Bathsheba Monk's Blog, page 5

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Mortal Matters

You get one life. Because of inauspicious planetary conditions hurried along by over-use of petroleum products, a portion of the populated world is suffering drought and is on the move, displacing other people and pissing them off mightily.  Belief in the hereafter surges because the hereandnow sucks. You get one life, though: the hereandnow. I question the idea of good guys, bad guys for that matter. We're not looking at it right: a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do and man is a soul stuck in an organic body with appetites which need slaking then governing to coexist with other organic bodies with appetites and sometimes that calls for the displacement of .... certain organic bodies. You get one life, though, both the displacer and the displacee feel strongly about that. Unless you find some meaning in death, which I never have. The best face you can put on it is that your organic matter decayed might feed other organic matter and provide a home for other souls, human or not. The older I get the more I feel my own death will be a damned shame, just because I know certain things that will die with me. Because both the beauty and the horror I have seen with these two eyes will die with me. The sounds. The passion. The great cooking. All the things my soul experienced through my body. Kaputski. All this is coming to mind because I'm editing a manuscript now which Blue Heron Book Works will publish this spring: "Man has Premonition of Own Death" by Nicholas DiGiovanni.  He talks about death which is actually a way of talking about life, with warmth and humor and humanity. But don't take my word for it. I'll keep you posted.

Big Tent

Four souls, thousands of miles from home, gliding over the terrain in a pristine late model Camry, the driver checking the directions on the iPhone on the dashboard, promising I would "reach your destination before 1:09", I gesture "no hurry" and the driver Ahmul sees and admires my two lapis lazuli rings--he made jewelry in his native Afghanistan and lapis is an Afghani stone, did I know? Afghani, but he grew up in Germany and I say, "Ja! Ich bin in Deutschland auch gewohnen," he in Frankfurt, me in Heidelberg it turns out, but not so far at all--"we probably passed each other!"--his German is much better than mine so I tell him in English about the snow storm I'm missing by being here and the Chinese mother and daughter in the back seat say "Yes!" they are missing an even bigger snowstorm in Toronto where they now live--and I say, "No kidding!" and tell them my brother and his wife live in Toronto--and it makes us all inordinately happy to have these connections. random travelers in the big wide world meeting in a late model Camry on the Hollywood Expressway--while we chorus "Small world! Small World" and meet each other's crinkly eyes--thinking, maybe Donald should ditch the limo, just once, and take an Uber ride.

Big Daddy

Living in the condo below us on Beacon Hill was a middle-aged
Republican who came back to Boston (from Florida where he cared for his elderly mother) to run for state rep whenever our seat was up for grabs.  He thought that no one should run unapposed, as most seats in Massachusetts were, because everyone in Boston was Democrat. So every couple of years we tripped over his placards in the hall and enjoyed the live piano concert coming up through the floor, and after the election he tipped his pork pie hat to us, wrapped a scarf over his bow tie and flagged a cab to Logan. I was working in a big insurance company and our CEO was also a bow tie Republican lawyer from a big downtown firm who found out I was a writer and kindly connected me to someone in his firm for some gratis advice. The CEO had a policy of hiring as many employees as he could who lived in the city because our building was an extra wide tax free footprint in the middle of the financial district.  Despite our heavily subsidized cafeteria, some employees still stuffed their pockets with extra food "for later" and when these employees were taken to HR to be fired the CEO intervened and said "I will not fire people for stealing food. We are not that kind of company, we are not that kind of people."

I am worried that my fellow liberals are thinking that because Republicans are in power--in no small part because of liberal inertia--that bad things are going to happen to us. I am saying that in the most important ways, nothing has changed and we don't have to wait for permission to act like patriotic freedom loving Americans.  I still have the power to intervene when I witness the powerful beating up the powerless. I still have the power to advocate for the rights of my fellow humans--not because I am "tolerant" (a concept I detest as if the exercise of someone's rights is dependent on my largesse)--but because when one of my fellows is denied his rights it's a CRIMINAL ACT.

