Ninth

The program notes tell of Mahler's trials as he wrote his Ninth symphony in 1909--his departure under fire from the Vienna State Opera, the death of his daughter, the diagnosis of his soon-to-be fatal heart defect--and they go on to trace movement by movement the emotional narrative of longing and resignation. Still, what I heard was not pathos but an hour and a half of the most fascinating sound I could imagine. It sounds superficial, but I don't apologize for my pleasure.

It was endlessly interesting to watch from the balcony 99 conservatory students make music in every combination of individual instruments and groups. The strings, sometimes with lush long lines, and sometimes pizzicato plucking, the horns (of course, it was Mahler), the harps, the flute, the solos of the first violin and the first viola, and, oh yes, the first cello. Deep rumblings of the basses, the muted tuba, the braying trombones, the clarinet raised in the air like trumpets, the piccolo, even the triangle. Perhaps I was distracted from the emotionality of the music by the wonderful way you orchestrated it, Maestro Mahler. And you kids, how each of you in your own special moments and all of you together sometimes made time as intricate as interlocked Celtic curlicues!

I thought of how, earlier in the evening, I'd said that, in my experience, what distinguishes students whose English improves from those who leave no more articulate than they came is the willingness to listen, to be open to what they and others actually say, and how. It struck me, on reflection, that the same is true for encounters. Ordering or orating are not receptivity, and don't readily segue into conversation. Whether we seek out the other or the other finds us, there's a time of taking in that sets the tone for all that follows.

Taking in is what I did this evening. Two students, neither very familiar with classical music, much less something as richly textured and with such intricate dynamics as this. What they encountered I'll find out tomorrow. The audience, though, responded in cheers tonight. And I, still unable to feel the dirge (and Mahler can do funeral marches) in the notes, am glowing with the exertion of listening as hard as I did. Watching you kids create that soundscape note by note, and you, Mr Wolff, directing the process gesture by gesture, was like watch a parade of endless color variety pass by.

Okay, I heard patterns and repetitions and internal structure, but the sonic spectacle: that took the cake. Thanks all.

Next step

What's my idea at the end of this year of seeking and recording daily encounters?


Encountering: a new way of seeing and seeking; on top of or within our existing perceptions and purposes

Encountering (I/you, one and an other): peppy, frexhoic, rich experiences, the basis of a pal way of life 

peppy: expressive of potentiality, energy, power, the livingness of things

frexho: practicing friendship, exploration, hospitality; the best 2nd person interactions

pal: characterized by presence, adventure, lastingness, stimulating, satisfying

rich: vivid, potent, urgent, suspenseful, intriguing, impressive

Encountering: good for us all, singly and collectively

Encountering: worth encouraging in each other by sharing, coaching, exemplifying, facilitating, appreciating, championing


In short: 

1. a new mode of engagement

2. a new quality of life

3. a new way for the world

4. a new positive project 


This is my project from now on. If any wish, let it be ours together. Contact me to start that conversation.

Unfamiliar feelings

Cav/Pag: ritual killings. The set up requires regular sacrifices, except nobody is innocent, and the anguish is palpable every step of the way. I love it all: the costumes and sets, the poses, strutting or mincing, the inflated chests and straining necks, the contorted faces, the music, the stream of song propelled by it, the large expressions--this is opera, and I give myself to it wholly.

I half fall in love with Nedda, the clown Canio's consort, so his wild jealous rage at learning of her unfaithfulness is directed at me too. When in the midst of the vaudeville, the murderous darkness of his face is too real for entertainment, I feel it in the growing panic of the doomed woman as she tries to play to two audiences at the same time. After the crazed comic stabs her and leaps into the audience to cut down her lover, the misshapen foil clown Tonio intones: The comedy is over.

The moment I feel your pain, Canio, Pagliacci of the title, is when you sing the ever-so-well known Vesti la giubba: 'On With The Costume', that is, the show must go on. 'Bah, Are you a man? You're a clown!' It's a standard theme, but who hasn't had to lock powerful feelings behind strong internal doors while carrying on doing what one is paid to do. (Never mind the pounding.)

This I get, but not your jealousy--melodramatically amplified, of course--but still a feature of Italian village life of the time, and not just there, not just then. The force of the betrayal I understand, and the outrage, but not the knife. The provocation of the performance that finally tips you over the edge into mayhem is very plausible. Still, the sense of dishonor that compels you to think immediately of blood is something I don't feel viscerally in myself. And many are like me. I enjoy seeing it work in you, Pag, but I'm not moved as your audience was. They, the villagers, knew what was at stake, men and women.

Is this an example of what philosopher of the passions Robert Solomon claimed: emotions are in part, learned, picked up from one's cultural milieu, a way a particular group 'articulates' or names its particular value experiences. In this case, the identity of a man is linked tightly to the sense of status expressed in the term honor.

Today we see the same term used to justify the killing of daughters or female relatives considered to have impugned the good name of the family. It's be all reports a colder killing than in the opera, but surely heart-felt, not just calculated.

