Sentient Life is a constant protest...

Sentient life is a constant protest against the borders of its own existence. Want and need beyond the point of superfluity are the shrill, indistinguishable expressions of its insatiable, throbbing urge to control and expand.

All of that misery, every bit of my misery and yours, too, is simultaneously a wildly thrilled shout of glee: I AM!

From birth to death - at least - every complaint, every demand, every urge, however faint, is simultaneously a roaring, albeit masked, song of jubilation and self-aggrandizement.

Sex versus Gender

I enjoy sex! I have a gender. Why oh why am I repeatedly asked about Sex by various online surveys -- including one recently received from the Society for Technical Communication (to which I belong) -- that really want to know my Gender?


It seems so unfair. I would dearly love to report my sexual preferences, interests, opinions and objections. (Sex with animals, for example, just strikes me as icky.)  I could even provide testimonials from former girlfriends and perhaps my wife. But instead, I'm limited to selecting a radio button labeled Female or for Male.


Darn. Whatever happened to truth, clarity and a decent respect for the subtleties of English? Garrison Keillor, where have all the English majors gone?

 Westeminster Abbey, London, England, photographed in November, 2009, is perhaps one of the most powerful testaments of one nation's appreciation for all of its citizens, regardless of social class or life mission,  that I have encountered.

 Within those walls, England honors citizens of every stripe whose lives and actions have been deemed a contribution to the well-being of the nation. Writers, scientists, warriors, Kings and Queeens, dancers and many more besides are represented in word and effigy within a vast, compelling, and very animated space.

BUILDING BABEL A Prose Poem for Performance

Production Note

Spotlights shift from scene to scene, person to person and element to element across artwork, with each change of voice. The object here is to create a cast of actors frozen in time, yet highly animated. The set itself recreates the mythic city of Babel, presented in modern dress.

The author intends that the story, not the personality of individual participants, predominate in the audience’s mind. It must seem as if any person, living or dead, could be or could have been a citizen of Babel.


MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

URGENT ADVISORY MESSAGE. The Surrogate Jester has decided that thinking may be injurious to your mental health. In laboratory tests, thinking has been shown to cause cancer of the stamen in common houseplants.

CHORUS:

PLEASE READ DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE OPENING.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

Warning. Consult your physician, your doctor, your pediatrician, your obstetrician, your gynecologist, your cardiologist. Consult your mistress, inamorata, hetaera, courtesan. Consult your gigolo. Consult your dictionary. Consult your thesaurus. Consult your astrologer, channel, your TV and consumer guide. Consult. Consult. Consult before taking this journey, trip, jaunt, stroll, sashay, voyage.

In particular, individuals who have contracted or have considered pedagogy, pederasty, depilation, superfluity, anorexia too-mucha, advertising and enlightenment or anyone under medical care for any other condition including intelligence, ignorance, superannuation or radioactivity, the very elderly, growing children, adolescents, centaurs, polygamous or polyandrous hedonists, stoics, hermaphrodites, artists, idiots, misanthropes, anthropoids, salesmen, mannequins, merchants, lepers, lawyers, freaks, heretics, the hirsute, ursine and otherwise should. Very definitely should. Should not listen. Should listen.


CHORUS:

Cha cha cha.

VOICE ONE:

Any of the above can advise you whether you have of the above conditions or if for any reason you do have any of the above conditions how you, too, can in three easy lessons. No obligation, No money down. No money up. Ninety days and out.


CHORUS:

Listen.

Voice Two:

Purchase the perfectly patronizing partner of your dreams. Guaranteed to provide gourmet entertainment suitable for the most sanctimonious, superficial, sugar coated and excruciatingly vapid cerebellum, served sunny side up. Call today: that’s 1-800-WHO R YOU!

CHORUS:

THE WHOLE EATH WAS OF ONE LANGUAGE AND ONE SPEECH AND IT CAME TO PASS, AS THEY JOURNEYED EAST THAT THEY FOUND A PLAIN IN THE LAND OF SHINAR: AND THEY DWELT THERE.

Voice Three:

[Scream] Here they come!

CHORUS:

[Voices in unison imitate falling bomb]

Voice Four:

Get it together, would you?

Voice Three:

[Scream] Here they come!

CHORUS:

[Sings portion of “Jingle Bells”]



Voice Four:

Cut! Cut. Take it from the bottom.