Yes, it's SAD that the person occupying the big bully pulpit doesn't consider it his job to advocate for the rights of all Americans, or, as far as I can tell, anyone's rights besides his own, but that doesn't stop me from being a patriotic American and in daily relentless acts using whatever influence I have to model patriotic American behavior.  People want to do what's right and sometimes it only takes one person doing the right thing to start avalanche.  I saw that in my own town, Allentown, PA, when our mayor, Ed Pawlowski, took a wildly unpopular and courageous stand when he declared Allentown would take in (throughly vetted and legal) Syrian refugees at a time when all across the country people were hysterical, thinking that sharing a little of our comfort would diminish us instead of making us larger. Mayor Pawlowski's public display of American values gave all of us, I think, the courage to do the same. It gave me the courage a couple weeks later when I was buying a pot at the Corning outlet in the Sands Casino: an elderly Indian couple was in line in front of me and it was their turn when the cashier pointedly and rudely looked beyond them to me and said, "Come on up here, I'll take you." I pushed them forward, despite their confused and embarassed protests.  No, I thought, we are NOT that kind of people. Coincidentally, a little boy who was with his mother (oblivious to this little drama) was watching the interraction intently. Play it forward, babe.

I can't malign those who voted for either Hillary or Trump. These are the candidates the system served up. There are millions of good people who voted for Trump who wish that he had a moral compass and a sense of humor and millions of good people who voted for Hillary who wish she had articulated a vision that was about something other than herself.  And all of us, the millions from both parties are good people who step up when they witness injustice and help when their neighbor needs it. That's the kind of people we are. That's what patriotic Americans look like.

Nude Walker update

Just finished a one-act play "The Son He Always Wanted" based on characters in my novel, "Nude Walker." More to come.

Transition Team

To my fellow citizens who closed your eyes, tapped your heels together and said "there's no place like home" you got your wish. You're home again. I don't condone, but I don't condemn either. It's hard to know what's right when you're living in Plato's cave as we all are. So much non-sensicle phenomena in the shadows. I've always found the truth when I extrapolate wisdom from my own experience, but you know what? That doesn't work anymore. I flooded the engine with info. Too much phone time. One snippet, though, comes from my time as a business consultant. The people on the line--they always knew more than management about how things should run. Is that the truth here? Wisdom in the masses? Of course, they had real hands-on experience to base their recommendations on and now what do we have? Fake facts, misleading hysterical headlines--MEMES! Gawd.  Aside: Please don't pass them around this year. Nothing intelligent was ever conveyed in a single quote taken out of context or a faulty analogy. Nothing. Ever. If you can't create an honest-to-god syllogism, make this the year you learn how to do it. It's fun and the only mess you make is in your mind when you realize maybe your thinking needs adjusting to square with the 3D world. Back to business consulting again--maybe it's because we have a businessman prez now--but in business you always have to have a mission statement. We the people haven't had a mission statement in 8 years. We have one now. I'm not crazy about it--it's a MEME for gawd's sake--but it's a start. Defining "great" and agreeing on "when was again" will cause a civil war, but let's get the conversation going. Or, no. You get the conversation going. I'm retrenching. I've decided to stop being part of the drum section and concentrate on the symphony in B Minor we got going in Blue Heron Book Works. Our authors--Larry James Neff, Paul Heller, Jim McGarrah, Laura Libricz, Vincent Francone, Maddy Wells, Joe Taleroski, Billy Ehrlacher, Nicholas DiGiovanni, Lynnie Godfrey, Fanny Barry, Jeff Weiss, Richard Martinez, Alessandra Benvenuti, Paul Misencek, and all the contributors to Songs of Ourselves...they are singing the songs I want to hear and I'm thinking if enough thoughtful, talented writers make their message of common humanity heard--which is what we're all about in BHBW--maybe we can change the tune. Happy New Year.