What emotions are we creating today? FOMO, or fear-of-missing-out, is one that in the remote past or places did not trouble as many people as it does today. Is it an emotion if there are no physiological symptoms? But it is a motivator; it is linked to our systems of value; it is recognized generally. Indeed, perhaps the definition of an emotion is what someone can use in an ad.

Still your grief, clown, and your frustrated longing, road-wife, trapped in a repetitive ever-on-the-go life under the control of a jealous and brutal husband, and dreaming of being a bird, are tonic to me.

The lady sitting two chairs down from me clapped as enthusiastically as I did at the HD screen. Then she introduced herself and told me that I wouldn't be seeing her around because she'd be in Paris seeing live opera. Why you felt she had to tell me, I can probably guess. The desire to arouse a bit of envy is an emotion I know well. Well, sorry, but have a good time anyway.

Poignancy, nostalgia, urgency

After saying the prayer I pretty regularly direct to you, God-in-love, I was struck anew by the list of three conditions that are to characterize the world to come: Let the consummation of your creation quickly approach, soon arrive, that new and lively cosmos of infinite hospitality, friendship and exploration, of change without transience, time without the past, life without death, your dwelling in the midst.

Can I really imagine change w/o transience? Can I conceive of time w/o the past? What about life w/o death? No less than Steve Jobs at Stanford called death 'very likely the the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.' So how could any world work where these conditions obtain? Indeed, it's hard to understand what they mean, so paradoxical are they.

And then there's the question: would we want such a world. Transience is the heart of the poignancy of Japanese cherry-blossom watching. Nostalgia is at the heart of our fond memories of childhood. Urgency is at the heart of our eager response to deadlines. Do we want to forego these very special parts of our human experience?

And yet our devotion to what is past can constrain what is now, and to what is passing can resist what is to come, and to what won't last can devalue what will. It's a devotion that can at times be tyrannical, leading to paralysis, sadness and terror.

And yet you and your Beloved, in whom we participate, are even now laying the foundations of a world using 'bricks' which are our individual dared deeds of hospitality, friendship and exploration, each of which suffused with the time-sensitivities and identities of the moment of encounter, each encounter a world with its own potentialities to explore, and altogether, worlds in worlds. The new principles of significance for these units in the world to come may be other than just succession or accumulation. Indeed there may be new ways to honor the former, the ephemeral and the mortal.

The prayer envisions a world where change does occur, time does flow and life persists, but open, untrammeled by the reservations we have now.

A three dimensional sphere passing through a plane would seem to the Flatlanders inhabiting the surface like a sudden appearance, expansion, contraction and disappearance, change over time, when to 3D observers off the plane, the sphere seems to be in motion, change in location, a notion suggesting that, to observers in higher dimensions, the past, transience, and death may be artifacts of a different kind of change than we suspect, one that someday we will know.

Post white

The study of the VOA article on developments in the racial make-up of America was only supposed to take 20 minutes or so, but we had to go back to basics--reviewing the geography of the nation as depicted in the two maps illustrating the story--to really begin to do the job.

I'd forgotten--stupid me--how, for many of you in the class, the names of the regions, the layout of the states and counties, the concepts of majority vs minority populations, and the age pyramid, were unfamiliar, and needed explication. I put pie charts up on the board divided into 'people who look like Peter' and 'other people' to show the demographic trends underway across the country.

The theme of growing diversity came through loud and clear as you pointed to each other in the class--Russian, Haitian, Brazilian, Vietnamese, Honduran, Salvadoran, Dominican, Kurd--as illustrative of what the story was essentially about: the changing face of this city, this nation.

There was some slogany 'land of opportunity' talk but also discussion of the sometimes narrow focus immigrants have on just making money and remitting it home. Where we went after that was to the idea of the future of this place as the shared responsibility of all who live here and love it.

I thought, how much of the fraught history of this republic you have missed, as well as the inspiring stories of remarkable men and women, the life-force of our tradition.

It used to be that classes such as ours in, say, the beginning of the last century, would have preached patriotism to those landing at Ellis Island. We don't do that anymore, but I could hear in your attentiveness, your questions, a readiness to learn what you are heir to, now that you've thrown in your lot with all the rest of us.

The class felt somehow religious in a distinctly non-dogmatic fashion. Then I gave the writing and reading assignment for the next class and you, the new America, said goodbye, walked through the door and dispersed.

Joking

The topic of the class was jokes. The three of us laughed uproariously, but it was all quite deliberate. Not all jokes work even when well told, and not everyone gets or appreciates every joke. Yet when you're receptive, there are many that tickle the funny bone. We told jokes, laughing at our failures in telling (but got better with each rendition); remembered funny stories from our lives; laughed at our laughter.

Recently listening to an audiobook version of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, philosophy illustrated by jokes, a little world of assumptions poised to be violated in the interest of some conundrum. The rug pulled out from under us so often, a session of jokes is a gymnastics of pratfalls.

