Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured quietude.

Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep
Where only body’s laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind;
Yet he who treads in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!

 While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth’s consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

I heard the news of terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC on the clock radio as I was waking up the morning of September 11, 2001. I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to take it in, and then got up to check the Internet. I couldn’t get a connection, so I went into my teenaged son’s bedroom and turned on the television. He woke up to the image of the burning towers and my jumbled explanation of what had happened. A few minutes later, we watched the first tower crumple to the ground.

“There were people in that building,” I said. There wasn’t much else to do but go fix breakfast and try to gain some sense of normalcy to the day.

It has been an extraordinarily busy ten years for me ever since, and I honestly haven’t spent much time reflecting on the events of what is now known as 9/11. But major anniversaries are a good time for reflection. George W. Bush, whose presidency was floundering, found his calling that day, and his puppet-masters behind the scenes found the cover they needed to go on offense with half-baked, ideological dreams of grandeur. Seven horrendously destructive years later, the country radically shifted gears and elected the first African-American president, a long-held liberal dream. I like Obama a lot and believe he has done an extraordinary job under impossibly stressful circumstances these past three years, but his relative inexperience wielding power has caused problems that perhaps weren’t inevitable. Still, he’s a smart, honorable man, and the best leader we’ve got to help us muddle through the current mess.

Ten years on from 9/11, old systems and institutions around the globe are in a state of turbulence, and life sometimes seems more chaotic than ever. But I’m continually struck by how much strength, resilience and good will there is down on the ground in ordinary life. I have faith that we will get through this and emerge stronger than ever. There are times, though, when I wish it was easier to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Tiamat, the chaos dragon, is the Great Mother. She has a dual character. As the origin of good she is the creatrix of the gods. Her beneficent form survived as the Sumerian goddess Bau, who was obviously identical with the Phœnician Baau, mother of the first man. Another name of Bau was Ma, and Nintu, “a form of the goddess Ma”, was half a woman and half a serpent, and was depicted with “a babe suckling her breast”. The Egyptian goddesses Neheb-kau and Uazit were serpents, and the goddesses Isis and Nepthys had also serpent forms. The serpent was a symbol of fertility, and as a mother was a protector. Vishnu, the Preserver of the Hindu Trinity, sleeps on the world-serpent’s body. Serpent charms are protective and fertility charms.

As the origin of evil Tiamat personified the deep and tempests. In this character she was the enemy of order and good, and strove to destroy the world.

– from Myths of Babylonia and Assyria, by Donald A. MacKenzie [1915]

“The Tea Party version of the American Revolution is not just fundamentalist: it is also Disneyfied, sentimentalised, and whitewashed. It rests on a naïve, solipsistic and exceptionalist faith that for America it will all work out in the end, because America is “the greatest nation in the world”. They take solace in tautology: America is great – this they know – because Fox News tells them so.”

Sarah Churchwell: “The willful ignorance that has dragged the U.S. to the brink”

Do not seek too much fame,
but do not seek obscurity.
Be proud.
But do not remind the world of your deeds.
Excel when you must,
but do not excel the world.
Many heroes are not yet born,
many have already died.
To be alive to hear this song is a victory.

Traditional, West Africa
– from Bly, Robert; Hillman, James; & Meade, Michael; The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart; 1992: New York, Harper Perennial.

There are all kinds of reasons why I continue to have faith that President Obama knows what he’s doing and is playing his hand skillfully in these treacherous times. James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine has had a running dialogue on his blog on this subject, and he was kind enough to include some of my thoughts in a post yesterday (I’m “reader LB in California,” the last contributor in the sequence). For a less wonky and more amusing presentation of the same essential idea, here’s a clip from a few months ago of Obama describing the art of compromise to a group of college students and speculating on what the Huffington Post might have had to say about President Lincoln when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Funny stuff!

I was holding off on buying an e-reader, as I have a long-established pattern of waiting for new technologies to settle in before adopting them and I already have a zillion things on hand to read. The first chink in my resistance came when a friend mentioned that he thought e-readers would end up replacing mass market paperbacks. That made sense, simply on the basis of ease of portability. This point was driven home when I flew to Washington DC at the beginning of last month, laden down as usual with too many books, magazines, etc. crammed into my carry-on luggage. My seatmate carried on a Kindle and a bottle of water, and seemed perfectly at ease for the five hour flight. Hmmm, I thought.

The light bulb finally went on when I looked up an obscure Joel Chandler Harris title on Amazon a few weeks ago. The listing showed it was available on Kindle for $0.00. Duh. Anything published in the 1900s is in the public domain. That was the breaking point. I had balked at the idea of paying for a book in the Kindle format as opposed to having an old-fashioned hard copy to read, but free content is another matter entirely. A whole new world has opened up, as all kinds of little known works of famous writers are out there in the aether waiting to be downloaded. I am in cloud heaven. I bought a Kindle after my Joel Chandler Harris revelation, and immediately downloaded the beginnings of a fine library of old literature. Tonight I’m going to kick off actually reading from the thing with Treasure Island, which a book group I recently joined plans to begin reading aloud.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

I took the dogs for an off-leash romp this morning at one of our usual regional park trails, a few ridges over from my house. As we headed back to the car, one of the park service informational displays caught my eye. It noted that the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza had passed through the area with a small group on March 31, 1776, and described how differently the landscape would have looked back then. Among other things, a diary entry from the expedition noted the abundance of tule elk and antelope roaming the hills.

Even so, it gives pause for thought. The abundance of unspoiled, open space in a gorgeous natural setting is one of the great riches of this area. It’s noteworthy that it’s still possible to reconstruct how the land might have appeared to the first Europeans who stumbled upon it. That’s something very much worth preserving in this cacophonous modern age.

At a certain point along the way from youth to adulthood, it dawns on you that with freedom comes responsibility. Adults can get away with things adolescents can’t because they’re the ones paying the bills. My generation was heavily involved in breaking down cultural barriers as we came of age, a fact that has had lasting consequences for better and worse. The older I get, the more I appreciate the fact that there is ultimately no mastermind in control of the outer boundaries and guard-rails framing the contours of what it’s possible to achieve. Our best shot is to have a clear-eyed view of those boundaries and how they operate, and then tailor our actions to work with, rather than against, the flow of energy contained within them.

Despite America’s multitude of problems and flaws, the ideal of every individual citizen’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a flame burning bright as ever. Our country is a work in progress, and there is still much to be done.

Forty years ago today, the 26^th amendment to the Constitution was ratified, lowering the voting age in the United States from 21 to 18. It was a logical outflow of activism against the Vietnam War, because guys were legally required to register for the draft as soon as they turned 18. There was, simply, no credible moral argument for maintaining the three year age gap: if young men were old enough to be forced by the government to be sent overseas to fight and die for a cause they didn’t necessarily support, by definition they could be assumed to have the maturity to vote on the policies their government was carrying out. My brother turned 20 in Vietnam, a month after the Tet Offensive, so the issue had personal resonance for me. I registered to vote as soon as I turned 18. The first election I was eligible for was a special one for something like county garbage collector, but I dutifully went down to the polling place and cast my vote. When my mother was born, women hadn’t yet won the right to vote in this country, and I sensed it wasn’t something to take for granted.