Health care

One thing we surely know about health care is: everybody needs some sooner or later. We are working on this.

Allegorical vs. Real Characters in Fiction

Now I'm writing a third novel, Smoke.

My son said my fictional characters are formed too heavily upon allegorical concepts instead of real people. I think his assessment is correct. What am I going to do about it? That is the question.

As if that wasn't enough, my dentist was drilling away on my novel bridgework as well. A few weeks ago, he remarked that the first novel had "a lot of characters." That's true. I'm all over the place with these imaginary people, which renders my novel narratives, it seems, too complicated, or scattered, opaque, and therefore not easily accessible to mainstream readers. All true, as I am discovering. I probably knew it all along, to tell the truth, just too stubborn to do anything about it.

But hey, what about the wild-penned luminaries of the past who were venerated, yeah I say unto thee, even catapulted to bookish success, for their obscure story-telling style? I'm talking about Faulkner, Joyce, and. . . well you know the type. Novelists who would cloak all their rambling opi-opuses in arcane symbolism, subtle literary allusions, and stream of consciousness genius run-on sentences which, when read aloud by contemporary poets, always end each phrase with a rising voice intonation as if the speaker had just declared or questioned the most profound literary utterances ever laid out bare and naked for all the world to read and all the New York editors to puzzle over to their hearts' content.

Not to mention their protagonists, who are really dysfunctional savants whose character developments reflect societal manifestations of every misfit's compulsion to prove to the world that the deepest desire of modern men and women is simply to go crazy, flinging off the envelopes and tethers of slavish conformity/morality, and then post the video on Utube.

Speaking of which, video images are taking over the world of communication. Text is dead, unless you want to be one of the elite who actually think. I suppose this very rant is evidence of our literary degeneracy. I'm a drowning man here.

But I digress. Need to get back to the heart of the matter. I need to make my fictional characters more like real people, less like allegorical constructs. I'm working on it.

And good story-telling--I need to work on that too, which is why I just read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island--a great story by a master storyteller. Its a book that steadily intensifies suspense from beginning to end while cultivating reader involvement all along the voyage.

I have learned something valuable from Mr. Stevenson. Maybe now the Europe-crushing clash of 1930ish big ideas (as my son calls them) that I've taken on in the new novel, Smoke, can artfully fade into back story support; then Philip, Nathan, and Tabitha will navigate, in a very believable tale, the perils of a world hung upon the edge of communo-fascist disaster in 1937.

We'll see if I can sail this ship back into the trade winds of reader accessibility. Have a nice day.

Sun Yat-sen's memory in Hawaii

Sun Yat-sen was a great leader who managed to lead, 101 years ago, the Chinese people out of their dynastic bondage to the Qing empire.

After many previously failed revolutionary attempts, Mr. Sun was able, by 1911, to summon enough organization and gumption among his countrymen to actually accomplish the liberation for which he had spent most of his life preparing.

How he did that amazing work, I don't know. As nearly as I can surmise from a little bit of incidental reading and a movie or two, his role in Chinese history is similar to George Washington's in our American story. But he was not a military man, as Washington had been. Sun was a thinker, a planner, but he was intelligent and perceptive enough to actually put his revolutionary thoughts and plans into effective action. As a result, he is the founder of the Republic of China. So, since he was not a military leader, I perceive that his role in China's liberation from feudalism is more akin to Thomas Jefferson's.

During his education here in Hawaii (where I am now writing), he became familiar with the writings of Jefferson and other proponents of freedom among the opinions of mankind.

Sun Yat-sen was not, however, a politician; his piloting of the fledgling republic was, I think, removed from his grasp during the 1920s and '30s, and supplanted by the chaotic joustings of military warlords. By the time he died in 1925, the nation was in disarray, and hobbled as a collection of feuding factions. When the Japanese invaded in 1937, the two main groups--Communists and Nationalists--had to make an uneasy truce to drive Hirohito's army out. After the war, Mao's People's Liberation Army were finally able to wrest power, by 1948, from Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang army, which Sun Yat-sen's comrades had formed during the 1911 revolution.

Thus did Mao Tse-dung, Deng Xiaoping, and other Communist leaders enforce, at long last, the People's Republic of China.

Not the same as the Republic of China (1911-1948). Nevertheless, it's all a progression of Chinese politics and military victories. From an optimistic American perspective, one might say that Deng Xiaoping had initiated another revolution, a relatively bloodless one (until June 4, 1989.)

