Category Archives: Writing

Verse – Eugene Field…

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Eugene Field
is Spinning in his Grave

The computer, smartphone, and iPad too
Are all that this child could want.
With Clash of Clans, and Auto-Theft 2,
I’ll always be so smart
School studies can suffer–no homework tonight–
I might watch a little TV,
But my brain is exploding, I’m feeling all right,
There’s nothing the matter with me,
I’m happy as I can be:
With computer,
Smartphone
And Pad.

Now Mother and Father will sputter and fuss–
They don’t understand at all.
For Granny and Gramps said, “Read! You Must!
Or all your grades will fall!”
But we take exams on computers at school,
No notes, but txts we snd!
The Principal axed the No Gizmos rule
So our school-wide strike would end–
“Unions Forever, my friend!”
With computer,
Smartphone,
And Pad!

  • Steve Shoemaker, September 2, 2015
  • NOTE: Click HERE to read Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac posting on Eugene Fields, author of such poems as “Wynken, Blinken, and Nod”.

Verse – a New Inscription

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A New Inscription
For The Statue of Liberty

The lamp once was a beacon. Now the hand
holds high a searchlight, torch, a burning flame
exposing all the exiles, all who came
unasked in search of liberty. Our land
is full, our steel gate closed. Those who demand
a chance to live in freedom now will name
our border guard lady Mother of Shame:
the rich protected, refugees are banned.
“No sanctuary here, no room,” she cries
with rigid lips. “No welcome at our door
for homeless masses struggling to rise
above the hunger, pain, disease and war
in lands where they were born. Compassion dies.
I send the poor back to El Salvador.”

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 13, 2015

Medical Marijuana

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Steve (Shoemaker) and Alexander Sharp, ordained clergy advocates for the medical use of marijuana, wrote a guest commentary published by the News-Gazette to set the record straight on medical marijuana. Click  Weeding Out Editorial Inaccuracies to read their critique of editorial’s mischaracterizations of the Journal of the American Medical Association study of the medical use of cannabis.

Quote of the day; Stories . . .

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Scroll down to read Day Parker’s quote about stories. Anthony de Mello was an Indian Jesuit priest who died of a heart attack at the age of 55. His writings were of some controversy, such that Joseph Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) investigated de Mello’s views 11 years after his death, concluding that some of his writings were “inconsistent with the teachings” of the Faith. The Indian magazine Outlook claimed it was an attempt by Rome to undermine the clergy in Asia and indicative of widening fissures between Rome and the Eastern Church. Like Elie Wiesel, Father de Mello knew that stories, not investigations and pronouncements, are the (appropriate) currency of human contact.

A Blogger’s Dilemma – Words and Silence

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Although no two days are the same, they divide themselves between up and down, loquacious and dumb, wordy and wordless.

Some days the words greet me in the morning. They pour out through my fingertips before I know what they’ll say. Other mornings the words play dead or hide-and-seek.

The words don’t come when the news is bad…when the world itself is too wordy, when the sacredness of words is profaned by jabber and chatter and pretentious prognostications about … just about everything. Some of those days and weeks I know enough to keep silent. On others I try to write and publish something here on Views from the Edge despite the inner voice that whispers “Shhhh! Not now. Maybe later the words will come. Shhhh!”

Although no two days are ever the same, they group themselves between “Not now; not yet!” and “Good morning! Today’s the day!”

Whether the words know when to be written is another thing altogether. Neither they nor the keyboard knows, and so some days I write in hopes they won’t profane the sacredness of words and silence.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 7, 2015

 

The Punishment and Rescue of the Talkative

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You’re reading a blog post. Blogging is talking. Sometimes it’s downright t-a-l-k-a-t-i-v-e. Chatty. Pointless. Silence is to be preferred to word pollution.

Two photographs in The Wood of Our Lady, Dennis Aubrey’s Via Lucis post, give reason to talk about talkativeness. Open the link and scroll down near the bottom to see two capitals: 1) two figures with their heads in their hands, weeping, and 2) what Dennis calls “The Punishment of the Talkative”.

