A Remarkable Poem by W.H. Auden

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the treaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With all your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

A Depressing Post

This morning, during the hour break between my classes, I decided to go through a drive-through and get some breakfast. I always listen to CDs in my car and never the radio. I had taken my CDs out of the car, for some reason, and so I started listening to what was on.

The show I chose seemed ok (I think it was Today’s Issues on American Family Radio). It was a political talk-show of some sort. They were discussing Hilary Clinton’s comments this morning concerning health care. She hadn’t said much. She’d just pointed out that at least 47 million people in the United States had no health insurance and that she’d support universal health care in her candidacy. No big surprise there. The first few moments of the radio show were just outlining her (rather brief) statements. This was all fine. It seemed interesting.

Then, they started talking of course. I will try to be as accurate on these quotations as I can be, but I’m going from memory here. I’m going to verify everything when the podcast goes up in a couple of days. I assure you that this is accurate concerning the nature of the broadcast.

Guy No. 1: “I will agree with Hillary on one thing; things are different now than when she proposed universal health care in 1993. I’m afraid she’s right that people would be more open to the idea of universal health care than they were then. For one thing, there’s an aging population, and there’s the AARP and those sorts really supporting it, and so there’s those people really eating this up.”

Guy No. 2: “Yeah, and all the Hispanics. They’re dying for universal healthcare. They’ll all think that’s appealing and vote for that. Especially all those illegal aliens. I tell you, you give them amnesty and let them vote, and the Republican Party will just be history. It won’t even exist anymore. It’ll just be the Democrats and whatever liberal party pops up on the left of them. Those immigrants would just love universal health care I’m sure.”

No. 1: “Yeah, you can see that she’s right that this would appeal to more people today. With healthcare costs as high as they are now, there are these portions of the society that could be convinced to think universal healthcare would be a good idea.”

No. 2: “But what these that this would appeal to don’t understand is how this would hurt the quality of the healthcare in the country. There would be longer waiting lines, and the doctors wouldn’t be as good. There wouldn’t be sufficient competition, so the medical field would stop improving. Sure, offer these people a little healthcare, and they’re going to be tempted to take it without seeing that it’s socialism.”

No. 1: “What’s going to matter is how these people see it. If we can make them see it as socialism, it can be stopped. But if they see it as universal health care, it won’t be.”

No. 2: “Unfortunately, these people are getting their truth, their version of truth, from CNN and ABC and CBS and the AARP and all the people brainwashing them to think that way. It’s could really happen. We could end up with socialized medicine. It’s scary to think about really. Let’s go to commercial.”

Of course, it was a commercial for the station, trumpeting their Christian values.

Things are scary indeed.

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Update on my grandmother. She was kicked out of the hospital even though everyone, including the doctor, knows she’s strong enough to be out of it yet and even though she’s still needs the equipment hooked up to monitor her heart rate and blood sugar. Medicare won’t pay for her to stay longer, however, and the family can’t come close to affording the health costs either. She’s in a nursing facility now where she’s expected to feed herself, although it might be a few weeks before she can do that for herself. Of course, the family’s trying to be there as much as possible to help with that sort of thing (though since everyone works and lives all over the state, this is going to be difficult). Grandma does still need to have people stay up with her at night to help monitor everything and to just be with her (since she’s far from out of the woods), at least for these first couple of nights. So far, there’s been somebody to do that every night for the last couple of weeks. At the nursing facility, however, this won’t be allowed.

These are just a couple of the problems. Things are not going too well.

My Least Favorite Bible Verse

At that time the Lord said to Joshua, "Make for yourself flint knives and circumcise again the sons of Israel the second time." - Joshua 5:2

A Bit of News

Well, since my last update on Grandma, we had only gotten bad news until this evening. Today, they did say that the pneumonia seemed to be getting a little better for her, as well the fluid around her heart. So, for really the first time in over a week, we've had a bit of hopeful news.

I was pretty annoyed a couple of days ago to hear that Medicare will only pay for her to stay a couple more days in the hospital, and then she'll be kicked out (despite still needing hospital care). She'll be going into a skilled nursing home then. Hopefully, that'll work out well.

She's not out of the woods yet, but things are better.

Thanks for all of the prayers.