As an American, I don't know much Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Republic of China, but I am happy to report that a very important part of his ideological development was accomplished during his youthful residence and education in Hawaii. Yat-sen's brother, Sun Mei had moved to Hawaii in 1879, prospered greatly, and was one of the richest men in Hawaii by the turn of the century. During those years, Mei saw to it that his younger brother was brought to the Islands to live in freedom and to be educated.

Sun Mei's wealth included 3900 acres of agricultural land on the slopes of Haleakala volcano (now dormant), on the island of Maui.

Two days ago, Pat and I drove through Sun Mei's formerly vast land-holdings, in the district of Maui called Kula. There, very near the old Sun Mei homeplace, we found this memorial, built to commemorate Sun Yat-sen, father of the Chinese Republic, who had spent many an hour, many a month over many years, there in reflection, respite, recreation and rest, before later going back to the Middle Kingdom and making world history.

I will end this brief historical observation with a fact that is, to me, and also (I hope) to the world, quite significant:

Sun Yat-sen was baptized a Christian in Hong Kong in 1887.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Lover Beach

The Ocean is tidy this morning.

the tide is half; the sun comes up

over the swells; Lanai and Molokai loom

across the choppy blue. Old Maui volcano sleeps,

cloudy and vast, heart of the island.

Come to the veranda; bright is the sky!



Always, from the breaking waves

where Pacific pelts this sun-kiss'd isle,

Listen! you hear the roaring power

of our planet that flings up watery wings

and pulls them down again on shifting sand.

Roar, and whisper, and roar again

with cyclical slumber to lose and win

a perpetual thrust of planetary din.



Poet Arnold felt it long ago

among the pebbles of Dover beach, summoning

the futile strands of faithlessness

and existential woe; I

find instead the inevitability of faith

called up to bloom upon this far-flung ocean isle.



The ocean of despair

so near and far in present past, to pound us down on human shores,

throws its tantrum of pointless angst, with cynic sand.

But now I only feel the wave of our resolve

upon a flagg'ed pole of hope,

advancing, in the sun-stirred air

of dawning day, o'er the bright edges of our vision,

as lilies of the field.



Ah, love, let us be true

to one another! for the world, which seems

to pound upon us like a surf of strife,

so relentless, so provocative, so hard,

has a terrible power all its own

that would dash our love and hope in forceful blight.

But we here on our sun-bathed isle,

caressed with waves of love and delight--

we subdue the heartless poundings of the night.



Glass half-Full

Kula haiku

In Maui land and sky

Sun Mei brother Sun-yat Sen

shelter from the Storm.

Selah.



Glass half-Full

Speculating on a Stratified Story

Wandering on a rocky Hawaiian shore we discovered this layer of red rock stratified between two layers of black rock. I was wondering, how did this happen?

I am no geologist, but I have done a little reading about the earth and the rocks within it, and some exploration, as you can see here. That's my hand in the pic.

In offering a layman's analysis of this geological puzzle, I must begin with a basic fact: The Hawaiian islands are all exposed parts of one very big volcano, situated on the Pacific Ocean floor three miles below the surface, but extending high enough to protrude into air.

In this particular case, the red strata, formerly hidden within massive black/gray lava fields on the edge of Maui island, has been exposed by the erosive action of nearby ocean waves that have been perpetually crashing upon these rocks for a long time.

What I do now about the black layers is that they are igneous rocks formed by volcanic lava, which had flowed from the erupting earth fissures many years ago.

I'm not so sure about the red streak. My investigating touch (shown above in the pic), indicated that the texture of the red rock is granular, sandy, which is different from the feel of the black layers below and above it. This apparently sandy composition may indicate that the red layer is sedimentary rock. If that is correct, we could say that the red, iron-bearing deposit was laid by weathering wind/water forces, and laid upon the black basalt lava rock below it.

Presuming that my sedimentary assessment contains, perhaps, a grain of truth, we could infer that the red streak may indicate a more recent epoch of time when the volcanic lava flow had ceased, enabling earth processes to leave something different for awhile--say, a few thousand years? I don't know.

A geologist could tell you. On the other hand, he may blow my whole theory to smithereens, just like the volcano, Puukukui, blew all that black rock into the location you see here.