The weeping figures of 12th century Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité strike a chord of familiarity.  How many times a day does the news cause us to put our head in our hands in despair? But “the punishment of the talkative” capital evokes no such sympathy. It strikes us moderns as barbaric, the art of a Christian first-cousin of ISIL with grotesque figures excising the tongue of the talkative. Yet it served to remind the worshipers in the 12th century, as it still does in its startling way, that talkativeness is no virtue. Words are sacred. Dennis Aubrey puts it this way:

Perhaps the most famous capital represents the punishment of the talkative, presumably by excising the tongue with tongs. I don’t know if this condemns lying, calumny, or verbal abuse, or if it is a more generalized censure of chattiness or language in general. While this punishment somehow seems fitting for the slanderers who fill our public lives, I would prefer these thoughts of Voltaire, … les anges m’ont tué par leur silence. Le silence est le just chatiment des bavard. Je meurs, je suis mort. “The angels have killed me with their silence. Silence is the just punishment for the talkative. I’m dying. I’m dead.”

It was poet Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, whose first published book (1918) was titled The Madman, who used words to say, “I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerative from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.”

Thank you, Dennis Aubrey and P.J. McKey for bringing the teachers to light.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, April 20, 2015.

An Axe for the Frozen Sea Inside Us

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Writer Franz Kafka discusses books worth reading.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Castle, and posthumously published The Trial and Parables and Paradoxes wound and stab us. They “wake us up with a blow on the head.”  They “open the frozen sea inside us”.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Feb. 28, 2015, in tribute to Franz Kafka.

 

How do you know?

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How do you know you’re a writer? Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Virginia Wolff might have “known” because other writers, publishers, and Broadway and Hollywood producers heaped praise on their writings. But the operative word is might. Existential knowing is a different sort of knowing.

Like great athletes, composers, and musicians, great writers are rarely satisfied with their work. They are always reaching beyond themselves. Often they operate from the depths of depression, despair, obsessed with death, the dark depths of the human psyche and the world’s instinct toward self-destruction. Some of the greatest – Hemingway, Wolff, Sylvia Plath, and Edgar Allan Poe – do themselves in.

How do you know you’re a writer? Some would say you “know” it existentially by the ebb and flow between times of creativity and nothingness. When I feel down and the well runs dry as a bone, I know existentially…I might be a writer.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN Feb. 28, 2015, inspired by tour of Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West, Florida.

Église Abbatiale Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes (Dennis Aubrey)

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Via Lucis Photography of Religious Architecture is a Views from the Edge favorite because of its ability to synthesize art, history, theology, and social commentary centering on the deeper things of the human spirit and the awe of Gothic and Romanesque architecture. In the midst of this post, Dennis Aubrey draws attention to the lion which appears to be spewing foliage. I proposed to Dennis that perhaps the lion is “eating straw like the ox” in Isaiah 11 and 65, Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom, an interpretation that seems to go well with the church’s sculptural rendering Jesus’ Parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25.

Église Abbatiale Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes’s Last Judgment scene suggests an artistic interpretation that eliminates the divide between sheep (saved) and goats (damned), a pictorial witness to the final judgment as universal forgiveness and salvation. To enjoy the original, complete with photographs, scroll down and click on “View the Original”.

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The church of Saint Jouin de Marnes is known as the Vézelay Poitevin, a tribute to its importance and beauty. It was named after a 4th century hermit named Jovinus from Mouterre-Silly near Loudun. Desiring a retired, contemplative life, he settled on a site of a Roman camp near the road from Poitiers to Angers, ten miles southwest of Mouterre-Silly. The site was called Ension and was in the swamps of the river Dives which flows two miles to the east. In 342 he founded an oratory church which attracted a modest religious community. By the time he died in 370, Jovinus had achieved a great reputation for sanctity and miracles. Over the years, his small community grew in importance, but eventually there was another decline.

In 843, however, the monks of Saint-Martin-de-Vertou in Brittany were forced to abandon their monastery by depredations of the Vikings. With the help…

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Gender Economics: It used to be even worse

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 When I Was a Grad Student

The lowest legal wage
was all I made
as part-time teller
in a city bank.
No teller could receive
a tip–if paid
the cameras would see,
you know… “Your back
pocket. The cash you stole!”
At end of day
your balance true would not
be evidence
of innocence no matter
what you’d say.

My wife made ten times
what I did, and hence
in 1968 she applied for
a credit card. No way–
she was not head
of our household. At Field’s
she tried once more:
a woman manager
was brave and said
the card could be in her
own name. My wife
was a real person, too,
with her own life…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Feb. 5, 2015

Editor’s Note: Steve was a student at McCormick Seminary in Chicago. Nadja was a research scientist at Northwestern.