Always ugly--mission impossible, actually.
Pray for me
I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.
The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the
For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both
In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.
Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to
For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.
(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)
The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville
"Miłosz's 1953 book, The Captive Mind, is a study about how intellectuals behave under a repressive regime. Miłosz observed that those who became dissidents were not necessarily those with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs; the mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can take only so much."
ReplyDeleteHow do intellectuals behave under not so repressive regime?My reason and ratios and rationalization serves my bias/belief mindset which may dictate to the stomach--how much it can take IT itself (mind-set) is impregnable, salved and sealed./
ReplyDeleteYou have to be in hot water to be clean. There was a coaster in the store with an Emily Dickinson quote: the wounded hart leaps the highest. Or deer. I am thinking of the Psalm: as the deer pants for the water, so my soul, o Lord, longs for you. ( I have sung this in a beautiful Buxtehude cantata.) (Wie der Hirsch schreiet...). How do we think without trouble? Not so well. Man seems to deal with nothing so poorly as with good days. I know my theology so well only because I cannot live up to my own standards.
ReplyDeleteOr rather, I know my Lord because he has mercy on the unlovable. Our stomachs churn at lack of mercy.
ReplyDeleteThorn in the side. Pea under the mattresses. Always unease and distress. Existential . Comes with the territory of being alive and conscious. Original spin.
ReplyDeleteLuther said he thought it would be best to be somewhere in the middle, not too poor to despair and not too rich to be too comfortable or insolent. As to myself I would love to be comfortable but when I am very comfortable, I get selfish and bored.
ReplyDeleteI'm always uncomfortable--but selfish too. Wretch-like-me. Why I never could relate to Carl and his Walk on Water impenetrability and Have-a-good-Day patronizing generosity. Hiss. .
ReplyDeleteOne can be more or less selfish.
ReplyDeleteI'm more comfortable admitting MORE than less--another reason why I don't get along with a "Carl." grrrrr
ReplyDeleteI do want to serve. Makes me get up in the morning.
ReplyDeleteMe too. Love game match
ReplyDeleteHaha.
ReplyDeleteService :Thoreau said he wouldn't walks across the stree to save the world and yet is solitary preoccupations indirectly had great impact on the work of Gandhi and MLKing.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-Henry-Tale-Walden/dp/0763618284/ref=sr_1_25?ie=UTF8&qid=1400706491&sr=8-25&keywords=thoreau+henry%2C+children
ReplyDeleteFound this in the local library children's section the other day. There are many kinds of service.
"Stunning illustrations distinguish this lively fictional portrait of Henry David Thoreau, a man whose simple yet extraordinary vision made history — and reminded us that "heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
ReplyDeleteThinking about the tension between lively fictional account and biography.
ReplyDeleteSo what are your thinking-about thoughts about this important distinction?
ReplyDeleteDifference between hagiography, slander, gossip, prejudice and fact. Could be shabby and shoddy. But I am headed for the Rockies. I might have to thank Henry for the parks--or maybe not. Nevertheless, I will raise a glass to him while there.
ReplyDeleteYou might enjoy Civil Disobediendce if not Walden (both on line) "They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head."
ReplyDeleteI choose my prophets carefully. A prejudice.
ReplyDeleteOf course. Do you imagine there are them who don't? I've been going back & forth with your hero Bror this morning after he made fun of some Baptists who invited him to their bible study (him,new on the block in New Mexico) He chooses his prophets carefully and don't mind denigrating others (Abomination he says--about Calvinists) So it goes. As you say: a prejudice. And prickly
ReplyDeleteHe reminds you of you, don't he.
ReplyDeletePeas in the pod, possibly.
ReplyDeleteI reckon.
ReplyDelete