Whatever that red layer is, obviously it was later covered by a another black volcanic lava flow, and thus was covered for many an eon until the Pacific Ocean knocked the shoreline around and taught it, and us human inquisitors, a thing or two. If you can help me interpret this stratified story, please do. Rock on.

Glass half-Full

This here's for the Rule of Law!

Whether or not they actually could, the people of the British empire sought to civilize the world. One could say, perhaps, that on a good day those loyal subjects of the realm were sauntering forth to bring to unruly distant lands the rule of law, the benefits of a well-constructed language, and good manners, not to mention cricket.

Or one could say that, on a bad day, those John Bull limeys were exploiting the indigenous peoples, robbing them of their ancient heritages, playing contractual tricks to abscond their homelands, and getting rich in the process.

And one would be correct on both counts. Such is the dual nature of civilized man: he is a scoundrel, even as he strives, or pretends to, follow his so-called better angels.

Ditto for us Americans, their bratty little brothers in this saga of colonializing world history. But hey, it is what it is, and that's all that it is, so be that as it may, today or someday.

Nevertheless, one beneficial concept that the world has, IMHO, derived from the hegemonizing Brits, is the rule of law. Like the Romans before them, far-flung British representatives of the Crown have, in recent centuries, carried to the four corners of their known world the idea that justice should prevail, and men should be accountable, in a duly-appointed court of law, for their actions.

Therefore anarchy and mayhem are not permitted.

In British literature, a residual benefit of this principle is demonstrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in his classic story, Treasure Island. I'll not tell thee the tale, as thou must read it for thyself, or find a video of it somewhere online haha, as if there were such a thing.

Nevertheless, I'll take thee in thy imagination, as author Stevenson did, down to a little island in some distant sea wherein lies a hidden treasure that was left behind during a dispute between some gentlemen of fortune, some of them honest, some of them not, but which is which, I'll tell thee what--on second thought--suffice it say, some men were killed, and some got caught.

Years later, as the story is told, having obtained a map that could lead to the buried booty, a band of reputable fortune-seeking men have returned to the island to uncover the misplaced gold, which is a considerable weight of what's called pieces of eight. And if'n you don't know what that is, matey, go look it up on your wikipedia slate.

By and by, I'm a-comin' to my point, lads n' lassies, about the civilizing effects of the British empire. And this is how it happened:

There was, to state it plainly, a mutiny among the men. I don't know how else to say it except that certain dirty/rotten scoundrels were led by their wolf-in-sheep's clothing leader, Long John Silver, into the perfidy of lawless rebellion against the good Captain and the owners of the ship who were with him. And there was among the loyals the good lad, Jim Hawkins, cabin boy, who lived to tell the tale, whose account enables me to write it to thee.

Pirates is what they were, pure and simple--Long John Silver and his mutineers.

During the course of the dispute, an actual battle broke out between the two sides. The Captain and his loyal men had managed to occupy an old stockade. The contemptible buccaneers were planning to overpower them with muskets and swords and the ship's cannon offshore, which they had occupied.

Immediately upon taking the stockade, the Captain had made it his first order of business to raise the Union Jack--the British flag-- on a log-pole above the fort, although it might seem there could be more productive ways he could have spent his energy and precious time at that perilous moment.

Very soon the scumbag pirates began firing cannonballs at the stockade. This turn of events is told near the end of chapter 18 in the book. A ship's owner speaks to Captain Smollett:

"Captain," said the squire, "the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are coming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?"

"Strike my colors!" cried the captain. "No, sir, not I"; and as soon as he had said the words, I think (the ship's doctor is writing this. -ed.) we all agreed with him. For it was not only a piece of stout, seamanly, good feeling; it was good policy besides and showed our enemies that we despised their cannonade.

The good Captain, in so doing, was proclaiming to the scoundrels, and to the very world: This here ground we have taken is now for God and King! This here's for law and order! We'll not tolerate mayhem and rebellion! That's our stand and we are stickin' to it.

Now this particularly resolute act of the Captain had good effect, even beyond the mere declaration of it. Young Jim Hawkins, who had been separated from the ship's loyal men, was out in the island somewhere, among the scrubby shrubs and sandy spits, trying to get to the stockade to rejoin his mates. And he had found, long story short, a wild island man who was not actually wild-- though he appeared to be so with the scruffy beard and raggish coverings. This character, name of Ben Gunn, had been marooned on the island by the former buccaneers, the ones who had left the treasure somewhere in the vicinity.

