It tolls for thee

Have I ever shared with you my favorite poem in all of literature? It's quite famous and old, but it never rings less true and never fails to inspire:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee. 

John Donne
Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Expiation

She felt a dark thread leave her body and it traveled high towards the stars above her on a path marked by a prayer that had descended upon her soul in the night. Please cleanse me of the sins that have been committed against me-- against my life and body and soul, she had asked. She had never asked such a deed be done, but immediately there was a newness, a lightness, a joy that overcame-- and she understood a new definition of an old word, a new forgiveness and liberty.

For anyone who knows what it means to chase knowledge...

So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,

Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky,

The eternal snows appear already past,

And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

But, those attained, we tremble to survey

The growing labors of the lengthened way,

The increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes,

Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

- Essay on Criticism (c. 1711), Alexander Pope 
via a letter from a soul sister, My End of the Bargain

A New York Night

I was crouched low to the ground flipping frenetically through out-of-print editions. Vsevolod Garshin found me the day before at the Metropolitan with Grace, and I went home to read all of his work. Yes, all. Muses don't come by as often as they used to. Inspiration had been buried under a quieter life and the polar vortex-- the embers had pressed themselves inward. Inspiration was no less existent, but overlooked... that is, until Four Days detonated within me. Vsevolod's interior monologue captures a wounded soldier left immobilized and face-to-face for days with the corpse of a young soldier he had killed. I needed to get my hands on a physical copy. 

I had been meaning to visit all the dying, forgotten bookstores of the city before I left. But when Tuesday rolled around, I was late from work and had gotten lost somewhere around Union Square. I settled accordingly on visiting The Strand, a home I love and hate all at once. Sarah browsed patiently as I searched high and low for my new lover, who was not to be found in the entire establishment.

Disappointed, we settled on a more traditional night out and found ourselves walking towards SoHo, through another wonderful bookstore and into the tiny, European comforts of YN, the best girl-date bar in New York City (in my and Very Highbrow's humble opinion). We talked, at first tentatively, as it is with most humans, until we couldn't.

- You've never seen the face of a man you love deeply, you've never mutilated that face to a thing you hardly recognize... Parting ways with him was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And the fact that in all my legalistic torture-- I put him there? What the hell is an unequal yolk? Some people endure suffering as victim, as the persecuted. Their hands are clean. Amy's mom died, David's mom died, Franz-Pol's mom died, Daniel's mom died. And their stories came to me like burning coal on my soul. There are so many aspects of their protracted suffering that make me angry, that make me humble, that drive me to the end of all my questioning. But there's another kind of suffering when you are the harbinger of pain, when you bring the destruction-- that's altogether different. When you look that squarely in the face, you'll never think of yourself in the same way.

She looked at me as if she was looking inside of herself. I couldn't tell what she was thinking, so laughed saying,

- Sarah, I mean, I was so distraught that-- you know that virus that plagues only the frail and elderly? Yeah, I gave myself shingles. Anyway, it was a million years ago.

She almost snorted. We went on to talk about God and life, and about the real strength of women.

We parted ways at the top of the island. I stood waiting for a tardy bus, and arrived at home at an obscene hour. But in this very small hour of morning, I found a small red book at the bottom of my bookshelf. Johanna had bought me a collection of Great Russian Short Stories when she had visited some time last year. I had read through them all in a day. Voraciously. And then had forgotten: Vsevolod was with me all this time.

Instead at The Strand, I had purchased my favorite. Keats. I bought this monetarily worthless copy because I found a cutout quotation from a playbill within. Fitzgerald has haunted me in NYC, in ways I can't yet understand. I always thought I outgrew him sometime between ages 15 and 16, but his ghost seems to have sought me out. Maybe I will always be that fanciful. I always say I ought to have been born in a different century. Sometimes, I find myself in old paintings and poems. Like here,

... Already with thee! tender is the night

And then I found Shirley, littered with Chenier. Chenier, who understands-- the desire to finish a year and see the harvest. Who knows why I'm always listening to the rules. Who knows why I am going where I am going. I am ever a slow, plodding wanderer, and not for want. In the words of a dear friend, desire is a function of will. Perhaps one day more of my emotions will align.

I have not seen even the fire of morning,

I want to complete my day!

Malala, Martin and Martin

I have nothing original to say on the topic except to reiterate and braid some disparate threads. 

Malala Yousafzai finally wins the Nobel Peace Prize, and she shares it with Kailash Satyarthi, Indian children's rights activist. Malala is universally recognized for her activism, especially regarding education for girls. Her story is one of peace in the face of interminable violence. It also illuminates that the Taliban and other unrecognized, militant, terrorist entities are not sustained by their own breath. Hate begets hate. We in the States don't think carefully on this fact, because we don't see who suffers for our deeds.

In undergrad, I asked myself incessantly, so what is our part? What should we do in the face of violence and suffering? I was obsessed with the writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that."

How do we love here? We can act: we can go, we can pray, we can advocate-- we can speak. 

The following is a poem Malala's father kept in his pocket. The page is an excerpt from her eyewitness account and memoir, I am Malala. She was just sixteen when the book was published.

