No Coward Soul Is Mine

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's
storm-troubled sphere

Emily Bronte, from "No Coward Soul Is Mine"

the truth

There's nothing wrong with stretching the Truth. We stretch taffy, and that just makes it more delicious.

- Stephen Colbert

... all the sad young literary men

"She had enormous green eyes and held her back straight and walked like a ballerina, the heel just in front of the toe, and she spoke English with such a proper, old world reserve that Mark wanted to help, to put his arms around her, to tell her it was OK."

- Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men

paglia on palin and abortion rights

Camile Paglia ruminates on the Sarah Palin pick, explains the ensuing Democratic freak-out, and wonders if abortion rights need necessarily be wedded to the women's movement. I like Paglia's thinking, and appreciate her ability to step outside feminism and survey the political landscape in its entirety.

Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thoma(admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer ....

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

ugandan preacher boy

Muwanguzi's name means the victor or conqueror.
But is his message getting through?

A gentleman sitting at a bar nearby says: "We need to dig down a bit, and find out exactly what inspired him to come out onto street. "Is it divine? Is he trained to do that? Or indoctrinated?" the gentleman asks, sipping on a beer.

A woman cuts in, saying: "You wonder what makes a young person like him come onto the street and preach like he does? He's so strange but I think that people might take him seriously."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7561512.stm

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry--
the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

- e. e. cummings

here is my secret. it is very simple.

"Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."

My rough translation: "Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

magic in a voice

I have been listening to sermons from my old church in Chicago.

The instant I hear my old pastor's voice, I am transported back to that church. I am sitting in the middle section, ten rows back, where I sat surrounded by trusted friends. I see prayer ministers with white robes and kind smiles (and one in particular's fearsome eyebrows -- like giant mustaches). I hear E., my dear friend, chewing gum, see her huge rhinestone celebrity shades perched atop her head. She whispers that she'll give me ten bucks if I dance in the aisle. And we giggle, like middle schoolers.

And I remember how I came to know, there in that holy place, that God was my shield, that he wept with me when I wept, and that his fingers were working in my heart, and that he wanted to take my burdens, and that I could set my compass on him, even as my hands shook, even though the woods seemed so dark.

And that he had made us each so different, but that through his sacrifice, he had made possible the sharing of trust and meaning.

One word. I am transported back, and washed over in God's faithfulness. It's as real as a good friend's hug, or the shafts of light flickering on the altar, or the communion wine's burning on the way down.

To lend credence to this post, to clean up this "spontaneous overflow of emotion," I should probably whip out my Walter Ong right now. Or my Marshall McLuhan. I could talk about the medium and the message, the transformative, communal power of sound, as opposed to the individulastic sterility of the written word. But I don't want to, somehow ...

Walking in Fog by Barry Goldensohn

Everything looms at me. Hound's-tongue
with wet doggy leaves and blue flowers
starts up from the mist-streaked hillside.
Standing by itself, framed in fog
the live oak twists black arms above me,
an embrace, free of the crown of leaves that hides
the outlines of limbs in the crowded background view.
The canyon and the next hill disappear.

An owl on a low branch sits in its silhouette
in the white flame of a wild cherry
and a tiny wren weaves through the sagebrush,
singing as it stops then flashes back in.

Plunging into dense puffs and gusts of fog
along the road a dying friend wheels
and lunges from cliff wall to cliff edge
in a bright yellow blouse and blue jeans
joyous with losing herself and coming back
in daily magic, you see me then you don't.

faith is a ragged garment

"His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing, the tears showing, a garment that he clutched about him like a man in a storm." -- Frederich Buechner on James Muilenberg