So, meanwhile, back at the outback part of the island where Hawkins and Gunn are dodging cannonballs and musket shots, old Ben says to young Jim, at the beginning of chapter 19:

As soon as Ben Gunn saw the colors he came to a halt, stopped me by the arm, and sat down.

"Now," said he, "there's your friends, sure enough."

"Far more likely, it's the mutineers," I answered.

"That!" he cried. "Why, in a place like this, where nobody puts in but gen'lmen of fortune, Silver would fly the Jolly Roger, you don't make no doubt of that. No, that's your friends."

Which is to say, the ringleader of the mutineers would not be flying the Union Jack. He would not be claiming ground for God and King. He would not be declaring by such actions: This here's for the rule of law. Come ye to this flag and you shall find order, and justice, not mayhem and rebellion! Ben Gunn knew this, and he assured the cabin-boy that the Union Jack was reliable, and so. . .

It could come about that the ship's doctor would later write:

"And I ran to the door in time to see Jim Hawkins, safe and sound, come climbing over the stockade."

Thus had this incident made known, in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, the sanctuarial power of Brittania. God save the King, and the Queen, too!

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

BodySurfer's Intuitive Calcs

Ocean waves, generated by the interplay of lunar and earth gravity, travel very long distances across open water. When a wave reaches land, having no more water in which to move forward, it breaks upon the shore. How many millennia have humans been observing this? A long time.

Standing in shallow water very near the shoreline, we would see the hapless bodysurfer waiting to experience the thrill of catching a wave and riding it the short distance until he and the wave are tossed onto the sandy beach. If you happened to be at Ka'anapali beach, Maui, Hawaii, yesterday, that adventurous bodysurfer would have been, perhaps, me, or one of the other hundreds of free-floating small-time adventurers.

The body surfer is not a real surfer, you know. He's just a clueless vacation visitor, not really serious about investigating the larger potentials of the great swells on the north shores of these far-flung islands. He doesn't have the board. He just has his own body, which he has trained to float. In my case, I learned to float at YMCA summer day camp in Jackson, Mississippi, long about 1956 or so.

Consider one wave coming in--the one that I'm going to jump into in just a few seconds here. How does this little dance between the wave and the bodysurfer work?

When the wave is still out in deep water where there is nothing to alter its somewhat ideal sine, or cosine, or bell-jar shape, it is a force of energy moving through the water, rearranging the shape of the water surface as it moves forward. It is moving the water somewhat, mostly up and down, at any chosen point of the ocean surface. Within the force of the wave there is kinetic energy moving those millions of molecules of H²0. But the wave is not really moving as much water, or anything else, as it actually has the physical power to do. So within the wave there is, along with the kinetic energy that is in constant use, potential energy.

So every wave that travels across the Pacific, approaching the beach, is a combination of both kinetic energy and potential energy. When the kinetic force of it hits the beach, the potential energy is suddenly converted to strong kinetic action and the wave totally expends itself on the sand. All that physical force erupts upon the shore and upon whatever happens to be there, be it a surprised snoozing sunbather, a sand castle, or a bodysurfer like me. Over long periods of time, this wave action churns rocks down into fine sand, and this is how we get our beaches. It also steals sunglasses and plastic cups and rubber rafts and other stuff that we consumers drag to the strand with us.

What the bodysurfer seeks to do is partake of that thrilling moment within the wave when its potential energy is instantaneously being converted to kinetic force, and thereby producing for him/her a few seconds of very fine sporting excitement. This occurs when the wave's natural shape is being violently altered by its contentious encounter with the sandy bottom. Entering shallow water, that potential energy has nowhere to put all those water molecules that were formerly being moved up and down in such a gentle, rolling manner. Suddenly there is no more "down" available to the wave, because where there was deep water before there is now something solid that does not yield to the wave's force. In this case, the "something solid" is the edge of the island, i.e. the shore.

So the rambunctious wave tosses all those water molecules up into the air, in a kind of tantrum. Like a spoiled child that has grown accustomed to having its way all the time, the wave shouts with much sound and fury that signifieth nothing, if I can't have my wavy way here, I'm going to throw all this liquid in the air! Waugh! Now it's splash and crash time.

So suddenly the formerly tame motion becomes an eruption of spray through the air, and foam upon the sand. That noble wave that hath traveled afar all the way from Japan or wherever--it just gives up the ghost and dies right there on the coast of Hawaii.