Voice Three:

[Scream] Here they come!

CHORUS:

[Imitates race cars]


Voice Four:

Goddamit. Let’s go!

CHORUS:

[Sings portion of “Swing low sweet chariot”]

Voice Two:

Warmer, definitely warmer.

Voice Five:

Obal, Sheba, is that you? Obal?
Hey, Obal. Uzal, Diklah! Are you coming? Thank God you’re here!



CHORUS:

AND THEY SAID TO ONE ANOTHER: COME LET US MAKE BRICK AND BURN THEM THOROUGHLY.

Voice Five:

To build a universe, begin with brick.

A brick. A universe.

A rectangle. Erect tangle.

A three-dimensional erect tangle. Clean and modest.

An austere succession of thickless planes, piled

So neatly and precisely that only the brick appears.

A space filled with oblique angles, mischanced tetrahedrons and

Immaculate molecules joined as precisely as only a master mason can.

There is a universe in a brick.


CHORUS:

Build, man, build. Build, lady, build.

Gotta build. Wanna build. Have to build.

Now!


Voice Six:


Enter Babel. Entrance yourself. Look! Everywhere you look: See! Floating world,

sliding on skids greased with slick black, all natural harmonic motion.


CHORUS:


Where? Here?

Voice Six:

Here! Hidden here. Oldenburg missed a bet when he overlooked the brick.

It’s a minute monument – a mini-monolith of magnificence – deathless, towering, terrible
brick.


CHORUS:

Brick.

Voice Six:

How old is brick? Who knows? Who invented brick? No one knows. Where did it come from? What accident of fate or incredible genius produced this microprocessor of history. This horizon-humiliating edifice.


CHORUS:

Brick.

Voice Six:

Spears are gone. Bows and arrows are archaic. The Gutenberg is a museum piece. The Model T is just a letter on a list, a faded photograph in cavernous memory. Genghis Khan could be toothpaste… Jewish toothpaste. The telegraph, the steamboat, radio tubes, Sputnik, even Little Boy… all gone, antiquated.

CHORUS:

But the brick…

Voice Seven:

The brick remains.

Supercharged sand and mud, water and heat,

Tingle-tangle with converted energy.

Brick is beautiful.


CHORUS:

AND THEY HAD BRICK FOR STONE, AND SLIME HAD THEY FOR MORTAR.


Voice Five:

Consider your bricks. Your building blocks. The bubbles of plasm that build your frame. How many times have your cells, the little ones in your arms, the tiny ones in your hair, and the teeny-weeny ones in your blood, your skin, your veins, coursed the cycle of life. Is it possible that your soul transmigrates? Your bricks do.

CHORUS:

You do. Who do? We do! You do.

Voice Eight:

Imagine your body as a body of water. Or a flower.

CHORUS:

(Falsetto) A flower!

Voice Eight:

Or urine.

CHORUS:

Oh, shit.

CHORUS:

Brick.

Voice Nine:

Pulsatingly alive. The particles of life that we name shit, the drips and drops of apparently deceased and desisting. We are!

CHORUS:

I am.

Voice Nine:

Am was. Am will.

CHORUS:

And will be when I no longer am.

Voice Ten:

Am forever am. Am ubiquitous am.

Voice Nine:

Locked in convoluted chains of concatenating whimsy,
the evolutionary essence is not lost. It lusts
for patterns, rejects, depletes,
reveals and reclaims.

Voice Ten:

Separates.

CHORUS:

Impales and fecundates.

Voice Eleven:

Oh, we are alive! Whose breasts, whose feet might those have been upon which you sit? Can you deny the orbit of your cells, or identify them once they’ve gone?

Voice Twelve:

Rise and greet the atom of life, the molecules that wrench flesh and desire from effluvium. Dear, poor discrete essences locked in sublime self-consciousness… concerned that spume and lick of time may float you into phosphorescent slime, glorious...

Voice Eleven:

Glorious liquid now, that may swell and surge but cannot be compressed except by hands in which we are mere mortar.

Voice Twelve:

Kinship, consanguinity, are not the delicious knots that you suppose.
Not of blood that confounds and contains, discriminates and separates. Not flesh of mauve or hair of madder, not thick, fuzzy thighs nor dappled cheeks nor kinked and cursive hair, Semitic scimitar noses, nor graceful languages of limpid recessive X’s or Y’s.

