Ithilien Exile

Quote of the Day 5/25/08

2008-05-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

I am under no delusion that mine is the definitive account. It is just a version like everybody else's, and I suppose it is no less flavored than all the others by the cask it was aged in.

Antonio in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

$1.09 from the Gutter

2008-05-07T05:19:00.000-07:00

A young Nasrani boy named Elias has been coming into the AHT for the past several weeks. His family emigrated from Palestine when he was a toddler. He is 13 now and is trying to make his way in what is still the New World.

For some reason, he is absolutely fascinated with the antique store and all the amazing things herein. It's a rare day now that he doesn't jump off the bus and come in at least for a few minutes.

One day he was looking at an antique letter opener in one of the cases, and I asked him if he would like to have it. He didn't have enough money for it, so I asked him how much he did have. He said he had five dollars and 41 cents. (Boys that age, if they haven't grown up too fast, will often have this kind of exact accounting of their funds).

I told him I could sell it to him for six-fifty, plus tax.

Looking crestfallen he said, "Oh. I don't have six-fifty."

I said, "I bet you could earn the rest in a day. In fact, if you can earn it in a day, I'll give it to you for twenty percent off and pay the tax myself.

He thought about it for a minute, perhaps doing the math in his head, then said, "Yes!" and raced out the door trailing his jacket in his hand.

About two hours later just before I was closing up, he walked back in, flushed but beaming from ear to ear with his six-fifty. And he had found it all in loose change, just walking along the gutters in the neighborhood!

It really is amazing what the snow melt leaves on the streets around here.

So I gave him the letter opener for five-twenty and probably launched my young man on a career as a seeker-errant. Once you find out you can live out of the gutter you probably increase your freedom for such things three fold. Besides, he is already something of a seeker even at his young age.

Since the incident of the letter opener he stops by regularly and I've started to recommend books for him to read, and, when I can, loaning him books from the Temple library downstairs.

Most recently I gave him The Chosen and he found that very interesting.

Quote of the Day 4/27/08

2008-04-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason,” but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will to ward the light of being, and to receive the world as a gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” – indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail – and cannot be truly known if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything one must first love, and having known one must fully delight; only this “corresponds” to the trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so in its every detail revelatory of the light that grants it.

David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite

For Camilla, Wherever You Are

2008-04-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

I don't know why some people love Spring.

Spring makes me feel like this:

Jamais Vu and The Chosen

2008-04-16T05:25:00.000-07:00

Last week a group of Hasidic Jews came in to the AHT looking for a large dining room table.

I noticed one of them had a pipe tucked into his pocket, so struck up a conversation that ranged about in topic from good tobacconists in the Twin Cities, to favorite pipeweed, to the virtues of cherry wood pipes.

I opened up the humidor and smoking lounge for them. I even pulled out a special pouch of a perique I picked up from a wandering seeker a couple months back.

They bought a nice old mahogany table. Sturdy but well crafted and ornamented with some gold inlay. Nicely turned legs. A beautiful piece of furniture.

Whenever I come into contact with the Orthodox Jews in the Twin Cities, it always gets me thinking about Chaim Potok's The Chosen. This time I picked up the book again and read it over the last few days.

In the book, the protagonist, Reuven Malter, has an accident in which he nearly loses his eye. But everything turns out all right and the accident kicks off a remarkable turning point in his life.

One of my favorite chapters is the chapter describing Reuven's homecoming from the hospital.

He says of the hydrangea bush in the front yard of his two story brownstone, "I had never really paid any attention to it before. Now it seemed suddenly luminous and alive."

And of his apartment he says, "I had lived in it all my life, but I never really saw it until I went through it that Friday afternoon."

And finally: "Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life."

Reading the book this time, in the context of thinking about whether it was all over or not, Baby Blue, made me wonder if this sort of dawning, this sort of illumination, this sort of jamais vu is not in fact one necessary component to the restoration of whatever has gone awry.

Maybe there is hope yet - a hope borne not of political action or conscious cultural renewal but of seeing afresh.

And maybe, so long as "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" that sort of learning to see as if you have never seen before will be possible.

Quote of the Day 4/16/08

2008-04-16T03:50:00.001-07:00

The one advantage I know to living in a dream is that in dreams you may never get more than a shadow of the things you really want, but you also never really get hurt either.

Antonio in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

Quote of the Day 4/12/08

2008-04-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

An associate of mine once wrote a novel called Corridors of Power, which told the story of various people discussing how the world has become a corrupt and dangerous place and whether or not there are enough people with the integrity and decency necessary to keep the entire planet from descending into despair. I have not read this novel in several years because I participate in enough discussions on how the world has become a corrupt and dangerous place and whether or not there are enough people with the integrity and decency necessary to keep the entire planet from descending into despair without reading about it in my leisure time. in

Lemony Snicket's The Slippery Slope

A Find

2008-03-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

Some antique dealers prefer to go only to major estate sales to find their product.

The volume you can aquire in a short amount of time at reasonable enough prices to profit is sufficient for them.

I, however, still like to go out to the little garage sales and yard sales in older communities, working class neighborhoods where portable goods have been passed down from generation to generation. First of all, the people are nicer. Secondly, with some time and elbow grease it really is still possible to find that hidden gem, the holy grail of antiquing, the item that is considered junk by the owner but by virtue of its scarcity or unrecognized craftsmanship is worth a great deal of money.

I found such a deal in the first garage sale of the season. I happened to be out in Delano on Saturday morning and noticed a little 'garage sale' sign sitting there in the snow. And sure enough a late middle aged couple (Jake and Wendy) was sitting in their garage in the middle of a snowstorm around a pot bellied stove! They were also serving hot chocolate.

I love rural Minnesota.

At any rate, they had a box of old jewlery marked $5.00 with a piece of masking tape. In amongst the tangles of cheap faux-pearl necklaces, guady rings, and braided gold was this:

It is a victorian era mosaic necklace worth around $4,000 on the current market.

Even though I guess this is now my "livelihood" I still felt bad taking it for only five dollars. I noted the address and the next day sent them a check for $200 telling them I had had it appraised and wanted to pass on the wealth. I didn't tell them what it was worth. It's best they not know.

Quote of the Day 3/22/08

2008-03-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

The life that is untouched by authentic things recognizes that it has been captured in the mirror of the artistic construct, and thereby gains consciousness, albeit negative, of its distance from reality and of its illusory status.

Siegfried Kracauer in "The Hotel Lobby"

Spring - Keeping Things Together This Side of the End

2008-03-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

Spring of my 35th year. Midway through our life's journey.

If I did decide it was all over, I think I would want to buy the finest aged ruby port I could find, take out a smooth $50 smooth cuban cigar and put these songs on the turntable in this order.

(If the video's not there, you can click on the linked song title.)

Bryan Adams, "Summer of '69"

Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"

Heart, "These Dreams"

Peter Cetera, "The Glory of Love"

Kenny Loggins, "Meet Me Half Way"

Phil Collins, "Against All Odds"

The Beatles, "Penny Lane"

The Rolling Stones, "Ruby Tuesday"

Bruce Springsteen, "My Hometown"

Billy Joel, "Scenes from an Italian Restaraunt"

The Beatles, "In My Life"

Bob Dylan, "Sara"

Dan Fogleberg, "The Last Nail"

Kansas, "Dust in the Wind"

Bob Dylan, "Mr Tambourine Man"

REM, "Man in the Moon"

The Beatles, "Long and Winding Road"

Eric Clapton, "Tears in Heaven"

The Beatles, "Let it Be"

John Lennon, "Imagine"

Louis Armstrong, "What a Wonderful World"

Bob Dylan, "When the Deal Goes Down"

Bob Dylan, "Dixie"

It's never as bad as we think because "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

Enjoy. Arise. Live.

Quote of the Day 3/11/08

2008-03-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

During my years as an English teacher, students were always handing in stories that ended up with a sentence or two to the effect that the next morning they woke up and found out the whole thing had been just a dream. It is one of the easier ways, certainly, to bring a story to a close--it saves you from having to draw all those loose ends together, for one thing, and excuses you for any improbabilities you may have committed along the way, for another--and for reasons like that most of my colleagues regarded the practice with considerable disfavor and docked the grade accordingly. I, on the other hand, always tended to like such stories. In life as in fiction, it seems to me, the richer and more memorable moments inevitably do take on a dreamlike quality once you emerge from them. The birthday party, the walk through the park in the snow, seeing the old man with the umbrella knocked down to the tax-- did they happen really, or did you just dream that they happened?

Antonio in Frederick Beuchner's The Book of Bebb

Falling Slowly

2008-03-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

Charis Rhiannon and the Eagle at High Bridge

2008-03-06T05:14:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I went down to the high bridge in the gloaming to watch the Mississippi drift beneath me.

I often look towards downtown St. Paul while meditating on the second to last stanza of Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" (audio and text):

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

But yesterday I decided to stand and look upstream, towards the High Bridge power plant. And as I was thinking of other things than "emblazoned zone and fiery poles, / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night," an eagle spun up from right beneath me, circled on the winds above the bluffs and after about ten minutes moved upstream.

I went back home and found a note from an old friend, one of those friends who used to be an intimate but now hangs often in a sweet melancholy at the edge of time remembered and imagined. His wife just gave birth to their fifth child and they named her Charis Rhiannon.

And I walked back down to the High Bridge. And I turned to the city. And there were the mastering lights again, "Arranging, deepening, enchanting night."

__________________________________________

March

2008-03-03T05:23:00.001-08:00

What a doldrums.

After treking across the US and Canada to come home to March in Minnesota.

Still too cold to walk around the cities taking pictures.

Trash revealed by the melting and congealing snow.

People all wrapped up in March Madness and office pools.

I can't wait for spring, spring cleaning and new blood moving around.

