gray matters

Gray matters, meaning all is not black and white, is it? Gray matters, as in all that stuff we associate with the brain and cognition (though neurologists tell us thinking and feeling really need each other and are not substantively different in a physiological terms). Gray matters, meaning the healthy person accepts, even embraces, doubt and ambiguity -- something that "originalists" and text-driven fundamentalists, literalists, have a hard time grasping.

So at lunch today my friend / mentor / brother /father /coach person handed me a small, well designed book, A Heart Full of Peace, by Joseph Goldstein, for Christmas 2010, with these words on page 91:

Love your crooked neighbor
with all your crooked heart.
-- W.H. Auden

Words that speak wisdom in today's climate of coarse discourse.

Poetry matters.

Gray.

Grey, too.

And black on white.

Poetic Performance Anxiety

For today, my Zen Calendar offers this quote, by the poet W.H. Auden:

To ask the hard question is simple.

You know, W.H. (can I call you Wystan Hugh?), that's indecorous at best and embarrassing at worst, and not just because of the age factor.

Or maybe it's easy to ask the hard question, but significantly more difficult to answer the hard question.

Yes, yes, private conversations sometimes skirt the issue of the hard question, but it comes down to blunt reality in the long run.

And that naked fact is incontrovertible: it either is or it isn't [existentially, that is].

(For once, The Laughorist is not declaiming about punctuation, but if we had to characterize the topic grammatically, it would fall under the word defined as "a short sudden emotional utterance" -- or attempts at such.)