Voice Eight:

Planted like seeds, we are saplings fed upon the fertile soil of cellular architecture. We are all cities: Babels built of eons, each cell the consequence of other cells. Measure your molecules and ask them their origin.

CHORUS:

They will not lie.

Voice Nine:

The strands of hair that were lost from the head of hoary wisdom have tied our whirling senses to the crucible of here and how and why.

Voice Thirteen:

(As if preaching) Brothers and Sisters! We are the brick. We are the mortar. What shall not become of us if we are willing! Can you hold the hand of your neighbor? Can you?

CHORUS:

Hallelujah!

Voice Thirteen:

Are you bold to build a rocket, to excrete yourself into the suburbs of the local solar system? Then make bold to join yourself to your neighbor, brick.

CHORUS:

Hallelujah!

Voice Thirteen:

Combine and build. Congress and burgeon. Coalesce and perceive. Incorporate and waltz to consciousness.

CHORUS:

(Strong) Hallelujah!

CHORUS:

AND THEY SAID COME LET US BUILD US A CITY AND A TOWER WITH ITS TOP IN HEAVEN. AND LET US MAKE US A NAME LEST WE BE SCATTERED UPON THE FACE OF THE WHOLE EARTH.

Voice Ten:

Imagine a tower so tall, that air itself flees from its heights. A spear of hubris, planted in the heart of Terra, endlessly rising. An arrow aimed at infinity. Or a spire.

Voice Eight:

What work do you do?

CHORUS:

Build.

Voice Nine:

Whose work do you do?

CHORUS:

Ours.

Voice Ten:

What work must be done?

CHORUS:

Build.

Voice Eleven:

When do we start?

CHORUS:

Now.

Voice Twelve:

When will it end?

CHORUS:

Soon.

Voice Thirteen:

Where do I start?

CHORUS:

Here.

Voice Fourteen:

What do I do?

CHORUS:

Build.

Voice Eight:

When is the end?

Voice Nine:

What’s the point?

Voice Ten:

Why do I bother?

CHORUS:

Build!

Voice Eleven:

In the plenum of permutation, there is only a single choice.

CHORUS:

Build.

CHORUS:

AND THE LORD CAME DOWN TO SEE THE CITY AND THE TOWER, WHICH THE CHILDREN OF MEN BUILDED.

CHORUS:

[Country sounds: wind, birdcalls, tractors, buzz of fat flies. Falling water.
Train in the distance. Bell rings. Now street sounds. People sounds.
Car sounds. People sounds, vast multitudes.]

Voice Two:

Taxi! Taxi!

CHORUS:

[Honking. Rushing, murmuring waves of flesh. Screech of wheels. Pounding footsteps.]

Voice Three:

Come on. Get in. Get in. You want me to get a ticket already?

CHORUS:

[Door closing: Sharp handclap]

Voice Three:

Ok, where you goin’?

Voice Four:

To Babel.

Voice Three:

Wasamater. You want to pull my leg or something. Lady, I ain’t got time for foolishness. I got a living to earn. I lived here all my life and I ain’t never heard of Babel.

Voice Four:

Well, actually, I came to see a tower…

Voice Three:

Oh, The Towers. Sure, can do. For a moment, I thought. Never mind. In this business, let me tell ya, you meet all kinds. I had this guy, a Holy Roller or sumthing. Jus’ the other day. Wanted to see the Empire State Building. Which is fine wit me. So I takes him down to the place. Traffic’s lousy, you know.
So he says to me… Hey, lady, you listenin’ ?

Voice Four:

Yes.

Voice Three:

Says to me, as he gets out. “Thanks, this is the end.” Yeah, I know that, I says. I know. That’ll be $7.85. I mean, can you believe it? Who’s he to tell me—I’m the cabby, right? Hey lady, you listenin’?

Voice Four:

Yes.

Voice Three:

So anyway, he says to me…

CHORUS:

[Screech of brakes, horn]

Voice Three:

Stupid son of a mick! Sorry. That bastard’s crazy. You see that! You see that! I got to find another racket. So where was I? Oh yeah, so he says to me, have I been saved? I tell him. I wasn’t never lost. I was born here. This is my city.

Anyway, he says, God loves me. And he can tell I’m a beautiful person. Can you believe this? Here? God loves me? Your soul shines like a beacon, he says.

