Man of Steel

Three things.

This:

(source)

this:

from "Crucifixion" by artist Daniel Mitsui
Man of Steel? 

and this:

Signposts in a Strange Dream

"A friend from Yale who hadn’t been in touch since graduation looked him up after envisioning a suicide attempt; the phone in Murphy’s Fargo home rang just as the local retired farmer, hunting enthusiast and poet loaded his double-barreled shotgun. Instead of ending his life, a two-hour conversation led him to relinquish the gun. 

... 

"After his conversion, Murphy still hadn’t completely resolved his past, he said, including sexual abuse by an altar boy at age 6 and by an almost-ordained Jesuit priest he met in college at age 18. He also had lingering questions about his homosexuality and the church. 

But four weeks after he heard the booming voice, he found peace. 

It came by way of a dream about Pope John Paul II, he said. 

“I walked him down to the waterfront, and he said vespers and heard my confession, but mainly he heard me bitching about the Catholic attitude toward gays,” Murphy said. “At the conclusion of the dream, all he said was, ‘Te Dominus amat’… He didn’t say, ‘Ego te absolvo,’ ‘I forgive you,’ but simply, ‘God loves you.’" 

"The next morning, Murphy turned on the radio and heard the bells from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome alerting the world that the pope had died."

Full story here (requires subscription)

H/T Dappled Things

Cross-lashed

A chapel, not a church:
just a clearing in the wood
of aspen, pine and birch,
where a rude altar stood

pegged by a boy's hands;
behind it a birchwood cross
cross-lashed, but neither stands.
They are gone under the moss.

When I quit Wilderness Camp
I rose up from my knees
and left the altar lamp
burning in the trees.

Summits would loom above
the stony trails I trod.
Sex led me to love;
love bound me to God.


Agápē
The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp
to hear confession from an Eagle scout
tortured by forty years of sin and doubt.
You whispered Vespers by a hissing lamp

Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,
followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront
down a firebreak this camper used to hunt.
Through all I said you suffered silently.

I blamed the authors of my unbelief:
St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,
the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,
the altar boy when I was six, the grief

of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead
by Peter's Church and all the choirs above.
In a thick Polish accent choked with love,
Te Dominus amat was all you said.

--Timothy Murphy

Writer's Block -- UPDATED

Writing and bourbon go together like a doctor's appointment and a day planner. 

Niles and Ichabod Crane. 

OJ Simpson and Robert Higgins. 

. . . help me out here.

Ain't A Ghost

"The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century*. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff.

Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century? 

... 

"Is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in the machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?"

 (Walker Percy, Lost In the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)

There's too much of everything
     books, stars, flowers.
How can one flower be precious

     in a bed of thousands?
How can a book count
     in a library of millions?
The universe is a junkyard

     burnt out meteors, busted up stars

     planetary cast offs, throwaway galaxies

     born and buried in an instant

     repeating, repeating

Yet something remains
     the dream of fewness
     one woman, one man.

(Untitled, The Thomas Merton Poems, J.S. Porter. Moonstone Press, 1998)

Dying

Adam and Eve laid death 
at the roots of the Tree of Life 
Adam donned a hard hat 
and the motto, "Safety First," 
while Eve snuck off 
to the Cinema Paradiso 
every afternoon for repeat 
bargain matinee viewings of 
the Bergman film in black & white-- 
that famous chess game with death. 

"The Grim Reaper" became little 
Cain and Abel's favorite 
Saturday morning cartoon 
when they moved out to the suburbs 
and could afford cable TV 
now that Adam had landed 
a sweet promotion to 
a management level position. 

A little death goes a long way-- 
the sterile hospital smell, 
the clinical distance, 
the rubber gloves, 
the pain, 
the indignity of various 
procedures, the cancer 
with its claws inside you, 
your life stretched out and nailed down 
like a man on a cross 

You regret the fear, the caution 
that cut you off from things. 
But then you see and smell 
and taste and feel 
the substance of your life. 
And your mind, Lazarus-like, 
shakes off its shroud and walks 
in the wonder of it all.

Adam and Eve wake up
from their long sleep.
Drudgery and repetition turn the corner
and learn to be a funeral march
Dixieland style down Bourbon St.
to the gardens of the dead
where these bones lie waiting to be
refashioned for a new
and never ending dance.

(House of Words, J. Potter. Korrektiv Press, 2010)

*that was when people realized that they didn't have Mario Kart.

NOTHING Else To Do

I Noticed That You Noticed That I Noticed That You Noticed . . .

Maybe it's this gin that's been keeping me company for the past three four out of five nights . . .

A mutual acquaintance, no?

. . . along with a few of my closest alter egos. But this, by Korrektiv's Angelico Nugyen, Esq., OP, tickled me helpless:

Heheheh.

Too funny! I woke my downstairs neighbor, probably. And that Guardini quote, from the epigraph to The Last Gentleman, was touching.

Well, carrying on, I suppose the thing to do now is to shake the dust from your feet, and whatever else might be clinging to their bottoms. Or, what I mean is: being featured on the Korrektiv Press blog is pretty fantastic, and who could ask for more than three mentions and a sidebar link? I mean six mentions and two sidebar links would be great, but . . .

In truth, to take a page from a certain Korrektiv founder (and I guess the Roman centurion and missal): I am not worthy. But thanks! again, for the encouragement and the promotion, and not least of all for the elevation from anonymous blogger to fellow komrade.

Is it too unfolded and flattering to let slip that I feel like Pierre Cassel, left of Serge Gainsbourg here, in the presence of such monochromatic suave and talent?

Pride? What is pride? 

Probably, right?

But whatever. "[T]he more precious will that love be which flows from one [vaguely Walker-Percy-themed web-log] to another," indeed!

I've Been Noticed!

Ahem. Not that that, um . . . not that I, you know . . . am freakin' out about it or anything. 

It's just . . . Jonathan Potter at the Korrektiv Press blog was kind enough to post this:

!

Many thanks to Mr. Potter and Korrektiv for the shout-out and the nice komments from the present kollektiv. Even if no one else reads my blog (pffft, "if"), these fifteen minutes or so of fame nestled in your - in my eyes - luxurious, silky blog has made all my hard work worth it.