Divided by Zero (Pt. 1)

The world will little note, nor long remember
what we said, did and cried there
But our hearts will never forget this life,
delicate china, tiny-pink, but not a doll
to be set aside and out of mind

Even the sun seemed reticent to shine
on broken hearts and bleeding souls
Shine it did, now and then, on faltering steps,
shaking hands and the small black hole
metastasizing at the center of our universe

Gravity drew me in, shaking hands grasping
a collapsar in casket form, miniature Taj Mahal
as reluctant gift to the gaping earth
Gravity fragmenting my porcelain heart
caught ever in the orbit of her new sun

~In memoriam of her, half of my first light
July 22, 2012

---
The line in bold is from Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address.' A different memorial of course, but the sentiment struck hard on my heart.

Magpie Tales 127: She Lied to Me About Infinity

Figure Eight, 1952, Franz Kline, via Tess at Magpie Tales

Laying entwined side by side

in lightning light through north glass

spattered sheeting rasping their backs

she laughed, hiccuped into his mouth

wine-warm breath and obsidian eyes

glancing to the wet canvas, You like it?

the question hung before his fogged brain

squinting while besotted memories

bubble up from the black lake

inside, he grips her hip, turning her sideways

to smile only with his lips It's fine, love,

but we were supposed to be infinity,

and all I see is a figure eight

That Old Time Religion

It's Sunday, and you know what that means. It's time for guns and Jesus!

...

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? I thought so, too, when the tagline first crossed my mind on Saturday. I tried to set it aside in favor of something else. As the day wore on, and the more I read in the news, I realized I wouldn't be able to drop it.

I was meditating on the awfulness of the shootings and killings that occurred in Aurora, trying to gain some understanding. It saddened me deeply to think that yet again something like this happened, yet again we will go through the cycle of shock, outrage and collective forgetting of the random, sudden violence that seems to be an unfortunate, horrifying earmark of life in the modern United States.

I told myself to send up a prayer that such a horror never happens to me, my friends and my family. I told myself to send up prayers for the victims and their loved ones. In many ways that is all we can do when faced with tragedies which have their only connection to ourselves through the medium of modern telecommunications technology.

I also hoped that outsiders with an agenda would exercise some tact and common sense, and refrain from using the tragedy as a sounding board for all manner of fear-mongering or idiocy.  Way too optimistic on my part, I know. Sadly, that lasted all of no time.

That some commentators on ABC News got way ahead of themselves by trying too hard to make a link between the alleged gunman and the Tea Party, based on very sketchy and unsubstantiated information, was bad enough. I'm no fan of the Tea Party, but the link between the perpetrator and them was so tenuous at that stage (and I don't think it has been substantiated even now) these veterans of the reporting trade should definitely have known better than to put it out there.

Trying to be the first to report, okay, I get that. Want to be cutting edge "on the scene", okay fine, just do a better job of fact-checking before trying to trump the competition. Really, it was way to early and so little facts were known that it ends up making them look stupid.

What really made me sick, and feeling so fed up with the culture of violence in this country, was one particular set of statements made by U.S. Representative from Texas Louie Gohmert. In a truly breathtaking leap of logic (or illogic, depending on how you look at it) that strains the bounds reasonable thought, he made the following remarks in a radio interview broadcast by the Heritage Foundation:

"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place."

"Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important...Whether it's John Adams saying our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people ... Ben Franklin, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters ... We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country."

"People say ... where was God in all of this?...We've threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God's name, they're going to be jailed ... I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don't want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present."

So he thinks that there is a link between random, mass violence and lack of religion. Furthermore, he seems to think it is specifically due to lack of Christianity. What is truly breathtaking in its willful irrationality is the connection he tries to make between supposed 'ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs' and the psychopathic actions of a single mass murderer.

Say what? How in the world does that even make sense? My guess is the perpetrator is a deeply troubled individual whose mind went places most of us cannot even imagine. I truly do not believe that it was a lack of Christianity that led to this; it was a pathological lack of reason and empathy. It speaks to narrowness of mind and arrogance of belief to claim this random act of violence as an attack on ones' belief system. Frankly, if Gohmert and folks like him are making Christianity look bad by claiming their religion had something to do with this crime.

But that's not all. It gets worse. He went on to speculate that the tragedy could have been lessened or stopped if only (you guessed it) more people in the theater had been carrying guns, and thereby could have taken down the shooter:

"It does make me wonder, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying a gun that could have stopped this guy more quickly?"