2016 Goddam

What are you scared of, little girl...the fact that they came for Anne Frank or that you aren't sure on which side of the moral divide you would have fallen? I's easy to say you would have been a hero 80 years later when innocent and guilty are buried, case closed, holding up your lily white hands for all to see...but not everyone's a hero. And now it's here. Our kids, grandkids, history, will judge us on how we respond to the evil that has risen again. Can't you feel it? I can smell it. I was walking in the woods one morning when hunting season began in Pennsylvania. The crack of rifles, dogs on the hunt baying, igniting the dogs in the neighborhood to riot, tearing at their leashes. Yes, I smelled fear and death, but also exuberance and dominance. I started running, but I can't tell you if I was running to or from. And now I'll find out. Too bad. I almost made it out alive.

If it quacks like a duck...

It's not surprising that non-college grads who just want their jobs back voted for Duckie because if they had gone to college and taken a European history course to study the white western civilization that people are so keen on preserving, they would already know this play and know it's a stinker. We'd be saying "Madam President will play the lead" instead of "Who should we get to play Himmler and Goebbels?" Because that's where we're headed. No press access, enemies lists, personal loyalty valued above everything including expertise, the rule of law thrown through a window like a brick. A terrified population, first the outliers but soon everyone will be "just following orders" in order to save their skin, their families and then people start wondering just what the price of a soul is and if the civilization they enabled is worth preserving because it feels like they ushered in hell. It starts like this, you people without a college degree who just want your old job back. Your job isn't coming back. You were snookered. Don't get me wrong, it's not exclusively your fault. There's plenty of blame to go around including the fact that the forces of goodness and light ran the wrong candidate forever forfeiting their right to call themselves the forces of goodness and light. But for god's sake, you've got to shake off 30 years of torpor. What made America great the first time is the same thing that's great about us now: we are endlessly inventive. Why are we now waiting for orders to follow?

All Souls

I never drive at dusk in the fall....from the side of my eye I see shades slide into the ditches like cats and I want to follow them. Dangerous rascals. The fallacy: there is wisdom in death. Fact: death is dumb. Has George Carlin come back to tell us what the hell is going on over there? No. And he'd be the one. "An angel is dying" a friend says of his long lived life partner and I think, one angel--one devil--more or less. How many wing patterns are there? There is wisdom in life, though. Life knows it's terminal, and assigns itself importance,knowing full well there are a million variations on the theme trying to be the answer. Buildings and bridges. Mini me's. Attics full of art and writing and songs and snaps of picnics in the park and the big old maple tree brushing against the side of the house exhaling, Happy Halloween.

Catcalls

I've developed an intense interest in the society of cats...their transactions make sense because they aren't fogged with conversation.They see a bird, boom! No chit chat. I'm pretty interested in bats too and shopping for the perfect bat house..how high do you think they have to be?...that keeps me awake: how are the bats doing? And the bees...I want to have bees, but do bats eat bees? As soon as you insert yourself into places other creatures want to be with creatures who don't necessarily want you there,  you have feeding frenzies...bats, bees, cats, birds... Iraq... Afghanistan...South America...my friend Mary came over this morning and said, "what are we going to do?" ... I told her I don't think the cops are bad in our town..."Like if you have a bowl of blue skittles and a couple are poison, would you stop eating all blue skittles? Noooo!"...the polite look...I, a white woman with working blinkers on all vehicles, could drive a nuclear warhead through town and cops would wave at me..so, what to do?..."Education," she says..."I tell my sons to keep their hands on the steering wheel"...oh, that kind of education ...I thought we might try educating the folks creating the mayhem...I've had several cats now and I've seen that birds get excited chirping hysterically when my cats are around, but the cats could give a damn ...the only thing that drives the cats away are robins who buzz their heads and peck at them...no chit chat.