Telegram

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Wednesday, March 31st

Lighten Up


Every image is distorted. The image on the printing plate reverses when the proof is taken; the photograph begins as a negative, or a vignette, or a grid of dots upon the paper. The color is gone, or wrong; there is nothing to see beyond the boundary of the paper. And what we see, directly, is altered by the flaws in the eye and in the mind. Yet, enough truth is available in these images that they are trustworthy; we learn to have corrective vision, to adjust to the false part of what we see. In a glass, darkly, but still, the kernel of the whole truth.
David on 03.31.04 @ 07:34 PM CST [link]


Tuesday, March 30th

Back in Harness


I spent a few days away housesitting, which became an interesting Lenten deprivation. I didn't write any entries, I didn't check my e-mail, and I didn't look at my life and try to find journal-fodder in it. Plenty happened: a glorious performance of Rutter's Mass of the Children, Sam's Flood, the fox in the road, a few beautiful teaser days, and lots and lots of lifting. I will only allude to these things, and not relate them any further. I never pretended that I'd tell everything.
David on 03.30.04 @ 07:08 PM CST [link]


Saturday, March 27th

Wetlands


I generally enjoy good health. To be more accurate, I experience it and take it for granted. This means that when I suffer a sniffle, a headache, or, as in today's case, an irritated belly, I overreact and assume I will never, ever recover. I lost a little sleep, when I woke up and felt two kittens wrestling in my duodenum, but in a little while I had semi-recovered and went on with my day.

I went over to the fairgrounds to see what the conditions were like; if we can get the tents up early then we may be able to empty the big barn's contents into them and start our construction work. Otherwise, we'll be working on that while accepting donations and that'll be a little intense. I saw R's car there, and sure enough, she and R were there updating the signs. It is unlikely warm today, and the interior of the barn was pleasantly cool. Hrad to imagine that those words would ever enter my vocabulary again: "pleasantly cool".
David on 03.27.04 @ 03:22 PM CST [link]


Friday, March 26th

D


Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days. Promising but inconsistent, the story of the years between the wars for an English public-school master (the school is English, he's Welsh). As a protagonist he's a bit of a cipher, or he's bland and colorless. Some of the major secondary characters are more interesting; however, the women seem to exist mostly to fulfill the requirements of the plot. Less prominent characters make no impression, which makes them difficult to differentiate when they reappear hundreds of pages after they left the stage. The narrative is intermittently interesting.
David on 03.26.04 @ 05:37 PM CST [link]


Thursday, March 25th

Sweet Bay


That one lived, this one died. I met her when I was just finishing college, caught up in a mist of confusion, despair, and hazy hedonism, and we walked those same paths. I was ensnared and fascinated by the struggle, not noticing that she was also caught in a web, but that her struggles were so much more desperate than mine. I held her close in the morning, the light angling in from a bleak winter sunrise, as we swayed to an awful song, turned up too loud. I only saw what I wanted to see, until she drew back and I saw all the shame, degradation and cruelty I'd lit in a romantic light. I went away, thinking I'd see her again someday; then somebody told me she'd been hurt in an ambiguous accident. She died a year or two later, I don't know how, but that death pointed straight back at all that had come before,and pointed its accusing finger at me. I don't know what I could have done for her, or whether I could have done anything at all; I do know that whatever it was, I didn't do it.
David on 03.25.04 @ 05:31 PM CST [link]


Wednesday, March 24th

Jojo


I have the last card she sent me. She went to Europe and the Levant after she graduated, and I wrote, and she wrote, with months often passing before a little bit of flotsam would wash up. I think some of my fervent, penitent, awful letters must have gone astray, or missed her as she moved along. It is dated August 30, and I suppose it took weeks to arrive. I imagine I wrote back and never got a reply. You lose a lot of people over the years, and frankly, you don't miss them until you are reminded, maybe by a faded artifact you treasured. I didn't lose her to death, I lost her to life, and the different things life became for each of us. "Life is an adventure", she said; I hope that she's enjoyed it and that it's as much of an adventure for her now as it was then.
David on 03.24.04 @ 05:50 PM CST [link]


