Ginger56’s Weblog

Morning. It’s always morning, when
I’m reading & writing to prove
I read & write. This time it’s
Ferlinghetti. You can tell
can’t you? And, really, I already wrote

for awhile, in my chair, where the air
barely reaches from the vent, blowing
cool over empty tables & spaces, the fan
spinning casual as a flirtatious Flamenca’s fan.
Finally ineffectual.

Really, I was writing then
about God, as always, because I began
with Ephesians & trying to be the first
on my block to crack the nut of
the shape of time & God’s will

all that—which led me to

surrender. That’s what we do
willy nilly—without will, that is,
though feeling willful. I write.
I read. I eat. I drink the coffee
congratulating my spineless consciousness

that today it has cinnamon. Today I have written.
Today I have read. Today I have followed
myself. Ferlinghetti gives form to my thought
I am an echo. Ferlinghetti thinks about God.
I think because I have read Ferlinghetti

for years—though not constantly—he
was beginning of poetry for me —he
taught me all I knew before
I knew more & another thing or two.
I never knew Ginsberg until Ginsberg was

passé, had passed away— then I noticed
Howl, and Kaddish, then I loved the grocery poem
with Whitman in the aisles. I got it: he was not
some random madman tangling tradition’s web
he was strapped in reaction & I am strapped
in it & him & Ferlinghetti & neither he, nor I,

nor Ferlinghetti can help it—we are spinning
the web from our bellies because
that’s what we do—we practice
or perish, the publishing
public & frog-like takes its own

inevitable course, not predetermined but
inevitable nonetheless
RANDOM INEVITABILITY
that’s what I learned from the sandpiper tracks
of those verses in Coney Island of the Mind
my first favorites. That’s what I want to say

You wake up you read, you write, you eat
you type—or whatever, whatever strikes you even if it feels
forced and routine—you are the routine & the random
offshoot of some other routine.
Even if you’re out of cinnamon

walk out the door—Be surprised
by Ferlinghetti’s girl with the ice cream sprinkles
outside the dry cleaning store

or whatever the great and powerful Oz has in mind for you today.

Generally, I write these posts in MS Word and edit before I post. Given the lack of traffic here, it seems a little silly to change that pattern, but this feels urgent–and it is time-sensitive. The article that triggered the thoughts will be archived soon. The moment will pass. And the issue is crucial.

So if it’s the week of July 1, go to this link
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/washington/01gitmo.html?th&emc=th

If it’s not that week, read on; I’ll summarize a bit.

The article concerns Guantanamo and an appeals court decision that a particular prisoner was held on scant real evidence. In fact, the government’s basis for holding this particular Chinese Muslim was that it had three documents that all declared him–without citing any hard evidence–to be connected to various terrorist or terrorist sympathizing groups.

The court, according to the article, rightly compared this to a situation in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” where a speaker declares, “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

The court’s ruling that just saying so does not constitute grounds for detaining a human being for six years of his life–or any length of time for that matter elicited this response from Glenn M. Sulmasy, “a national security fellow at Harvard,

“This case displays the inadequacies of having civilian courts inject themselves into military decision-making,” said Mr. Sulmasy, who is also “a law professor at the Coast Guard Academy”.

The military, in other words, should get to decide whom it imprisons and for how long entirely on its own.

Of course, the article doesn’t clue us in to the intricacies of Mr. Sulmasy’s thinking. We only get the conclusion. But that conclusion raises serious concerns about our nation’s division of powers. Of course, there are 3 branches of our governments: legislative, judicial and executive. The first 2 determine what is legal, that last enforces those laws and conducts the country’s business. In the federal government, the business includes making war, so the military is linked to the executive by way of a civilian commander in chief and the Secretary of Defense whom he appoints. This arrangement helps create a balance of power.

Thus, while the military may most often go its own way–and has managed to convince a majority of Congress as well, apparently, as a majority of the populace to go along most of the time–it is in fact ultimately beholden to the president and he, with the permission of Congress, decides which wars to fight.

Without this crucial safeguard, the military could decide to go to war on its own. Generals would exercise much greater power over our fates. Often, at least when I was in government and American history classes, I was told that the idea of civilian leadership of the military was enlightened–a kind of trigger-lock on the whole apparatus of warfare.

But Mr. Sulmasy’s statement suggests that the military should oversee its own activities and be allowed to reach judgments by a different standard, according to its own perceptions and determinations and quite apart from civilian oversight. This, I submit, is a dangerous position.

