Dormition fast, August 2; usual Dormition topics: Tom Waits (america's final prophet), Georges Rouault's well-bred ladies, and smoking.

God said don't give me your

Tin horn prayers

Don't buy roses off the street down there

Took it all and took the dirt road home

Dreaming of Jenny with the light brown hair

Night is falling like a bloody axe

Lies and rumors and the wind at my back

Hand on the wheel gravel on the road

Will the pawn shop sell me back what I sold

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I'm gonna take the sins of my brother

Down to the pond

Then again, the little demons have plagued us since the first taking of bad fruit.

There is R.S Thomas, the Welsh technophobic poet, whose work has been of some influence on me. Thomas saw things as they were, or we like to think so. He was not like the English pastoralists, he acknowledged the beastliness, the brutality of pre-industrial agrarian life. He moved to rural Wales and lived in a cottage with no modern conveniences. That is something. Certainly more than ChesterBelloc ever came close to doing. But it is still not working in a field 12 hours a day. It is not the knowing that such work is all there will be until one rests in the field. And there is the bitterness of Thomas, so often found in agrarians. He was said to be "formidable, bad-tempered, and apparently humorless."

As Wiki notes:

"The poet's son, Gwydion, a resident of Thailand, recalls his father's sermons, in which he would 'drone on' to absurd lengths about the evil of refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and other modern devices. Thomas preached that they were all part of the temptation of scrambling after gadgets rather than attending to more spiritual needs. 'It was the Machine, you see,' Gwydion explained to a biographer. 'This to a congregation that didn’t have any of these things and were longing for them.'"

His congregants probably had to do a great deal more physical labor than Thomas, hence their longing for the things that he so droned against.

Distributivism and related ideals have always been the fancies of certain upper middle class folks. Sure, Belloc worried about money, which meant he worried about keeping a nanny, housekeeper, and gardener paid while he sailed his old yacht around Europe, leaving his kids whose mother had died in the care of others. There have been some distributivist types who actually knew something of physical labor, take Eric Gill, but then again, he had incestuous relations with his daughters, was a psychopath, and had more than normal affections for the family goat, which, I suppose, is a distribution of sorts. That is not exactly the sort of hands-on distributivist idealism one hopes to see. When I read an upper middle class Christian non-incestuous writer wax on distributivist themes, there lingers one thought which I cannot banish - when in this person's life did they distribute their capital?

Birds cry warning from a hidden branch

Carving out a future with a gun and an axe

I'm way beyond the gavel and the laws of man

Still living in the palm of the grace of your hand

The worlds not easy the blind man said

Turns on nothing but money and dread

Dogs been scratching at the door all nite

Long neck birds flying out of the moon light

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

Im gonna take the sins of my brother

Down to the pond

Arturo is correct, of course. We all make decadent choices now. I choose to do what I do and that choice is not really a choice for "tradition," indeed if I were to choose the "tradition" of coppersmithing I would really only be choosing the style of the tradition of coppersmithing. To be in a real tradition is to not be conscious of it in the manner that we are now conscious of damn near everything in a postured manner. How can I not be conscious when what I do is different from other doings and all doing is bought and sold on difference? We sell our lanterns on the rhetoric of difference - hence the stylization of it all. And the hard facts do not really all add up either. I can show you the traditional soldering techniques, before an open flame, the beyond antique metal lathes, the hand breaks, the foot shears. But I could also point out the Chinese made drill presses, sanders, torches, grinders, and the like, which we must get from China to afford to operate. Not to mention that we all get to the shop in the morning in cars with parts made all over, most of us eat factory foods to stay alive, the office is air conditioned, we sell our lights by advertising in very high-end design magazines which involves professional quality electronic photographs, etc. Sure, our product is better made than others, but let's face it, this is not the village coppersmith anymore. Many of our customers want lanterns made like the village coppersmith would have made him, but that likeness is a longing for style and sentiment. There is no village anymore, and you cannot export a part of it, it only ever existed as a whole.

Smack dab in the middle of a dirty lie

The star spangled glitter of his one good eye

Everybody knows that the game was rigged

Justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig

Dark town alleys been hiding you

Long bell tolling is your waterloo

Oh baby what can you do

Does the light of god blind you

Or lead the way home for you?

