--Personal preference has nothing to do with it. You are where you are.
Sure, maybe you could move. Maybe you could also stop being your mother's child.
What are you looking for, really? Will leaving help you find it? Or will it just make you always gone?
Good and bad are everywhere, yeah, out there, in here, in your human heart. Flee the bad place and try to outrun the bad in you. You can't.
Even so--am I just preaching atrophy? If the house goes corrupt, will you know to escape? And how?
Until then--you can't know all there is to know about this one piece of soil in a lifetime of study. So why abandon it?
"...In biblical scholarship and its associated disciplines one finds (with a few wonderful exceptions) little sense of excitement. On the one hand, one encounters the work of fundamentalist Protestants, orthodox Jews, and old-fashioned Catholics, each of whose work is characterized for the most part by compulsive-obsessive behavior. Of course this is a generalization, but I have read tons of the stuff. It consists mostly of asking the same old questions, in slightly new ways, so that the answers turn out to be the good old conclusions. This scholarship, if such it is, has the virtue of keeping its engages from thinking about big issues. Much of it reminds me of the weekend morning television cartoons for children, where one or another cartoon animal runs off the edge of a cliff and manages to keep running on thin air, always provided he does not give in to temptation and look down. There is, in the literature I am describing, a real terror: a fear of looking down, of having received views checked against external reality.
"On the other hand, Christian 'liberal' scholarship--for the most part done by Protestants, but increasingly by Catholics as well--often has a lost, bewildered and gloomy quality to it. Later I shall discuss the famous 'Jesus Seminar' which typifies much of liberal Protestant and Catholic thought. Taken collectively, reading the publications of the Jesus Seminar is like stepping into a church basement where the pastor is conducting a support group for guys whose partners have dumped them."
--from Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, Donald Harman Akenson
[Inspired by, but not dependent upon, actual conversation.]
"If you weren't a woman
but were just as you are
just exactly as you are
just not a woman--
with your same sharp mind
your fearless eyes
your laughing, loyal soul--
I'd never let go.
If you weren't a woman
I'd love you."
excerpt from an article about littlesteven.com:
Go and read, absolutely read, all the essays on all the albums. Little Steven wrote them specifically for the site. He reports on an epiphany he had, just before he started his solo career, when a "German wise-ass" accused him of putting missiles in his country. At first he tried to distance himself from his country's foreign policies, but then, he says, "I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I was an American citizen and maybe some responsibilities went with that. So okay I'm putting missiles in this guy's country and I start reading books to see what else I've been doing since World War II." But Little Steven wasn't content with reading damning essays about US foreign policy. Before he wrote his songs, he went out and met those who were affected. His essays--compelling reading, every one--talk about crossing from West to East Germany ("It was the first time I ever missed advertising on billboards. There was no color."), negotiating for his life with South African revolutionaries ("The topic of conversation for the first hour was whether or not they should let me live."), and meeting Nicaraguan President Ortega's wife ("After you spend a little time in politics you learn where the power is and try to get to it as quickly as possible. In politics, as in life, the wife is usually a good place to start.")
full article at Tribal Soul Kitchen.
With you I've watched the stars fall.
Ten years ago we stood in your backyard
Giddy with new dark lateness--
We being good girls
More often early to bed.
The night was intoxication enough,
The night, its shower of stars,
Our hopes and secrets and school laughter.
With you I've watched the moon turn red.
"Goofballs" you called us last night
As we headed outdoors with handpainted wineglasses--
Roses and rosebuds--
Filled with white grape juice
(The night being intoxication enough).
We laughed that we knew ourselves
And searched the sky for the moon.
Clouds veiled it, unveiled it, hid it again.
We sat on your neighbor's front step.
"The dragon eats the moon in Vietnam."
You spoke of the serpent biting its tail,
How one day
You might imprint it on your skin.
I watched you shiver.
I brought a towel from my car
And draped it over your shoulders.
We watched the moon.
And now I've seen
Signs the world must end
And I've seen these signs with you.
I will touch my glass to yours
And toast the serpent feeding on itself
Who says more stars must fall
And the moon will pull away
From the hunger of those jaws.
Let us toast the beginning times.
Listen. It happened. I remember it.
I'm trying to convince us both. It hardly seems real anymore, but I couldn't have made it up. I can still feel the wings fanning my skin.
I was too young for a job, or between jobs, maybe. Or was it during the school year? I was in high school at the time. Maybe I was going out there after school, out to the backyard in late afternoon early evening, always around the same time, to stand at the corner of the house. I would be between the raspberry bushes and the air conditioner, just under a pattern on the bricks of the house that made me think of a sword. I'd stand and wait.
The butterfly would be there already, resting near the sword on the house or flying round the corner of the balcony.
He was a Red Admiral. His marking was like the inverse of a monarch, mostly black with spots of gold and white at the wing tips. Monarchs haunted the dark hallway between the houses where the live-forevers grew. They were skittish, vaulting from the pink star-shaped flowers at anyone's approach. Red Admirals seemed friendly by comparison, tame and companionable.
The first time--it must have been an accident. Did I startle him into flight, did he circle back as if curious? Was he testing me, could I be trusted?
I presented myself as another object in the landscape, a pillar on the lawn he'd never seen before. The butterfly went round and round, closer each time, touched my shoulder, flew off.
I knew the secret. I just had to stand still.
Day after day, I went back. My reward for patience would be to serve as a perch for some moments or minutes and to be slowly fanned by black and gold wings. I would hold my arm out, palm up, a statue-allegory on the act of offering. He rarely settled where I wanted him to.
A tiny touch, then gone. He would sense a bird shadow and take off in pursuit. He careened after whatever flew by. I finally understood what he was looking for when he chased the shadow that happened to be made by another butterfly. He flew up, they danced together, a sparrow shot past. This threw a shadow he could not resist, so he abandoned the dance to chase an impossible dream. The other butterfly dropped down to mope on me. I tried to be there for her even if I didn't know what to say. Eventually she flew away too.
I would wait, afternoon after afternoon, for either of them to return. Sometimes they would; mostly they wouldn't.
This is what I did for I don't know how long--until other things caught my interest, I suppose. But in a way I am out there even now, just barely feeling the weight as he touches my arm, just barely feeling the air move when the wings fan. Standing still, hoping the touch will come, powerless to grab tight, clutch or keep.
Go here.
It will explain everything.
I am not Yeats.
If it's a clunky line,
It's my clunky line
And I do not like to change it.
Better a poem honestly bad
Than untrue but pretty.