I reallize that Mr. Sulmasy is not talking about the president’s power to initiate warfare or the Congressional power to declare and provide funds for war. But the civilian commander in chief is a synechdoche of military structure and control. As the president leads the entire military when it comes to making war, so the civilian justice system should have some say about how the military (part of our government and thus reflective of our values) conducts its affairs–particularly when those affairs involve civilians–regardless of nationality. Remember, the Declaration of Independence, speaks of rights for all humans, under which, in the particular instance of our nation, we gained the right to establish a government for ourselves in order to secure “inalienable” rights of “men” (not just Americans).

Of course, like Mr. Sulmasy, the military power-structure assumes that detainees at Guantanamo are not civilians but “enemy combatants.” And we are in a so-called war on terrorism that, mimicking our global economy, defies the notion of national boundaries and identity. This detainee from China was found in Afghanistan and, maybe, had friends or associates connected to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Terrorists don’t wear uniforms, so their guilt is by association–unless they are caught red-handed.

And that, it seems, seldom happens.

Perhaps, then, we need a revised strategy for finding and prosecuting–or combating–these “enemies. The counter-argument generally asserts that suspension of habeas corpus is a temporary casualty, instituted sparingly and only when someone has a really good reason. But even detention of Japanese citizens of the U.S. (which was pretty awful and for which the government has had to apologize) did not last 6 years. World War 2 as not six years long. Moreover, we have been promised a War on Terror with no end in sight. So presumably rather than 6 years, an innocent person could spend life in prison simply because the Pentagon said three times that he or she was dangerous. Or might be.

So this is my urgency–we need above all not to sacrifice our values in the pursuit of security. This deviation from principle is not an aberration and is unlikely to be temporary. We cannot afford to turn over not only 40% of our federal budget but also the power to decide who is an enemy and what to do about it to people in military uniforms. In an age of volunteer armies, this becomes especially important. I mean no disrespect to our military citizens. I admire their courage and dedication. I do not take lightly their willingness to die for us, for me. Nevertheless, a volunteer army means everyone in the army, navy, air force marines, is willing to go to war–may even expect to. There is no civilian restraint in such a system. No poor schmuck gets caught up by fate in a war in which he or she has no stake or interest and sent off, terrified, to risk life on a battlefield. So now more than ever we need civilian oversight of military activities. We need a president who acknowledges other options than war, a populace vigilant about the expense, in all ways, of maintaining the military as our first choice against our adversaries. And a populace devoted enough to the values of its society that it will not abandon those principles just to be safe.

Many military people cite willingness to die for one’s values as a sign of true virtue. If you won’t die for them, the argument goes, it doesn’t count. Well, I’m just holding the rest of us to that same standard. I don’t call for us to go into battle. In fact, I believe we should have fewer battles and resolve conflicts by other means. The danger I invite us to enter is hypothetical: maybe if we release people we feel might be dangerous, maybe if we never even detain them, some will go on to commit heinous acts of agression. And maybe they won’t.

We need civilian courts to protect those fingered by the military without probable cause or evidence. It’s easy to give up six years of a poor Chinese man’s life, but if guilt by association remains grounds for arrest, those six–or eight or ten or twenty–years could be your next door neighbor’s

Or your own.

So I look for congenial, possibly exciting assignments to stimulate them. And this morning I stumbled upon a great idea: use litany style poetry to teach parallel structure. Explain the concept—similar syntax repeated with varying though related content.  It would also afford the opportunity to look at coherence, emphasis and certain enduring “documents” like MLK’s “I Have a Dream,” the Declaration of Independence, which resurfaces in Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” the opening lines of “A Tale of Two Cities,” Ecclesiastes on appropriate times . . . Quite a list.

A positive approach to teaching grammar allows students to experience a rhetorical tool and then, on revision, to discover the pitfalls and ways of correcting them in peer groups rather than rote exercises. Correction, being based on the students’ own writing, will be meaningful to them so the skill is more likely to “take” (as all you writing teachers will recognize).

I believe such an assignment could work for basic as well as advanced writers. In fact, I think it might work at almost any level. At any level, poetry is a challenge and appeals to creativity. It would demonstrate form as a stimulus for truly creative production–as opposed to the unexamined, stream of a not very interesting consciousness drivvel that often passes for poetry among adolescents. It could work for a single day’s class activities and even, potentially, lead to a portfolio piece. After all parallel structure–properly used–is a powerful rhetorical structure. Why shouldn’t they master it? And then be proud?