Pakistani Teen Malala Yousafzai Shares Nobel Peace Prize

At 17, Malala becomes the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history

A Seattle Minute

It’s been over a year since I’d been back in this town, yet so much has changed. Things feel different here; or maybe it’s that I’ve been given a new space and the old one’s gone, but I walked to this café like a ghost thinking— “I loved that park once, that café, that restaurant, that view, this crosswalk…” Life is fast— just as much as I have changed and checked my demons, so have the people that surround. This morning I met with G and her baby buckled to an eco-friendly carseat in the back of her Prius. The fact that her life had changed forever dawned on me. Baby. E. I touched his little hands and his little feet. He blew me kisses and held my fingers. Skype did none of this justice. We visited the house she and her husband are building at the top of one of Seattle’s seven hills. She pulled out the blueprints on her laptop. It was as if our life together had gotten up, grown legs, and walked off without me.

Soon after I arrived in town, an onslaught of friends and colleagues ignited my phone. I love seeing every one of them. I am who I am because of them. But amid the clanking of silverware, between bites of autumn squash frittata, boon, or salted cod, above the din of old conversations finding new— I remember I also love Seattle for moments like this: moments alone.

There is a man in his early thirties sitting across from me, tall and bearded, donned in a proper nylon rain jacket, dirty jeans, and noise-canceling headphones that seal him off from the world. He is drinking a beer before noon and reading a thin novel with no title on its cover. His chalice says, “La Fin Du Monde.” I remember sitting with E on a bus as the sun was setting deep in South London where she remarked,

- I've been seeing that everywhere recently.

- Seeing what?

She pointed to the pub sign, “La Fin Du Monde,”

- That phrase, “the end of the world.”

She mused on about Stephen Fry, or was it Zadie? I hadn’t thought about that memory until today (six years later!) when I saw this man drinking from a cup with the same insignia, that single, empty chalice on the worn, wooden table across from mine. He caught my eye as I read him, and it’s as if he said,

“This is the end of the world. Where we are today. We are born to die. We live on the edge of life at all times— it’s a terrifying but reassuring idea. It frees us from the ideas that constrain us—the fears; of the unknown, the future, and humanity— it makes us bare to our desires.”

His expression is one of complete arrest, far more intense than the generally gentle gypsies of this town. It reminds me of a professor I once knew. Actually, the professor had said all of those thoughts. In reality, this man sitting here is probably only bothered by my shamelessness. Rudeness is the worst offense here, just the way laziness is in New York. We are upstairs in my used-to-be usual corner. There is a couple downstairs: two elderly women talking a bit too loudly about a special they saw on PBS. Nazi life post World War II. The man on his laptop behind them looks slightly perturbed. He’s got a weathered murse to match his weathered face. I glance at his screen from above. He is coding. Only in Seattle would you find a man in his 50s, coding.

I worked for a judge once that told me a story of one of the first computers built in Seattle. His clerk was on maternity leave, and his secretary was at lunch. Sitting there in chambers, surrounded by windows, ancient wood and paraphernalia from his clients from around the world, I had tiptoed in to set a motion on his desk. When I asked him about his family portrait, he got talking about his family and then his wife, and then her fixation with a machine. “This machine,” she had told him as a late teen, “is going to change the life of every human on this planet.” I told him that I could see why he married her. He sunk in his leather cloud from behind the giant oak desk, robes off before his next case. His aging face lit up the dark, gray sky.

I came to town for a wedding, a cosmopolitan love affair that traipses all kinds of continents, years and life circumstances. The wedding was beautiful, mainly because the couple was so beautiful—radiating life and happiness. The bride was clothed in her constant joyous composure, the groom in his ever flippant anti-cajolery, and they were surrounded by proud family, friends and a magnanimous view of the Sound (the eighth wonder of the world). Someday, I hope when they are old and gray, they will let me write their story of young love. But for now I am off again to lunch with dear C. She is back from a year in India with her own stories of travel, love and new chapters. 

Augustine: Confessions Book 10, Chapter 27

Winter 2010. It was the worst winter in Seattle for many years. The city shut down. No one went to work. The hills were blanketed with that foreign white substance. I was indoors reading my damned civ pro outline; Luke was on the couch watching television. Friends stopped by when they could. I'd hand them a glass of wine. We drank more than we should have.

I was editing a research paper that some friends and I had written in the fall. The policy objectives were simple. I.e. forced sterilization is unsafe and torturous. Your numbers are out of control. Education and awareness. Access. Condoms? Birth control pills? Safe. Effective. Cheap.

The snow was falling, and I flipped through stories of women being mutilated-- I flirted with words. "Free of coercion?" "Violence?" "Forced?" "Involuntary?" "Eugenics?" Disgusted, I'd wander back to my school work. Interminably restless, I'd come back to the research report. This happened in cycles until I threw my hands in the air and thought of the best solution, "Wine!" 

I remember one winter day, when the snow had melted into weeks of freezing rain, I heard a song called Late Have I Loved You. I couldn't stop listening to it. These words were so different from the others. I must have played it at least a thousand times over the next three years.

"You called and you shouted, you broke through my deafness; You flashed and you shone, dispelled all my blindness; You breathed your fragrance on me."

I found the words again today, in a poem written by the infamous Augustine. He is like a grandpa whose words I have heeded (kind of, not really) since I was a child when one of my teachers gave me his Confessions to read. All this to say, that the following words are true and recurrently so:

Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new: late have I loved you. 

And see, you were within and I was abroad, 

and I searched for you there;

deformed I plunged into those lovely things which you made. 

You were with me, but I was not with you. 

The lovely things kept me far from you, 

though if they were not in you, they were not at all. 

You called and you shouted and shattered my deafness. 

You flashed and you shone, you scattered my blindness. 

You breathed fragrance on me, 

and I drew in my breath and now I pant after you. 

I tasted, and hunger and thirst. 

You touched me, and I burned for your peace.