cringed -- literally, physically cringed -- yesterday when I was driving on a street near the court house and passed a woman on the sidewalk who was a certain type. She could have been me when I was just a few years younger. I knew before I could even see her clearly that she had been at the court house to protest something, just from the gray of her streaming long hair and her jeans and long jacket and the assertiveness of her walk. I cringed because I felt she had been wasting her time, that we have all wasted all our time, all these years. What did we do wrong? Why couldn't we prevent the situation we now have from developing? Didn't we try hard enough? Did we put our efforts in the wrong places, go about them in the wrong way?

The facts are staring us in the face: In the United States we have created a culture of incivility, of violence, and of greed. I wrote as much to one of my wise friends -- the one who suggested that violence comes from fear. If ever there was a direct illustration of how right she is about that, it's in the videos Young Cho left behind. Yes, his mental illness had progressed to the point of psychosis, which sets him apart from the mainstream. But the way he chose to deal with his psychosis was purely, entirely American. Do they have school shootings in any other country? I don't think so.

Last night, trying to blank out a bit and get away from the news coverage, I watched a movie titled The New World, which was about the Jamestown Colony. I'm a little fuzzy on this period of American history, but I think Jamestown happened before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock. At any rate, it was early in the 1600s. This movie - - too Hollywooded Out to be called a film -- was more historically accurate in its costumes and setting than most. They even managed to find a young actress who physically resembles the portrait we have of Pochahontas, when she went to England at the invitation of the King and Queen. When I was watching the movie's depiction of the settlers squabbling -- hell, they were killing each other -- as they struggled to get their fort and houses etc built, this thought came into my head: "What can you expect from a country that was settled by petty criminals and losers?"

Is that our problem? Do we have ugliness here, now, because of that? I don't really think so. I hope not, because my own ancestors on both sides of the family were here by the middle of the 17th century and so, are among those earliest settlers. On one side they were Scots, who came here via Ireland, having been starved out of both places; on the other side they were English who somehow got to the Outer Banks -- I've thought they might have been pirates who jumped ship. Anyhow, they were all losers and maybe some of them were criminals too.

At this point in time, none of that matters anymore. What matters is that we look our present situation squarely in the eye and acknowledge that things have gone too far. Are we going to be able to face this reality?

I changed the title of this blog to The Compassionate Curmudgeon for a reason. I am not psychic, I didn't have a vision of the Young Cho's existence or what his plans were; no more had I a vision of Don Imus (now there's a scary thought) doing his foul-mouthed thing when he did it. But my timing has proven fortuitous. There's not much I can do as only one person, and a person, at that, who no longer has a current book contract or a website except for this one. (Though a few days ago I purchased the right to my old domain name, dianneday.com, and could put up a website if I want to.) But I can keep opening my cyber-mouth in whatever forum I find myself, I can post comments that are both compassionate and consistent with my belief that we must take these things as signs that change is more than ever necessary. We must see with clear eyes, listen with open minds, and find still the love in our hearts. And we must not be silent.

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory...

I can't believe the last thing I wrote here had a keyword "amusing." Nothing even vaguely amusing has happened since then. I'm no longer even sure how many days have passed since a 23 year-old man named Cho shot and killed 32 people, and then himself, at Virginia Tech. I've blogged about this on Crimespace, and commented on other people's posts about it. I have in fact become so saturated with the poison of this stuff that I believe it's made me physically ill.

I wonder how the news anchors stand it. I can no longer turn on CNN, which is difficult because CNN has become sort of a lifeline for me, my connection to the big wide world from here, behind the redwood curtain. The excessiveness of the coverage of "the massacre" has made me close to physically ill. I mean that literally. Either it's that or I'm coming down with something viral, which I seriously doubt.

But the excess has also given me some perspective. I woke up this morning with this in my head:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling down the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.

Why would the first verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic be my first though upon waking? I think the key is in the second line.

I think, taking a very long view of the massacre and all the tragedy surrounding it (including the tragedy of Cho himself, a wasted individual who was mentally ill and never got the help that might have saved him and his victims) the time has come to trample down the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

We need an end to violence, wherever it is found. Period. Full stop.

It has long been obvious that we need an end to the War in Iraq. But we also need an end to videogames in which characters are blown away routinely by boys too young to understand that if you shoot a person they don't just pop back up, like in a game. Those are the two ends of a continuum -- we need to change everything in between, too.

We need a culture in which compassion and kindness are valued in everyone, not consigned only to wimps and the Dalai Lama.

amusing thought

I don't really know where this came from, but as a break from all the seriousness, here's a thought:

the phrase De gustibus (non disputandem) means basically the same thing as Whatever.

Heh.

Enough With the Hating

Today, April 14th, Bill Maher has a good piece in Salon (sorry, I don't know yet how to post live links here, but you can find it if you go to the main page) titled Say It Loud: I'm Elite and Proud. I promised myself I wouldn't get into politics much here, but I never said that about religion -- nor would I, because religion is very important to me. And during this current US administration, religion and government have become unfortunately intertwined. I say unfortunate because this is America where constitutionally we have separation of church and state. I never have understood how politics and religion could become anathema to good manners in dinner conversation, or nowadays forbidden to some internet discussion groups. How can you live and not have opinions about these things?

The thrust of Maher's piece concerns a little-known fact: The Justice Department is being run by graduates of a place called Regent Law School, who are mostly female and in their 30s. And Regent Law School is a part of Pat Robertson's university.