I spend a lot of time wishing I was writing poetry, looking for topics, jotting down inspirations, scanning the interior landscape for my own, special tree. Oddly enough, in quest of poetry to read and to write I continually end up with ideas for teaching.

I am not a confident teacher—though I move sure-footed through my tutoring. Self-doubt is my most persistent pedagogic muse—glaring like an unfriendly district superintendent over my shoulder at every move, asking: Are you in control? Why don’t ;you get them to stop playing computer games? What did that teach them? Why haven’t they improved? Why do they hate this assignment?

I like my experience with students to feel like a social hour with me as host but able to command my guests and that way still accomplish a lot. This oxymoron traps me repeatedly. Wanting to mother, it seems I often alienate. After all, these are usually 18 year olds anxious to shed parental oversight. What they want is someone other, perhaps, a bit more exotic, less accessible, even scarier. It’s not a persona I adopt easily.

It’s summer now. I look forward to teaching, in spite of my trepidations. I stockpile articles and books on pedagogy, I read and re-read textbooks, trying to match their version of learning with mine and what I think my students will respond to. I’m likely to be wrong again in some cases. I know I’ll encounter those who don’t get me and many, perhaps, whose progress as writers is incremental at best.

But I don’t want to stop. And I continue to believe I’ll improve.

On Mothers’ Day (and as a mom I’m well aware that tomorrow IS that day and fully count on being “honored”) we celebrate an impossible ideal. Culture and media as well as our own rose-colored emotions conjure an image of a saintly, cookie baker that resembles almost no one I know. As one drive-by business sign summarized the prevailing attitude, “Mothers are angels without wings.”

As a flesh and blood, flawed and sometimes regretful member of that class, I cringe at such misrepresentations. They both call on me to be what I am not and tend to kick me out of a group to which I belong in spite of my flaws and transgressions. And, by invoking the entirely demystified and slightly immature cherub—in the tradition of the fairy godmother aunts in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty—the superficial stereotypes reduce the mystery, power, real sacrifice and intense and instinctual relationship compounded in mother-and child-hood. Motherhood is miraculous, but it’s not always pretty. Or even kind.

It occurred to me this morning that many of us suspect compassion in general of hackneyed bathos, syrupy sentimentality—and that the formulation of Mothers’ Day is partly responsible. . When someone speaks of loving neighbors and compassion for all sentient creatures, we think too much of Hallmark Mothers’ Day and not enough of . . . something else.

What? What component of love do those flowery cards lack that reduces them from true compassion to kitsch and, even, hypocrisy?

One component is sustainability. On selected days, for fleeting moments, a child or sister or mother, declares a gratitude and recognition that during the rest of their lives—outside the theater of the holiday—is soundly contradicted by “real world” behavior. Everyone shares a tear-filled moment, like the emotion conjured in a tear-jerker film, but no one can carry that sentiment into the everyday. Heck, it may not last through dinner. Leave the theater, buy an ice cream or coffee, and you’re right back in yourself, no permanent transformation accomplished because the experience is based on a fiction.

The frilliest of cards for mothers describe saintly self-sacrifice—without any of the emotions or conditions that made her behaviors sacrificial. The cornball postulate that by becoming mothers women achieve some level of apotheosis belies the moments in any mother’s (or other person’s life) when she (or he) was anything but angelic. And watching the relationships of those who exchange such platitudes, I often experienced a sense of subdivided personality. No doubt there is real feeling somewhere, but on a daily basis it’s revealed as considerably different from the representations on the cards.

Another missing component, then, is honesty.

True compassion, I suppose, detaches from all moments—the celebratory and sacralized as well as the ordinary and secular—and having observed truly but without judgment, accepts and honors, despite what in the course of life have been and will continue to be conflicts, pain, struggle and enduring existential isolation.

In this sense, the humorous card serves as the better vehicle for true connection. In shared laughter, by choosing to recognize what falls short of glory people generate true connection. Of course, it’s quite possible (though difficult) to find (or compose) cards that express heartfelt, real gratitude, but that real sentiment will never hold up an impossible standard as having been met when the recipient will know (almost certainly) that the image in the mirror is a lie. Instead, true sentiment remembers the concrete and recognizes that true heroism occurs among the flawed and the human.