So I says, $7.85 or I call the cops.
God loves you, he says.
Yeah, I know, I says. But I’m going to kick your goddamn ass before I let you get away with this. Cough up the dough. Then, get this. Hey lady..

Voice Four:

Yes.

Voice Three:

He gives me 20 bucks and a code, like. Like a password. Had ‘em in the war. He says: Don’t forget. ‘It starts wit you. It starts wit you.’ And, lady you know what?

Voice Three:

Yes.

Voice Four:

That’s it. Just walked away. Just like that. Didn’t even ask for change. Jesus, it takes all types. You know?

Voice Three:

Yes.

CHORUS:

AND THE LORD SAID: BEHOLD, THEY ARE ONE PEOPLE, AND THEY HAVE ALL ONE LANGUAGE; AND THIS IS WHAT THEY BEGIN TO DO; NOW NOTHING WILL BE WITHHOLDEN FROM THEM, WHICH THEY PROPOSE TO DO.

Voice Seven:

Oh God, we’ve been together forever.

Voice Eight:

Really?

Voice Nine:

Sometimes it seems that way, too.

Voice Seven:

You know, you’re not the only carbon isotope on the block. You can be replaced.

Voice Nine:

Splitting now would really give you a charge, wouldn’t it?

Voice Eight:

Ah, say, I was wondering, where were you when it all began.

Voice Nine:

I forget.

Voice Seven:

Ain’t that the truth.

Voice Nine:

Listen here, you..

Voice Eight:

You two haven’t always been a thing, I take it.

Voice Seven:

My first affair was with a dreamy hydrocarbon.

Voice Eight:

What happened?

Voice Seven:

Well, hydrocarbons are so unstable, you know.

Voice Nine:

Face it, he just couldn’t keep it together.

Voice Eight:

So it was a short-lived affair?

Voice Nine:

You mean explosive?

Voice Seven:
It was fun while it lasted.

Voice Ten:

Uh, is this a restricted script or can anyone participate?

Voice Nine:

By all means. I’ve heard this story a zillion times.

Voice Seven:

You know the problem with carbon? It’s common. Simply common!

______________________________________________________________________
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
[VOICES GRADUALLY OVERLAP, GROWING INTO CACOPHONY OF COMPETTING VOICES]______________________________________________________________________

Voice Ten:

Oh, fine. Well, I guess my finest hour was Jericho.

Voice Eight:

Jericho?

Voice Ten:

You know: “And the walls came tumbling down.”

Voice Eight:

Sounds familiar.

Voice Ten:

It was great. Like a huge party, only it was a war you see. You got all these natives hiding behind great brick walls. And you got these others, these He-brews, and they want in. But they can’t get in, cause the gates are closed.

Voice Eleven:

Sounds like they coulda used a little saltpeter.

Voice Twelve:

Peter? Did someone say Peter? I knew a Peter.

Voice Eleven:

Saltpeter. Leadhead.

Voice Ten:

So anyway, the invaders, they started marching around the city, blowing their horns and beating drums.

Voice Thirteen:

I used to be a part of a drum.

Voice Eleven:

Saltpeter. Like in explosives. Saltpeter: Like in Potassium nitrate.

Voice Twelve:

Actually, I’ve known of a couple of them that were quite likeable.

Voice Ten:

It sorta sounded like modern jazz. Percussive. Real percussive.

Voice Fourteen:

Now, man, what do you know about modern jazz? Modern jazz, that’s a misnomer right there. Ain’t no such thing. They’ve just going back to the roots of jazz. Now I know cause I was there. Now don’t ask me where I was. Just take my word for it, I was there.


Voice Fifteen:

He was there all right. He was part of the left toenail of the jackass they had for dinner at the coronation party for some old tribal chief.

Voice Sixteen:

Now I was a chief.

Voice Two:

Wrong continent, chief. Wrong era, too.

Voice Ten:

So anyway, I heard this sound, an’ I started feeling real nervous. Shaky all over. Couldn’t control myself.

Voice Six: (Shouting)

I tell you, gotta watch out for that kinda music. No wonder everybody seems to be falling apart. They play that stuff on the radio all over the world!

Cacophony of Voices:

Ever been to Venus?

I spent a wonderful decade as part of a chlorophyll molecule.