Tuesday, March 23rd

S & M


If you're putting anything out on the internet with any degree of regularity, I suppose you're halfway on the road to narcissism already. The very presumption that what you do, or think, or know, is worthy of the casual observer's time and attention is somewhat egotistical. That much is conceded; then there's runaway narcissism. This might happen in a case where, say, the proprietor of a public service, e. g. Diary-X, hijacks that service and forces its users to be mute witnesses to an event in his personal life. Not in the public interest, not an appropriate use of the bandwidth; just an ego trip and the moral equivalent of spam.
David on 03.23.04 @ 05:50 PM CST [link]


Monday, March 22nd

Chit Chat


Lunch. I was not sure if it would be prudent to go in, some of the powers had been going around whispering and wearing scowls. I went in anyway. In a few minutes there were six of us: that seemed safe. It wasn't until the conversation went to an extended discussion of breastfeeding that I noticed I was the only man in the room. I wasn't uncomfortable; I've never done it but nobody else in the room had done it in over fifteen years, it's just that the topic didn't fascinate me. Soon enough we'd moved on to something less sex-linked, and I was able to become visible again.
David on 03.22.04 @ 05:12 PM CST [link]


Sunday, March 21st

Sequence


A, B and C got back from Texas this week. A is about seventy years old, and is the mother of B, age forty, who is in turn the mother of C, the six-year-old whose picture is in my wallet. I love them all. A was in a terrible car accident a few years ago, from which she made a slow and painful recovery; but in recent years the damage that the accident had done has reappeared. She has difficulty walking and using her left arm; how she manages to drive a manual transmission car (the very car that assaulted her!) I can't imagine. I hug her whenever I see her. I am B's second-string husband. It's a position I fill for several others, as well, whose real husbands don't appear at church functions -- with B we were so habitually in one another's company that we were mistaken for the genuine article. C has been precocious and outgoing since infancy, befriended me before she could talk, and still likes me. And out in the cemetery, I'll be cutting the grass around B's father, who died when she was a teenager, long before I knew her. Two teenagers I know lost their fathers this winter, and knowing this family makes me feel hopeful for them, that this season will yield to another, as seasons do.
David on 03.21.04 @ 06:27 PM CST [link]


Saturday, March 20th

Synergy


Last night I went to see the Dartmouth glee club, on its spring tour of four cities in the Pacific northwest, and here. I am surprised that I have become the kind of person who will go to hear a glee club, but you should never underestimate the lure of a free ticket and a short drive. As is often the case with ensemble singing, the group was far better, as a whole, than most of the individual voices. I could offer one of my usual generalizations here, but I won't. They were quite good, with several interesting pieces to offer, and appealing to the eye as well. I was invited to the hospitality party, but it was almost nine o'clock and I went home instead.
David on 03.20.04 @ 05:31 PM CST [link]


Friday, March 19th

7 pounds, 14 ounces


When I told her the baby's name, we shared a moment of delight. It is also her brother's name. I wonder if she knows whether I have any brothers or sisters; I've known her for quite a while now and I know plenty about her. We all know in part, even as we are known; some pursue the hope of knowing more fully, and then, of understanding fully.
David on 03.19.04 @ 05:52 PM CST [link]


Thursday, March 18th

Scenes


Strange but true: Two places I've lived are about a block from the scene of murders. Both crimes were similar, a young man killing his parents. The more recent crime was something of a nine-day-wonder; it was national news, in a way, thanks to the rise of trash TV, and the dramatic flight of the culprit to Jamaica. The house has been sold a couple of times since, and as far as I know, is no longer considered "notorious". The other crime took place in the town where I grew up, a few years after we'd moved away. The killer had been my elder brother's best friend in high school. As far as I knew he was a very pleasant and unexceptional youth. Many years later I found a letter he'd sent to my brother, tucked into an old magazine. It was poignant and foreboding only in retrospect, full of adolescent anxiety, childish introspection, and the all-too-common mix of bravado and ignorance. Bad things can happen when you play in traffic.
David on 03.18.04 @ 05:57 PM CST [link]