Comedy is often peppered with jokes but it need not make us smile; rather the genre pays respect to the joke in the sense of highlighting the strangeness of a world that persists in surprising us. The Divina Commedia ends to the return to Dante to his normal life after adventures in hell and heaven. Tragedy by contrast confirms what we always knew was the things would turn out: badly. Comedy seems to turn doom on its head, if only long enough to open a window of moments in which to make our escape. The humor tragedy inspires is sardonic and bitter, but of comedy gleeful and wondering.

God-in-love, is this world a comedy, tragedy, or both? What I'm sure is that as life unfolds, mine, ours, we'll regularly be caught up short by strangeness of it; maybe jokes are our homage.

Ladies, let's do more.

Spooked

A sunlit early evening, people busily on their way home, lost in conversation or their own thoughts. Why was the woman so close to tears?

There were ten of us who had taken the shortcut over the locks to North Station on our way to Park Street and the beginning of our Back Bay tour. Strung out in groups of two or three, we turned onto Causeway St and one of us accidentally cut off a smart-looking woman in her late twenties with a backpack headed in the same direction, or maybe just got close. Why don't you watch out? she muttered. Why don't you apologize? Her voice was tremulous. Sorry, we said, but she wouldn't let it go.

Things got confusing. We said we were on our way to tour the city but she transferred her resentment from us to some man back down the road who had on running gear and was stretching. I'm so afraid, she said, of that man in blue. Who? we wondered. Stay with me, she pleaded, and started to cry, dabbing her eyes. We clustered around asking if we could help.

We're heading across the street to the station. Come with us, we said.

My husband is picking me up. How will he find me? she asked.

We started crossing the street and as we did, the guy in blue ran by and away with not a glance in our direction.

As entered the station, some of us wanted to wait with this distraught person, but, cellphone in hand, she looked out to the street and said that she had seen her husband's car, and ran toward it.

The whole episode of a few minutes moved from standard street grouchiness to paranoia to passionate relief. Had you been alarmed by the runner?  Did you  see us as enemies, or allies?  Was the relief in your voice due to your actually sighting your husband? Was this city such a scary place for you?

So many questions, but we were on our way, and in fact had a good tour. You were soon forgotten. But now you come to mind. We were all like fish in a river, tranquilly navigating the current lines of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, but you were flailing in the flow. I hope you found rest that night.

Eyes on the road

I've seen you lecturing on Youtube, read your 1991 book, The Dilemma of Freedom and  Foreknowledge, and copied some ideas of yours quoted somewhere about intellectual virtues (and vices). What really caught my attention, Linda Zagrebski, were two things you wrote that indicate the way you conduct philosophy:

'A truly satisfying solution to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge should be as thrilling as the dilemma itself is disturbing.'

'The dilemma of divine knowledge and human free will is difficult enough but I have discovered an even deeper dilemma...'

What these suggest is your conviction that there are solutions to even perennial dilemmas yet to be discovered and perplexing dilemmas yet to be recognized; and that the work of philosophy, therefore, is very much a live project, very worth engaging in. Thrilling isn't a word often associated nowadays with philosophy but you think the ongoing work of subtle argument, careful criticism, and creative speculation may in fact pay off with new real ideas and interpretations, not just the same old cud remasticated. There's something sanguine in your attitude about the project of philosophy I find very encouraging.

As I read that word, I was put in mind of the uplift I felt some years ago sitting in a campsite somewhere in upstate New York reading the first chapters of Whitehead's Process and Reality, that there's plenty of road ahead of us.

So too I appreciate your thoughts on virtues of the mind. The list I jotted down in my notebook ran something like this:

Intellectual vices: idleness, rigidity, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, insensitivity to detail, gullibility (that is, a tendency to accept things without sufficient evidence) and close-mindedness (that is, a tendency to reject things in spite of sufficient evidence.)  Intellectual virtues: humility, carefulness, open-mindedness, curiosity, rigor and something (I can't quite read in my notes) that could be...courage?

Virtue ethics focuses on the cultivation of character, habits of thought and behavior, rather than on specific decisions in particular circumstances. The idea is that, given the complexity of real world decision making, and the inevitability of regrettable choices, character keeps us pointed in the right direction, learning from our mistakes, and attempting the next good thing.

So steering between the Scylla of gullibility and the Charybdis of close-mindedness is my challenge as a thinking person, and through trial and effort I can get better, provided I keep my hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.

Your written style is somewhat turgid and your presentation manner is rather plodding, but there's much to think about in what you say, so thanks.

Lips

The eye looked at her eyes looking at her lips as she smeared them scarlet. The man at her shoulder, one arm around her waist, held the phone in the other in front of her face for the touch-up. The seen processed and projected, the image resembled a mirror, but not reflecting, watching.

Once in almost every woman's handbag was a powder compact, often quite elegant, with an application puff and a small mirror to facilitate making up. Light reflected from your faces was in turn reflected off the glass back past your heads. Those reflected rays traced back to convergence seemed to emanate from your face, a living, virtual face, as far behind the glass as you in front. It's all geometry.The camera eye, however, presents a real image, recordable, transmittable, waiting orders.