Don’t touch me, I’m deadly.

Free hydrogen now. Free hydrogen now!

Is an arbitrary decision based on the precipitation of ionic particulate matter in a supersaturated solution…

How’d you like to establish an organic bond, baby?

(Pause for Silence)

CHORUS:

Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. Nothing is lost. Only identities are altered.

Voice Ten:

To protect the innocent, I suppose.

CHORUS:

Were you there, at Babel?

Voice Ten:

Yes. I was at Babel.

Voice Four:

Tell us about Babel.


Voice Ten:

It was before the burning bush.
And before the Sermon on the Mount.

CHORUS: (Quietly)

Yes!

Voice Ten:

Cheops was only a distant cousin.
Ankor but a toadstool next to Babel.

CHORUS: (Louder)

Yes!

Voice Ten:

It rose like a sequoia among branches.
Many bodies, many minds, a single purpose.
A merging multitude borne by vision.

CHORUS: (Strong)

YES!

Voice Ten:

The bricks went up. Grew up. From hand to hand. Every hand a link, a convergence of flesh. Father to son to daughter to mother to son to father it grew—no—germinated and leapt from their will: a blossom of will to the pulse of possibility.

Voice Five:

We were as fingers of a hand.

Voice Seven:

The hands of lovers.

Voice Six:

It was like climbing a mountain.

Voice Eight:

That we piled ahead of us.

Voice Nine:

A staircase, rising like a song...

Voice Ten:

From the throats of angels.

Voice Twelve:

Rising, rippling, rushing up, up, up. Plunging headlong into nowhere that was suddenly somewhere no one else had ever been before.

CHORUS:

COME LET US GO DOWN, AND THERE CONFOUND THEIR LANGUAGE, THAT THEY MAY NOT UNDERSTAND ANOTHER’S SPEECH.

(Voices Shouting Simultaneously)

English 397 million
Mandarin 726 million
Spanish 258 million
Great Russian 274 million
Hindi 254 million
Arabic 155 million
Japanese 119 million
Urdu 72 million
Telugu 17 million
Marathi 4 million
Hausa 428 million
Fang Bulu 5.3 million
Swedish 12 million
Bemba 4 million
Tagalong 2.4 million
Danish 6 million
Rundi 45 million
Punjabi 71 million
Nyanja 7 million
Zulu 34 million
Aymara 8.3 million
Korean 56 million
Hungarian 48 million
Lloko 31 million
Tulu 12 million
Italian 48 million
Amharic 57 million
Luri 82 million
Khmer 13 million
Catalan 6 million
German 90 million
Bhili 23 million
Shan 125 million
Thai 34 million
Hebrew 14 million
Dutch 8 million
Wu 18 million
Portuguese 28 million
Ibo 67 million
French 247 million
Polish 54 million
Lao 32 million
Javanese 4 million


CHORUS: [Pause for a moment of silence]

SO THE LORD SCATTERED THEM ABROAD FROM THENCE UPON THE FACE OF ALL THE EARTH: AND THEY LEFT OFF TO BUILD THE CITY.

Voice One:

Hey, man, what you building? It look like a wall.

Voice Two:

I’m tending my garden, brother. Hand me a brick.

Voice Three:

If that’s a garden, I’m a beach!

Voice Two:

Thank you kindly, brother. You’re a beach and I’m a starfish. If you’d be so kind, hand me a brick.

Voice One:

I just gave you a brick and you didn’t hardly do nothing with it but lay it in that mess of bricks you building to hold up the sky.

Voice Two:

You have it all wrong, my friend. This is a garden. Its roots are the earth and its flowers are stars. This is the stem that binds them.

Voice Four:

Mister, you got it all wrong. Bricks like these meant to hit folks upside the head with.

Voice Five:

Or heave.

Voice Two:

Just hand me a brick, friend. Or put it down. This is my garden and I know how it grows.

Voice Three:

Tell you what, FRIEND. This is what me and my seed think about you and your F’n garden.


CHORUS: (Sound Effects)

[ A. ] Crashing of breaking window

[ B. ] Alarm ringing.

Voice Three:

See you round, old man.

Voice Two:

God damned son of a bitch! This—is—your—garden—too!