In Style

2008-02-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

Picked up a ride to Calgary from an aging hippie couple with an RV. Marianne made and eggplant-tofu bake while Dave and I watched the sun set by the side of the road.

Great Trip

2008-02-24T06:02:00.000-08:00

It was a nice wander out to Victoria (beautiful old city, an antique in itself).

The concert was great.

Afterwards, Igantius decided to keep moving down the coast and I dediced to try and catch Ritter's second show in Vancouver.

But now I'm headed home. Going back along the Canadian side.

I hope to make Calgary by nightfall. If I can catch a ride to Winnipeg through the night I will. Then one more stretch down across the border at Emerson, through Fargo and on ... home?

Girl in the War - Josh Ritter

2008-02-23T16:49:00.000-08:00

The Temptation of Adam - Josh Ritter

2008-02-22T19:55:00.000-08:00

2008-02-22T13:52:00.001-08:00

Pike Place

2008-02-22T05:30:00.000-08:00

Last night Igantius and I snuck into the Greyhound station in Missoula, just joining a group of people who had gotten off a late bus. Thankfully, this bus had missed its connection so they were all going to have to sleep in the station and we went unnoticed.

In the morning (which comes early at a Greyhound station) we did get a ride from a rancher back to Muralts, where we had breakfast and started looking for a ride to Seattle.

It took a little longer this time as Ignatius is starting to smell pretty ripe and we both looked a little worse for the wear. But I think Ignatius's cowboy hat and flannel shirt actually paid off because a cattle car driver saw us standing around the pumps with our little packs and threw open the door and offered us a ride as far as Spokane.

From Spokane it only took us an hour or so to get a ride with a couple of college students headed back to Seattle Pacific University from a ski trip that had gone a little longer than they had expected.

We got into Seattle around dinner time and they dropped us off at Pike Place, which I remember fondly from my wandering days between that brief but definitive time in the Cottage and the AHT.

I spent the night playing the harmonica with some of the musicians who hang out there (video) and Ignatius composed poetry extemporaneously in his cowboy hat and flannel shirt. He's gotten a little better in general about keeping his politics to himself, but last night was a rouser. He almost

At the end of the night a guy named John was kind enough to let us flop in his small apartment.

Right now I'm sitting in the library. My time's running out and Ignatius is starting to fume as he flips through the news magazines.

Tonight we should have no problem making Josh Ritter's show in Victoria!

Too Cold to Hobo

2008-02-20T15:18:00.000-08:00

OK, so we're more like hitchhikers than Hobos.

We left the AHT all bundled up yesterday and got as far as Stockmen's Truck Stop in South St. Paul. OK, we walked about four miles then hitched a ride with a college student to South St. Paul.

We bought a guy dinner there and he agreed to take us to Bozeman if we'd buy him lunch on the other end. We got to Bozeman, waited around for lunch, and then picked up another ride to Missoula.

We couldn't get another ride right away, though, so Ignatius and I wandered around Missoula for a while. He's never been this far West before. So he got himself a cowboy hat and a Pendleton shirt at Quality Supply.

We'll find somewhere to flop tonight then find our way back to Muralt's tommorrow to try and pick up a ride Washington. It's pretty cold here, too, but we'll find somewhere. Pay for something if we have to.

Hoboing to Ritter

2008-02-19T10:17:00.000-08:00

Ignatius is back in town.

Having grown somewhat restless these days, even in the Big Easy, he's begun to spend most of his time wandering up and down the Holy Highway looking for his lost copy of Boethius.

And now he wants me to hobo with him.

I don't think I can take too long off, but there is a new singer I've been meaning to hear. Josh Ritter.

Oskar's going to run the AHT for a few days and I'm off with Ignatius, hoping to hitch our way to British Columbia in 3 - 6 days time and hear Ritter at his February 22nd, 23rd or 24th tour dates.

Heck, if it's a good enough concert maybe we'll follow him back across Canada.

Where did you get the bread to go, Lefty?

2008-02-13T18:13:00.000-08:00

Ceremony

2008-02-08T05:22:00.001-08:00

A man about my age came into the Antiquarian Holiness Temple the other day looking for a military style dagger in a hard case sheath. "One that makes a pretty cools sound when you pull it out he said. And the older the better." I showed him several of the knives I've got, including a couple from the locked case up front. Most of the knives of the type he is after are WWII era bayonette's or special issue knives. But there are some very fine specimins from other eras as well. It's one of the things I try to specialize in.

He tried several knives, pulling them out of their sheaths, listening, running his finger along the blade.

I asked him if he collected knives and he said, "No. I'm looking for something for my son. He turns ten today."

It turns out this father was preparing for what he was calling "The Ceremony of the First Knife" - a rite of passage and recognition of one of the stages of manhood. This was a part of his attempt to help his son escape the cycle of prepetual adolescence (or, as peple seem to be calling it now "emerging adulthood") that seems to be plaguing not only the United Sates but also the Old Country.

I thought this was so interesting that after he chose his knife (a fine, seventeen inch Bolivian Mauser rifle bayonet) I opened up the upstairs of the Antiquarian Holiness Temple to him. I put Wagner on the turntable in the library and and we sat down and shared a cigar in the smoking room.

The man's name was Julius. He is a teacher and he thinks that the disappearance of ceremonies, rites, and clear cultural markers is either one of the main causes or one of the most significant effects of a more underlying erosion of culture. I told him about what Oskar and I are doing and invited him to think about joining us in our contemplation and perhaps future action.

He said he would come by again soon.

Quote of the Day 2/07/08

2008-02-07T05:09:00.000-08:00

Time comes when a man wants to be known for what he is, the bad with the good of him, the weakness with the strength.

Leo Bebb in Frederich Buechner's The Book of Bebb

Quote of the Day 2/03/08 (Baby Blue?)

2008-02-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

To this old park came Snufkin with Little My in his pocket. He crept silently along the fence, looking in at his old enemy, the Park Keeper.

"What are you going to do to him?" asked Little My. "Hang him, boil him, or stuff him?"

"Scare him!" replied Snufkin and clenched his teeth around the pipe-stem. "There's only one person in the whole world whom I truly dislike, and that's the Park Keeper. I'm going to pull down all his notices about forbidden things."

Snufkin now rummaged in his knapsack and pulled out a large paper bag. It was full of small glossy white seeds.

"What's that?" asked Little My.

"Hattifattener seed," answered Snufkin.

"Oh," said Little My, astonished. "Do Hattifatteners come from seeds?"

"They do," said Snufkin. "But the important thing is: only if the seeds are sown on Midsummer Eve."

He began throwing handfuls of seed between the fence rails. He crept noiselessly along the whole of the park fence and scattered his seeds everywhere, but was careful to throw them sparsely, so that the Hattifatteners wouldn't have their paws entangled when they came up. When Snufkin's bag was empty he sat down, lit his pipe, and waited.

The sun was setting, but the evening was warm, and the Hattifatteners began to grow at once. Here and there on the neatly mowed lawn round white blobs were appearing, like snowball mushrooms.

"Look at that one," said Snufkin. "In a little while it'll have its eyes over the earth."

He was right. Very shortly two round eyes appeared beneath the white skull.

"They're especially electric when new-grown," explained Snufkin. "Look now, he's got his paws!"

The air was already filled with a faint rustling sound from all the growing Hattifatteners. The Park Keeper still hadn't noticed anything unusual because he was keeping a keen eye on the woodies. But on the lawns all around him Hattifatteners were shooting up in hundreds. They had scarcely more than their feet in the ground. Soon they would take their first steps. A smell of sulphur and burned rubber drifted throught the park. The Park Wardress sniffed.

"What's that smell?" she asked. "Children, who of you's smelling?"

Faint electric shocks were noticeable in the ground.

The Park Keeper began to shift his feet uneasily. His shiny metal buttons were flashing small blue sparks.

All of a sudden the Park Wardress gave a cry and jumped up on the seat of her chair. She pointed a shaking finger at the lawn.

The Hattifatteners had grown to life size and now came swarming and moiling towards the Park Keeper from all directions, attracted by his electrified buttons. Small flashes of lightening crossed the air, and the buttons were crackling. Suddenly the Park Keeper's ears lighted up. Then his hair crackled and sparkled, his nose began to glow - and all of a sudden the Park Keeper was luminous from head to toe! Shining like a full moon he scuttled off toward the park gates, followed by an army of Hattifatteners.

The Park Wardress was already climbing the fence. Only the little children were left. They sat quietly in the sandbox and looked very suprised.

"Smart," said Little My, impressed.

"And that's that!" said Snufkin, pushing back his hat. "And now we'll pull down every single notice, and every single leaf of grass shall be allowed to grow as it likes."

All his life Snufkin had longed to pull down notices that asked him not to do things he liked to do, and he was fairly trembling with excitement and expectation. He started off with:

NO SMOKING

Then he flew at:

DO NOT SIT ON THE GRASS

After that he turned on:

LAUGHING AND WHISTLING

STRICTLY PROHIBITED

and the next minute:

NO HOP, NO SKIP

AND DEFINITELY NO JUMP

ALLOWED HERE

followed suit.

The little woodies stared at him with more and more astonishment.

Little by little it was dawning on them that he had come to their rescue. They left the sandbox and gathered around him.

"Go home, little ones," said Snufkin. "Go wherever you please."

But they did not go, they followed him everywhere. When the last of the notices was trampled to the earth and Snufkin lifted his knapsack on to his back, they still followed at his heels.

"Shoo, little ones," said Snufkin. "Run along to your mamma now."

"Perhaps they have no mamma," said Little My.

"But I'm not a bit used to children!" said the now terrified Snufkin. "I don't even know if I like them!"

"They seem to like you," replied Little My, grinning broadly.

Snufkin looked at the silently admiring group that had flocked around his legs.

"As if one weren't enough," he said. "Well. Come along then. But don't blame me if everything goes wrong!"