But not before this thrill-seeking tourist can get in on a little super-planetary wave action, ha! I love it.

Glass Chimera

Planetary birth pangs

Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about three or four miles down below the water surface, our planetary home gave birth to Hawaii.

As Father in Heaven had sewn within Mother Earth's deep crevices the seeds of creative planetary development, she cried out from the Deep in her anguish when the aweful time of delivery had come. With wailings of hot magma and rumblings of steamy contraction, Mama pushed out those volcanic islands-to-be. Spewing forth from her ocean floor, striving upward from her tectonic fissures, the nascent super-hot lava tumbled and rolled skyward from beneath its tectonic birthplace, into cold Pacific waters. Then, after a few million years of childlike submersion under watery tutelage, these pubescent islands stuck their stony little heads out into air and proclaimed to the birds and the stars that they had at last arrived, ready to be transformed as the land of the living.

Yesterday, we were walking on some of those rocky island shoulders. We watched with fascination as vehement Pacific waves pounded her dark lava extremities with ceaseless planetary fury, casting high cascades of spray into the blue sky with airy veils of aquamarine and silver-white brilliance. The basaltic wasteland whereon we trod was sculpted with moonish alacrity, revealing with otherworldly starkness layers of black, grey, reddish brown-- solid rock punctuated with massive boulders, cracky protrusions, some rounded by the rushing of the water and wind, others still sharp with the newness of elemental violence.

Then, there is was. A small carpet of vivid green something living, splayed upon the barren rock, growing as merrily as you please in the sunshine, with little orange-tipped teardrop succulent leaves spreading across the lithic void.

"That," said the traveler to his nephews and nieces, is the beginning of dirty old life.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Parabola

Neither life, nor anything in it, is just a simple straight line. Even crystals, which grow along straight mathematical forms from the elements and minerals of this world, have to be cut before we value them.

There's nothing really simple out there. It all confuses. That is why, I suppose, people have such trouble accepting the idea that there is some kind of absolute truth in the universe.

Nothing in this life ever just jumps on a straight-line path and goes forward, without vectored influence to push/shove it to the right or left. In experience we are, like, all over the place. Here one day, there the next, trying to make up our minds about what to do, how to approach this or that person about something-or-other problem, or how to solve this problem and ignore that other one, hoping it-he-she-it will go away.

So if there is any truth in this life, in this world, universe, we access it only after discovering the nugget from some obscure hiding place, and then we are proud of ourselves because we've uncovered some precious truth, like treasure in a field. Eschewing the common good and beauty all around us, we prefer to dig for rare booty. Then finding something good beneath all the crap that goes on becomes a triumph of sorts, and we can feel good about ourselves for a while.

Jesus explained to his disciples that he speaks to the people of this world in parables, because they do not see really what something is when they are looking at it, and they do not really hear what's going on here, even though they think they are listening.

I think that's why writers like me like to veil our visions in allegory, metaphor, nuance, and literary B.S., hoping that the world will dig through our fabric of symbolism and story to discover some truth in it. We could say that, parabolically, we are a little bit like the master story-teller of all time--the one who spoke truth in parables. In truth, however, our vain musings can not hold a candle to his wisdom.

Glass Chimera

From hydrogen to iron is a long way

A man stands on the earth and looks up into the night sky. He sees the stars, the moon, the great expanse of space. He wonders at the immensity of it all, the brightness, the contrast, the arrangement of stars and heavenly bodies in the visible universe. He ponders it. He considers it all, from the perspective of one who knows a little something about how things seem to fit together here on earth. Could it have all just happened at random, or is there some grand design to it?

Yes.

I'm not the only person to have done this. Take, for instance, the famous progressive leader from antiquity, Moses. He started his best-selling book with this statement, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Let's compare this statement to Robert Hazen's statement in his brilliant best-selling book, The Story of Earth.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Story-Earth-Billion-Stardust/dp/0670023558

Mr. Hazen wrote, "In the beginning, all space and energy and matter came into existence from an unknowable void."

So compare: What Moses calls "heavens and earth," Robert calls "space, matter, and energy." They are both writing about the same thing, which is all that stuff out there that we're not sure about exactly what it is and cannot really prove how it got there.

Faith and Science are equally clueless.