CHORUS:

THEREFORE WAS THE NAME OF IT CALLED BABEL: BECAUSE THE LORD DID THERE CONFOUND THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE EARTH: AND FROM THENCE DID THE LORD SCATTER THEM ABROAD UPON THE FACE OF ALL THE EARTH.

______________________________________________________________________
AUTHOR’S NOTE:

AT THIS POINT THE LIGHTS GO DOWN. AN APPRECIABLE PAUSE DEVELOPS. WHEN THE AUDIENCE BEGINS TO BECOME RESTLESS, THE NEXT VOICE PIPES UP. ______________________________________________________________________



MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

Excuse me. Excuse me! Ladies and gentlemen. Guests, hosts, friends, neighbors, critics, champions and children. It has come to our attention that the universe is apparently a closed system.

CHORUS

HAND ME A BRICK.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

Just as the earth, until recently, appeared to be a closed system.

CHORUS:

HAND ME A BRICK.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

And the continents before that.

CHORUS:

HAND ME A BRICK.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

And the voice of being spoke from beneath a miter.

CHORUS:

HAND ME A BRICK.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

Chased or traced back to the birth of the son of a carpenter, a flower of the stem of David.

CHORUS:

HAND ME A BRICK.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES:

Whose father built a Temple and whose ancestors conceived a story.

CHORUS:

HAND ME A BRICK.

Voice Twelve:

A chapter of which…

CHORUS

HAND ME A BRICK.

Voice Thirteen:

Recalls the construction of a tower.

CHORUS:

HAND ME A BRICK.

ALL VOICES:

BABEL. Whose destruction is long since myth and metaphor. Still, there are bricks…

Voice Fourteen:

And gardeners.

Voice One:

Musicians.

Voice Two:

Merchants.

Voice Three:

Geeks

Voice Four:

Freaks.

Voice Five:

Kikes.

Voice Six:

Dikes.

Voice Seven:

Gooks.

Voice Eight:

Cooks.

Voice Nine:

Litigators.

Voice Ten:

Mitagators.

Voice Eleven:

Honkies.

Voice Twelve:

Heretics.

CHORUS:

All bricks in the monument built in memory of a mystery peopled and perpetuated by humble members of the high order of Homo Sap.

Voice Fifteen:

Masons.

Voice One:

Translators.


Voice Two:

And stories to recount.

CHORUS

HAND ME A BRICK.


THE END


By Glenn Scott Michaels
706 West Palm Lane
Phoenix, AZ 85007
Copyright 2008

On the day after Christmas, even Jews are exhausted

On the day after Christmas, even Jews are exhausted. So little carpet, so much mopping!

Pre (my) pubescence, “mop-top” was a popular noun used by people with a professional interest in sterile prose to identify a recently discovered species of musician, indigenous to England, then coming into favor with those professionals’ sterilized children. Why were they called mop-tops? Perhaps because they cleaned up, financially speaking.

In my middle age, and especially during the holidays, a mop-top is a far more prosaic item used to clean floors soiled by relatives’ muddy shoes, misplaced hors d’oeuvres, paw prints, wily dust monsters, wayward ribbons, bows and wrapping paper, artificial pine needles shed by petroleum based pine trees and sundry food items that had attempted to escape from panting pots, hot plates and kitchen counters, only to discover that the laws of Toy Story do not apply to vegetables or condiments, and who, when captured away from any nutritional battleground, are considered to be and are treated as enemy combatants.

In the pre- and post-Christmas arena that is otherwise the dwelling my wife kindly allows me to share, I am the mop-top mercenary. In this battleground, there are frequently sharp engagements with such rogue elements as hard-boiled carrots, skittish silverware, bottle tops gone AWOL and unidentifiable sticky stuff. Officially, I am in charge of all mopping up operations. But I also bag and carry out the trash and recyclables.

Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Limpia, Limpia, Limpia*, I am not afraid of being replaced right away. My wife is too busy cooking. My mop and soapy water filled bucket comfort me.

*From the Spanish infinitive verb: Limpiar. Trans: To clean.
Imperative verb (command form): Limpia. Trans: Clean!

It’s a tough job, but my wife says I have to do it. She says we can’t afford extra help. Plus her mother is much more useful in the kitchen than I am. Especially with a knife. Personally, I think that she wants to keep me out of her hair but underfoot.