In films, people always tell little boys that true courage is not an absence of fear but a moving forward despite it. Why can’t we tell mothers the same thing? No matter mistakes you have made—and will continue to make—your relationship matters. If you have worked against your grain, suppressed your own desires, bitten your tongue, even over-reacted in fear for the safety of your child, you have been a good mother. And because that’s one key relationship in any person’s life, celebration of whatever it was and preparation to improve whatever will be are worthwhile. So in honor of your true—and imperfect—reality, we will not propose an impossible standard but will take this moment to say we love you anyway. In that way, Mothers’ Day (and holidays like it) could further the quest for true compassion. The teacher who first explained Buddhism to me called it a recognition of “suchness:” the absolute individuality of an entity. He spoke of experiencing this knock-you-off-your-feet insight in response to a dandelion pushing through a sidewalk crack. We can begin that project by acknowledging our real mothers–and children. By rejecting the phony rose for the scrawny but miraculous—and actual—flowering weed.

I am drinking coffee, eating cereal, reading Worship Arts—an article that calls the parables “upside down world.”

(So much to record—so much in so few minutes!)

I consider what the woman preacher-author says about the Parable of the Sower, looking not at the kinds of soil but at the farmer, whose liberal (some might say “careless” or “wanton”) dissemination connotes, for her, largesse and an openness to possibility.

(She speaks of brainstorming in that connection: when “all things are considered possible.” All things . . . possible.)

Then, I read in The Sun a story that, parable-like, also upends expectation. The reader-writer describes stealing potatoes in Germany during WWII—when her family was hungry, when she was a child—and again at a reunion years later—for fun and nostalgia when they were not hungry and she no longer a child. Having remembered the taste of fire-roasted stolen tubers, she and her family re-enact the thefts, for the joy! for the possibility! for the taste!

I am weeping as insight floods me: the potatoes do not belong to the farmer. The joy of these thieves—one a preacher—eating their potatoes and reminiscing about a time when need drove them—completely surpasses the value of the potatoes themselves. Joy and community redeem the trespass.

This is transcendence.

(THIS is a MasterCard commercial!)

Flooded with the tears of amazement, I look up to see Jesus, MY Jesus—a small, brightly painted Mexican crucifix on the front door. He is transformed through devastation, transcending death by filling with All that is. Above his head, a dove—sky and spirit. His arms, so painful in death, now stretch wide in welcome, palms uplifted. His robe, bright yellow, displays and contains the universe He embraces: the sun, a great orange flower, opens at his heart. Two humans, male and female, stand beneath, then white homes like migrant cabins below them in the skirt. And then, the vegetal world: a tree and plants just above the soil into which he has deeply planted his bare, pristinely white feet:

Jesus is All the World to me
THIS Jesus, who literally descends, who binds together, sanctifying transgression to the Glory of God, subsuming worldly good and evil in a bounty of blessing overwhelming to our meager human hearts.

Tuesday morning, NPR ran a creepily light-hearted feature on bioengineering students cloning new strains (that is, essentially, new species or at least sub-species) of E.Coli. In particular, they were adding new genes to change the odor. The students’ cavalier attitude—“what fun! Now they smell like banana!”—expressed itself in the end (and I quote) as, “we’re just making stuff,” emphasis firmly on “stuff.”

At that point, I realized that while I shuffle through ancient arguments about intangibles like God, these folks are out there literally redefining—reinventing—life itself, becoming agents of evolution and assuring that evolution will now serve (or try to serve) human whims.

But in the long run it may fail to serve human interests.

The consequence of this school-child tampering?

A loss of “life”. Once we marveled at and called it miraculous. Something even the most knowledgeable alchemist could not bestow upon a rock, no matter how humanly shaped. Life the “Chi,” the anima, the spirit. Life is now, simply, “stuff.” We can no longer distinguish its value or miracle from that of base metal.

So as science fiction has warned us since the early 1800s, we’re playing with dangerous fires. But where the nineteenth century read Mary Shelley’s dream of an ill-treated patchwork man, we draw our stories from the morning news. Truly, we are not far from the cyborgs and androids, the odd performing hybrid “toy” creatures of Blade Runner. Nor, it seems, from the callous disregard that characterizes the corporate engineers of those fictional societies in whose radically materialist eyes humans, too, are merely cogs, functioning or not, in the system. Harrison Ford barely has a better life than his condemned, blond paramour. When he fails to perform for the state, a price falls on his head as well. Life, it’s just “stuff” after all.