And with twenty-four serious little children at his heels Snufkin wandered off over the meadows, bleakly wondering what he would do when they got hungry, had wet feet, or a stomach-ache.

in Tove Jansson's MoominSummer Madness

An Interesting Time for the Pawnshop Industry

2008-02-01T05:29:00.001-08:00

I've been busy of late.

A couple weeks ago I flew to Washington, D.C. to negotiate the purchase of all portable goods from several old Virginia estates.

This week I have 7 major estate sales to decide between.

It's foreclosure season.

The time of the jackals and vultures.

The hour of the deal.

It's hard to do this job well.

But things must be saved, be it in pieces or in whole.

We do our part.

Quote of the Day 1/27/08

2008-01-27T16:58:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't want to live there, but dreams are not a bad place to visit, especially after an overdose of reality.

Antonio in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

Silence in the Sonata

2008-01-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

Listen to the silence in this piece, accompanying the piano when the violin ceases, accompanying the violin when the strings of the piano are still, and resting between the two voices at all times.

Of Daffodils and Dried Apples

2008-01-26T06:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve found out that it’s hard work trying to think one’s way through the end of the world. But I’ve also found that once you start asking the question in a serious, systematic fashion, it’s a hard question to avoid. Everywhere I turn not only the answer but even the questions seems, as Bob once said, to be “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

But I thought I would put it down for a while and just enjoy the simple things – the elements, the earth, the things of this world to which love calls us. And they are even more poignant than before. The hazy refracted sky of a cold Minnesota winter. The tubs of octopi at Chouleng market in Frogtown. The squirrel-dug spatterings of tundra around the old hiding place of an autumn nut.

Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, like clean water and dried apples in Cormac McCarthy’s desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, these simple things have great staying power. And from them, it is possible (as Hirsch suggests in an essay that has become very important to me) to wrestle poetically forward towards a new world of sorts—from earth to world through hard poetic re-construction.

And when on the darkest paths of apocalyptic pondering, despair or escape seem to be the only options, it is best to choose neither, but to embrace the things of this world to which love calls us.

Quote of the Day 1/21/08

2008-01-21T05:53:00.000-08:00

In face of such a sight and mystery as a girl can present when she walks toward you though the firelight in a moon-colored dress, it is possible for any one of us to be like whichever prophet it was who, when he beheld the Lord himself sitting high and lifted up among his angels, could only cry out, "Woe is me, for I am undone ... I am a man of unclean lips..." Nor, Brownie would be pleased to note, was that the only reference to Scripture that this moment of seeing Sharon again at the barbecue recalls, because Bebb had come up behind me by this time and said softly into my ear as she approached, "Behold, I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband," and the next moment she was there holding out her good hand toward me saying, "Take it easy, Bopper. Herman's mare threw me, and it's taken till now to wash the horse shit off"-- horse shit not as an obscenity but the way Bebb had used it once as a technical term for something that smells of grain and musk and sun and makes the vegetables grow.

in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

Quotes of the Day 1/17/08

2008-01-17T11:58:00.000-08:00

He was stranding by the edge of a small pool—not more than ten feet from side to side—in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sun overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possible imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others—a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive. When he tried to describe it afterwards, he always said, “It was a rich place: as rich as plumcake.”

In C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew

They stood still and listened, but all they could hear was the thump-thump of their own hearts. This place was at least as quiet as the Wood between the Worlds. But it was a different kind of quietness. The silence of the Wood had been rich and warm (you could almost hear the trees growing) and full of life: this was a dead, cold, empty silence. You couldn’t imagine anything growing in it.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew

An excellent example, I thought as I ran across it while reading this morning, of the difference between silence and emptiness. (See also other surrounding posts.)

Quote of the Day 1/14/08 (Baby Blue IV)

2008-01-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

"Man of War" -- Carol Frost

After there were no women, men, and children,

from the somber deeps horseshoe crabs crawled up on somber shores:

Man-of-Wars' blue sails drifted downwind

and blue filaments of some biblical cloak

floated below: the stinging filaments.

The cored of bone and rock-headed came near:

clouds made wandering shadows:

sea and grasses mingled::

There was no hell after all

but a lull before it began over::

flesh lying alone: then mating: a little spray of soul:

and the grace of waves, of stars, and remotest isles.

in Poetry 191:4

I Am Legend

2008-01-12T09:12:00.000-08:00

"My name is Robert Neville. I am a survivor living in New York City. I am broadcasting on all AM frequencies. I will be at the South Street Seaport everyday at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky. If you are out there... if anyone is out there... I can provide food, I can provide shelter, I can provide security. If there's anybody out there... anybody... please. You are not alone."

Robert Neville in Frances Lawrence's I Am Legend

I snuck away from the Antiquarian Holiness Temple yesterday morning to see a matinee of I Am Legend with Oskar. Denise wasn't interested in seeing it.

We've already spent several evenings over at his flat going around and around and back and forth and through and through this question of whether it's all over now or not - pulling helpful books off of my shelves, watching some documentaries and films, etc. We've worked slowly and with disciplined inquiry now through several four packs of Goose Island Bourbon County Stout.

(That beer, by the way, just may be the best beer every created. Silence is the caramel colored liquid lingering on the side of a brandy snifter of Goose Island Bourbon County Stout.)

At any rate, we decided we would go see I Am Legend. I had heard very little about it and Oskar even less, but I am a connoisseur of the post-apocalyptic genre and even though this film looked more like an excuse for an action adventure movie featuring Will Smith, we decided it was worth at least a matinee fare.

By the time it was over, I was in shock. Bob Marley's "Redemption Songs" was playing as the credits rolled on the screen and I was choking back tears, tears of sorrow for who we have become and how bad it might get, but also tears of hope and faith, faith in God, in his presence and in who he has created us and re-created us to be. Art, beauty, music, faith, church, family, and even responsible science make more sense after watching this movie. The movie brings every small act of creation, preservation, sacrifice, resistance, remembrance, humility and perseverance into its proper light as a means of grace.

Oskar is more of an agnostic and always at risk of falling finally at the feet of the absurd, but he was also very moved. Perhaps I can get him to visit at least a Quaker meeting with me. He won't step into a Catholic church (unless its empty) or a large evangelical church (on any terms), but he has expressed some interests in coming with me to a meeting. (I attend, on a monthly rotating basis, the twin cities Friends meeting, Bethlehem Baptist Church, the Cathedral of St. Paul, and Messiah Episcopal. On the odd fifth I usually just take the day off. Sometimes I'll drop in on House of Mercy on Saturday night.

I Am Legend is one of the most morally serious explorations of humanity at the beginning of the 21st century that I have yet encountered. And that's saying a lot since I was recently so moved by both Into Great Silence and No Country for Old Men. I Am Legend ranks right up there with them, maybe even ahead of them in its clarity and precision if not subtlety and nuance.

2008-01-11T11:32:00.001-08:00

Redemption Songs

Quote of the Day 1/07/08

2008-01-07T09:12:00.000-08:00

Ours does not promise to go down in history as a great age of religious poetry. Yet if contemporary poetry is not often religious, it is still intensely, covertly metaphysical. Human nature, it seems, compels us to keep asking about first things, even if we no longer accept the same answers that our ancestors did, or even the same kind of answers.

Adam Kirsch in "The Taste of Silence," in Poetry 191:4

2008-01-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

Quote of the Day 01/04/08

2008-01-04T15:46:00.001-08:00

WALLY: So I mean, is that our problem? Is that what you're saying? Are we just like bored, spoiled children who've been lying in the bathtub all day, playing with their plastic duck, and now they're thinking, What can I do?

ANDRÉ: Okay. Yes. We're bored now. We're all bored. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process which creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous, really, than one thinks? And that it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep? And somebody who's asleep will not say no?

in Wallace Shawn and André Gregory's My Dinner with André

Cheerwine!

2008-01-02T13:42:00.000-08:00

What a great day.

The day after the new Year, as if to salve my historical despair, I received a shipment for the Antiquarian Holiness Temple containing a collection of Cheerwine bottles, ads and memorabilia!

Is it all over now, Baby Blue?

2008-01-02T01:48:00.000-08:00

Cafe Bruno had a little New Years Eve party last night (a cold one).

As I watched the little ball drop on 2007, in the company of a few other drifters and partyless folks like myself, I completely ruined whatever festive mood there might have been by putting Bringing It All Back Home on the turntable and playing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."

See, I've been having apocalyptic thoughts of late.

These are not despairing thoughts or thoughts about the end of the space-time continuum or even particularly religious thoughts (though they have, of course, a religious dimension). These are apocalyptic thoughts in the old, high sense. Thoughts about the unveiling of history. Of times and epochs. Of great events and maybe even of designs and purposes.

I am beginning think that it just might be all over, this grand experiment of Western Civilization - or at least in any sense we know it.

There may be a time on the horizon when it no longer makes any sense to sing Handel's Messiah, discuss Melville's Moby Dick, go to a museum to see one of Cezanne's paintings or travel to Rome to see Bernini's sculpture. The time may be coming when there is no silence to build upon but only emptiness. Or maybe we will just have to rethink what sense it makes.

As I read, listen, and look about me, it just seems like ... well ... to paraphrase Yeats, things may be falling apart and that the center may not hold. What if the tide is rolling in and there is nothing we can do now to stop it? What if the West is exhausted? What if Europe is just a the beginning? It's happened before - at least for a while.

Thinking about Silence, Emptiness and Noise, talking some with Ira and others, investing all that time in creating the Antiquarian Holiness Temple and Pawnshop Project have made me want to dedicate a good deal of my intellectual energy over the next few months to addressing several questions for myself, but not alone if at all possible. Hence I wonder aloud here.

Is there 'something coming'? Some dark tide? Some new dark ages?

If so, what does it mean? Why is it happening? What's going on here?

If not, what is it that so many people seem to be talking about? Is this just the way it's always been? Am I really getting that old?