The scientific method, assuming we cannot know everything but positing that we can know some things, then proceeds to prove, by successive experimentation what we can know, one hypothesis at a time. Makes sense to me.

Faith, on the other hand says, there's a lot out there I don't know, but I do understand this: It didn't all just happen. There is an order to it, and, Whoever designed it included in the program a personal conviction within me that I didn't just randomly pop out of the stardust.

Pretty naive, n'est ce pas? I believe it.

So faith is one thing, and science, or knowledge, is another. One thing I like about science is: it is so very useful. Take, for instance, Mr. Hazen's very instructive scientific book. His introduction and first chapter have communicated to me light years of knowledge about the universe that I had not understood before. His explanation, based on the elements, and the Periodic Table by which we successfully contextualize their intricate interactions in the physical world, starts with the simplest element, hydrogen. Mr. Hazen then guides us very simply and concisely through the mysterious process of nuclear fusion. Fusion combined small quantities of the original, simplest element--hydrogen--to produce helium. Then, by continuing fusion, other more complex elements such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen were created, and ultimately life itself.

That last phrase, "life itself" is where misunderstandings between us Faith-holders and some Scientists tend to arrive at different conclusions. No problem for me though. I believe that Moses could stand on a sandy beach, as I did yesterday, and know, yes know, that indeed "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it. But hey, even though I'm a person of faith, I can still move on, and learn some stuff. I wish I could have seen this cumulative hydrogen/fusion stuff in sixth grade instead of starting our science class with the atom, which was like starting a great story on page 7 instead of page 1.

But back to the future, or excuse me, to what is happening just now. . .here is something I learned yesterday, after standing on a Hawaii beach and contemplating the universe, and then reading Mr. Hazen's fascinating book:

"Iron is as far as this nuclear fusion process can go. When hydrogen fuses to produce helium, when helium fuses to produce carbon, and during all the other fusion steps, abundant nuclear energy is released. But iron has the lowest energy of any atomic nucleus. As when a blazing fire transforms every bit of fuel to ash, all the energy has been used up. Iron is the ultimate nuclear ash…"

In other words, after all that high-heat nuclear goings-on after Big Bang but before earth, a big hunk of iron was left over when things cooled down a bit. And that chunk of mineral/rock was (and yes, I am vastly oversimplifying this) our earth!

Praise God! What a piece of work is earth.

Glass half-Full

True Love

If a man chooses a woman as his wife, he should stay with her. He should be faithful to her, because when he is old, who will care for him? And she should remain faithful to him, because when she is old, who will care about her?

This is not easy, although in the long run, in the big picture of life, it is the best way. And when you get right down to it, during the time of approaching old age, it is not only the best way, it is in fact, the easiest way.

The way of fidelity is the best and easiest because, although the man gets old, and his functions diminish, and maybe he takes the little blue pills to help him and his wife along, the old triggers of youth remain. They do not go away. The old visual stimuli that motivated him as a youth and cornered him into tight places of desire and release do not just disappear.

So this is something that the man and wife deal with in their latter years. And it is better that they address the issues of waning masculinity and withering femininity together, because that is better than being alone.

Of course, ultimately every man is alone at the very end, and he must deal with it--a matter between himself and his Creator. Same for the woman, though her worries and fears are, I believe, different. There is a difference, you know, between the man and the woman.

But insofar as it is possible, a man and woman who have committed themselves to each other should remain committed for life. In the long run, this is the best for both of them. Trust me, from my beach perspective here on the island of Maui, I can see a multitude of directions that a man could pursue, but where would they lead him?

My fading memory of such libidinous pursuit in the early days tells me that those random paths of desire would lead, after perhaps some momentary release, to frustration and disappointment. So it is better that the man remain faithful to his woman, and she to him.

The Creator has designed life this way. By the time a man is old, he is cornered by God, bound by his own diminishing prowess. He has no truly viable choice but to remain faithful to that woman who has stayed with him all along the unpredictable twists and turns of this life's journey. The same is true for the woman, I suppose. Or at least I hope so.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Golden gated possibilities

The Golden Gate bridge was completed and dedicated for use in 1937. It was a pretty impressive piece of work. Check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Bridge

The idea of actually building this necessarily very big, complex structure took hold among some forward-thinking people; they were business leaders on the far side of the San Francisco bay area, in Santa Rosa, north of the waterway. Those enterprising folks in the California outback got together and started pushing the preposterous idea of building a bridge. Everybody who looked into the possibility of such a project knew it would be a tall order, no doubt about it.