Apparently we pay no heed to the moral warnings embedded in those tales.

Tragically, the young people performing these Frankensteinian pyrotechnics were completely unaware of their power or any consequences other than, it seems, sweeter smelling excrement. (We already have women buying pills that virtually eliminate their gendered rhythms. Imagine the thrill of purchasing a kit that will forever eliminate your need for bottled bathroom fragrance.)

Someone has to stand up for the sacred spark in life—for freedom as a value and a right that undergirds all progress. As elusive and indefinite as God, it is sacred both to God and to evolution. Without freedom to mutate as they will, living organisms will be more than ever in thrall to the dangerous humans. And like any monopolistic autocracy, the human empire will visit havoc on the order of the universe–or at least the little corner of it we call the earth.

This is a moment to rethink all assumptions. Some will conclude that those intangible, comprehensive categories—life, for instance—never had any more absolute value than the concept of God or transcendance. They will point to better smelling e.coli—potentially better smelling excrement—as a wonderful commodity. Never mind that foul smells inform us—warn us, often, of poisons and danger. Within that new world order human value will be challenged by its own . Our value may plummet with the value of the “stuff” we are made on. And the seemingly innocent pleasures we derive may trigger destructive consequences as the universe—all that other “stuff”— seeks equilibrium.

“Free the E. Coli” seems an absurdist mantra, but I’m thinking of printing it on a t-shirt.

This conversation began for me in a station wagon forty years ago. I was sixteen or so, on my way with “The Group” (a collection of self-declared—and real—misfits on whose outskirts I lingered) to a weekend retreat at the Episcopal campground 50 miles south of Indianapolis where I grew up. Though I’ve forgotten his name, I idolized the young curate who chaperoned us. The rest of the party were friends in the high style of high school soap opera, thriving on strife and stoking their depression and alienation at every opportunity. They wrote poetry, talked about Existentialism, hung-out at each other’s houses bewailing their lot. I wrote poetry, too, but I was undeniably the more conventional, the middle of the roader and more inclined to fit in—or try to.

On the hour drive along two-lane, farm country roads, talk turned, somehow, to absolute and relative truth. A favorite intellectual adversary (Bill, are you listening?) had recently shocked me by declaring, “There are no absolutes.” Brightest and most intellectually mature of all the bright intellectual crowd, he may, even at that age, have read some Nietzsche; regardless, he had read me perfectly and recognized a comment that would spark me to passionate dispute.

I was honestly disturbed—perhaps experiencing what I learned years later to call “aporia,” a dizzying sense that reality had suddenly ruptured beneath me and I was falling through a continental divide into outer space. Take no prisoners relativism still bothers me, but at least now I understand the concept that founds such a radical—and absolute—statement.

So I asked my recently ordained chaperone if there were absolutes and, not missing a beat he replied, “Of course there are.” Coming from him, at the time, this was answer enough.

Like most post-modern philosophies, relativism is fraught with paradox. For Catholicism and other orthodoxies, things go easier. “Absolutely no relativity” leaves no logical wiggle room. But “absolutely only relativism” immediately undermines its own pronouncements, by being, itself an absolute. Unfortunately this clever parlor game entertains mostly the reactionary and terrified orthodox, who like a scholar who’s just found a single spelling mistake in his rival’s dissertation, hold this one kink as disproof of an entire, sophisticated, often unarguable observation of fact. Anyone living in this world without hypocrisy has encountered, I’d venture, at least one instance where “absolute rightness” seemed impossible to determine or when a sudden exception dashed a previously unquestioned and unqualified assertion: an abortion that saved a woman’s life, a theft of bread to feed the hungry, a lie that gentled a hurtful truth, an adulterous affair that saved a despairing life, a war that seems just (at least to some). . . Depending on the commandments you start with, you can make your own list.

At church and in Christianity generally, people talk a lot about “God’s will” and, lately, discovering “God’s purpose” for one’s life. I have great trouble with the latter, as I decline to regard my life as a B-grade movie pre-ordained and edited, now screened without preview so that I, its audience rather than its protagonist, am the only one who doesn’t know how I turn out. I am said to have free will but in fact, as God foreknows the choices I will make, it hardly seems to merit the term “free.” It’s like being in a first person shooter where suddenly the machine takes over and all you can do is cling to the controls and marvel (or recoil in horror). I don’t want to be God’s errand girl, with the entire “purpose” of my life a simple to do list for the almighty.