Once there would have been two, the dashing woman with thick, wind-winnowed hair enhancing the brilliance of her luscious lips, and her beau in the camel-hair coat pleased with her excellence with four eyes total delighting in the scene, and the mirror no more able to freeze the magic of the moment than they could have.

Now, there's a fifth, not vain, not proud, but focused, and alert to the gentle pressure that will rip this live outdoor moment from her face and paste it to the wall of some gallery under the heading: Lips.

Alternative

Naples, March 1957. Should the Federal Republic of the Sicilies join the European Common Market? It's a question all Sicilians are asking themselves. The representatives of France, Germany and the other northern European nations along with the Italian Federation are meeting in Rome to pledge themselves to cooperation in hopes of avoiding another conflagration. But what has this do with us?  Will we be better off?

As the head of the government accounting office, I advise against it. Since the failed attempt of the northerners to topple our monarchy and annex us a hundred years ago, the directions of the two countries have widely diverged.  New uses have been found for our abundant and cheap to produce sulfur. Our merchant fleet  has dominated Mediterranean trade and middle-eastern trade since we used our substantial cash reserves to outbid the British for the shares of in the Suez Canal offered by Isma'il Pasha in 1875. Today Sicilianese are in every port from here to Yokohama.

They talk about German engineers but our tradition is as distinguished, going back to the industrial complex at Pietrarsa where the first Italian cars were built, now popular around the world. The iron works in Calabria produced weapons as fine as the Krupps themselves. Silk and wool production in Basilicata lead to the establishment of a luxury fashion industry that has become the benchmark for all others. Our pasta is on the plates of the most discerning everywhere. Our fine educational system is pervaded by the spirit of Salerno and produces world-class scholars and engineers. Our music is sung worldwide.

Like the Scandinavians, we sat out the first war, though when the Italian regime collapsed in the second, we were occupied after our soldiers were overcome after hard fighting. When liberation came, we were more ready than any of the other countries to rebuild. We have pride, and a history of accomplishment. Why do we need the northerners? We can go it alone.

The northern resentment of our Sicilian success is clear in that recently published bitter alternative history book in which the annexation succeed, the resistance was suppressed, the land impoverished by cheap agricultural imports and millions of our people driven to emigrate to places where they could and did make a difference, Argentina and the United States. A despised and corrupt extremity, the butt of all northern jokes. As it it, the Italians have to depend on the graciousness of Europe for their well-being.  We are able to look further afield.

So, I recommend the FRS not join this new circular pledge of desperate nations to stop themselves from  ever fighting again. We have better things to do. The American market is opening and we have a lot on our plate with the conflicts in the southwest Mediterranean that threaten our lifeline to the Far Eastern markets. Our country needs to keep its money at home and spend it on improving our infrastructure, and not send it to the impoverished north.

So, with respect to your opinions, Mr Prime Minister, I urge you to refrain from signing and linking our fate to that of the northerners.  Yours, Niccolo Antonio Zingarelli.

Working order

It's with some diffidence that I approach this space today, which for the last year has been my comfortable home. My momentum somewhat dissipated, I look around at the space and ask what is it for? I feel a formality as if I have to knock on the door, wipe my shoes on the mat, and wait to  be invited to sit down.

I've written a year of direct encounter accounts, but now...? Like many autodidacts, I am insecure about the proper venue and register for my speech. How in this blog, I wonder, can I present a presence/adventure/lastingness (PAL) way of life without becoming didactic, contemplate a God-in-love framework without becoming dogmatic, or find or build a community explicitly dedicated to hospitality, friendship and exploration without becoming pushy? That may be this year's query.

In the meantime, you, old plumbing system in my house, are trying my patience. That leak of water out the back of the wall and down into the basement whenever I take a shower has got to be stopped. Possible rot, a water supply for ants and other pests (already I'm nervous about carpenter ants): these are good reasons to act quickly. I can get access to the back of the shower wall through an opening in a cupboard under my sink. Crawl in, get some padding, crawl in again, twist and turn to see through and up. Turn on the faucets and see water dribble down the stucco (?) interior surface.

Nothing, nothing, ahh, no, wait, a glistening, a dark path, a drip, a stream.

So, turn off the water supply to the house, take out and examine the valves, find the name of the one which sends water to the shower or the faucet (without the name, one feels like a fool: 'I want a...,you know the thing that....'), try to figure out how the diverter (three-valve shower-tub diverter) works, clean, readjust, reinsert, test, watch it still leaking. Change the valves, change the O-rings, change whatever, anything, No dice. Long moments leaning against a cupboard thinking: is there one leak or two (or more) and under what conditions? 

Go to store, buy lots of stuff that looks like it might help. Talk to clerk who confesses ignorance (and dislike) of all plumbing. Try my fancy new replacement parts. It turns out I can have a shower or a bath but not both (with the same fixtures). Rescue discarded washers and reinsert. Ah, restored bi-functionality.