Could such a thing even be done?

The Chamber of Commerce in the city of Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, set the wheels of potential progress in motion. That is to say, in 2012 parlance, the "private sector." haha. They ran with the idea of getting something started. Together with "public sector" legislative bodies, the elected Board of Supervisors of Santa Rosa and of San Francisco, they recruited some engineers to actually get the ball rolling on the design requirements of such a gargantuan task.

An elected governmental body, the California legislature, eventually took on the massive project in 1928, turning its implementation over to their highway department. Bond financing became a problem in 1930, after the Crash when times were hard and folks didn't have much money. Many didn't even have, as they say, "two dimes to rub together." So a major player in the financial industry, a founder of the Bank of America in San Francisco, bailed out the debt logjam by, according to Wikipedia, agreeing to buy the public-issue bonds, in order to get the bridge constructed. Actual construction work began in 1933.

By April of 1937, long story short, there was a bridge where none had been before; and now, seventy-five years later, it's still there. I know this is true. Pat and I have walked across the thing many times, even though we live in North Carolina. Our business-administrating son, a SF resident, rode across it yesterday on his bicycle.

These things have happened in history. Put that in your public/private-sector pipe and smoke it, all ye 21st-century couch-potatoed Americans. Where there's a will, as our grandparents used to say back in the day, there's a way. And they proved it.

Now these days, such projects would be much more complicated.

Or are they? Well, yes, but that's a deep subject.

These days, you can't just cook up a big project like that and go out and round up a bunch of folks in need of work and get them to do the thing. Americans don't work like that any more, and besides, our infrastructure is already built anyway, right? I mean, nowadays you can't just find a bunch of shovel-wielding fellers and get 'em to dig a big hole in the ground, pour some concrete and steel into it, then do the same on the other side, and bolt up a bridge between them. Can't do it. Americans don't work like that any more. We're not programmed like in the 21st-century.

I wonder what it is that Americans can do now. We are, you know, pretty damned good at, what? making excuses, blameshifting? These days, we're about as likely to do a big collective work like that as we are to wander out in the yard and watch the sun heat up the roof, or watch the lawn grow.

Glass half-Full

The Smile

What was God up to

when he came up with this smile thing?

--when it was implanted

within the potentiality of any man, any woman,

any child, or in each and every oldster--

this capacity to instantly broadcast

Joy!

and then project that joy across space,

and time,

sowing contentment like seed corn

into the swirly-world fields of people and places.

Here comes one now-- an unexpected smile that

lands suddenly upon my stony day.



What in heaven's name was Creator intending,

by positioning at the corners of any living human mouth,

or in just any wagging bouche or yapping trap,

this little trickle,

this glistening trace element

of radiant happytude; it shines

through the air, and boldly accross errant cares,

leaping out at us like it owns the place.

What a forcefield of fulfillment,

this silent manifestation of mirthy music!

How could such insignificant little corners of a person's

upturned lips,

dancing with the wrinkly corners of their bright eyes

ever so gracefully--

how could this facial arrangement display

such uninhibited sparkle

such irrefutable iris gleams?

How could this smile leap forth so freely

to disable nearby gloom

and decimate delinquent dismay?

So unashamedly is this random joy

flung at us passersby,

as if to smother with contentment our alienation, outperforming our angst,

destroying our dread,

trumping our worry, like some ace of hearts hidden beneath love's sleeve.



See the waitress over there

hispanic looking gal--

she doesn't even need to

do the lips maneuver,

doesn't even need to turn on a residual sparkle.

Her countenance, by some indeterminate power,

radiates well-being

before the mouth even catches up.

How does she do that?

Wonder what God was up to, enacting

this sublime power of the smile.

Look! There it flashes again.


Glass half-Full

The Notion of Equality

To say that God created all men

equal,

Now that is one thing. But

to apprehend the throne of God and then

set up men as his replacements, in order to

equalize

all the inequality, that is another.

It just aint natural to try and make

everybody equal.

I mean

Lenin tried that, right? And then Stalin and

look what happened there.

Oh they had a great idea, right.

To rip down the palatial pile of czarist wealth and

redistribute it, so everybody's got the same.

Looks good on paper but then

the working out of it, the the the i mean the

blood

the gulag and the schmulag and the ragtag

enforced

equalization of it, well it . . .

you tell me.