Still, I want to be and act in harmony with that will. I have no argument with the larger dimension of divine purpose, if by that we mean, quite simply, what God would prefer. I’m down with real free-will and undetermined futures. And, though it opens quite a can of worms, I’m down with the will of God. And troubled by the question of whether it is absolute—in all or part.

Unfortunately, being finite creatures we can’t always absolutely or immediately ascertain what precisely is the most just, most right configuration of a specific situation. In fact, philosophically as well as literally, “just” and “right” are more like directions, as in “to the right”, than fixed locations. Preferences. In other words, it’s relative.

Two things seem to happen if this is true (maybe more, but these are a good start): First, God’s Will sounds a lot like the Dao. The path and our direction on it trump the indeterminate destination as proof of our “righteousness.” And that correct directionality is itself relative to where we began—kind of like Mecca is a different direction from wherever you are and, if we’re honest, Mecca itself is spinning in orbit on earth and around the sun—not fixed at all. Second, the “righteous” have no “right” of self-righteousness. As Jesus insisted, they had better look to their own sins: take the beams from their eyes and drop their stones. Directionality shifts, almost literally with the tides. The rightness of an action shifts as other beings—sentient, conscious and inert—adjust, take action and move in a direction of their own, whether with or against what from your perspective looks best at the moment. The truth of chaos, the unpredictability of phenomena, derives from their interconnectedness. So acknowledging connection—which we Christians call surrender to love—is the origin of ethical behavior.

So, are there absolutes? If not, can we have righteousness—or even rightness or ethics without them? In avoiding absolutes, I would assert just one. It comes from the old testament. It’s written into many hymns, here it is in the lyrics of one of my favorites:

“What does our god require of you? To seek justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with your God.”

In accordance with that absolute, we make our relative way. I think that’s probably what my newly collared young cleric meant. It makes me happy to think I’m still down with his viewpoint as well.

10 March

Spring Break has ended and I am back. My adventure cured me for the present of my fear of flight. Yesterday morning, I could not wait to board, to take-off. To get home. My husband figured large in that, though sun and relative warmth were very welcome. We flew non-stop after Cincinnati, gradually leaving the blizzard to the plows and the natives of the north. In Tampa, we were welcomed like the long lost, “I’ll have you home in no time,” promised the parking shuttle driver. And he was right.

The whole experience folds away now, sinks back into and under routine.

Two images endure: the dining room of “refugees” with the waitress braving the elements to serve us. The chatting. The ersatz bonding. The chill blasts from the entry doors opening on a steady stream. Coming and going. The piles of dishes as customers rotated through and the overworked waitress simply sat the next at a different table like the Mad Hatter at Alice’s tea party. From that picture, so many questions linger: Did my elderly women get back to Dayton? Did the teenager on break from her prep school ever join her grandparents in Puerto Rico? What will become of two-year-old Nathan who befriended everyone he could charm? Did that couple ever find the right hotel? Did the single robin poking for worms in the drifts survive?

And the snow.

I sit in my room, pulled up to the sliding glass, looking out on the tarp-covered, snow covered pool and the surrounding yard. All white.

Truly quiet—snow quiet—now. The wind gentled and the flakes at rest, clear now, no falling. Near dusk and the few birds have sheltered. Is it the last snow of my life? I’m not so old, but Bradenton will never see such a storm and even here this snow is breaking records.

I do love to look at it. Here in the warm room, the cold merely laps at the sliding doors. My knees feel the chill while the outer air stiffens into clarity. It’s like a tv picture suddenly tuned to HD.

White lamp posts, white fence posts and white snow. Dark pine and darker trunks and lamplight, here and there, behind grey shadows, dappling drifts and piles. Darkest of all, bare twigs of a maple or oak against the pure grey sky. And now, the nearer white post lamps gleam on and tint the drifts beneath them with a barely yellow glow. There blackbirds shoot to roosts across the pointed tops of the pines and a headlight or two sweep past in the street beyond.

What isn’t here? The diners down the hall, slurping read sauce and garlic toast. My daughter. My husband. And the dead—my dead—beyond me, farther still.