That there is another shooting comes as no surprise, it is commonplace now, expected and there are only questions: how many this time, what kind of weapon was used, what motivated the shooter to do it.
What does it say when we define mass killing as requiring three or more dead bodies in one place.
The body of the single victim is no less dead than the mass killed but death by gun is so commonplace, we roll right by it unless we know the victim or the location holds special significance to us.
So we have ceded our humanity to the Almighty Weapon, all we have are prayers, for we are now too tired to be angry, and mass anger is our only hope.
I tell him I am thinking of becoming a rabbi, someone just like him, a man who saw so many through all manner of crises, joyous events.
He sits back in his unsteady chair, one he refuses to replace, this one finally broken in, he says with that gentle smile that melts anger, anxiety.
You would do well at it, I know, he says, and I will gladly write you a recommendation but think about this carefully, it is not the life you might imagine it to be.
But before you decide, he adds, reaching among a stack of books, read these, handing me two volumes that I did not imagine would change my life.
And somewhere, I have my own copies of Alan Watt’s “Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen” and “The Book:On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are?”, and I then knew.
The person I see each morning looks vaguely familiar, perhaps someone I once met in passing, or maybe a distant relative. But he was so much older so he was difficult to place.
I do say hello each morning but get only a nod, a gesture in response, as if the person is mute, for he smiles back so it is not a silence born of anger or displeasure.
I will of course keep trying for I know that I will one day recognize his all too familiar face, and I need to act now for he is aging quickly so my time is limited, and in any event the mirror does need cleaning.
I spent too much time looking backward, looking into the past, looking into the mirror to frame a dream history of my desires and fears. He called one morning, left a message, “Mother died, more details will follow.” A mother his by birth, mine by legal act. I should have felt stunned anger, I said quietly to myself he’s cocky, has issues, and went about momentary mourning. That is the psyche of the adoptee who was never family, always an adjunct. Later my antediluvian dreams gave way under a torrent of deoxyribonucleic acid rain. She who I imagined in the mirror took name, took shape from and old yearbook, offered a history, a family, a heritage. When I knelt at her grave she told me her story in hushed tones, or was it the breeze in the pines on the hill overlooking the Kanawha? I bid her farewell that day, placed a pebble on her headstone, stroked the cold marble and mourned an untouched mother.
They took up shovels, pickaxes, bare fingers to pry up the seedlings, the saplings just taking root and the seeds just planted still watered by the sweat and tears of those who lovingly tilled the brittle soil.
They offered nothing in return, barren ground where only anger grew, fertilized by fear, by by greed, by blindness.
Will we sit by and watch as promises wither under an ever stronger, more glaring sun, as hopes are blown away by arid winds, or will we again return to the soil, start over, our faith now perennial.
They arrive after a long flight from tyranny, from oppression from the nightmare of endless fear, from hunger, from faith denied, from the bottomless depths of poverty, scarred memories etched in their souls, hoping for an ending as much as wishing for a new beginning. They have been here, a new generation, raised on the stories, versed in the painful history, still residual anger born of love for those who fled, without the pain of experience, who can forget when it is others who now wish only to arrive to the freedom they have known since childhood
I have gone by many names, some chosen, some inherited, some thrown at me in anger, in scorn, in friendship.
Names add nothing to who I am, who I choose to be, who I am seen to be by the those who throw around names as if they were magical incantations, elixirs with great power that fall at my feet like shattered icicles of my not caring.
Reality is clearly something to be avoided to be dressed up in tattery, tied in ribbons, perfumed, yet its fetid stench is always lurking in the background waiting to pierce your nostrils in an incautious moment until you retch and bring up the bile that marks the darker moments of your life, the kind that lingers in the throat which no chocolate can erase. Reality is often ugly, so we ignore it or hide it behind masks, or offer it willingly to others, a gift in surfeit. It sneaks up on you, and sets its hook periodically, and thrashes you at will, the barb tears through new flesh, setting itself deeper, intractable. You and I are dying, as I write, as you read, an ugly thought particularly lying in bed staring into darkness, no motion or sound from your spouse, mate, paramour, friend, significant other or teddy bear, where God is too busy to respond at the moment and sleep is perched in the bleachers, held back by the usher for want of a ticket stub, content to watch the game from afar. I cast ink to paper, an offer of reality as though the divorce from the words will erase the little pains and anguishes of our ever distancing marriage, while holding vainly onto the warm and sweet, the far side of the Mobius of reality (the skunk is at once ugly and soft and caring). We write of pain, of ugliness, of anger at terrible lengths, or weave tapestries of words to cover the flawed, stained walls of our minds, like so many happy endings, requisite in the script. Basho knew only too well that truth of beauty should be captured in few syllables.
First Appeared in Chaminade Literary Review, Vols. 16-17, Fall 1995.
an old writer and his words 