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| Sunday, September 16, 2001 |
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Original priorities 
| | I've been playing in the back yard with Jeffrey and his friend Camille. Both are four years old, and not the least interested in the world's Great Issues. In fact, they clearly gather that what absorbs their parents that isn't fun is plainly pointless and distracting. |
| | I took this picture of the two of them a few minutes ago with my new camcorder. What I see on their faces is the top priority we were all born knowing. It's what we come from, what keeps us going, what we value most in the world. |
| | Today, looking into these four little brown eyes, I think that peace is play, and love is fun. |
| | Excuse me while I go back for more of it. |
It's still personal
| | I think it's just more human to write email than to compose linky text. And it's easier. A few of us are journalists, but all of us are correspondents. Mail is the oldest and most comfortable form of written communication in the world. |
| | In a related matter it's also interesting to me that people follow links only between, say, 10% and 30% of the time. A minority of you will see this on my own discussion view page. The two pieces by Michael Stern I published in the last couple days (here and here) are getting 23% and 6% pass-through at the moment (assuming there are not inbound links from elsewhere). |
| | That's why, if I really want people to read something, like those Robinson Jeffers poems I put up this morning, I'll put it right in the blog. |
The Westering Edge
| | About half an hour ago my nose started bleeding profusely. This happens from time to time, but this one was huge. It's finally gone, I think. If I don't sneeze before I sleep, I think it'll be okay. |
| | I don't know why, but it seemed a somehow fitting end to a day when work — ordinary, necessary work — depressed me. In fact, pretty much everything depressed me. |
| | Our spirits were lifted a bit when we went down to the beach with a picnic at sunset. A group of about a hundred people with drums and instruments were improvising tribal rhythmic jazz, which is about the best I can describe it. |
| | "What is it?" Jeffrey asked, meaning, What tune were they playing? It wasn't an answerable question. |
| | But for a while it was nice to join a crowd of old hippies, young stoners and ordinary families like ours, dancing, playing, juggling, while this homeless-looking guy on a bike covered with vegetation thick as fur scattered huge pink and red flower petals. |
| | When we got back Jeffrey and I went upstairs to sit out on the roof and look at the stars, which is a sweet bedtime routine. But the stars seemed to have lost their charm — at least for me, for now. Jeffrey fell asleep. After awhile I did too, but not before thinking about what Robinson Jeffers said about violence in The Bloody Sire: |
| | It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's values.
What but the wolf's tooth chiseled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds and hunger
Gemmed with such eyes the great goshawk's head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.
Who would remember Helen's face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.
Never weep, let them play,
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.
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| | I recently read that the average duration of a species is about two million years. I pray we haven't run out of time. |
| | Dave is right. We need to think. We need to use the Internet as a medium for relationship — with each other, with each other's cultures, with the Earth, while we still live in something like peace with them all. |
| | The historian Hiram Hilty, grandfather to my first two children and a truly great man, once told me the most common record for young men in the South after the Civil War, written in family bibles and municipal records, consisted of two words: "Went West." He also told me our country has weaker "family values" than every other country in the world, for the simple reason that nearly all our ancestors left home — usually permanently. And we're still leaving home, moving ever westward, at the drop of a job offer, a romantic encounter, or just that deeply American hunger for adventure. |
| | But now, with World War III already declared, with commercial aviation nearly as ruined as the World Trade Center, we find ourselves standing at the far edge with Robinson Jeffers, who also wrote this in The Eye: |
| | The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shrines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud wit the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the gray sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half
the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that
never close; this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. |
| | Jeffers wrote both The Bloody Sire and The Eye at his home in Carmel, California when it was still where ocean and wilderness meet, on the occasion of World War II. |
Remembering New York's front teeth
| | It's almost like the feeling when you have lost a tooth, and your tongue continues to probe the place where it used to be. For a while, the sense of absence is much stronger than the sense you had from the tooth while it was still there. |
First quote for the memorial
| | "The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his belief in the cooperation of men, and through this cooperation his ability to find greatness." (Heyer, Paul. Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America. London: Allen Lane / The Penguin Press, 1967, p194-195.) — Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986), architect of the World Trade Center: |
| | Thanks to Peter Kaminski (and his wiki) for that one. |
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