An Update and a Reflection

Well, Grandma is doing better than she was Tuesday night. On Wednesday, she started feeling much better, and everyone was fairly optimistic. On Thursday morning, however, she suffered through a really rough spell. She started coughing, and that threw her heart a little out of whack. It started going way too fast, and her blood pressure dropped to almost nothing. She was also jaundiced. They gave her some blood, and that stabilized her. I got to see her a couple of times yesterday, and she did have much more color than on Tuesday, and she could talk, and her mind was fine. There was a period in the late afternoon when she started seeing scriptures appear in the specks in the ceiling tiles, and she was trying to get people to help her read them. Other than that, however, she was very lucid, and so we weren't very sure what to think. Today, she is doing basically the same as yesterday. She's a little better than she was earlier in the week, but there's a very long way to go.


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There were two moments from our hospital experiences Tuesday night that really struck me, though I’m going to write about one of them now.

The doctor had just informed Grandma and the family that she was in “very critical” condition, and he had then sent in a nurse to find out some important information from Grandma and the family. Mom and Aunt June had consulted Grandma’s living will to answer the questions. Were they to pursue an aggressive treatment of the pneumonia (which was the only chance for longer term survival but that may kill her immediately)? Yes. Were they to use life support? No. If her heart stopped, should they use the paddles to bring her back? No. The nurse left.

My Aunt June who was there is one of the most steady people I know. There are very few people whom I admire more. She’s Grandma’s oldest child and is only seventeen years younger than Grandma. They’ve been through a lot of life together.

Aunt June walked up to Grandma and put her hand on her cheek and, in the exact same tone of voice she always uses, said, “Mama, you heard what they said, you’re in critical condition, and things are not looking very good. They’re going to pursue an aggressive treatment on this pneumonia to give you a chance. Is that alright with you?”

Grandma: “Ok.”

June: “That’s good Mama. We love you, and we want you to get better so that we can spend more time with you. Now Mama, they’re not going to use life support or paddles on you. Is that what you want?”

Grandma: “Yes.”

June: “Mama, they’re about start this treatment tonight, and if it gets too hard for you, I want you to tell us, and we will make sure it stops. And we’re going to be truthful with you about everything that’s going on.”

Grandma: “Ok.”

June: “I love you Mama.”

That was it. I watched in awe of the conversation. Several things struck me as I stood listening. For one, I’m not sure that I’ll ever be a person who is able to be as straightforward and honest as my aunt is, but I would like to be so. That conversation couldn’t have taken place as it did had there not been a lifetime of truthful speech between the two women.

The second thing was my grandmother’s demeanor. She was calm and, like my aunt, was matter-of-fact. She was very ready and able to deal with this situation, which happened to be the possibility of her own death. I wouldn’t say that she was stoical; she wasn’t suppressing her fear of what may be coming. Rather, despite the pain she was experiencing, she was peaceful; there wasn’t any fear to suppress.

I think that moment’s going to stand for a long time as a testament to the power of faithfulness, in all of its forms.

Prayers Requested

I ended yesterday’s blog post a little abruptly. The reason for this was that I got a phone call in the middle of typing. My Grandma had gotten sick, and my aunt was bringing her to the hospital in San Angelo. My mother is Grandma’s favorite child (out of eight) and is the closest one to the hospital, so the phone call was to tell me we were taking off to meet them at the doctor’s office.

So, Mom and I left. We really weren’t worried. Grandma’s pulled through countless spells like this, and it didn’t sound like this was one was too bad. Mom and I laughed and joked the whole way to San Angelo.

The problem is that Grandma’s health drastically worsened on that car ride to the doctor’s, and my aunt (who’s exactly the sort of person you want to be in charge of a difficult situation) had to really push it. By the time things got really bad, it was too late for her to do anything else but rush on to the hospital as quickly as she could. When Mom and I got out of the emergency waiting room (where we were waiting for them to show up) and first saw Grandma, we stopped still and couldn’t speak. We thought she was dead sitting there. She couldn’t move or talk, and I had to lift her out of the truck and put her in a wheel chair, and Mom had to hold her up in it as we took her into the emergency room.

She’s eighty-seven, had bi-pass surgery over ten years ago, has congestive heart failure, and now has pneumonia. Last night, they told us that she was “very critical” and probably wouldn’t survive the night. They also took down all directives concerning life support (etc.) and advised us to call the preacher. Then, they kicked us out for the night.

We waited all night for the call, which doesn’t make sleeping very easy. It’s a little like sleeping with a pinched nerve. You finally find a position where there’s not the piercing pain, but you spend so much energy trying to maintain that single position that you exhaust yourself and feel worse than before. We didn’t sleep well. The call never came though.