But Maher, as much as I think his heart and brain and therefore also his tongue are in the right place, is not perfect himself, and I didn't like the way he said what he had to say. I think he's been infected with the same germ that finally brought Don Imus down. Further, Maher made one statement that's flat wrong, and I don't think he made it tongue-in-cheek. He said "that eye-for-an-eye stuff that Jesus was always in a flap about" -- that's not an exact quote, but close. Fact is, Jesus wasn't in the eye-for-an-eye camp. That was Old Testament stuff. The new stuff that Jesus formulated had to do with cheeks, not eyes. Turn the other cheek, that was Jesus.

The Christian Right has consistently distorted what Jesus said and did, even while they cling to the Bible as the Word of God. Jesus, if he were alive today doing the same kinds of things he did in his own time, would probably be in trouble with any government. He was kind of anti-authoritarian, to say the least. But mainly, he was for love not hate, he was for everybody gettting along with everybody else, he was the ultimate uniter of people, not a divider. He was into forgiving, not punishing. And as for pre-emptive strikes, remember what Jesus said about "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

Regardless of which side of the political or religious or cultural or socio-economic spectrum one is on, I think the time has come to put away the hate, and the language of hate. We have to learn how to be confrontational, when necessary, without being destructive. That's a tall order. I'm not even sure how to do it. But for starters, in my own daily life, I'm going to try.

The Dark Matters

As promised, a few words on dark matter.

I mean the kind of dark matter the physicists and cosmologists now say may make up a very large percentage of the universe, since without its existence, the galaxies we've discovered via the better-seeing new telescopes like Hubble and Chandra etc. would fly apart. There is not enough gravity, as in from Newton's Law of, to hold them together. Or something like that. I am neither a physicist nor a cosmologist so it's hard for me to read about this stuff much less explain it.

A word or two of background as to how and why I got interested in this stuff in the first place. For starters, it's "dark matter". How could a mystery writer not be intrigued? And there's the fact that astronomy has always interested me, from earliest childhood. I don't know how old I was when I used to pull the National Geographic magazines off the shelf in my grandfather's study and sit there on the rug looking at pictures of the stars, but for certain it was before I could read and I learned to read at 5, so .... The one I remember best was called the Spiral of Andromeda. Now I know that's the galaxy nearest to us; then it was only the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and I was vastly disappointed when I couldn't see it myself up there with the Big Dipper and Orion and all the rest, that I'd need a telescope. I could go on with memories of this nature because I have many, but you get the idea.

Well, a couple of years ago I thought I might write a book about the year 2012 and tie it to dark matter somehow, so I did a lot of research. I read a ton of books - - maybe I should say I tried to read them because none of them were easy going, and I about broke my brain over string theory. (Anyone reading this who has ever read any of this stuff yourself, please note I said I broke my brain not my brane. ) This is a most intriguing thing, is it not, to think that not just some but most of the universe is composed of stuff we can't see?

Here is what I propose, having read all the scientific stuff to the best of my ability: WHAT IF (you know the author's what if, don't you) the stuff that there is so much of but we can't see it is spirit, not matter? What if there is a whole spiritual realm so vast that it has cumulative weight?

If you think about it for a while with something like an open mind, and can get past the fact that we live in such a science-dominated age that all of us tend to have caught the scientific bias of needing visible, repeatable proof, then you have to admit it's possible.

What if there really are beings of individual personality and intelligence that have never had bodies and don't even want them? What if these beings are the origin of our belief in angels, which is almost a universal belief among humans of all cultures and all periods of history? I tend to believe that things that have often been repeated in mythology, especially mythologies that have formed the basis of religions, are there because they do in some form actually exist and we human beings have a sort of race-memory of those elements embedded in us somehow, maybe in our very genetic codes. We all have some ideas of things invisible that are nevertheless real. It's just that the true nature of those things eludes us, so that many of us end up denying their existence.

I am not really going anywhere with this proposal that dark matter is spiritual stuff, though I played with it for a while in terms of a novel. Some of the ideas I played with, the ones related to 2012, I'm putting into the book I'm working on now, which may or may not ever be finished. Even while I was reading and formulating my ideas, I had a hunch that these physicists and cosmologists were over-thinking the whole thing. From a commonsense point of view, I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps Isaac Newton, smart fellow though he was, might not have come up with a law that works in our solar system but not necessarily outside of it. The existence of dark matter isn't necessary to postulate within the solar system, it's only when you get to those galaxies -- and I guess within our own Milky Way -- that you need dark matter so that Newton's laws will continue to work.

Small moment of digression: I continue to be blown away by the fact that we call our galaxy the Milky Way, and one of the great wall sculptures at that ancient temple in Cambodia [whose name escapes me but will probably come to mind as soon as I get away from the computer] is called Churning the Sea of Milk. It's one of the great Hindu myths about the creation of the world. That's an example of what I mean about the truths being in the great old stories. And that temple is Angkor Wat. I didn't remember it, exactly, I remembered it's in Graham Hancock's book Heaven's Mirror, which is a lovely book even if he is a bit of a kook. So I looked it up. There's a whole chapter on Churning the Sea of Milk in there.

Now bringing this up to date and to a close: In yesterday's mail, after I'd said I was going to write about dark matter in this blog, I got something from Scientific American, a Special Report (their caps) titled Does Dark Matter Really Exist? It seems there is an Israeli physicist named Mordehai Milgrom who proposed, all the way back in the 80s, that Newton's Law of Gravity doesn't work at vast distances. He came up with something called MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which makes the existence of dark matter unnecessary. The more the new telescopes discover, the more his MOND is proving out -- though there are a lot of people in his own profession who won't accept it.

And so it goes.... (with apologies to Linda Ellerbee, who was smart to grab that expression for her own).

new attitude, new url

I've also changed the url for getting here, to thecompassionatecurmudgeon.blogspot.com.

But I guess you'd know that or else you wouldn't be here.

Which reminds me, I'd better send a notice to people, just in case....

More tomorrow or whenever.

--DD