All this time crawling into someplace not much bigger than an animal's den, and then pulling myself out, then in again, craning my neck, hitting my head, going downstairs to turn the water off, and again to turn it on. Blood on the forehead the requisite offering. More long ponderings, indistinguishable from fatigue.  One leak identified and fixed; only not the diverter. I can have a tub but forget a shower. Perhaps that washer...

I've been in this house 30+ years and still I find the old shortcuts of the previous owner, an Italian florist who moved the house to its current location at the top of a slope when he sold out his greenhouses at the bottom of the slope to a McDonalds. He and his wife lived and cooked down in the basement. In the backyard, a large garden and a grape arbor. Oh, and lots of scattered sheets or buried masses of concrete.

Still, the weather is beautiful. There's a small peach tree on the porch I bought at the home improvement store along with plumbing tchotchkes. The tag says it will produce fruit the first year. Well, I'm not impatient,  but if it can, I can.

Dramatis personae

Flowery language, highfalutin' sentiments, human drama, this short play Call of the Revolution based on a work by Leonid Andreyev, had them all, and this evening, you, my students, really got into it. The two parts, a husband and a wife, were distributed around the room since you were almost equally male and female.. Sometimes the lines were short, a few words, and sometimes extended, but you all got a chance to express the heroic or idealistic sentiments.

We'd begun thinking about script-reading last class, but tonight we had two full run-throughs of the eight page play. How engaged even the quietest and most held-back of you were as your turn came to say the line which would take the dialogue the next step. When one of you read the words aloud as so often you do in class, affectless and monotone, the rest of you groaned and urged more expression.

There were quick lessons on key words to accent, on pacing, on intonation as we tried to find the right way to deliver the words with the feeling the play seemed to require, and amazingly they made a difference.

The second time we did it, two students took two pages each in order to better get into the flow. As we gave our increasingly dramatic reading, you were sitting agitatedly on the edge of your seats, your faces flushed, your attention rapt.

It amazes and moves me to see how powerful play-readings or proto-performances can be in an ESL class. Reading aloud at all, much less fluently, is challenge enough but a play, the right play, quickly moves us beyond the mechanics into another realm, first of just scripted interaction, and then dramatic or comic expression. For whole moments, I can see you becoming the originators of those words you speak and participants in those amusing or moving scenes.

It's not just you, my students, who readily respond to plays and readings. I remember a colleague to whom once I gave lines from Poe's The Raven to recite, and who then thanked me for the opportunity. Perhaps we've become too literally ourselves and need opportunities to wear masks and costumes, try on new voices, adopt attitudes and poses, and generally be other than our oh-too-familiar selves for a little while. Is this why charades was always such a hit at my family parties?

I can find reasons for the lesson vis a vis my syllabus but the real justification tonight was the way we were all caught up in a story of a man and woman ready to throw their lives into a risky political moment and who discover each other afresh as they do. If English is not for this, then what?  

AWOL

Where were you last night when I looked for you? A dozen times, I found myself wanting to haul you out of my pocket to check the weather (Is the rain going to stop. Is it ever going to warm up?), check my email (just ads and announcements usually, but...), play a game (and pass the time), see the news, listen to music, watch a video, write this blog...and you weren't there.

I felt non-plussed, off-balance; my plans for the evening, out of the wind and rain and doing good work were thrown into disarray. And yet, not so long ago, when you weren't in my life, I organized my time, began and completed tasks, read, wrote, and went to bed satisfied with what I'd done. I didn't need your blue-shining face to encourage or enable me.

You provide tools and information and entertainment but no direction; I have to come up with that. Indeed it's hard enough establishing a line of march when, close at hand, you provide easy distractions and encourage dissipation of my energies and time.

Still, I love your heft as you sit in my hand, the easy way you slip into my pocket, the brightness of your face, the fervent 'yes' you say to all my 'can I?' questions, the ear you give to the conversation of all humanity, and the voice you provide me for participation.

So I tamped the unease I felt and said, I'm going to learn to live bereft, at least for a night. I didn't even complain to my wife. So I finished reading a book that I'd been lent by a friend, watched the first half of Prokofiev's War and Peace, made a list of some outstanding philosophical issues I want to think through in the next few days, grumbled to myself about not being able to write online, listened to the slap of rain on the windows (what is it going to do tomorrow?), and went to bed...to be wakened at 5:30, not by your alarm, but my own inner restlessness.

Here you are next to my classroom computer, as I thought you'd be. Messages for me? News? Quirky pieces of information I find myself needing from time to time? All there. Everything assembled, day ready to begin. Ah.

Still, I whose face shines blue with your reflection still have to find the course, and hew to it, that provides me fullness of life, that is, encounters. If you're up to that, come along.

Refusal

From childhood I was taught by the elders in the rituals of the sacred groves, the dreaded incantations of storm and war, the blessing ceremonies of pregnant women and their issue, the lore of leaves and fruit, the songs of unlocking and binding, the secret names by which are invoked the spirits of the rivers and their pools, the forest glades and their denizens, the wells and ancient trees. With my death, the last of the lineage, the lines of the land, the lay of our lives will be dissipated and lost; everything that once emanated will now be inane.