And finally, one way or the other, how should we then live? Should those of us who wish to stave off the darkness gather in smaller groups? Put forth our best efforts? Keep the fire? Go out guns blazing? Create alternative communities and sub cultures?

Over the next few months I'll be posting quotes specifically on this topic from what I'm reading and rethinking, quotes such as yesterday's - some evocative, some suggestive, some provocative, some explanatory and maybe even some proscriptive.

Comment here or on these future quotes as you like. I would love to hear what others are thinking about this.

Feris and Ignatius were at Bruno's the other night and already got a jump on the conversation, commenting on yesterday's quote.

Quote of the Day 12/31/07

2007-12-31T17:33:00.001-08:00

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

in Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" ( lyrics ) ( video)

Silent Night, Holy Night

2007-12-24T20:07:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas.

Silence

2007-12-19T20:54:00.001-08:00

Silence is Creation. Emptiness is Non-Being.

Silence

2007-12-18T12:20:00.000-08:00

All ultimate questions are borne in Silence and answered in Song. Emptiness breeds only timid and fragile answers to terrifying, dead questions that are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Silence

2007-12-17T21:02:00.000-08:00

Silence is something you can share. Emptiness you do alone.

Silence

2007-12-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about Silence ever since I saw Into Great Silence ... and Silence is really something one can build upon.

It may even be the holy ground of all being.

As I was shutting down the store the other day, cleaning up some of the wooden blocks that a child whose mother had expressed interest in silk handkerchiefs had been playing with downstairs, I was struck by how those wooden blocks were rooted and grounded in Silence.

Here are some thoughts.

The real enemy of Silence is not Sound, but Emptinesss.

Silence and Sound are from different orders of Being and are not even analgous across those orders.

Silence is to Absence as Song is to Sound.

Emptiness is to Absence as Noise is to Sound.

Emptiness is the true enemy of Silence.

Emptiness is profane Absence or Absence profaned.

Silence is holy Absence or Absence sanctified.

Noise is profane Sound or Sound profaned.

Song is holy sound or Sound sanctified.

Hamlet's last words: "The rest is silence."

So much hangs on what he means by 'silence.'

'Silence' as Silence?

'Silence' as Emptiness?

'Silence' as Absence?

'Silence' as Song?

to be contiued ...

Quote of the Day 12/13/07

2007-12-13T10:57:00.000-08:00

With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, but rather sit apart. And one doesn't know anything about the other. I'm an old man with a broken voice, but the tale still rises from the depths, and the mouth, slightly opened, repeats it as clearly, as powerfully. A liturgy for which no one needs to be initiated to the meaning of words and sentences.

'Homer' in Wem Wenders' Wings of Desire

The Antiquarian Holiness Temple and Pawnshop Project

2007-12-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

OK, sorry I've been away for a while but I've been working night and day on a revision of the antique store vision.

See, when I landed back in St. Paul after two years of rambling, I wanted to become a proprietor of a small business that really mattered and mattered in a particular way. I wanted either a coffeehouse, a tobacco shop, an antiquarian bookstore or an antique store that edged dangerously close to a pawn shop.

When this place came up for sale a few months ago at a good price and with little start up cost involved, I just decided to buy it. I love antiques, old things, relics and junk. Today I closed a deal on all the portable property at a farm in Wisconsin. Here's just a first look at what awaits me when I get a chance to get down there:

It's a wonderful way of life, to deal daily in such objects, and more -- to deal in Memory, Time and Eternity, to work in the 'place' where Space and Time meet, to sit between Song and Silence. This is what it means to be the proprietor of a shop like mine.

And yet, when I saw Into Great Silence the other night with Oskar and Denise, I started wondering if there wasn't somehow more ...

more than I could be doing, perhaps, to enhance people's appreciation of the sacred...

The next day gave birth to the Antiquarian Holiness Temple and Pawnshop Project.
I decided that in buying the antique store I had cut myself off prematurely from the full vision of creating sacred space that had initially led me to consider several different options. So I decided to expand the vision for my corner store.

The antique store on the first floor will continue to be the "front" of the operation. The sign out front reads "Ithilien Antiquities." Bell over the door. Ring, ring. Miscellany. Etc. Swords, scabbards, oil lamps and old handkerchiefs. Me behind the counter. Most people come in, mill around, and leave none the wiser.

But for those who linger in a particular fashion, signalling some appreciation of the scared ...

maybe an erudite young man with glasses who picks a book off the shelf and thumbs through it, running his fingers along the spine ...

maybe an old man who balances one of my estate pipes in his wrinkled hands ...

maybe a small child who chooses a penny whistle rather than a piece of candy out of the basket marked "FREE" on my counter ...

For those folks. Do you have a moment? Let me show you something.

Down in the basement I've lined three walls with oak bookshelves full of great books, old and new, for sale, purchase, or long term loan. I've got an espresso machine down there. Make yourself a drink. There are three large oak tables with brass finished library lamps. A couple of leather couches. Sit down for a while. For the third wall I went out and bought a 61" LCD HDTV and I am currently playing Into Great Silence over and over again.

In the corner is a toy shelf with all kinds of old wooden toys, stuffed animals and plain wooden blocks. Bring your kids. As long as they're the sort of kids who will play with these kinds of toys. If not, you might want to leave them home.

But stay a while. Read a good book. Buy it if you want. Just take it home if you like. Bring it back if you can. Donations always welcome.

Or perhaps you would prefer something upstairs? You may remember that I couldn't figure out what to do with those two extra upstairs rooms? I've turned one into a smoking room. It has a small walk in humidor, leather couches and recliners, a dart board and a cupboard full of brandy and various aged ports. Have a drink. Just one please. Here take a cigar for a friend. The other is another small library but with a hi-fi stereo system. Listen to one of my albums or bring your own next time you come.

One way or the other, you're always welcome at the Antiquarian Holiness Temple and Pawnshop Project. But, shhh ... keep it quiet.

Quote of the Day 12/8/07

2007-12-08T11:16:00.001-08:00

I dislike the opposition between abstraction and creation because it seems to me to pose a false dichotomy between what the eye does and what the mind does.

Kirk Varnedoe in Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock

Crucifix of the St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe, NM

2007-12-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

Quote of the Day 12/4/07

2007-12-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

The German people have divided into as many states as there are individuals, and these small states are mobile. Each one takes his own with him and demands a toll when another wants to enter.

in Wem Wenders's Wings of Desire

Into Great Silence

2007-12-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

I've got a friend, Oskar, a photographer and painter in the warehouse district of St. Paul, who has a state of the art digital projection system in his studio.

He recently purchased a copy of Into Great Silence and had me over last night to view it.

(Of course, we also had start with a couple drinks made with Green Chartreuse, the liquor made by the Carthusian monks at Grand Chartreuse, where the documentary was filmed.)

The documentary, if you've not heard of it, consists entirely of video of the monks going about their daily lives, most of which is done in silence.

A monk prays in his cell.

A bent and stooped gardener clears snow from a plot of ground.

A blind brother sits at his table.

They pray together.

They sled in the snow.

They chant.

One sits in a red doorway eating a bowl of soup.

One measures cloth for cutting.

And then it's over.

When it finished at 9:45, I looked at Oskar and said, "Let's watch it again."

He said, "OK. You want a Mona Lisa or a C and T?"

At midnight, Osakar's girlfriend Denise came by to remind him that they were supposed to go to the Sage Wine Bar together tonight with some friends. Oops. She's a very understanding person. We put a frozen pizza in the oven, popped some popcorn and started the film again.

At 2:15 Oskar carved a little hole through the ice on his windshield and drove me home across the high bridge through the silence of snow and sleet covered streets.

Quote of the Day 12/02/07

2007-12-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

Praise has always been the preoccupation of those who live in vital awareness of a universe resplendent with mystery.

Thomas Merton in A Book of Hours

Seven Songs Plus Three for the Last Day of Fall

2007-11-30T19:26:00.000-08:00

There's a storm a comin.'

Autumn's gone. As gone as Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

Fall is dead. As dead as Johnny and June.

Winter's coming for us all, even Princess Diana, Marilyin Monroe and Scarlet Johansson.

Here are some perfect songs for the occasion that I'll have playing all day long in the store. Pay no attention to the videos, unless you really want to.

I heard "None But the Rain" just the other night for the first time at Bruno's. An older man with an acoustic guitar (pictured below) played it.

Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down (excellent video)

Johnny Cash - Hurt (excellent video)

Townes van Zandt - None But the Rain (ridiculous video)

Bob Dylan - When the Deal Goes Down (excellent video)

Johnny and Rosanne Cash - September When It Comes (excellent video)

Dan Fogelberg - Another Old Lange Syne (neither here nor there video)

Don McLean - Vincent (neither here nor there video)

Elton John - Candle in the Wind (excellent video)

Don McLean - American Pie (informative video)

The Eagles - The Last Resort (neither here nor there video)

The Great Dismal Swamp

2007-11-28T20:31:00.000-08:00

Did anyone else know there was a Great Dismal Swamp?

I was sitting behind the counter today looking at an old book of maps and found the Great Dismal Swamp.

Amazing.

A Poem for Six Sundays

2007-11-25T17:24:00.000-08:00

I broke
faith
yesterday, skipped
church to see

I'm Not There
to
find out that
I'm not there,

that, in fact,
all
is a red glove
in a dusty gutter

and everyone should
be
six selves
searching for a seventh.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-24T21:00:00.000-08:00

Thursday was, as most of you know, Thanksgiving.

I have no family in the area (and precious little family left anywhere) so I had planned to stay at home, or perhaps make my way to one of those lonely diners through into which the flotsam and jetsam of our human family float on holidays. It's not that I can't cook. I even got a late invitation from Bruno to join his family in St. Cloud.

But I kind of like the feeling of these lonely holidays.