So, we’re starting a second day of all this, and it’s never very easy to go through. We’re, of course, not ready for the worst to happen, but I think we are all prepared (especially Grandma). If you get a chance, please pray for peace, whatever that is going to be in this situation.

I read this last night and thought I'd share. It's from an interview with Stanley Hauerwas entitled "Christianity, it's not a relition: it's an adventure" from The Hauerwas Reader.

"What we do when we educate kids to be happy and self-fulfilled is to absolutely ruin them. Parents should say to their kids, “What you want out of life is not happiness but to be part of a worthy adventure. You want to have something worth dying for.” It’s awful when all we have to live for is ourselves; that’s what the Gospel reveals to us. The Good News tells of the adventure that humans have been made part of through God’s grace, through Christ, and through the church. God made each Christian part of God’s sacrificial life so that the world might know what it is not abandoned and that there is salvation. That’s who Christians are. Doesn’t that sound like a joyful thing? I use the language of joy because happiness is just too pale to describe this adventure.

Christianity is the proclamation that God gives Christians a gift that they don’t know they need. The gift then transforms their lives so that they are trained to want the right things rightly. Christmas has absolutely destroyed this understanding of the Good News. It’s trained people to believe that Christianity is fundamentally about giving and receiving and that our happiness is in giving and getting what we want. But, in fact, the best Christmases are often the ones in which one doesn’t get what one wants.

Remember when you got a chemistry set rather than a bicycle and you thought, “I hate this thing.” But one wintry day you started playing with the chemistry set and
discovered that it was really interesting. Suddenly you were trained to have wants you didn’t know you should have. That’s what Christianity is all about: it’s an adventure we didn’t know we wanted to be on."

I'm afraid this is a lot more radical than it at first appears.

Reminder #29

When you go to a wedding and are single, it's a good idea to take a long walk outside or to suddenly need to use the restroom whenever you think the garter and bouquet are about to be thrown.

Thankfully, I've learned this lesson well over the years.

My Review of 300 - I Can't Believe I Watched It

I guess "meaningless" wouldn't exactly be accurate; there's meaning in the story. It's just that what meaning there is in 300 has so little value.

My friends and I who went to see this really ended up laughing through most of this film. Sure, it was pretty. But that was about all there was to it. Everything in the story was just so trite, and there’s not a character in the film that’s not a stereotype. Plus, there's no plot. The Persians are coming, and the whole movie is just the Spartans battling wave upon wave of the different kinds of warriors that can be thrown at them. The repetitive battle scenes are only broken up by a couple of gratuitous sex scenes and speech after speech after speech (six or seven) that all say the same thing--the Spartans are the reasonable people in the world, fighting for freedom and justice. They even got a Mel Gibson look- and sound-alike, and they had him give a couple of Braveheart speeches (though I liked that movie, which made a little bit of sense).

Of course, there’s not a whole lot about the Spartan society in the movie that makes it seem so free or reasonable. Infants with the slightest imperfection are thrown to their deaths. Boys are ripped from their mothers and drafted into a violent warrior culture where, it is made clear, concepts of love and mercy are anathema. If these boys don’t survive their childhood, they don’t deserve to live anyway. The “philosophers” and “boy lovers” of Athens are mocked, and it’s made clear that Spartan society is socially and economically unjust. They even kill the defenseless enemy messengers in one of the opening scenes of the film. Also, King Leonidas’s wife tells him the standard Spartan line, “Either come back with your shield or on top of it.” Many of these things, I’m sure, are pretty accurate concerning Spartan society. But this isn’t a free or reasonable society. It’s ridiculous that the movie pretends so.

Honestly, there’s not a value in the movie that I could agree with. It's really out to appeal to peoples’ worst instincts. The film is at its heart about violence for violence's sake, and the concepts of "liberty" and "justice" and "duty" are only cheapened by being in it.

A common definition of pornography: “creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate desire.” Frankly, 300 comes pretty close to this.