I can make rocks sweat and trees writhe like yarn on a spindle, and snakes assemble and twine around my ankles. I can conjure thunderheads and make water spurt from the earth. I can find underground seas and gold in the roots of trees and the buried eggs of dragons. What is to be is open to me. My power can cause the earth to buck like a Brahma bull and the very oxygen to sequester itself from human lungs so that my enemies die gasping. You can see why I'm a dangerous man, but one dying without legacy.

With my death, the world of power disappears, a world that existed in only in unwritten tradition, in the lays of the bards and in the learning of the hierophants. Despite your injunction on all record other than of memory of mind or muscle, garment or sacred object, for the sake of what is about to evaporate into pitiful innocuity, I must write and so forestall the coming silence of my voice. Many follow the forms but none know the secret words. Without the words, no power. Forgive me, elder ones.

Let me begin with the ritual of twelve steps. First, when the call for peace is issued, the key word is hed_wch. Huh? Well, the making of the ring needs the secret word _ylch. What's going on?

The muse is evoked next but in vain unless the word hawe__u is spoken. This won't do. Have to try harder. Then, for the consecration of the elements, say the word fflwo___ in a loud voice while turning around. Then the invocation of realms with the word co_d spoken three times.  No, the complete word. What's happening to the words as I write them?

Then the invocation of the spirits starting with M_bo_ ap _od_on and ending with _yl__ ai_ D__. This is not enough. The spirits won't know themselves from these fragments. They won't come, they won't work.

What about the e___t__df__d? No, no. Might as well throw oak leaves about and hope for trees as expect power from these scattered letters. Is the secret that the secret words refuse the page; may only be spoken--as you, ancient ones, always said? Only in the assembly, in the groves, and from human lungs may they ever be whole and hearty. And the lungs are few, mine are failing fast. Hwyl fawr, oh wonder world, am nawr.

Cards

At the kitchen table, gusts of giggles punctuating a regular flow of commentary, faux accusations, blurts of triumph: the sisters are playing cards.  King in the Corner is a circular solitaire-like game and my sister-in-law has just gone out on her first turn, and to me in the other room, it sounds like a gale of laughter.

These red-haired women have been in each other's purview over 60 years, have clashed and comforted, rescued and resented, been witness to the vicissitudes, the celebrations, of each other's lives. All of that falls away, or rather is present but unremarked, in their enjoyment right now of the slap of cards down on the table.

Another pair of sisters I know is my mother and aunt, two women on either side of 90. From this small sample, it's clear that sisterhood is a complex relationship of loyalty, irritation, affection, concern active simultaneously in dynamic ratios. What simple word can characterize this meteorological melange?

I join to make a threesome, and observe up close my wife's sharp, amused eyes and my sister-in-law upwellings of enthusiasm. Their lives so intertwined, so many shared events, memories--this very game used to be favorite of their grandmother--and she had a poker face--so many issues still being worked out, and everything that is ahead, all  coming down now to this moment.

This relationship, this thing impossible to fully plumb, to completely characterize at any point, much less over years, is what I mean by the word encounter, in this case between two persons. If there were a mathematics of such, it would have to include a suitcase of ineffable values to finally balance the equation.

Do you recognize us all, your Beloved, around the table, God-in-love? Is that your laughter I hear?

One each

When it was my turn to go to the Secret Registry, I wasn't sure which one of the many I treasured I would want to keep, but I could only keep one secret and had to turn in my extras for publication in the the public space, along with everyone else's.

It had to be a real secret, not just fantasies or lies, so I had to take in some verification of the secret I wanted to keep, but I couldn't figure out which so I brought along several to talk over with the Divestment Counselor.

I'm torn between three, I told the woman sitting behind the desk. She nodded sympathetically, so I went on.

The first is a secret bank account that I haven't told my partners about. I don't think it has hurt our business but it has given me and my family that extra margin of security we deserve. I pushed a bank balance sheet on the table.

What will you lose if your partners find out? she inquired.

They will be furious and call it embezzlement.  It'll be humiliating, of course, and I'll have to divvy it up among everybody but business is doing well though and perhaps I'll get it back. I don't know that they'll ever trust me again though.

Okay, she said, what next?

Well, I'm on the vestry of the church, a leader of the church, and, to tell the truth, I don't believe in the divinity of Jesus. I want to the way my wife does, but the whole thing seems like an answer to a question I'm not asking. Still, I have to read from the scriptures, lead prayers, conduct Bible studies and feel like an imposter saying the things I say..

I put on the desk my father's old prayer book which I use now he's gone, in the margins of which I'd scrawled a few skeptical remarks.

What will happen if they find out? she asked.

Maybe nothing, I answered. It's sometimes more important in people's eyes to support the institution than its premises. But it's my job to set a public example for people to follow, and what kind of role model is a person who doesn't believe what he says.

What about the third?