When I was young, my parents warned me again and again that marrying someone who shared our religious affiliations would ultimately make marriage easier (I think they meant more tolerable). Although they were both big league sales pros, I wasn’t buying. They would have had an easier time selling unbreakable nylon rope to the guy wearing the hood and handcuffs under a gallows-tree.

At the time, being young, naïve and analytical, I didn’t see how any married life could be worse than what I observed six and a half out of every seven days for most of my short life. Still, they insisted that it was important to have something in common.

By “something,” they meant religion. Our religion, as I understood it, consisted of membership in the ranks of the bourgeoisie and two obligatory family outings to Temple Emanuel each year.

As it happens, I was born in America. But like most children of that period and class, I found that my constitutional rights were few while my obligations were virtually unlimited. Consequently, I became a permanent member of the loyal opposition at an early age. In retrospect, it seems natural and appropriate that the woman that I eventually fell in love with and married was also a life-long member of the loyal opposition. It’s just that the high priests guiding her opposition wore robes of a different color than the corresponding leaders of the opposition on my side.

The high priests of the opposition on her side identified themselves with a plus sign. The preferred insignia on my side was an asterisk. On the other hand, the spiritual leaders on both sides wore yarmulkes at work.

Interestingly enough, the robes on her side prayed in a nearly lost language associated with an ancient, now vanished empire. A language that my wife didn’t speak. Guess what? The robes on my side did the same thing with another, equally ancient language that I didn’t speak. Coincidence or fate? You tell me.

And you know what, on both sides, the ones wearing the robes were guys.

The main difference between us seemed to be that the opposition on her side traced its ideological roots back to the state that had once or twice vanquished the state to which the opposition on my side traced its roots, just a bit before both states went to pieces. Widely scattered little pieces.

In short, we had lots in common! My wife’s ancestors had been enslaved and forced to build buildings and tend crops. Mine, too! Sure, they were enslaved on different continents in different millennia, but slavery is slavery, no matter when or where. So why quibble?

Her family got itself skunked by poverty. Mine had dined on empty plates many times prior to my arrival on the scene. Her mother left an abusive partner. Mine did, too. (Of course, mine went back while hers didn’t. To which I say: Viva la difference!)
English wasn’t her mother’s first language. It wasn’t my father’s first, second or third language.

My wife’s mother is a clean-a-holic neatik. One her hobbies involves emasculating shrubbery. My mother was an acolyte of Saint Spic-n-span.

Mom knew exactly where everything in the house belonged, to the cubic micron, and whether anyone had dared make an uncertified adjustment. Dust was so afraid of her, it just blew over our house and stopped by the neighbors, instead. It didn’t dare enter the house.

My wife lived with her mother until she was 30. I lived with my parents, off-and-on, until I was 35. (However, I lived in a guesthouse.) Both mothers took their eldest’s (long overdue) departure as an unforgivable personal insult and then got over it.

Her grandmother’s given name was Delphina. My mother’s given name was Delphine.
As far as I can tell, the only important thing my wife and I didn’t have in common was gender! Believe it or not, that really concerned my mother. She got over it, thank God.

Which brings us back to the day after Christmas and the Four Questions.
What are the Four Questions? In our household, as I was growing up, the youngest person at the dinner table was assigned the job of asking four questions at least once a year. But not just any old questions. Not even the questions that really concerned the youngest person, such as the law on child labor and involuntary indenture or the law that said the liver and spinach on one’s plate must be eaten before anything else could be served no matter how long it took or how disgusting it looked, smelled or tasted.

Nope, the Four Questions were pre-formulated by robes so wise and venerable, they had even provided the answers. No cribbing necessary. Any idiot could pass this test. Year in, year out, the questions never changed, sort of like high school biology tests. The answers didn’t change either. In the culture I grew up in, the test books are valued family heirlooms.

Basically, the Four Questions aren’t really questions. They’re traditions... pillars of meaning and culture akin to the magic of the Eifel Tower or a flying buttress. They link ancestors and descendants within a shared experience. On the other hand, they can also be viewed as an insidious, culturally legitimized, intellectually paralyzing form of brainwashing, using the standard regimen of disorientation, humiliation, positive and negative reinforcement to achieve homogenous (and easily controlled) thought processes.

I think that’s why my wife felt so comfortable adopting the Four Questions. It’s just that in our house, the oldest puts the Four Questions to the youngest. And instead of asking the Four Questions in the spring, we get started in December... on the day after Christmas. Every year, I ask my wife the same Four Questions. And every year, without fail, she has the answers.

