Vaslav Nijinksy

I like to speak in rhymes because I am a rhyme myself.

Vaslav Nijinksy, Russian ballet dancer

Thus spake Nick Cave

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

Last night Nick Cave grabbed my face with both his hands, stared deep into my eyes and said (well, shouted, more like) Girl! Don't you know that the story is always the same! It's the same old recycled shit that we all live and read and sing about. Forget the plot! Character development is where the real excitement is! That's what we've got to focus our attention on! Don't you see?"  We were in a bar, having some beers, and he'd only just finished reading the short story that I'd sent in for publication earlier in the day. I don't know where the Bad Seeds were. Nick had picked me up in an old blue pick-up truck and I was wearing the red dress I bought last weekend in New York, which might actually be the most perfect dress I've ever owned.  ZZ Top was playing in the background. It was a good night and I don't remember even minding too much that he called my story shit.  

Now, Nick Cave is great, maybe even brilliant, but I've never considered him prophetic.  But all day today I walked around with a sort of glow, the kind of glow that comes from being chosen to receive a small, secret seed of understanding that, with the right tending, might grow into something valuable and good. Nick Cave visited me (with the obliging help of my subconscious and 25 mg of benadryl) with this great message; some pretty deep shit that might be worth considering after we wipe the sleep from our eyes.

further mystery

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.
And how long is that going to take?'
I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.
That could be a long time.'
I will tell you a further mystery, he said.  It may take longer. 

Wendell Berry,  Jayber Crow

pause & reflect

Recently I read an article in a scholarly journal suggesting that nurses who take a few moments each shift to pause and reflect on the deeper meaning and significance of their work generally suffer less anxiety and burnout.

Ok. Whatever you say, guy. Here it goes:

Hmmm. Stopping to pause and reflect as I look around, it appears that I somehow work in the middle of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. How lovely that my life so closely imitates art!

Hieronymus Bosch The Last Judgment, detail

sweet old fashioned words

Travail, fidelity, and solace at last.

it was the 14th of April that was ruination day

monastic wows

1. A bottle of Chimay Blanche, a golden apple, a plate of sharp, Irish cheddar. 

2. from A letter from Jesus Christ to the Soul that Really Loves Him

"One thing I have to warn you of especially is your constant tendency to grow fainthearted under the weight of your faults and oversights and an inclination almost to despair when a sudden lack of confidence reduces your firm decisions to nothing. I know those moods when you sit there utterly alone, eaten up with unhappiness, in a pure state of grief. You don’t move towards Me but desperately imagine that everything that you have ever done has been utterly lost and forgotten.

This near despair and self-pity are actually a form of pride. What you think was a state of absolute security from which you’ve fallen was really trusting too much in your own strength and ability. Profound depression and perplexity of mind often follow a loss of hope; what really ails you is that things simply haven’t happened as you expected and wanted. In fact, I don’t want you to rely on your own strength and abilities and plans, but to distrust them and to distrust yourself, and to trust me and no one and nothing else. As long as you rely on yourself you are bound to come to grief.

You still have a most important lesson to learn: Your own strength will no more help you to stand upright than dropping yourself on a broken reed. You must not despair on me. You must hope and trust in me absolutely. My mercy is infinite."

-- John of Landsberg, 16th century Carthusian Monk

The Cemetery

Step into the light poor Lazarus/Don't die alone behind the window shade/

Let me see the mark death made/I dream a highway back to you

-Gillian Welch

Bowled over lately by the unfine-ness of things, I take to wandering the cemetery in the melting light, a mug of milky tea in hand and a nip of bourbon in the pocket of my spring blue coat.

There are lots of Katherines and Catherines there. Some Katies and Kitties but few Kates. On good days I make sure to visit my favorites: Ms. Peach Wayland, The Meachem Family, Agnes Plum, Stonewall Jackson Kerns and his son, Adelbert Jackson Kearns. On bad days I consider laying down amongst the McCathran clan until the damp green ground of their plot accepts the persistent weight of my tired bones.

Today is neither good nor bad, though, so I sit on the slope of the far hill and watch the birds peck at things I can not see. An old man follows his dog along the muddy path below and when he looks up and sees me, doffs his cap with a sweeping bow.  I touched three dead bodies this week I say aloud to the birds. Three men who were alive one minute and then not alive the next. I think of everything it means to be dead and then I think of all the ways to be dead while you are alive and the way to come back to life, which requires another kind of dying, too.  In my notebook I write DEAD in all capital letters and below it

CHERRYRED UNWED INBRED SOFABED WIDESPREAD TALKINGHEAD

which makes me laugh aloud to myself. Underneath my rhyme I sketch crude outlines of headstones and fill them in with my best gothic handwriting:

KATE

who tried her best to be kind

to drunks & addicts

who pissed on the floor & her shoes

or

Here lies KATE

who believed in

at least 100 second chances

or even just

KATE

who was usually on time

but is now truly late.

I sit on the side of the hill until I hear the bells from the church down the road. Long after their carolling ends, their message floats over the acres of graves. I sit as still as I can in the near dark and listen. Let the dead bury the dead. Go back to your living.  And for heaven's sake, be thankful you were not named for a Civil War general.

The Healing of that Old Ache

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence: the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves: the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be re-united with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache."


C.S. Lewis 
The Weight of Glory

faith, hope, and jungle cats

Oh, but Kate! A tiger doesn't change his stripes! my father says.  He says this because it is mostly true and because he is my father and its his job.

And yet...my Father also says The lion shall lay down with the lamb which is also true and so beautiful a promise, and real, that I am able somehow to step outside myself and continue believing that there is nothing better than this feral, ferocious love and that it is my job to share it.

(Yes, I know that the the real verse is about wolves and leopards.)