This is the card of the hotel where for half a year I carried on an affair with the wife of my best friend. She'd get out of class early and I'd leave the office, or sometimes we'd just call in sick, and, oh, those afternoons, those days. The passion, the poignancy. We created a world where the people we weren't ever allowed to be on the outside could find a place, our place, special to us. At the beginning, it was so magical we thought we would be torn apart by the spells we were conjuring. And then, as we began to wake up gradually to who and what we were betraying, it was heartbreaking in a way that nothing has ever been since. Am I foolish to call it beautiful, because that's what it seems to me in reminiscence. It came to an end when she discovered I'd had a stupid one-nighter on a business trip, but that was just the storm that formalized the end of autumn.

Nobody ever knew, not my wife, not her husband, and she died, a respectable and respected lady, of cancer just five years ago. But that tearing off of each other's clothes as soon as the door was closed, and the long loungings in bed together as the late afternoon light slanted through the window. It was our place, our time, our secret selves, ours alone.

Do you know which one you want to keep? she asked.

I nodded, gathered up the balance sheet and the prayer book, and left.

Full disclosure

My office is down a steep little flight of stairs and low overhead from the sidewalk, easy to miss, hard to navigate,  but the clients still manage to find me. Only a little sign  above the entrance almost the same color as the brick: 'Divulgence Services: The Truth Will Make You Free' tells them they're in the right place.

It's a small room with only a desk, a chair, a sofa for snoozing, a coffee pot, and a dirty street level view of feet trudging by. Yet, it's as big as it needs to be because clients only come in one at a time, all kinds, some ashamed, some afraid, all of them tired, and each with something in their craw they need to get out and can't do it themselves. So they come to me. I don't judge; I'm just the messneger.

Don't get me wrong; I earn my fees. Sometimes I have to coax  out of them what exactly it is they want to divulge, and then the particulars of this or those to be let in on the secret. I require some verification of the truth of the secret to make sure I'm not being used for a hit and run job, and have them sign a waiver along with the contract. Then it's up to me when and how to spill the beans before I turn the matter back over to my client to handle the fall out.

Adulteries, pregnancies, thefts, what have you, all come down come down into my cave. Some of the secrets are so old its hard to find the person they need to be told to. Some so old they've gone beyond expiration to mold and aren't worth my fee to tell: 'This isn't a secret; this is junk. You need a dumpster, not Divulgence.' Still, they keep coming, but one of the strangest was the minister.

He was an affable guy, pastor of a liberal congregation downtown, an easy conversationalist, and interested in what I do. So what can I do for you? I asked and he told me he had a criminal past that he wanted divulged.

Probably something to do with embezzlement of petty cash, but no: he had years ago deliberately and with ingenuity stolen over the course of a week a complete leather-bound multi-volume Bible commentary from his seminary library, and while he knew intellectually what he'd done was wrong, he didn't actually feel it that way. In fact, the presence of this impressive set of books on his shelves made him feel seriously intellectual and good about himself.

So you want to divulge this secret to your congregation? I ventured.

I've already done it. When I told them it came out sounding glamorous and it actually improved my reputation.

To whom then? I asked.

Myself, he replied; I want to feel the full weight of what I've done come home to me. As it is, it just contributes to my general sense of respectability. I just can't feel bad about what I've done, and I should.

This was a new one for me. Usually the secrets I divulge come as a surprise to the people I contact. My hardest job is often just to convince them that, no matter how angry or sad they feel, the facts aren't going to change. Your situation, pastor, is just the reverse.

I understand, he replied. But think of this as someone keeping a secret from themselves. The dastardly me is keeping a secret from the respectable me, the secret of shame. I want to be shocked by what I did and dismayed by what it says about me. As of now, I don't.

He plunked a thick book down on my desk with a thump, and said, Here's volume one. There are twenty one more at home. A tremendous undertaking by one lonely scholar but fascinating and I've found it useful as a source of ideas for my sermons.

I picked it up, studied the ornate title page opposite the etching of author in the frontispiece and then thumbed through the gilt edged pages, all carefully slit, admiring the elegant typeface of the text and the copious footnoting. Inside the front cover on beautiful green marbling was a bookplate clearly identifying the book as property of a prestigious local seminary.

Okay, so how will I know if I've earned my fee? I asked. Good question, he answered. How about if you give it a good try and if I still don't really recognize what I've done, then I'll just consider myself incorrigible and pay the full fee?

I don't like taking money for doing nothing, I responded, but I'll give it a try.

My first call was to one of the librarians at the seminary telling them that I knew the whereabouts of said commentary and asking if they would be interested in getting it back. The woman put me on hold for it must have been twenty minutes before coming back and telling me that the library had deaccessioned books of that theological persuasion. However, she said, they had been much sought after in their day judging by the record of request slips the library kept. Whomever removed it illicitly (she didn't want to accuse me directly) should understand what that meant.

I'm working on that, I said as I hung up. When I told my client, he remarked that the seminary was notorious for avoiding any accusations or confrontations that could disturb the 'holy tranquility' of the place. He wasn't touched.