Wednesday, March 17th

Joker


What does it take to be a fool? The guy on the playing card seems to be some sort of holy innocent. He is not a laughingstock, he is not a dupe, he is not a simpleton, but he is simple. He is Lear's fool, wiser than the sophisticate; or maybe he's just a clown. What kind of fool am I?
David on 03.17.04 @ 05:46 PM CST [link]


Tuesday, March 16th

March King


It was mid-afternoon before thesnwstorm started in earnest. By then the memorial service was under way, and theere wasn't much we could do. Boss had hired the college boys, I call them Bill and Ted, to help with the shoveling, but it didn't start for us. They tried to level a grave and got stuck in the mud. The pre-school teachers had an inservice in the basement; as soon as they were finished the kids from the youth group fled the reception for their refuge. They aren't too good at pool. I was chastised for taking a cookie. The snow is really starting to pile up.
David on 03.16.04 @ 05:38 PM CST [link]


Monday, March 15th

Soothsayer


Beware the Ides of March. I haven't read any Shakespeare since I finished Julius Caesar, probably back in January. This week we had the political fortunes of a nation shifted by a criminal act; the political currents of this nation are still influenced by the terror attacks of thirty months ago. The Caesar conspirators, painted by Shakespeare in so few strokes, showed a variety of motives but held one belief in common: that their act would have a particular and predictable effect in their nation. Events overtook them instead. History is not a boulder which can be shifed by the measured motion of a lever on a fulcrum; any stone which starts to roll is potentially an avalanche.
David on 03.15.04 @ 05:55 PM CST [link]


Sunday, March 14th

Lifting Heavy Things


I have spent a lot of my free time the last few days moving pieces of furniture around. Supposedly, it is an effort at reducing clutter and making life better, and it might have that effect. But other factors are at play, as ever. I am tired of sameness, of my long confinement in this igloo. I took a chair out from under a pile of unworn clothes and set it by the lamp, where I can sit and read as the evening sun streaks through the window. Maybe if I sit in a different place, I will be different. I change what I can, because there is so much I can't change, and I'd rather not think about those things. If everything moves around often enough, maybe it will come to rest where it belongs.
David on 03.14.04 @ 05:07 PM CST [link]


Saturday, March 13th

The Bad Stuff


Yesterday, a friend found the rear window of her car smashed in. It might have been malicious and personal, or malicious and random, or non-intentional and random -- I suppose in some world-views it might be considered non-intentional but personal, but that's a different meditation. The same range of options is available for acts of God; hence the problem of theodicy. The loophole is found, these days, in the complex and possibly infinite sequence of causation, so that an event, by proximate causation bad, might be for good in some larger scheme. Here on earth that's some mighty cold cabbage.
David on 03.13.04 @ 04:42 PM CST [link]


Friday, March 12th

Rawlinson Beginning


I never met the geezer, myself, nor had any kind of fannish contact with him. A while after he died ablaze Ki turned up on the internet and I exchanged some correspondence with her. She liked me well enough to write back, for a while, but then she dropped out of sight. I remember I asked her more about his artwork than she was expecting, and I imagine that she'd heard the same old questions often enough and was happy with some new ones. I fell out of touch with her about eight years ago, around the first anniversary of his death. My interest in all things Stanshall has ebbed away over the years, and the publication of the book didn't revive it -- in a lot of ways his was a very sad story. But on a whim the other day I dropped by the website and found out that he was due to become a grandfather, and this has come true, I hear. Best wishes to all.
David on 03.12.04 @ 05:25 PM CST [link]