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I'm gonna take the sins of my brother

Down to the pond

Of course, most of us had ancestors who wanted to get the hell out of the village. Chesterton taught that the village was the place where love was most possible because in that small context you were confronted by your neighbor constantly, and differences had to be lived with and often dealt with. He was right, and today we have the ubiquitous cliques of likeness, wherein we all seek communities of likeness, same age, same income bracket, same basic ideology, people who look more or less like me, same education background, same looking lawn, etc. But then again, Chesterton did not live in a village. The tyrant right next door, or in your own house, leaves a human being with a natural desire for flight.

Here we are in a villageless world. There are those who would blame us for this condition, and I have been one of the blamers, but most of the blamers never lived in a village. I lived in a village of sorts in my childhood. But what did I do? I got the hell out and never considered going back; and I do not know that I would have even had there been a back to go back to. All of my childhood friends who could did the same. My grandfather who I am most like of all human beings I have known did the same. It was not all the lure of bright city lights, easy money, and comfort. The village also had pathologies we were running from. The tragic sense of life may be vital for the post-lapsarian human person, but only a socio-path or a soon to be suicide embraces it.

God all mighty for righteousness sake

Humiliation of our fallen state

Written in the book of tubold Cain

A long black over coat will show no stain

Feel the heat and the burn on your back

The rip and the moan and the stretch of the rack

All my belongings in a flour sack

Will the place I come from

Take me back

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I'm gonna take the sins of my brother

Down to the pond

I didn't choose and stay in my profession because it is traditional. Not really, that is all hubris. I chose it because it is work that requires sweat, and sweat work is the only thing I have ever done that I have been sure of. That and I like to be left to tinker, which my employers generously allow me.

You have Rouault's four types: his clowns, his well-bred ladies, his judges, and his soldiers. There are also his whores but they remain hidden for the most part. It seems in our day, the clowns are all but gone from the earth - they have died, or, the most of them, have sold themselves to ideas or entertainments, and thus become well-bred ladies or judges. Who can blame them? The clown way is the hardest by far. There are many of Rouault's soldiers, and their numbers are growing. So what have I been? I fancy myself a clown but have usually been a soldier, devouring others, though at times, for the relief of contrast, I play the well-bred lady with my expensive coffee, or the judge with my intellectual airs, and it is all airs. So where do I go then? Seek refuge in your heart, poor wanderer.... Did Georges find his refuge? Poverty and silence is the natural abode of truth, he wrote. I have tried to chose poverty. It's not so nice.

They'll hang me in the morning on a scaffold yea big

To dance upon nothing to the tyborn jig

Treats you like a puppet when your under its spell

Oh the heart is heaven

But the mind is hell

Jesus of Nazareth told Mike of the weeds

I's born at this time for a reason you see

When I'm dead I"ll be dead a long time

But the wines so pleasing and so sublime

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I'm gonna take the sins of my brother

Down to the pond

I asked Jesus once what I had to do to be saved. He told me, and one should not expect a novel plan for oneself, the sell all of your possessions, give them to the poor, and come follow me admonition. I lived and worked in a homeless shelter for a year, and I learned a bit. First and foremost, that I don't really like poor people and that I don't really like being poor. There is the awkward time, if it is a time, between when you sell all you've got and the, you presume, crucifixion that follows. But in the wait, at least in the one case I am familiar with, you get hungry, and so you work an odd job in order to go get a lobster and beers. Then you wake up, hung-over, the next morning and you've got a family and a piece of shit house that leaks. Hmmm.

But you know there is no other way. You can dabble the well-bred lady bit, you could go a little longer with the judge, and while you are good at being a soldier you have traded so many ideologies in one lifetime that at a certain point everyone knows you are just another mercenary, and thus you ask yourself, before even the bigger and more appropriate questions, is the soldier/mercenary bit going to pay enough to cover the liabilities? I mean, is there ever enough pay to justify the "those who live by the sword die by the sword" truism? I doubt it.