And to add to the ambiance of the day, a light snow was falling here throughout the morning. So I walked into downtown St. Paul and strolled around the empty city. I had Blood on the Tracks playing on my I-pod and the album, the day, the snow and the city all sort of blurred into one epiphanous heirophany.

The poem I posted that day (still a work in progress, really) emerged out of the experience. Those of you who know either Blood on the Tracks or 7th Street in St. Paul will certainly recognize some of the elements.

When I got home and unlocked the door to the shop, I decided to turn on the neon "Open" sign and keep a pot of coffee going for any wanderers. I stayed open till midnight and the clicked off the sign and headed to bed, seeking, once again, shelter from the storm.

Quote of the Day 11/24/07

2007-11-24T18:51:00.001-08:00

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

in Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"

A Poem For Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T08:23:00.000-08:00

“Downtown Dylan 11/22/07”

A simple twist of fate, snow flakes,
Thanksgiving,
snow snakes on city streets,

Seventh Street, St. Paul,
Minnesota, Wabasha,
56th and Westcott Station,

Tangled up in white wind
Black Dog, Big Jim,
Café, come in.

Seeking shelter from the storm.

Quote of the Day 11/22/07

2007-11-22T06:43:00.000-08:00

Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it come from a grocer's. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, "That was a nice cup o' tea, dearie, that was. Did me good." Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be a pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction , rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,

the child whose love is here, at lest doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion; perhaps, even, the wild dog to the over-tame poodle or Peke.

C.S. Lewis in "Lilies that Fester"

Low Fog and Nightime in the City

2007-11-20T11:56:00.000-08:00

I closed my accounting books last night and decided to step outside for a minute.

There was a strange low-lying fog creeping up in the city. The moon above was clear as a bell and the neon sign of Cafe Bruno was just barely affected with a dim extraterrestrial glow. But a block and half down, the street lights were little more than an amber smear in the chill air.

Thinking it a good night for a smoke, I went back in and took out one of my nicer cigars (a Gurkha Titan), poured myself a small glass of Broadbent 10 Year Malmsey Madeira, and took my old copy of Rilke down off the shelf. Then I took all three out to the doorstep of the store and sat down, lit the cigar and leaned back against the bricks.

It was after ten. A few souls shuffled by, some muttering their nighttime greetings, others walking their city dogs. When I had burned about an inch of ash, I picked up Rilke and read.

I didn't bring much with me away from that little Cottage in Ithilien, but I did bring Rilke.
And last night I remembered why.

Of course I re-read "The Song of the Waif" again, slowly and for old time's sake. (You may or may not be pleased, Camilla, to know that I lifted a lonely glass to you, wherever life has taken you.)

And of course I smiled to read again "The Solitary", remembering all that had once passed from that poem through me.

Those two poems are almost like sad old friends from a childhood of the soul.

But as my Gurkha burned down, I also read ...

"Initiation"

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.

So I did.

Ira Redux: Seeing the Sacred

2007-11-18T14:10:00.000-08:00

I closed the shop for a couple hours today. Ira picked me up in his 2003 Cadillac Deville and took me to his favorite St. Paul steakhouse for lunch.

I wanted to just get a salad, but he insisted that I get a steak. In fact, he just ordered the New York Strip for me. Furthermore, the wine list at this restaurant is good but not great, so Ira had brought a bottle along with him, the 2004 Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon Special Selection.

It was a very good steak and a fabulous bottle of wine.

While finishing the bottle over dessert, Ira told me a little more about his life. After a tour in the navy (he was in the Mediterranean during the Spanish Civil War), he spent his life and made his money as a cattle broker, working out the South St. Paul Stockyards Exchange building. But he also used to travel all over the west making deals on cattle to be shipped by rail to South St. Paul. He talked about some of the ranchers he had to get to by horse or by helicopter, about the decline of the industry in the late 60's and 70's and about his life after the stockyards. He had put enough money away and invested it wisely enough not to have to worry about that, however. (Hence the enviable caddy and the expense account lunch.)

As he dropped me off at the store and I opened back up for business (few customers passing through, nothing purchased, yet) I got to thinking about the relationship between Ira, the most recent quote from The Book of Bebb and the recent thoughts of myself and others concerning the sacred and the profane. It would be all too easy to look at Ira as a lonely old man who did well for himself but has nothing to show for it here at the end of his life and is reduced to taking almost complete strangers out to lunch, trying to buy friendship. It would be easy, even, to think of him as pathetic.

But I believe to do so would be to actively profane the universe by expecting to see only the profane therein. I say more. To do so would be to create a profane cosmos.

Rather, let me look with sacred eyes for the sacred. Let me see in Ira, because I'm looking for it, the dignity of a man continuing to struggle against the chaos, continuing to answer Hamlet's question, continuing to light a small candle in a dark room. Let me see a man who having lost his wife is now half himself, but who continues to practice the sacrament of living and the ceremonies of daily life. Let me see not a fool but a sage, not a buffoon but a hero.

And "let me not to the marraige of true minds admit impediment."

Quote of the Day 11/17/07

2007-11-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

You see in this world mainly what you expect to see, and what you do not expect to see you are usually blind to.

in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

The Sacred and the Profane: Point-Counterpoint

2007-11-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

Profane: the assembly line production of the Model T

Sacred: a trip from Omaha to Tulsa in a Model T

Profane: cell phones

Sacred: A call from a dying friend to say goodbye for the last time

Profane: asphalt

Sacred: the stretch of California Highway 49 from Oakhurst all the way to Vinton (excepting, perhaps, its brief sojourn in Auburn)

Profane: Salami

Sacred: Katz's Original Recipe Salami Sandwich eaten in at Katz's

Profane: Barnes and Noble Booksellers

Sacred: Reading Paradise Lost in the Fargo Barnes and Noble

Profane: New York City

Sacred: New York City

Profane: Nothing

Sacred: Everything

Profane: Everything

Sacred: Nothing

Ira

2007-11-13T16:41:00.000-08:00

There are still a few men left named Ira, but even in the obituaries they grow scarcer and scarcer.

One of them has been coming into my store every weekday for the past couple of weeks.

He's a regular at Café Bruno - one of those gentleman of a time now long gone who still wears a tie, an overcoat and a hat when he goes out. How many of them can there be left?

Ira is a widower who lives alone in a small one-and-a-half story house a couple blocks away. He walks to Café Bruno around 6:30 every morning, orders a regular coffee and a scone, sits at a corner table by the window, takes a hard-boiled egg and a sandwich baggy of cheese out of the pocket of his overcoat and has breakfast.

Over breakfast he reads the New York Times pretty much cover to cover then skims the Wall Street Journal. Thus sated, he takes whatever book he is reading out of another pocket in his overcoat and reads for an hour or so.

Around 10:00 or 10:30, depending upon the book, he has been leaving the Café, crossing the street and coming through my door.

The first day he jingled the bell as he came in I said, "What can I do for you, sir?"

"Huh? Oh, just looking around. Just looking around," he replied (a typical response in my line of work).

"Well can I recommend the wrenches today?"

"Wrenches?" He asked.

"Yea, can I recommend the wrenches? I've got a nice group of wooden handled wrenches. Right over there in the cabinet. Behind you and to the left.

"Wooden handled wrenches? Gosh. I'd forgotten about those." And after a moment, "Sure, I'll take a look at your wrenches."

Now Ira comes in daily. I make a recommendation. We talk about the old days (his, not mine). And he tells me what if anything is worth knowing about the world today.

Yesterday I made him a cappuccino and we talked over a tea towel from Wales.

Quote of the Day 11/13/07

2007-11-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

"When you get right down to it, dear, you see, people don't want miracles."

"But that's what they do want," I said. "Get the rumor started that a statue of the Virgin's nose has started to run, and within twenty-four hours people will be lined up six deep."

Brownie said, "Little miracles, yes. People will flock to little ones like that the way they would flock to a magic show. But you take a real miracle, like resurrection--nobody wants those kind, dear, because they make it so you've got to believe whether you want to or not."

"You're crazy," I said. "That's just the kind people do want." People like Miriam, I thought. People like the fat lady with her corsage under the clock, like Charlie Blaine even, sleeping his life away on his kapok pillow. "They'd give their right arm for a miracle big enough to believe by."

"They'd just explain it away like Easter, dear, and say it never happened," Brownie said. "Take the miracle of life, for instance. People say it's all just acids."

in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

Quote of the Day 11/12/07

2007-11-12T16:25:00.000-08:00

That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like as spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I as seeking to discover was a thing I'd always know. That all courage is a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

Some New Items

2007-11-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

I've had a busy week acquiring new items for the store this week. Of course a lot was miscellany, but among the more high end items I picked up at various estate sales and lot auctions were a set of six hand-colored engravings by the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, including this one of a buzzard

and this one of a monkey.

I also picked up a Louis XVI gilded Centre table

and this 19th c. urn shaped lamp

The Sacred and the Profane: Unplugged and Applied

2007-11-09T10:56:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of a sacred man who manifested himself to me while I was living in Santa Fe, working part time in a cigar shop.

Here is another picture of the sacred man.

Here is a close up of the holy object of the sacred man.

Here is the sacred man and his holy object making their way through a profane crowd.

Quote of the Day 11/06/07

2007-11-06T17:15:00.000-08:00

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

Richard Rorty in "The Fire of Life" Poetry, November 2007

Heirophany, Ontology, and A Wrench

2007-11-06T16:06:00.001-08:00

There are, of course, a lot of oddments in an antique store, but among my favorites are the antique tools.

Among these, the gems are the small, wooden handled tools like this H.D. Smith & Co 6 inch crescent wrench.

Today a younger man, about my age, with the shadow of a beard and a black sweater walked into the store. With eyes on fire he bought this wrench.

But what he payed for it or even what he might have been willing to pay have nothing to do with the ultimate value of that wrench, a value that was clear to both of us as we spoke of wrenches and of other things, of icepicks and antique planers. Of the cold outside and of the coffee.