My next move was to post a description of the books on a collectors' message board, hinting broadly at the irregular provenance. Nobody would buy of course but I got what I wanted: a stream of insult and vituperation that hopeful would blast through the complacency of my client. He saw himself described as sneak, scum, better off in hell, and so on.

This is you, they're talking about, I told him. They know what dishonest is and they call it. How does it make you feel?

The words makes me feel dirty but really all this nastiness is really over the top, isn't it. What's going to work is something between the sly insinuation and the bludgeon.

My last idea was the annual book-sale of the local library. I rented a table and had my client display the set on it with a sign saying, If you ever wanted it, here it is. I stood behind the table and he sat further back.

In that bustling room full of trestles laden with trays of books, plenty of people found time to come over to admire the collection, this beautiful artifact of what might be a lost civilization. Then one old slow-moving fella with sag-ass jeans, flannel shirt and Hulk Hogan mustache, came up, stopped, looked over the array, picked up the eighteenth volume (big XVIII on the spine) and opened to a certain place near the end and began to read...and read...took out a small notebook and jotted something down...and read some more.

I stood stock still till he closed the book on his finger, looked far away to the ceiling, then around at us. You know, he said, addressing me, it must be this very set that years ago we read at the seminary.

Oh Lord, how it's coming back to me. My fiancee and I would meet in the stacks near where this was shelved. We were passionate--about our faith, and each other. We looked up the commentary on Paul's 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians, you know the love chapter, and it seemed that every word he wrote was a tocsin ringing in our hearts. You know these Germans can sometimes be so solemn but he seemed like a pastor blessing us. We began to pace out our reading aloud to make it last, it was so sweet for us. We'd read, talk, hold hands, pray, almost as if we were in heaven already.

The old guy stopped, and drew a ragged breath, then continued: The night before our wedding, we came here again to finish the chapter, we were almost at the end of the discussion of 'And now these three remain...' but when we went to turn the final page we found it hadn't been slit so we went right to the beginning of the section on chapter 14. We didn't want to attempt to open it. So she had this wonderful idea. We wrote out our promises to each other on a sheet of paper and slipped it between the pages where the last words on chapter 13 were written.

Why did we do that? Maybe we felt we were planting our love inside this greater love; maybe, because we were a bit superstitious, we thought we would absorb the blessing radiating from the very words; maybe we thought that words unread and unspoken, secret words, had a some special potency, like our silences together. We called it our Pocket of Praise.

My client was leaning forward listening, searching the old man's vertically-lined face.

He went on: When we came back after the wedding, the whole set was gone, vanished; the books on either side pushed together. It was perplexing and sad but we had plenty of other things to think about. Now it seems it was an omen. We tried hard to escape but couldn't. Somehow we lost our faith and we lost our love, I don't know why. It was so long ago. If she's still alive, I do wish her well.

He opened the book again, and separating the two next pages, reached in and with the tips of his fingers pulled out a small sheet of lined paper torn from a notebook.

Can I keep this? he asked of me, and put it in his shirt pocket. I'm all of a sudden having lots of memories, he said. I think I should go sit down.

Watching the old man go, I felt my client touch my shoulder, and I looked around at a face aghast.

That's what we do at Divulgence Services. Call for an appointment or drop during office hours.

Duel

He came up on my left from behind, ran just a little ahead of me--and stayed there, a guy about my side and some years younger judging by the quantity and color of hair.

There are lots of runners who pass me as if I'm just walkering, lean, loose, long striders who antelope by. They whoosh up and by, creating a distance between us that gets undeniably larger moment by moment. I have to admire these; how can I not?

Run beside me if you'd like; I appreciate a good pace-setter, but don't run just ahead of me and don't, don't pull into my lane just a stride or two in front of my face. It's impolite and it makes me mad.

So I turned on my burners--lifted my legs, extended my stride, balanced on the balls of my feet--and overtook him. I ran with an unobstructed view ahead for a quarter mile or so when I began to hear the thumping of his shoes over my left shoulder and he appeared in my peripheral vision, then my foveal. He went past me, then moved into my lane. No!

I swerved to the left and really put my wheels in gear, drawing even, pulling ahead, I left him behind, and kept the pace as I turned onto the Mass Ave bridge and kept it up all the way across. By the time I was on the down-ramp to the Esplanade, and could look back, he was gone.

A good run, and I thank you for it, but my right leg started cramping a bit with the extra exertion. If that's the price of having my own view forward, so be it.

Benched

I thought I'd find some warmth in the radiance of the full morning sun when I turned west onto the path next to the river, but the wind was strong in my face, the air sharp and the light impotent though brilliant. The cold clasped me like an Iron Maiden; my hands began to lose feeling.

Runners and pedestrians were going both ways on either side of  a bench on which lay a hooded woman, swathed in shawls and blankets of different bright colors, face to the rising sun, perhaps sleeping, perhaps waiting.

I thought, 'I'm cold but in motion; how much colder you must be, lady, still as you are. Under those layers is there shivering flesh waiting for the sun's warmth to sooth?'

'How long,' I wondered,'will you have to wait?' Not too much longer, I hope.