Thursday, March 11th

Across the Asphalt


As usual, it's the unexpected. There is nothing more likely than that, the unexpected incident, and it is both natural and miraculous. The seeds produce shoots: predictable, yet a joyous surprise when they appear. Winter yields to spring. The woman carries potentiality within her, and the child comes forth. Inevitable, miraculous, surprising. We are in motion and we cross the paths of many other moving bodies over time; our paths don't have to cross, but they do. One body at rest and yet in motion, the astounding phenomenon of a baby, asleep.
David on 03.11.04 @ 05:56 PM CST [link]


Wednesday, March 10th

One O'Clock Jump


My seeds are up, and then some. I suppose if I looked back I'd find some mention of them in these wires. It has only been a few weeks since I put the first ones into some potting soil, watered them and hoped that the vitality bursting from them would spread through the rest of the earth. And, somehow, a change has come over the earth in those few weeks. The frost softened, the days, for a while, were insanely warm, and the signs of spring started to become plain. It's cool again, but nothing like it was, and the green shoots I'm seeing are no illusion.
David on 03.10.04 @ 05:48 PM CST [link]


Tuesday, March 9th

11:55


I knew I wasn't looking at a miracle:

"Unfortunately, he died last night."

Today, she didn't touch the piano.


David on 03.09.04 @ 06:34 PM CST [link]


Monday, March 8th

Wet and Mild


It's a sloppy, late-winter snow, and it's fading away a few hours after it fell. It resembled nothing so much as little gobbets of wet toilet paper falling to earth. There was a funeral today, and the black suits stood out against the white of the snow. A young woman, fifteen or so, was in the church house parlor. Her father is in the hospital and she spent the day waiting. Picking out a melody on the piano, but she had a phone with her and she was on it ten times. I have given up on Ulysses,but I'm inclined to take another look at The Dead.
David on 03.08.04 @ 05:01 PM CST [link]


Sunday, March 7th

Sunday Morning Coming Down


It is my friend's birthday. She rang with her bell choir, second service, today. Later, when I stepped in from the narthex to change the lighting, I saw her sitting in a pew near the back, next to a lovely young woman holding a baby. They interacted a bit and I realized I was seeing, for the first time, her daughter and granddaughter. In the pew behind, another daughter and her husband. The baby stood on the pew ahead when we rose to sing the Old Hundredth, and reached out to a young woman, a stranger to her, who got to hold her. The smiling was contagious.
David on 03.07.04 @ 06:07 PM CST [link]


Saturday, March 6th

Disclaimer


Remember, these words before you are no true representation of what happens. Life is a continuity; these entries are discrete points. Consider the series constellations seen from your planet: the mind connects the dots until it finds an image therein. But the spaces between, however vast, are full, only hidden. And who am I to say that the constellation built by the viewer is not true, even if it's not what I see?
David on 03.06.04 @ 05:24 PM CST [link]


Friday, March 5th

In A Mist


Everything is veiled; the curtain descended last night while i was at the Historical Society meeting. Driving home after nine, I kept hitting little patches of fog, tearing away like cobwebs and reforming again. It has drizzled, the sun made a strong effort and retired, it turned into a "wet air" day -- it wasn't raining, drizzling or misting, but if you were outside long enough you got wet -- and then a deep fog came down on us again. It is the most spiritual of meteorological conditions. "I reveal what I have chosen to reveal, and hide what I have chosen to be hidden." "Mysterious" is the superlative of "mist."
David on 03.05.04 @ 06:02 PM CST [link]


Thursday, March 4th

Rummage Meeting


I am not a department head, but I had to see someone who was at the meeting. After I got there, nobody seemed to be objecting to my presence, so I stuck around. There were about twenty-five people there, so not all the departments were represented -- so maybe I represented Christmas, or Holiday, or whatever it is now. A few changes were announced: Computers will get a room of their own, which will need electricity, and Shoes will move out into the tent. The interior of the Main Barn will be remodeled. We stuffed envelopes; K saw a major typo and we unstuffed them all. Someone showed off her new baby; someone is worried about a dying relative; someone answered my questions with sentences of one word. omeone came in just as the meeting ended and I recapped the developments for her as she took me back to my car. The business of Rummage is under way, and all the mysteries of the human beings involved have reappeared.
David on 03.04.04 @ 04:59 PM CST [link]


