Binding and Loosing

This would be my last go at significant emendation before the thing goes off to possible endorsers. If anyone can think of something clever or helpful you've heard me say in a "That oughtta be in your book" kind of way. Lemme know.
The Greenbelt Festival was wondrous. One can download a large percentage of the coolness, including my talks, here:
http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/shop/talks/
Here's me all sweaty and talkative with Steve Lawson:
http://qik.com/video/222720
And here's Ewan Gibson delivering, as he always does, the goods:
http://mysterybrethren.blogspot.com/
Two of the children are about to arrive on a bus. Must go. Still mean to say a word on Steve Martin soon.

Memory Believes

Believe me. The words "postmodern fundamentalist" only came strangely to mind as we strolled along, and I'm not sure I ever want to speak them aloud again. I also suspect that I could have come up with a more tasteful, reverent, and interesting way of speaking when I thought it somehow necessary to throw in that my dad had "passed." But this is the way these things go in the land of video I guess. Family members, please pardon my easy use of the first person plural. I don't mean to drag you into my madness (at least not unwillingly). "Memory believes before knowing remembers," sayeth Faulkner. I will say I trust the man’s epistemology. Anyone in Nashville care to guess where Geoff and I were? Incidentally, the youtube site has an option for viewing the thing in higher quality.
I'll get to Beck and Batman and the glories of Steve Martin's Born Standing Up real soon.

You Know Its Me All The Time

Many moons ago, I did a piece on Bob Dylan I'm especially pleased with and Paste now has it up on their site. There's a link to it over at stage left under Recent Broadsides. "I've Got My Bob Dylan Mask On," I called it (Dylan said it). And I couldn't track down the name of the person behind that wonderful little illustration. If anyone knows, please clue us in. I find it difficult overestimate the wonders of the Dylan one.

Secret Treasure Hidden

Poetry

Its door opens near. It's a shrine
by the road, it's a flower in the parking lot
of The Pentagon, it says, "Look around,
listen. Feel the air." It interrupts
international telephone lines with a tune.
When traffic lines jam, it gets out
and dances on the bridge. If great people
get distracted by fame they forget
this essential kind of breathing
and they die inside their gold shell.
When caravans cross deserts
It is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Sometimes commanders take us over, and they
try to impose their whole universe,
how to succeed by daily calculation:
I can't eat that bread.

--William Stafford

The Saying of It

Lit Instructor

Day after day up there beating my wings
with all the softness truth requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
they class my voice among tentative things,

And they credit fact, force, battering.
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,
embracing stray error as a long-lost boy
and bringing him home with my fluttering.

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;
it bites like a saw into white pine.
I communicate right; but explain to the dean--
well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

--William Stafford

Human

I've been reading Daniel Berrigan's commentary on the Wisdom of Solomon. So incredibly good. Whenever I read Berrigan, I get to wondering why I don't read him constantly. SO few people my age seem to give him any time, but I think he'll be remembered as a sort of William Blake-figure for our times. A sampling:
The Gift of Wisdom is not psychological acuity: it is the discerning skill of a heart open to all weathers, making all weathers from torrid to icy, one…The Gift ennables us to comport ourselves as humans—and this against the odds of an inhuman time...It would seem that the church is called to this momentous task: to hold close in Spirit, in honor and unity (and in face of cultural disintegration and incoherence), all that is worthy, all that is encompassed by the noble term human.