Per the ongoing conversation regarding Eliade on heirophany, I believe in the holiness of that wrench. It is a wrench beyond the reach of "market value." It is a sacred thing.

When, as happened today, the bell above the door jingles and the right customer comes through the door, when a magic word would have done as well as the money, we enact the sacred and the sacred manifests itself. The antique store becomes a kind of tabernacle.

But I believe in the holiness of the wrench because I first believe that the eyes of Christ are the eyes of God, that the descent of the Dove is the reign of the Holy Spirit and that in the arms of every father we feel the Father's love.

Christ does play in ten thousand faces, but I was taught to read him there.

The sacred are the profane, as Eliade says elsewhere, "are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history."

Assume the sacred.

Quote of the Day 10/5/07

2007-11-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

From the most elementary hierophany — e.g. manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree — to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.

Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane

Leaving Ithilien

2007-11-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

I was hoping there would be a time when I felt like making good on the promise to tell you what happened at the end of my time in Ithilien.

Well, now is the time.

I just sat down with a really nice Australian port and a chocolate soufflé. The soufflé was a slight variation on this recipe, and I made a black cherry sauce to go along with it. It presented beautifully on a triangular white plate I just swiped from downstairs in the store. But it was for me alone.

And I cracked opened my copy of Paul Ricoeur's Figuring the Sacred that I intend to read as a follow up to re-reading Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane. But I have no one to talk to about whatever I find. Sitting down to such a book with no prospect of conversation is like setting out alone to hike the Appalachian Trail.

(Or, perhaps, in the case of Ricoeur, it's more like the Pacific Crest Trail, in that I expect Figuring the Sacred to take me places more like the Chinook Pass than Shenandoah National Park. Both trails are beautiful, but the Pacific Crest is sublime.)

These prospects took me back to Ithilien and dinners at St. Godric's and even the humbler but no less delightful fair I sometimes shared with Camilla. To conversations with Brother Joseph and the monks. To our poetry sessions. I'm sure that I could find at least someone at St. Godric's with the time, inclination, and true leisure to read and discuss Ricoeur.

Yet I didn't stay. I set out. I'm here in an antique shop in St. Paul hitching my hopes for good conversation on a book club that meets at Café Bruno and whoever might wander into the store.
What I gave up is clear.

What I gained, though, as I said before, cannot be expressed as an answer to the question, "Why did you leave?" Nor can it be understood in a direct comparison of my life then with my life now. What I gained simply unfolded as a function of all the experiences I had after leaving Ithilien, in all the places I saw and the people I met. And it continues to unfold here in the antique store, across the street at Café Bruno, at all the estate sales past and future to which my vocation calls me, in trips to Duluth and in fishing the trout streams of south-eastern Minnesota and south-western Wisconsin.

My hope is that it will also unfold in friendships - with any seekers be they errant, coenobitic, or eremitic; with rooted folk and wanderers, or with anyone who values "food and cheer and song above hoarded gold."

But here's how it all ended in Ithilien and how I began my sojourn as an Ithilien exile.

I had been feeling deeply the lull of summer and the coming of Autumn, it got into my bones and drew at every fibre of my being that remained attached to the wandering life of a seeker-errant. I knew I didn't want to quite go back to that pattern, but I also began to wonder if I could stay in Ithilien either. So I took a two week retreat. I hiked high into the mountains west of Ithilien, following a little stream as my guide. Until I ended up here:

It made for a pleasant retreat spot. Plenty of deer and grouse and turkey. A red fox. A stream nearby.

Praying, fasting and communing, I gradually discerned that I needed to leave the valley.

When I returned, I spoke with Camilla. Most of what we said remained between the lines, but we spent one final evening fishing together, shared a bottle of stream-chilled Rudolf Muller Riesling Eiswein with foil-grilled trout and read Rilke together by candlelight. She knew I wouldn't be leaving till the next afternoon, but decided to say goodbye that night, under the stars instead. I told her the cabin was hers, unsure even then if she would stay.

The next day packed up the few things I carried to take with me, and headed down the valley. I stopped at St. Godric's, of course, to say goodbye. I left them my laptop and let them know that Camilla might be occupying the cabin, but if she didn't they could make use of it in whatever way they wanted.

Somewhat unfortunately, to my mind anyway, Brother Damien decided to quit the monastery and join me. He was only a novitiate so I don't feel that bad; but I don't think he would have left without my going. However, it was his life, his path, and I hope that path has remained blessed.

We did have a pleasant enough journey out of the valley, though, and if not exactly eager for company I was at least not eager to get rid of it either.

Once again, however, the Old Fisherman was out when we passed by his shack on the third day of our journey.

As we neared civilization and the shacks turned to general stores, the general stores to towns and the towns to suburbs of the largest city near Ithilien, the two roads of me and Brother Damien diverged. He wished to go home, to rest, to debrief. I wished to get on, to keep going, to not think about it yet. We said goodbye at the Greyhound station as he boarded the bus for Omaha and I waited for the bus that would begin my journey to Duluth.

Whether for hours I days I hardly know, but I rode the bus until we stopped and when I got off I found myself, once again, on the map in Duluth, MN.

Whether in 'exile' more like Abram in Caanan, Jacob in Paddan Aram, Moses in Midian or some strange combination I had no idea.

Within three weeks, however, I was on the road.

Noticing #8

2007-10-31T10:54:00.001-07:00

This is the skittering time of year.

The autumn leaves no longer fall in one green-gold red rush to swoosh down streets together, but in occasional brittle-crisp and yellow-brown isolations.

Last night I sat in bed with the window cracked, listening as these late leaves then made their several ways along the sidewalks and alleys of St. Paul -- through the darkness in mutual isolation.

Some cornered themselves in the porchway of the pawnshop and stayed restlessly spinning for a while before a larger gust moved them on with the scraps of last week's news, old plastic straws and one brown paper sack. I heard it all happen.

"Like 'ragged claws'," I thought, "Like ragged claws 'Scuttling across the floors of silent seas'."

This is the skittering time of year.

Quote of the Day 10/30/07

2007-10-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

“life is more true than reason will deceive”
—E.E. Cummings

life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose:higher than have
—but beauty is more each than living's all

multiplied with infinity sans if
the mightiest meditations of mankind
canceled are by one merely opening leaf
(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)

or does some littler bird than eyes can learn
look up to silence and completely sing?
futures are obsolete:pasts are unborn
(here less than nothing's more than everything)

death,as men call him, ends what they call men
—but beauty is more now than dying's when.

Several Items

2007-10-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

I closed the shop today and spent most of my time cleaning out the rest of the space above the store.

Something if not ascetic at least with a slant towards simplicity has lodged in my bones since I got to know Father Joseph and the other monks at St. Godric's. But when I bought the antique store (which occupies the first floor and basement of a small brick building) I also bought the two floors above. So now I have had to decide what to do with this space.

All I really need is my little corner studio apartment on the second floor, which is furnished with a small refrigerator, an antique gas stove, a single bed with a calico bedspread, a small end table and a lamp. There's a bathroom just down the hall with black and white tile and an old claw foot tub that pretty much completes my needs.

I suppose I could lease the third floor as an apartment. It is mostly ready, but I'm undecided on becoming a 'landlord.' And that still leaves the remainder of the second floor to work with. Once you take into account my studio and bathroom it's too small to rent. There is one larger room that was filled with junk that I'm clearing out to use as a library and a space for entertaining, and I plan on turning one of the smaller room into a tiny smoking lounge for my occasional cigar. That leaves one small room unoccupied and as of yet undesignated. An art gallery? An aquarium? A terrarium?

I made a lot of progress cleaning up anyway.

I also placed an order for my new "Ithilien Antiques" sign. Once I get that up and painted I can have a formal grand opening with balloons and little cookies and photocopied discount coupons and everything.

Before getting started this morning I picked up a copy of The Rake at Café Bruno.

This may be the best article I've read in such a magazine in years.

I also saw that there's a book club meeting at Café Bruno on Monday nights ... I was too tired tonight but it might be worth checking out next week.

Quote of the Day 10/29/08

2007-10-29T19:47:00.001-07:00

A true disciple is impressed by what his master has to say, and consequently by his way of saying it; an imitator -- I might say, a borrower -- is impressed chiefly by the way the master has said it. If he manages to mimic his master well enough, he may succeed even in disguising from himself the fact that he has nothing to say.

T.S. Eliot in "American Literature and Language"

Duluth Evening

2007-10-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

I love the city of Duluth.

It was the first place I landed after leaving Ithilien two years ago. I stayed for a few weeks into the fall, living on the streets for a while and then with a kindly family of Quakers.

I was able to hitch a ride up there yesterday and back again today.

Antiques

2007-10-27T04:35:00.000-07:00

I was thinking yesterday ... I never would have bought that old volume of Tristram Shandy if I had seen it on e-bay for the same price -- even with free shipping and handling. But there was something about having it in my hands.

Something about the old binding and the smell of the pages.

Something about knowing that it passed immediately to me from someone else's library, someone whose hands had perhaps flipped those pages and whose hands are now still.

Something iconographic or sacramental.

Something that was spoken into the world in creation echoed in its pages.

That got me thinking about antiques and why I might have bought this place.

Something more than just antiques is preserved in an antique store, something more than old farm implements, dolls with real glass eyes and the silver spoons of the dead.

It's a whole cosmos, a world, a moral universe, a way of life.

The antique store is a place where new and improved isn't a selling point.

Where old doesn't mean discarded.

Where time is not chronological but kairological.

It's a place that human hands have touched and where human voices still wake us.

It's a place where the ghosts of Tom Joad and Jayber Crow might might meet for coffee.

And it's a place where an old man who came in looking for a WWII bayonet to add to his collection might also sit down for a while ... with his own ghosts.

