POETRY

Poetry has been an important ingredient in my life and i write it
as well as read it. There aren't many rhymesters around these
days, maybe because it's hard to rhyme and sound natural at the
same time. On the other hand, have you tried memorizing some
non-rhyming poetry? It just doesn't come as easily. Perhaps
the days of memorizing poetry are over.

Here is one of my favorite poems, short and eloquent:


AH! SUN-FLOWER
William Blake

Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.


Isn't that beautiful? Uncomplex in rhyme or meter yet still
full of mystery, with archetypal images abounding.

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT WELL KNOWN PEOPLE

Donald Rumsfeld......Liberal?

Who'd a thunk it? Donald Rumsfeld was elected to Congress in
1962 at age 30 and immediately became a reformer. He fought
for civil rights legislation and sponsored the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act. He was so anti-Vietnam that Henry Kissinger used
to sarcastically flash him the peace sign. While he was chief of
the Pentagon he refused to meet with defense-industry exec-
utives on ethical grounds. His biographer says he was 'deeply
moral'.
--From a book review of Bradley Graham's biography of
Rumsfeld called By His Own Rules.

So what happened? How did a hero become such a villain? We
would prefer our heroes to be pure and our villains to be, well,
villainish, without any mitigating factors. But human beings con-
tinue to be human beings is spite of our wishes, and within every
human psyche is the potentiality for everything a human being
can do, the worst evil as well as the greatest good. Not so? Wit-
ness our present example. It would be fascinating to know about
the moment(s) Rumsfeld wandered from one side of the line to
the other.

Hope and Reason

So, a Black man is president, the Democrats have a maj-
ority in both the House and the Senate, and many pro-
gressive groups are redoubling their efforts to direct
attention to US American injustices. Full speed ahead
then? Unfortunately, no. The violently ignorant are
still being both violent and ignorant, as they have been
for the last three decades. The Culture Wars are not
over yet.

How much clearer could it be that the (for-profit) insur-
ance companies are delighted that so many of the
ignorati are backing them rather than a liberalizing gov-
ernment seeking to reduce these same companies' prices
for the benefit of all?

When i was young, political analysts used to say that
people voted their pocketbooks. No longer, and not for
a very long time---at least for the 51 or 52 percent of the
electorate who vote conservative. For the last three dec-
ades all a guileful politician has had to do to gain rabid
adherents is to praise Jesus and salute the flag. And now
they no longer need do even that much. Today all they
have to do is say "big government" and mobs with torch-
es and pitchforks are ready to do their bidding.

There is no reason involved here at all, only the torren-
tial hew and cry of the logically challenged (and the
terribly frightened).

Back in the '70s a woman wrote a book on how to be sub-
missive to your husband (The Sensuous Woman?) It was
a nation-wide best seller! Scary, but it turned out to be
the beginning of the end, thank heavens. Nowadays
young women don't have to call themselves feminists;
rights are taken for granted (altho of course the battle
isn't over yet).

Hopefully the same will prove true of present-day con-
servativism. Even tho that philosophy has proven itself
to be morally bankrupt, people still cling to it as to a
sinking ship. Perhaps it's their last hurrah; i certainly
hope so. Their mean-spiritedness has dragged our
country down in ways that we may never fully recover
from.

Hope and Reason

Hope and Reason

Hope and Reason

DOUBLE RAINBOW

I had the great good fortune the other day to see not only
a rainbow but a double rainbow, rare in this part of the
country altho common enough out West. As usual the
second (top) rainbow was paler than the first (bottom)
but almost all of it was showing save for a bit on the left-
hand side.

Rainbows are archetypal, i.e. it is easy to see them as
being charged with supernatural power. In Christian
mythology, the rainbow is God's sign that he will never
flood the Earth again.

Of course, 'archetypal' can mean different things to dif-
ferent people. As i stood at the door of the natural food
store i was working at, gazing at a rainbow over Troy
and wishing i could be watching it in nature, a man
with a cigar noticed me and said that he saw it while
driving past Troy so he drove into town and immediate-
ly placed a bet. He didn't say whether he won or not.

A rainbow is also an example of an argument about the
nature of reality. Consider:

A rainbow consists of three things: moisture in the sky,
sunlight, and someone to see it. Arguably, if there is
no one to see the rainbow, it remains merely the inter-
play between sun and moisture. In other words, if
there is no one to see the rainbow, it doesn't exist.

Sound crazy? Consider that in modern quantum (sub-
atomic) physics a quantum 'packet' is neither energy
nor matter until it is observed. Then when it is ob-
served--or more properly, measured--it can be either
energy or matter. What this says, according to my
limited understanding of the subject, is that nothing
is real until it is observed.

This has tremendous consequences in that theoretic-
ally the universe does not exist until it is 'seen' by
someone or something. Does that mean that the
world as we know it doesn't 'really' exist? I don't
know because the rules of the everyday world seem
to be different from the subatomic world and thus
i feel like Alice in Wonderland. On the other hand,
when i put my hand on my desk it feels securely
solid.

And whatever they might ultimately be or not be,
i still love and cherish rainbows.