258 candles-day 4

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Falling Fruit's interactive map of the world's forageable foods.

bread

years ago, when I was writing poetry as part of my mfa studies, I mentioned to a classmate that my 1st wife was paranoid schizophrenic. she said, "wow, that's gotta be a dynamite source of writing!" and that's when I realized that I'd never written anything about that period. this poem grew out of that.

BREAD

When everything else fails you, you can still

believe in bread. She is anchored in lime jell-o

in the kitchen. His suits litter the pantry,

his books are their plates. Sex is sliding on ice,

only with her legs spread. When he pries

at her with meat-thick fingers, she feels too much,

too much. She always has wool on. She pounds

the dough. Her fist goes through the table

and clanks on the floor. The bread, why not,

can be a doughnut.

Did he ever love her?

Might as well ask if she was ever pregnant. Depends.

Or was it the slant of light? Well. The oven's on,

and bread is bread and not doughnuts. He reads,

oblivious to bread, to doughnuts. She grabs a knife

and a chair. She faces the chair backwards,

at the kitchen door. She kneels naked on it.

She balances the knife along the top of the chair,

its handle blunt against the door. She props the tip

just above her navel. Metal and skin are a finger

and water. This is the question:

Will he open the door first, or will I stand up?

Minutes pass. The blade

mirrors her: the tense lips, eyes hidden in her hair,

teeth monstrous and full.

He goes on reading. She has to pee.

The knife clatters. That sound

and the smell of burning bread bring him to the door.

shaking the gates of hell

"People create institutions for a variety of reasons: to nurture life and serve the common good, to advance their own self-interested goals, sometimes to accomplish both. People create institutions to promote agendas that may either help or harm human beings or the earth. They invest their energy and resources...serve them, become loyal to them, and promote and defend them...When an institution invested with authority assumes this degree of importance in people's lives, the survival and growth of the institution itself may become paramount...

"What many people do not realize is that institutions are not simply groups of individuals working together. Invested by humans with authority, institutions tend to take on a life of their own, to develop their own personality, goals, ethos, culture, milieu. As an institution becomes larger, wealthier, and more powerful, individual human beings within the institution have relatively less control over what it does...

"In other words, an institution is more than the sum of the human beings who make it up. It is an actor, a protagonist, an agent, interacting for better or for worse with human beings, with other institutions, and with the nonhuman parts of creation. It is a Power. In a very real sense, through the people who make it up, it takes on a life of its own.

"In theological terms, one could say that the Powers are primarily concerned with their own survival and growth, even at the expense of mortal human beings. An institution demands loyalty from those who identify themselves as part of the institution and have an interest in furthering its goals...When this happens, people end up serving the institution, instead of the institution serving life..."

--from Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization by Sharon Delgado

if this is so--and I submit it is at least partly so--then theargument can be used in at least 2 ways: to further the legal argument that corporations become citizens, with rights and responsibilties, because they act in society's interest (or against it); and to argue that opposition to corporations and institutions is a holy act that religiously-inclined individuals are obligated to be a part of, even if it conflicts with their role as part of the institution.

effing the ineffable

I think I was happiest the nights I was making bread. I don't mean happiest in the sense that that time of my life was the happiest I'd ever been, but I think that the hours I spent baking bread while working overnights at the Van Kirk group home were the most fulfilling hours I've ever spent.

this is like trying to describe the undrescribeable. (it was nearly 30 years ago, after all.) I took to mixing, rolling, and pounding dough as if I'd been born to it. I loved coming up with new versions of different breads--sweet breads, herb breads, doughy breads--and it was one of the few consistencies of my life then that I could do it each night and enjoy doing it. as I remember it came about as an accident--I was the only one interested in making the bread the administration insisted we bake on the overnights--and got to be quite good at it. years later, working at b&n, I spent a part of a year just baking bread, making it the skill I could count on when all other things had collapsed.

I think it is in doing things like this that we become closer to what we think of as god, particularly if the bread is for people who depend on us. it's like my once-buddy snake said about the beneficence of meat: that people he did not know bought the ham whose slaughter he'd cleaned up after to put in their mouths, not knowing that it came from him or anything about him, and that somehow that was a holy thing.