Reading List 2007

55. The Elements of Style - E.B. White and William Strunk 6.5/10

54. No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy 8.5/10

53. Simply Christian - N.T. Wright 8/10

52. Following Jesus - N.T. Wright 8/10

51. Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament - Ellen Davis 8.5/10

50. What Learning Leaves - Taylor Mali 7/10

49. Life of the Beloved - Henri J.M. Nouwen 9.5/10

48. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro 8/10

47. The Nuts-And-Bolts of College Writing - Michael Harvey 7/10

46. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 10/10

45. The Prentice Hall Reader - 4/10

44. Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare 9.5/10

43. The Challenge of Jesus - N.T. Wright 8.5/10

42. A Little Literature - Sylvan Barnet, William Burnet, and William Cain 7/10

41. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling 10/10

40. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling 10/10

39. A Generous Orthodoxy - Brian McLaren 6.5/10

38. The Princess Bride - William Goldman 10/10

37. The Death of Adam - Marilynne Robinson 10/10

36. Legend - David Gemmell 8/10

35. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving 9/10

34. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die - Peter Boxall 8/10

33. Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences - Donald McAndrew and Thomas Reigstad 6/10

32. Smiley's People - John Le Carre 9.5/10

31. The Red Pony - John Steinbeck 7/10

30. The Honourable Schoolboy - John Le Carre 8/10

29. The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield 7/10

28. The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham 6.5/10

27. St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox - G.K. Chesterton 8.5/10

26. The Symposium - Plato 8/10

25. The Road - Cormac McCarthy 9/10

24. Satan in Goray - Isaac Bashevis Singer 5/10

23. Resident Aliens - Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon 8.5/10

22. Bus Stop - William Inge 7.5/10

21. The Slave - Isaac Bashevis Singer 9.8/10

20. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh 8.5/10

19. Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson 8 /10

18. Coyote Blue - Christopher Moore 7.5/10

17. Mornings Like This: Found Poems - Annie Dillard 7/10

16. Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 8.5/10

15. Candide - Voltaire 5.5/10

14. The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian - Lloyd Alexander 9/10

13. An Honest Answer - Ginger Andrews 9/10

12. The Longwood Reader - Edward A. Dornan and Michael Finnegan 7/10

11. Painless Writing - Jeffrey Strausser 5.5/10

10. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce 5/10

9. Writing Without Teachers - Peter Elbow 7.5/10

8. Community of Writers - Peter Elbow 5.5/10

7. The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing - Michael Harvey 8/10

6. The End - Lemony Snicket 10/10

5. The Penultimate Peril - Lemony Snicket 9.5/10

4. The Grim Grotto - Lemony Snicket 8/10

3. The Slippery Slope - Lemony Snicket 9/10

2. The Carniverous Carnival - Lemony Snicket 8.5/10

1. The Hostile Hospital - Lemony Snicket 7.5/10

Greek is my favorite language, so far. At least, it has been my favorite foreign language to study (which the exception of ridiculous midterms...). The thing I've liked, particularly, is seeing something of the origins of our own words.

Sometimes, it's sort of revealing. For instance, poie9w -- pronounced "poi-ai-oe" -- means I create, do, or make, and that's also the word that we get "poetry" from. That's pretty interesting for a literature nut like myself. It says something, I think, about the way we conceptualize the world if we get "poetry" from the word for "creation." You know, in the beginning was the word...

Another one is o3pou - prounounced "hoe-poo"- which means "where" and o3pwv - "hoe-pos" - which means "in order that." Of course, these two words are pretty closely related to the English word "hope." That both words provide some roots for the concept of hope seems meaningful. It suggests that "hope" is not just a vision of some sort of ideal - the where. It's also related to the action to get there - the "in order that."

The one that was interesting this week, though, was kwmh9 -- "ko-may." That's the word for a village or small town. Also, it's pretty closely related to the contemporary word "coma." Having grown up in Menard, I think I can see how those are related.

A Ginger Andrews Poem

Prayer

God bless the chick in Alaska
who took in my sister’s ex,
an abusive alcoholic hunk.
Bless all borderline brainless ex-cheerleaders
with long blonde hair, boobs,
and waists no bigger around than a coke bottle
who’ve broken up somebody else’s home.
Forgive my thrill
should they put on seventy-five pounds,
develop stretch marks, spider veins,
and suffer through endless days of deep depression.

Bless those who remarry on the rebound.
Bless me and all my sisters;
the ball and chain baggage we carried into our second marriages.
Bless my broken brother and his live-in.
Grand him SSI. Consider
how the deeper the wounds in my family,
the funnier we’ve become.
Bless those who’ve learned to laugh at what’s longed for.
Keep us from becoming hilarious.
Bless our children.
Bless all our ex’s,
and bless the fat chick in Alaska.