the sparrow-cicada skirmish

Parking lot of a Target store. A commotion on the pavement to the left and in front of my car. It's a sparrow tormenting and darting toward, attacking, a cicada, or whatever it was making that buzzing summer sound. The insect trying to excape, the sparrow vigorously making a point. "Leave me alone," if nothing else. A brief bit of drama. Not exactly Henry David Thoreau witnessing a war of ants, but the sparrow-cicada skirmish just the same.

land of the 'free,' home of the loud

When did every medical / surgical waiting room come equipped with a blaring television? Obviously, it was not always the case. In the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and maybe Eighties, it's not as if waiting rooms had radios to distract and divert us. What did people do? Read? Fidget? Pray? Converse? But starting -- when? -- in the Nineties or Oughties, televisions became ubiquitous in waiting rooms, as well as in a plethora of public places (supermarkets, barber shops, brothels, broth houses, sports bars, cafes, bistros, restaurants, fast-food joints, wedding chapels, betting parlors, electronics departments in mega-stores, corner stores, bodegas, salons, confessionals, opium dens). Televisions showing exactly what? Blather, folderol, pablum, static, chatter. Recipes, DIY, so-called news, energetic nihilism. Stories of triumph and optimism. America's great product: homegrown cheeriness blanketing doom. (You hear people use the phrase, "a disease of denial." But isn't all disease of denial? Go further, MadAvenue is built squarely on the bedrock premise of denying the Biggest D of All, the unmentionable and unspeakable closure of all closures.) So, today I paced a waiting room, an expectant father awaiting surgical news (all went well), searching for the never-to-be-found remote, tempted to tell the reception desk person to shut it all off, wishing If I Had a Hammer. What would Thoreau do? (WWTD?)

technology, and its discontents

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

-- Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

Think he was talking about Facebook, or blogging?

Between Silence and Scream

So, he was an English major, the mass murderer and suicide, and words were not enough to exorcise his demons. Words failed him. He failed in finding power enough in his violent and obscene words. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, he found the "time to murder and uncreate."

Last week, the topic in the U.S. was words and race and pain (or so I hear). I was in Berlin and saw in the courtyard at Humboldt University a plaque in the ground, amidst the cobbles, commemorating sadly the burning of books. Again, are words talismanic and dangerous? Or utterly futile? (Incidentally, do you recall what the tabloid topic was just before 9/11? Shark attacks. You can look it up.)

"Then how should I begin /To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?" (again Eliot).

This guy did so with bullets, finding words impotent to shape or hold or issue his rage.

"Unkennelled" shows up in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." What tragic dogs were unkennelled, unloosed, from this guy's tormented lair?

To my tiny mind, I see comparisons and similarities linking the Unabomber, Henry David Thoreau, and this guy. The rants against society, the unsparing "morality," the utter disappointment in human imperfection and injustice and moral decay. Of course, such a link is a stretch, a leap. The Unabomber was an anarchic, shadowy killer; this guy a long-simmering cauldron. And Thoreau had no bombs or guns.

I was struck by a passage in today's NY Times, quoting Lucinda Roy, a professor who taught Mr. Cho. She said he'd show up with a baseball cap pulled low, wearing sunglasses.

"He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,"

she said.

Now many more people are crying behind sunglasses, or in the open air. Alone and always and forever.

Miserere Nobis

Yesterday evening, I walked in Burnet Park, the dog and I.

The day after the last day.

The first day after the last.

The robin's insistent trill, a solitary vespers.

The jet engine's ascending roar in the distance, like that cobalt-blue Tuesday morning.

The light settling like a warm blanket.

The robin's chant.

The dog's piss stain on a patch of snow.

My human odor.

A ghost of a freight train rumbling.

The presence of absence.

The forsythia's whisper of yellow.

The stubborn verdancy of grass.

A broken branch under foot.

A lone robin, a sentinel and mourner,

Near the top bony branch,

Singing arias for the misbegotten

And lost.