sculpture

i made a simple wooden cross
blonde clean and facile
with visions of carving a story
suited to God
a foot-high, half-inch thick

and yet as simple as this tribute might seem
it became no less than projecting my soul
writing, in the end, with dried ink at the well
tasked to create something worthy of the symbol
from an unworthy font

I etched this cross a thousand ways in the folds of my mind
envisioning each crevice
before ever heaving mallet and chisel to
or even lifting my sullen weight toward it

it was as though i had to see millions
within the one
each time i might bear down on the wood
the hardness at hand gave way
to myriad eyes or thriving waters
or fields of scattering offspring
bursting vines driving forth through
the very grain

life's sheer will, it seemed, might spring
from this shattered idea
this plain golden crucifix

and, as usual, hacking up the flesh of it
i made something to abandon
not revere
faring only slightly better on the human details
finer points, as though pecadillos
tapped into skin
toward a greater finale

Sharing all the World

"People must realize that even with all these comforts, all this money and a GNP that increases every year, they are still not happy. They need to understand that the real culprits are our unceasing desires. Our wants have no end."

--His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Imagine All the People"

resistance

"In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."

-- Mahatma Gandhi

A View of Karma

"A man long absent
comes home safe from afar.
His kin, his friends, his companions,
delight in his return.

In just the same way,
when you've done good
& gone from this world
to the world beyond,
your good deeds receive you--
as kin, someone dear
come home."

-Dhammapada.

einstein, darwin, god

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details. I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice. The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

-- Albert Einstein, the stained glass version

This is the man who also said: "Not everything that counts can be counted, And not everything that can be counted counts."

Nor did Darwin seek an antireligious ethic in nature or evolution, expressing bewilderment at deep issues as the problem of evil:

"I feel most deeply that whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.''

my life in the circular ruins

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries... Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book..."

- Jorge Luis Borges, from The Library of Babel

here's a LitKicks essay on Borges ficciones. And a great view of writing:

"I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as 'The Masses'. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

- from the introduction to The Book of Sand

secret detentions and Bushwhackin'

Amnesty International reveals further evidence of U.S. "secret detentions" in the name of fighting the Big Fear-- CNN

and I love this sucker punch: The NYTimes' oh so penetrating story on the rhetorical soft spot, artificially set up by Hard Pants and the thinkboys-- as to whether this is really war!-- which then gets "clarified" by straightshootin' Alfred E. Newman "no less than five times." Hell yeah! Makin' it clear!

Great insight from the Times! No handmaiden listens nor transcribes better!