· Do you want me to mop now or make breakfast first?
· What movie do you want to see today?
· What time do we pick up your mother?
· What else do you want me to do?

Such is the beauty of tradition.

A Monarch Visits The Junepine

A king - the king of color - has dropped in
to harvest the poetry of lavender
petals on a sweet, damp fir-filled slope
next to our hard plastic table (at the Junepine)
with a view of a mountain ridge
shorn like the bristly head of a new recruit.

The almost visible blur floating
behind His consort's thread-thin orange proboscis
weaves the heavy air into something solid.
Side by side, they dine. We dine.

Welcome, Home

We, we are loam. Loam...
Sweet, rich, black, moist soil.
Soil filled with summer, full of fall,
pregnant with joy; food. Food
for food and all that creeps, peeps,
or sneezes: Home. Home. Yes.
We, we are loam. Loam.

Thoughts on war, occasioned by reading the book, "Conduct Under Fire," by John A. Glusman

As the son of a former American officer in WWII, as the seed of grandparents who died simply because they were Jews in Nazi-controlled territory, as someone who attempted to earn an ROTC college scholarship and failed, as a former teenager who couldn't imagine serving in the military during the Vietnam war and couldn't decide to whether to evade the military draft or not, as someone who ultimately never served in the military, I have had ample opportunity to consider the necessity of war.

Today, I have nearly completed reading, Conduct Under Fire -- Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941 - 1945, by John. A. Glusman.

It reminded me, yet again, of the truly unimaginable misery, destruction and waste that is the consequence of war. (You might ask why, in the midst of the Iraq war and a booming market in violent video games, any American would need to be reminded about anything regarding war. If you did, it would be an excellent question!)

True, I never served in the military. And yet, as the son of a former American officer honorably discharged with a 30 percent (psychological) disability, I can speak to the suffering imposed upon my mother, sister and myself by a human howitzer unable to cope with -- or even acknowledge -- an unbelievably volatile and violent temper. Dad was the glass of nitro in the kitchen cabinet.

There are many victims of wars long past. Think of the farmers and children unfortunate enough to step on lost or forgotten landmines in SE Asia, for example. That's how we lived. Lacerating explosions almost always followed any imagined slight or failure by a family member to adhere to unvoiced and utterly intractable rules.

I can only too easily imagine how fathers like mine, moving backward in time, have suffered and inflicted suffering on untold generations.

War, it seems at first glance, is consequence of human arrogance, ignorance and stupidity or any permutation thereof. Surely, I tell myself, war can only be a necessity when human beings have failed themselves, their God and their own self-interest.

Oh certainly, I respond, war is the result of a lack of imagination.

I and me then agree, war is -- certainly aggressive war is -- utterly criminal and contemptible.

However, simple condemnation cannot explain humanity's inability or unwillingness to choose non-military approaches to conflict resolution.

How is it that we continue to accept our lives -- and deaths -- in a completely predictable, utterly repetitive cycle of mass violence that that is inevitably self-destructive and poisonous to our planet?

How is it, I wonder, that the generation of human beings who experienced World War One would rush to martyrdom, again, in a World War Two?

Considering that perhaps 100, 000, 000 million people died as a result of World War Two between, say 1936 and 1945, why did humans rush to battle yet again in places like Korea and Vietnam within less than 20 years, to name two conflicts involving Americans? And how is it that the more destructive war has become, the faster our population - seen as a whole - has grown?

I am certainly not smarter than anyone of the billions who have undoubtedly noticed this situation before. And I have no sure answers to offer nor any certain solution I would impose, if I could.

Nonetheless, I am left with the following hypothesis... For human beings, violence is a self-replicating disease. Our inability to resist military violence (i.e., war) for any length of time whatever -- regardless of our situation and experience -- is suggestive of an addiction. And addiction, I believe, is considered a medical condition by the American Medical Association.

Whether such a hypothesis is testable, I do not know. Nor am I clear on how any of us can go about treating this disease, if indeed my hypothesis were to be accepted.

I am of the firm belief that humanity’s patently aggressive nature need not prevent us from resolving to cure ourselves of war. There are alternatives. We must only be courageous enough to accept them.

The treatment cannot be worse than the disease.