Monday. I get it.
Monday after Sunday that called me to sleep from seven p.m. to five a.m. How long, Lord? "The Persistence of Memory" is a 1931 painting by Salvador Dali that a close friend used recently to introduce his blogpost for the day. I'd not seen or thought of it in long years, but it all came back. Also called "Melting Clocks" and other nicknames, it's a perfect image of Time for me at this age, where did it go, how the Hell did I get to be this age in the mirror mornings, when I'm actually 17 inside of me and the best of life and Time are happening and never go away. What's happened, is happening, is that Time melted away and left all the memories.
Wishing you long years, and that you also come to a stage in life when melting clocks make perfect sense to you.
Time, Art, and Poetry, all surreal until you get there, eh?!
What am I doing? I'm sitting here in my chair, at my little foldable table that passes for a desk in the living room of 7H, looking out at a beautiful flat gray day of Life and realizing how fortunate I am. I am, we are, I am. Still moving, thinking, seeing, hearing, getting it for the most part, or at least for the more part, participating in the uniquely human sport of contemplating myself, having myself as my own object, nomesane?
The poem turned out good after all and in spite of myself. It's copy and pasted down below, but I'm not to it yet. Resuming more or less daily +Time blogposting with the idea of keeping it short and simple if not wise, it seems to be turning again into a morning mind-dump anyway. I don't care, whatever, I'll just see if I can keep it under control this Time round.
Of getting it and people who just don't get it - - as a headline, Black Lives Matter seems to have run its course, but hints of it keep surfacing. One such is a recent essay in The Jerusalem Post, "Don't 'All Lives Matter' the Holocaust" that well and specifically makes clear the inanity of retorting "All Lives Matter" to the uniquely black sense of hurt, pain and frustration voiced in the Black Lives Matter symbol of what life is for Black Americans.
To say "All Lives Matter" is as insensible and insensitive as telling someone just diagnosed with a terminal disease, "Everybody dies of something." Or the abysmal stupidity I have witnessed at any number of funerals, someone telling a weeping survivor, "It was God's will, we just have to accept it" - - what a detestable way to make someone hate God. The smugly dismissive, even despicably arrogant response "All Lives Matter" is a most classic instance of "just don't get it" obliviousness. A link to the essay https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-739841
Breakfast, a mug of hot & black coffee club excellence and the last and final scrumptiousness of chicken liver pate on one toasted slice of extra thin 45 calorie whole grain bread. Incredible. Indescribable. And surely the one slice of bread under it in place of a saltine cracker won't bring on the carbo coma plummet in BP that sometimes treats me to a delightful midmorning nap.
Else and other. From "this day in history" in 1916 the Easter rebellion begins, Ireland forcibly separating from centuries of English tyranny. Today many Americans make much of their Irish heritage; I made much of my English heritage until, through my sister's diligence, my mind was totally blown to find out that our Weller, Wäller heritage was German, not English at all. Half those wild-eyed Volk screaming "Heil" were my cousins. OMG.
My mind is still fiddling with yesterday's gospel from Luke, a post-resurrection story of Jesus meeting two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Every sentence, every phrase in a Bible story is significant - - so, returning to Sunday school, Bible study, and my seminary classroom, Why does Luke have Jesus tell the grieving disciples "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” and then go on for the rest of the journey to explain in detail that everything that has happened and is happening was foreordained in scripture by Moses and the prophets, and nobody should be surprised - - why is it important to Luke to have Jesus say this?
My quickie. Luke having Jesus say and explain this is Luke's way to counter the claim that, having failed to meet expectations, Jesus obviously was not the Messiah. It's Luke's literary tactic, very much like the gospel writers tactic of having John the Baptist himself renounce any claim to being the Messiah: it's to dismiss the doubts that are going round, to assert and assure readers that what the church is teaching is true and correct - - regardless that he was crucified and seemingly made irrelevant, Jesus was/is indeed the Messiah. That we failed to realize it because we did not realize what God's plan actually was. We were expecting a triumphant Messiah who would reestablish the throne of David, expel foreigners from the Holy Land, and induce the Shekinah to return to the Temple. If we had read and understood the scriptures correctly, we could have realized that God was not trying to live up to our expectations, that God had his own plan: a humble Messiah who would show and teach what is meant by humans created in the image of God, living in God's own likeness. Jesus was God's kind of Messiah, not our kind of Messiah. We just didn't get it.
What else this morning? Well, the poem, eh?
You won't have the patience to read today's online offering from poem.a.day, and if you do suffer through it you likely will think, as I did first reading, "WTH was she smoking?" but my uneasy sense of being as oblivious as a rock or block of wood, of missing something, took me back to reading it on screen as I listened while the poet herself, Natalie Diaz, read it into my ears, brain.
I admit to being as dumb as a rock, sometimes I try to overcome that. Not always. Not even usually. Sometimes.
Other Times, deciding to see and hear instead of tossing it off, I get it.
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