Quote of the Day 10/28/07

2007-10-26T15:13:00.001-07:00

"There Are Things to Be Said"
- Cid Corman

There are things to be said. No doubt.
And in one way or another
they will be said. But to whom tell

the silences? With whom share them
now? For a moment the sky is
empty and then there was a bird.

Estate Sale Gleanings #1

2007-10-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

My new life as proprietor of this small antique shop demands that I go to estate sales regularly and sift through the remains of some poor soul's life as through the detritus of a lost civilization.

This morning I was at one of the larger ones, where you arrive early, take a number, and wait in line to walk through the estate. I bought a coffee and biscotta at Cafe Bruno and rode my bike over to an old brick mansion on Summit Avenue. The sun had just come up. I was number 8. A buyer from an independent bookseller here in the city was in front of me so we chatted a bit. I guess he had heard that there was a nice library.

By 8:30 I had a beautiful set of silver in a mahogany and velvet case, a 19th century oak wardrobe, and a first edition of Tristram Shandy I'm not sure what makes me think anyone will buy a first edition of Tristram Shandy, but I'm also not sure that I care.

There's just something about owning - even if for only a time - a first edition of Tristram Shandy.

Of course I've never read Tristram Shandy, but it's one of those books one somehow knows about.

I picked it up tonight off of my counter.

Here's the first sentence:

I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; – that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind ; – and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost : — Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, — I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

Interesting ...

Noticing #7

2007-10-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

Returning to a formative book, a book upon which your days were built, a book that shaped you and left you fundamentally changed, is like coming home to a place you had almost forgotten was home.

We move away from home across the wide water and as we go the stones on which we stepped to cross the expanse sink below the surface and disappear behind us. It is no longer clear how we came to be where we've found ourselves. And yet when we are at long last returned to the place of our origins, we always know, somehow, that this is where we came from.

Explanation

2007-10-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

So why did I leave?

Why leave the shades of blue?

Why leave the poetry workshops?

Why leave the promise of such Thanksgiving?

Well, I suppose I could offer many so-called 'reasons.'

I could say, for instance, that I overerestimated my capacity to resist the pull of the seeker-errant life (though I was certainly late in setting out that fall) or that I simply miscalculated the arrival of a time of quiet solitude.

I could say that I was afraid of my changing attitude towards death and ran away.

I could say that the valley was getting crowded.

I could say that I was ultimately more frightened by Camilla than anything else.

And all of these would be, in some small measure, 'true'. The journals reveal them to be so.

But in the final analysis (and this is the final analysis), as I sit here at my desk with a fresh capuccino and a small pile of receipts from today's sales, I am forced to face up to the reality that any such reasons are merely justications after the fact, justifications of what I chose to do that do not explain the choice.

The choice to leave was free and it was mine.

In the end, the reasons for any of our 'setting outs' or 'goings forth' are ultimately far less important than the miles that followed, the people we met and the conversations we found ourselves immersed in.

In that spirt, I am sure I will write here at some point about the day I left and the conversation with Brother Joseph.

I am sure I will write here about my last conversation with Camilla.

I am sure I will tell you about almost turning back.

But I will also tell you about a mailbox I saw in South Bend, IN that made me weep, about a truck driver who I hitched a ride with in Spokane, WA who listened exclusively to Merle Haggard the whole way to Seattle, and about a man in Santa Fe, NM who trained a mouse to sit on the back of a cat and that cat to sit on the back of a dog while he walked them around through the adobe architecture trying to stay out of the heat.

I will tell you where I have been, what I have seen, what I have heard, who I did meet, and maybe even what I'll do now.

But I cannot tell you why.

Quote of the Day 10/23/07

2007-10-23T06:05:00.000-07:00

I had been praying, after all, and I suppose that is a kind of tears.

Antonio in Frederick Buechner's The Book of Bebb

Quote of the Day 10/22/07

2007-10-22T11:54:00.001-07:00

I sat down in one of the folding chairs in the front row, and because my eyes still smarted from all the open-car wind and sun, I closed them. It was extremely quiet in there, the kind of quiet you are apt to find in empty theatres or restaurants or even empty classrooms, as I remember them from my teaching days, places empty which you usually think of as full, places where the very absence of people becomes a kind of lulling presence.

Antonio in Frederick Beuchner's The Book of Bebb

Introduction

2007-10-19T13:58:00.000-07:00

I'm writing from a small studio above the antique store I just bought in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Out my window I can see the coffee shop across the wet street. Inside a mother and her two children are sharing drinks and a large cookie. A man and his dog, a good looking boxer, just walked up to the corner. The traffic light turned and he crossed the street into the park.

All of this means that I owe some of you and explanation, and others a mere introduction.

To the latter, let me simply say that over two years ago now I walked away from something - something beautiful.

A place. A project. A way of life.

A set of friends.

And I walked away unannounced. I walked away and I didn't stop walking till about three months ago when I bought this place.

Let that serve as an introduction.

If you want to know a little more about that place, that project, that way of life, I've arranged my journals from my time in Ithilien. You can find them here.

As for the rest of you, any explanation, I understand, requires that I answer the question, "Why?"

Why did I walk away?

Why did I not return?

Why did I buy an antique store in St. Paul, Minnesota?

The answers to those questions (and others like "Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?") I leave for another day, when perhaps the sun will be shining and the park full of children in sweatshirts, running and laughing among the littering leaves, while I sit enjoying my late coffee and oranges.

Seekers

2007-09-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

Ithilien - be it a place in the head, in the heart, or somewhere upon this middan-geard - is all about Seekers.

I am a Seeker and I have the utmost respect for anyone else who is a Seeker.

I had much to say of Seekers, their divsions, and their various pursuits when I was living in the cottage in Ithilien and am likely to have much to say about them here.

Behind the Brick

2007-09-04T00:38:00.000-07:00

I had no mailbox in Ithilien, so when people wanted to leave me notes they would just stick them on an old nail in my doorpost. So of course the first thing I did when I bought this little antique shop was to find an old nail to pound into its doorpost. But several notes disappeared inexplicably, so I had to come up with a different system.

Now if you ever stop by and find me not in and wish to leave a note or a poem or a song or a koan, there's a loose brick about two feet up from the ground and just to the right of the door, beneath the bell. Slip out the brick, slip in the note, and I'll pick it up when I'm back from my ramblings!

And when the box get's full, I'll add the notes to that same old cigar box that I used to store the notes in at the cottage.

On the Cottage Shelf

2007-09-03T00:32:00.000-07:00

I used to have a little shelf in my cottage in Ithilien where I would keep the books I was currently reading. Though I now have room for a few more books, I'll still keep a revolving list of the five or so that are currently on that same shelf in my mind.

If you've read or are reading any of the books, feel free to stick a note behind the brick.

On the Screen

2007-09-02T00:30:00.000-07:00

These are the five or so movies I have seen of late that have delighted, disturbed, enlightened or otherwise moved me.

As with anything you find on the cottage shelf, if you wish to comment, stick a note behind the brick.

The Old Cigar Box

2007-09-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

These rubber banded notes are from my days in the cottage in Ithilien.