What about Mao's millions

laid upon the altar of

the people's perfect plan,

some great hungry leap forward to revolutionize culture

like some vulture

would do, and then cometh Pol Pot,

with the common pot, and a head shot

and oh what an income redistribution hotshot.

I mean, you

may think I'm oversimplifying this but hey

that's the point.

Filling God's shoes with human ruse now

that's a tall order.

How's that workin out for ya?

Glass Chimera

The Breakdown of Society

It starts with polarization. Is that okay, or not?

Polarization between left and right; or between conservative and liberal; libertines vs. disciplinarians; religious vs. atheist; sinners vs. saints; Democrat vs. Republican; libertarian vs. socialist; communist vs. fascist; And of course there's the original human version, and most fundamental one of all: right vs. wrong, also known sometimes as "us" against "them."

Is your personal identity, or mine, defined by one's decision to take a position on "one side or the other"? Philosophers and sociologists call this way of classifying stuff as dichotomy, an insistence on believing that everything is either one thing or its opposite thing.

In reality, of course, we are all composites of both. I suppose that makes us all mixed up. Why, my own chosen faith framework, Christianity, teaches that we are all sinners, while we can be, even at the same time by God's grace, saints. Consequently, we discover that everywhere you look in this world we find, not so much black and white, but shades of gray. Shades of gray in every societal, political, and religious entity and institution that is out there.

And most important of all: shades of gray within my own (formerly) damned self.

Where does this endless diversity of contentions take us? What's the world coming to? And how will little old me end up in it?

Over my sixty years of life, especially in the last half-decade or so, I have noticed a certain suspect predisposition within myself, and it disturbs me. To describe it simply, I would have to say it can only be called a kind of death-wish on society, because the world is so screwed up. It's a perverse reasoning that if society--or the nation or the world--were to fall apart because of so much dysfunction and injustice, then conditions would spontaneously emerge that would somehow facilitate my self-actualization as a person, and hence my fulfillment with a meaningful role in the new society.

But this is madness. I mean, this was Hitler's problem. And look what happened there.

Furthermore, in research and reading that I have undertaken in the last year or so, I have discovered that I am not the only one who experiences this feeling of delusory self-justification at the expense of societal downfall. There are many others out there whose attitude toward the world is reflected as what some have called "apocalyptic."

As I am presently writing a novel, Smoke, which is set in the year 1937, I encountered this word, "apocolyptic" as descriptive of the fascists in Britain during that convulsive period of pre-WWII history. These desperate extremists didn't care if their movement would bring about the downfall of British society, because they were so convinced that they were right and everybody else wrong, especially the communists across the street (in East London). And Britain's experience of this polarization was minimal as compared to the Continental manifestations of it just across the Channel.

The whole European world was, at that time, attempting to divide itself according to the two opposing apocalyptic, or revolutionary, movements of that day: fascists vs. communists: fascists in Germany and Italy, Communists in Russia, eastern Europe and possibly Spain. There is so much to say about this, I cannot possibly do it here, so I'll continue dealing with it in the book I am writing. But I would like to bring to your attention this passage about Germany in 1930, from page 15 of World Crisis and British Decline, 1929-56, by Roy Douglas (St. Martin's Press, 1986.):

"Economic misery was matched by political chaos. At the General Election (in Germany) of September 1930 there were eleven parties each with a dozen or more representatives, and no single party held as many as a quarter of the total. The Nazis, who had only won twelve seats a couple of years earlier, became second party of the state with 107; while the Communists advanced from 54 to 77. Both of those parties believed in revolutionary solutions, and were perfectly willing to allow the state to collapse in ruins, in order to rebuild from their own preferred foundations. Thus they had no interest in making the economy work as well as possible, and every interest in refusing to cooperate with anybody."

Sound familiar?

What they had back then was a failure to agree, and consequently, movements of both formerly-centrist positions toward extremes. Ultimately, the only reconciliation of those polarizations was one hell of a big war.

So, is the lesson of history that failure to agree may lead to apocalyptically chaotic rearrangemets of society? It could happen, but I'm not looking forward to it. When I was younger, I thought I might be awaiting some kind of apocalypse. I thought it was beginning in the fall of '08. But we're still here, all of us plodding along.

So, in this sixth decade of my time on earth I'm hoping and praying that the world does not fall apart. How about you?

Glass half-Full