So you do the only thing you know to do. You went to Rouault's clown school. You are not a clown, you are probably a soldier, or a well-bred lady or judge who is a reservist soldier and who has learned to dress as a clown and drive in small cars. But there are no more real clowns anymore; everyone knows this. And even if there were, nobody wants to see them, except for a few people with issues beyond the likes of which that Dr. Phil handles on TV. So when a well-bred lady dresses like a clown it is something like those weird european movies of 1950's and early 60's that we all have seen only bits and pieces of while flipping through cable, and then think, that's odd, and then hop in the car to go get Starbuck's on our way to Borders.

Was Simone Weil for me an image of life, some sort of contra-utopian utopian realist ideal, or an idol amounting to nothing more than a transfer of haute bourgeois angst? I mean, of course, that year she spent, having dropped the philosopher bit for a spell, going to Lyon to work in an auto factory under and in conditions we would now consider quite brutal. The filthy room she rented, the six day work weeks with long hours, the cruel employers and indifferent, bitter coworkers who thought her a damn fool. Was hers a sick game, a desire for authenticity which was nothing more than a soldierly act - devouring others through the stylized ability to "know" them by working and living with them for a year (at any point during which she could have quit and gone home to comfort, an option not existing for those she worked with)?

But then there is the description of her miracle. How after 9 or 10 months there, someone on the shop floor did an act of overt kindness towards her - the first such act during her tenure there. I remember her description of this act - what beauty! Am I afraid that if I let go of what compelled her to Lyon I will have no terms to describe, to know, my own experience of such miracles? If there is any meaning in this life I have been given, it is found in a few moments, at least I think they were moments, in which or through which I was given selfless and self-giving, unquestionable and unquestioning, love, wrought in mercy. I keep these in the knapsack of my life as I wander. But for them, why wander? Why be?

I so wish that Weil's going to Lyon was the right thing to do, or perhaps, I wish that it was the real thing to have done. It is OK to carry the knapsack out in the open when dressed as a clown. But in the soldier's uniform, one must hide it. There is the perverse mimesis - the dead man who kills and brags of his killings, making the world a caricature of his own death; we all know this play, which is why, I suppose, Christ had to make the world a recapitulation of His own death. One grows exhausted while cursing the world in the image of one's own hollowed skull, but the quiet undoing of such cursings is very hard.

Kissed my sweetheart by the chinaball tree

Everything I done is between God and me

Only he will judge how my time was spent

29 days of sinning and 40 to repent

The horse is steady but the horse is blind

Wicked are the branches on the tree of mankind

The roots grow upwared and the branches grow down

Its much too late to throw the dice again I've found

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I"m gonna take the sins of my brother

Down to the pond

It's hot as hell here, in Memphis, now, and this time of year working in the heat leaves me in something of a trance, and this may have had some effect on my writing. A trance of clarity or a lack thereof? Hmmm. Well, I think that when one quits smoking, unless one has replaced smoking with holiness, which I have obviously not, then a lack of clarity is to be expected. The habit of smoking, and the physical activity itself, helps with clarity. It focuses the mind in relation to the world. And with my less than stellar lungs I had two choices, or so the technocrats tell me, quit smoking or die rather soon. That was a difficult decision, as a longer unclarified life is a tedious thing to consider, but a short life with smoke is decadent, and, in my case, a cruelty to some girls I know.

Thus, not smoking, one inclines toward listening to Tom Waits (I mean, he had to give up drinking after all, good grief) while moving together unclarified words on a screen, the only gift I have to give those poor unemployed clowns who read these scraps of knapsack.

Well, I suppose I could go pray instead, but that is so complicated isn't it? It's so hard to avoid syncretism in America, all alone sent to the corner with your clown cap on, you look at the icon the Theotokos, open your mouth, and what comes out? Fanny Crosby's Pass Me Not from Baptist days.

And then in the chatter of the heart you think God, I wish I could have a smoke, which does not really count as a prayer, I think.

But then again, I was once told that with prayer there is no counting.

I'm gonna wash them

I'm gonna wash them

I'm gonna wash the sins of my Father

I'm gonna wash the sins of my Mother

I'm gonna wash the sins of my Brother

Till the water runs clear

Till the water runs clear

Till the water runs clear