dude,
as I traveled this maze around your woods, I had to marvel at the quality of the...ehm.. well, whatever the heck you pack in your pipe. This is a different land you live in my friend.
- a wandering man
●
myrddin,
Your wistful desires... is your woods your means of escape? I sense a deep thoughtfullness tempered by loneliness? Perhaps a spiritual hole? While the view of your woods, your home, your stream are grand in creation, such a lush environment must be fed by much rain. Is it the rain sent by He who has no name, or is it simply tears of wandering man?
I hope to visit you again. to find you, by just wandering past, I have noticed the passion by which you created your home. I will watch for smoke from you chimney before my next visit. No smoke, I will pass by, if there is water on to which we may share a cup, I would enjoy a visit on your porch. May you rest easy and be Blessed in all.
●
Dear Myddin –
Glad to have found you not at home. It gives me the opportunity to leave this note. A better introduction in this case, I hope.
Sorry to have startled you last night at the window. Must have been a shock. I saw your little cottage and was curious.
You sleep very peacefully.
But you startled me as well. So by the time you came out, I had already made the mistake of climbing that oak by your cottage. The one with the birdhouse. Don't know what I was thinking, because if you would have just looked up I would have been trapped.
I decided to keep quiet and wait till you went back inside before I climbed down and continued on my way, but then you just sat down on the porch and started talking to yourself! (Don't worry I couldn't hear what you were saying.)
When you finally went in and shut the door, I climbed out of the tree and headed downstream in the direction I had been walking. A beautiful evening by the light of the stars. Didn't you think?
Must have been well after midnight when I saw a light and found the little monastery. The monks gave me lodging even at such a late hour, but I might also have slept in the garden.
I want you to know that you intrigued me, especially your willingness to talk to yourself like that. But I couldn't come down from the tree. Couldn't tell if you were entirely safe. But the monks gave me your name and with it many kind words.
Yesterday morning, when I walked into the valley, I thought I was just passing through - but even then I couldn't remember where I was coming from and I had no idea where I was going.
Seem to have lost my way at the right moment.
With your permission, I would like to stay a while in your valley, perhaps further upstream? See you soon?
-Camilla
●
I heard some thumping out in back when I came up but I didn't want to bother you in the midst of your work but I had to communicate with you somehow. I was strolling around the wall this morning and I was thinking about the poetry workshop tommorow.
I don't know that I'm good at it or even getting any better. But I like it a lot and I thought I'd like to come up and tell you myself. I've lost the nerve though.I'm dont know how to tell what I feel. I want to tell people what it's like to be me, not just a brother in a monastery but what it's like to see with MY eyes and taste with MY tongue and smell with MY ears. But I dont know what I'm missing. Maybe we can talk tomorrow.
Thanks for your coming to be with us now and then. We really enjoy your roguishness for it's freshness to our way of life and we enjoy your skill because you teach us so well.With gratitude,
Br. Damien
●
Nice place you have here. I think I'll stop by from time to time. - Wes
●
Count me in as a new frequent visitor. - Spencer
●
I was on my home the other day from a land a little East of Ithilien in a small plane flying about 1,000 feet above the swaying tree tops and noticed the smoke from your cabin chimney. I would have stopped but the runway options appeared a little narrow and short. I did give the usual wingtip wave as I flew by. Maybe another time. - U Dan
●
What I'd like to know is if, when you are visiting the monks at St. Godric's, you ever go to confession?
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Sir, i stumbled into the woods near your little house today. I have been a bit lost lately, i must admit, but it is the very fault of that bugger at the last inn who told me to go right at the fork in the road a ways back. All of my forks have 3 prongs at least, and so had this one, and neither of them looked quite right, if you know what I mean. Anyway, i stumbled into your woods and promptly damned them as i tripped over a very inconspicuous log. have you ever fallen onto twigs and prickles and hard cold ground? It sounds a bit pansy I admit, but it hurts like the devil, especially when the little plants' branches snag you face and beard. And i dropped some of my notes as well! Damn them i said and say again! Ahem,Pardon. Now after I had damned your woods, i had a bit of a look around. (After all, it is only after damning a thing that you can start to feel very cozy with it). It is not a bad place I admit. Quite a nice bit of musical, whistling breeze. Perhaps a bit solemn, but overall not a bad tune. i gather that the smaller breezes are not quite serious, but infact mock the elder winds a mite. Overall, i caught a few snatches worth recording in my notes (what was left of them, at least - Da.. ahem). i came upon this little cottage here. You must be gone somewhere. I heard once that the folks in these parts are all a bit serious minded, so perhaps you're off reading books. Books, hmm, well I feel they're a bit too verbose for me sometimes, if you know what I mean. My ear is particular sensitive, but my eyes are just a bit fuzzy at times. And besides i'm a bit of a prosaic fellow, and i gather from the winds and the woods that this place is a bit keen on the poesies. Limericks are more my line. Did you here the one about Mrs. Flanagan? Er, Ahem, well, perhaps that's for another day. Anyway, i sat on your stoop or perhaps your step (you don't happen to have a sandwich or some biscuits lying around here do you?... hmm, can't quite make out - perhaps you need to wash your windows and move that little table there - a body can't see a thing through these windows)and i was joined by a fat, nosy sparrow. i know it was a sparrow as those blighters are everywhere i go, and they will always join you for lunch whether they're asked or not. Haha, tough luck for this bugger, for he won't get food off of me, for i drank, er ate my last meal at the inn, and haven't got a scrap on me. Lord, i wish i had some pipe tobacco handy, or even just a scanty pint of beer. Hmm, or a sausage.... well, you sure like that reading plenty don't you! Hmmph, I figure I'll wander around some more and see if i can find those monks i heard about. The religious are usually pretty free with the comestibles. God keep the blighters. Ah, and what time do you usually have dinner?... just wondering...
-Mr. P
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Thanks for the stogie and the sunset last night. As we sat in the growing shadows I felt that if I could just stop breathing I would see the faere emerge from among the wisps of smoke lingering on the moss and tree roots. It's enough to get one through the chaos of the week. Maybe we could go fishing next weekend?
-Jonah
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Sir, I must say I was quite disappointed to find you not at home this afternoon; visiting you was perhaps the main reason I came to the valley. I was told of you by a mutual acquaintance, and decided to take a break from the multitudinous barrages of the American entertainment industry to visit your little valley. I am staying over at St. Godric's, although so far I have found it to serve only as a place to sleep, for I find myself constantly drawn to the agrarian wonders and simple complexities of the valley. At any rate, I will be here until Saturday, and I will check back again tommorrow; perhaps we can enjoy a smoke together. –Cyrus
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Perhaps what stirred our souls so much as we dug yesterday was the fact that we are amateurs in the true sense. (Of course the notion of a Grotten Brown from the cellar after an evening of fishing didn't hurt a bit, either.)
-Jonah
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Sir, An acquaintance, David Z., told me I could find you somewhere in this valley, and I am glad I managed to stop by. While I have found I have not the stamina for the life of a Seeker, it is definitely worth stopping by from time to time to learn from those Seekers that we are acquainted with. You will probably not hear from me too much here, but rest assured that I am observing and gleaning some insight from your life in Ithilien. Thanks for sharing your insights with us.
-Daniel
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Sucking on a skinned almond I tasteits slick ridges, the point addresses the tip of my tongue with yielding persistence. Between molars, split in two, I lap at its smooth interior planes. Even before I clench around it's silky flesh I can feel the sticky mach imbedded in my bicuspids. It is sour. It is untamed and therefore not bred for ingestion. It is laced throughout with arsenic, a natural component of the undomesticated almond. Never mind my house burning across the seat. Taste the bitter on the back of the tongue, almost in the throat. Swallow the urge to heave out the poison. Stretch out my hands to warm them in the glow of red and yellow. Lie back in the snow, smell the cold, hear the stars prick my eardrums. Brother Damien
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I wandered and I wandered.I pondered and I pondered.Alas, to long I've waited, a dream passed by me squandered. I stumbled through your woods, tattered worn and uninvited. Admiring the wonderous beauty my heart and soul delighted.
G4st
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Almost forgot. Left an AleSmith Speedway Stout around back. Enjoy!
B.D.
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Here's a little summer something:
I Scream!
Crunchysticky sweet,t,t
Circled fingers in that megaphone shape
The corrugated cake cone
The smooth silk soft serve
Chinlick by lipbite shaping cream to peak
-ed mountain
The inside ribs poke at the gums
Cold freezes teeth to their roots
Throat and stomach spread
The coolwarmth out to tacky fingers
Flipflop toes
Brother Damien
p.s. I beg forgiveness for my absence on Sat. I forgot about the pre-summer chores that needed doing around the monastery. The borthers all pitched in and it is now a respectable sight. Visit soon? B.D.
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Friend,
Thank you so much for your participation in our cermonies for Brother Oswald. He was dear brother and will be dearly missed.
I have recently been offered and have accepted new duties working outside the monastery. I have been asked to help some nearby members of the valley learn to live well in their surroundings and begin to garner some of the benefits afforded us by our surroundings. This is taking up much of my time and, though I sorely miss them and will diligently seek to continue them, I must decrease the frequency of my visits. I earnestly hoped to find you here but I see a rod or two missing from your collection and assume you have gone to lasso some river cattle. May He continue to bless you as I do,
Brother Damien
p.s. I am working on a new poem. perhaps we can discuss it this weekend? I promise to curtail my forgetful habits at least long enough to meet with you.
p.p.s. I watched Wim Wender's Wings in the middle of the week and I set a fierce, warm light burning in and around me. Thank you.
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You've taken it off your reading list, but I just bought and finished "The Baron in the Trees" and really liked it. I also read "The Myth of Sisyphus" right after and definitely liked the former better. Just finished Barth's "Dogmatics in Outline" and now on to "Pensees" (it was a long business trip). Suggestions on what next?
Spencer
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What a lovely little abandoned shack. I'm tempted to kick in the door, as it is clear that whoever used to inhabit this place has since moved on - permanently, by the look of things. But these walls were built by his hands. And so they are sacred. Perhaps the Abbey on the hill can provide me shelter. Should you return, I hope to meet you.
Well, I've been to the monestary, and it appears abandoned too, strangely. I believe I shall make camp here for the night, as I'm unclear as to which direction leads safely from this valley. It it lovely - but the horizon seems forboding. I pray you return soon, I could use your help. If you do, look for my tent in the nearby woods.
Scriblerian
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The sense of unease has been identified. Over the past several nights, it has become especially clear to me. Wandering through the valley by day, I had become distracted by the sound of the river, the wind in the trees, and the warmth of the sun on my shoulders and face. But at night...At night, with fewer distractions, it becomes obvious that I am singularly alone in this valley. Not only is the builder of this cabin absent - there is no indication of any life present whatever. No howling coyotes. No birds calling. Not even an insect's chirp.
What's more alarming than even this inexplicable solitude is that wandering to the edge of the forest has proven impossible. No matter how far I walk, and for what length of hours, I end up cresting the knoll to your cottage again.
I don't know if this should be troubling of peaceful for my soul. Those feelings flit like shadows and shift like the wind. I fear.
Scriblerian
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I tried kicking in your door here, but it is securely bolted. The windows are also curiously resiliant, and the slats confound any attempt at dislocation.
I don't want to intrude. It's just that this cottage is the only sign of any kind of life having ever been here. I feel I must find my way in, but thus far cannot.
I've read the other notes on the nail many times over. Strange, most.
I continue to await some sense of purpose for my current predicament. Perhaps if there were a key hidden somewhere...
Scriblerian
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Through the windows I spy various pieces of art and literature which I long to explore. The door clearly has two uniquely-shaped keyholes. One for the bolt, the other for the latch, I suppose. I've dug around as much as I can, seeking clues as to where you might have hidden the keys.
No avail
Scriblerian
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I've returned from an extended tour of this valley. I walked for two weeks straight. I believed myself hemmed in on all sides, but have since discovered a route through the mountains. Not sure where it will lead, but my rations are gone now, and without food to hunt –
I find myself strangely fearful and filled with sorrow for this place. Somehow I know that it shall forever remain deserted of life. The way into the valley is surely only known to a few. Scarce others might stumble on it by chance. Perhaps a few wanderers have heard of it and sought it as did I. But beautiful as it is - I pray they don't find it.
This shall be my last not on your doorpost nail - I will begin my treck to the mountains before first light. Your little pencil is but a nub now anyway. I doubt that any others shall make use of it.
Farewell. Should you return, I wish you well in your journeys. Perhaps our paths will cross someday. But I doubt it.