Wednesday, March 3rd

Bird


I saw more red jeeps today than I've seen in a month -- if they were swallows I'd swear I was in Capistrano. Yesterday S went by on her way to Far Hills (white VW), and I wondered. She fascinated me, a long time ago, and when I saw her, out at the fairgrounds last fall, I saw we still connected, even though we see each other rarely now. She parked by the fence and read a book at her lunch hour. I was there to look at the grounds and see how they'd fared, after rummage. We talked for quite a while, warm and friendly. She'd been to the sale with her grandmother, and asked after me, and I'd heard about it later. She refused me, very sweetly, long ago, and she watched me as I suffered through my grief, and I told her little bits about the life I was building after, at the church and at the VNA. What didn't happen with us, what might have happened, was very nice. I'll remember it always.

Caligari's mirror.
David on 03.03.04 @ 06:20 PM CST [link]


Tuesday, March 2nd

FAQ


All right, nobody has actually asked me any questions about these things, but I might as well put all the answers in one place for potential inquisitors.

Are you "nazianzus" or "gregoryofnazianzus"?

In a way, yes; at least I was. I have signed up for screen names under both variations, for some of the more massive internet services. I have signed up for a lot of free addresses and free webspace. I selected screen names meaningful yet obscure, not likely to be already taken.

And?

St. Gregory of Nazianzus (330-390) was a bishop, theologian and poet from Cappadocia, in the center of what is modern-day Turkey. He wasn't all that well-suited to being a bishop, but he found himself serving difficult sees torn by theological controversies. I identify with him, I think, becuase what he was called to do, and what he is acclaimed for, is something he wasn't particularly good at -- so, go figure. By the way, one provider objected to a four-letter string in my would-be screen name, and so...

So?

"chrysostom." After another Greek Doctor, St. John Chrysostom ("Golden-Mouth"), a slightly younger contemporary of the above-mentioned Gregory and his cronies, St. Basil of Caesarea and St. Gregory of Nyssa. Chrysostom appeals to me tremendously, for his humanity, his gift with language, and his subtle theology. His name is easier to type than the previous, and no more likely to be taken than it, especially at less crowded outposts like TUS.

How about "halfblindsphinx"?

When I was buying a domain name, I remembered that certain species of insects, particularly moths, have very vivid and poetical common names. I suspect they were named by a particularly vivid and poetical lepidopterist. The Half-blind Sphinx went through the registry. I believe it lives on coffee beans.

Any other pseudonyms?

"Pilgrim." "Emak Bakia." "VMGC54A." Some more that I can't recall.

Do you like Bjork?

Yes, but I don't have the album. I was looking at a copy of The Zimmermann Telegram when a prompt asked me to name my journal. My Parnassus was named in honor of a book by Christopher Morley.

Conshohocken!

God bless you.
David on 03.02.04 @ 05:53 PM CST [link]


Monday, March 1st

Cause


Design and Content, the two poles of internet existence. I tend to think ofthem as being like Form and Matter, although, in fact, Design is Content, in a way, and Content is Design, also "in a way". I started out interested mostly in design, and generating content mostly as a placeholder to spotlight the design. Then, I came to realize that I had a duty to put out some kind of meaningful content, and I challenged myself to produce some. In various ways I have moved toward that goal, but now, I am creating just enough design to enclose the content; hence, the spartan and problematic format you see here. Admittedly, this is not necesarily a flaw. Much of what is wrong with the internet is caused by excessive design, the rest is problematic content. It's all information, but it's not all true.

Photo gallery: alternate content.
David on 03.01.04 @ 05:52 PM CST [link]




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