Oh, for the love of humanity, really? A crowded theater full of people carrying guns? Is this man a complete moron? People who were in the theater have been quoted as saying they thought the commotion was part of the movie. And do I really have to point out that it is generally DARK in movie theaters, so between that and the confusion, the soundtrack with special effects a generally untrained population...how would anyone have been able to take down the gunman without hurting and killing even more bystanders? Does he not understand the concepts of "fog of war" and "crossfire"?

Not long after I read the above remarks, I saw that old worn-out platitude "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" making the rounds in the media and on Facebook. Oh, it made my head hurt and my heart sick. There is nothing that pisses me off more every time something like this happens, when the gun nuts and NRA puppets start squawking about not taking away their weapons or controlling them. It completely misses the point, and in no way is an excuse to NOT do something about guns and their potential for crimes like the one in Aurora.


What really galls me, makes me sick and angry, is that too often Mr. Gohmert and many like him seem to think it was a lack of guns and God that lead to these tragedies. There I must emphatically disagree; sometimes I think this country suffers from a surfeit of both.

But he and many others are willfully missing the point. It is neither Christian belief or the right to bear arms that matters here. The most important thing, what we should all remember, is that someone went berserk and yet again the blood of innocents is on the ground. Pray that it doesn't happen again. Pray that we all may find peace.

Devil's Hatband

Hot. Hot like the hell. Another round of temperatures exceeding the 100° mark, and it looks like we are headed for 110° in the next two days or so. Folks are predicting new records for the KCMO area. I am inclined to believe them. This is heat I haven't felt for some time, and never for so long. The yard is turning into brown chaff faster than sprinklers can restore it. When I look out the window I sigh and shake my head.

"There is nothing to be done," intones the hollow voice in my head. We water, we "tsktsk", we wonder: when will it rain? Rain enough to make a difference? I grow tired of waiting.

Drought conditions persist, not enough work, water or money. August is approaching. This means I am facing ten months without an architecture job of which to speak. This means that the rain has stopped. The cisterns such as I had are swiftly draining. I can see the bottoms now, this makes me very nervous. I have lost my rain-making juju. This vexes me greatly.

The lake level has dropped, you can see the stumps now. There is baked mud where used to be pond weed and lilies, frogs and fish. The trails of dying fish can be seen in the hard grey earth of the dry bottom. They flipped and flopped, gasping for air in the heat, perhaps not comprehending their fate. I can only know by imagination what they felt. The idea of suffocating in air, gills drying out, tongue blackening, is truly unsettling. I don't know it physically. I do know it mentally. My bad dreams have shown me the path into the desert.

Grim, I know. Not the sort of thing we really enjoy discussing in polite company. I try to avoid inflicting these inner terrors on those around me, and those for whom I care. I am, as you may have noticed, not a complete success in that endeavor. Witness the words I spill for you now.

I stepped out in the heat today, on multiple occasions. There were errands to run, lunch to be had, sprinklers to be adjusted. While I was out, I saw that the flower bed at the front of the house was suffering an incursion of pesky grasses and bindweed. This was a bit much for me, having been parked in front of my computer trying to piece together some fragmented areas of my domestic life. I was in an ornery state. The agitation arising from my contemplation of the figuratively disappearing lake spurred me into action. The grasses and the weeds, they didn't stand a chance.

I ripped. I pulled. I tore out handfuls of vegetation, reveling in the discharge of energy. It felt good to flex and move. The heat made me sweat profusely, but even that felt invigorating. As is often the case, the distraction of a well-defined task allowed my mind to let go of some Stuff. This freed it up in turn to contemplate some Things. Things like that slowly evaporating lake in my mind.

If the idea of vanishing water and sun-baked stumps seemed bleak, the lower level of the lake also presented opportunities. That which was once hidden by the murky water was now coming to light again. What used to be wreckage could now be salvaged. Ideas and ambitions, hopes and fears, exposed again to the light of the day-mind. Now I could wade into the shallows and drag them back to higher ground. Something good could be reclaimed from things I believed to be lost.

Cool water splashes on my calves and back. In my peregrinations around the flowerbed, I had wandered into the arc of the sprinkler out in the yard. The shock of the water reminded me by contrast, of the heat. The mirage in my head popped out of existence and I came back to this world. The sun burned like a plasma cutter and I heard the voice of my father saying "It's hotter than the Devil's hatband out there!"

I wipe the sting from my eyes. There was curse making its way to the tip of my tongue, but I swear I could taste a little lake water there, so I bite back on the epithets. The Devil's hatband might as well be on my brow, the sweat pouring down my face in direct contradiction to the drought all around me. The drought, though, seems less threatening. It's change that creates difficulties which can be hard to overcome. Still, with change comes opportunity. The heat may brown the grass and dry the leaves, but this time I'll save the seeds I've gathered, in anticipation of the rains I know will surely come.