World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.

[It might be Labour Day but, it's not.]

So. ... What shall we pray for then?

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Précis:   (for busy executives with no time to spare) Our friend Jorge/Francis calls for a World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, and it's today, September 1st. Of course there's no guidance or amplification of any kind from 'the Church', no event to attend, no organization provided by the high-priced organizational help. Fuck 'em! What else can one say? And, since the call was heard (after all) carry on in the dark. I'm definitely not the praying kinda guy anymore so I hope y'unnerstan' this'll be nowt but fat fond rhetoric, subjunctive, uma ficção - pretend but true in its way, the best I can provide. Carrying on from the Pleiades last time, and the much too complicated virtues of Aristotle's 'Nichomachean Ethics', and so instead taking a cue symmetry-wise from the simple seven deadlies, and the 3+4=7 virtues, I'll put seven of 'em - seven bites of (partly) bitter blather: 1. May what remains be strengthened: What follows is more of the hysteria mentioned in the last post. So, for balance, here's Naomi Oreskes; because she's a cool head and from her expression I'd say she's hummin' that old Nancy Sinatra fave-O-rite - with a strong message for the Koch brothers: "One'a these days these boots are gonna, walk all over you! 'Crime climatique stop !' (not 'Stop Climate Crimes' as indicated in the article) will start shipping tomorrow - orders can be made here. On August 26th The Guardian produces this article. It is not at all clear what it might be about. McKibben's website at 350.org sheds no light. They are all such wonderful communicators. The prayer here (if it were a prayer) would be for competent heads to prevail (or for The Guardian to do something rudimentary in the way of proof readers). There is little enough time left without stupidly wasting it on confused misinformation. I am no fan of Kalle Lasn either but his recent presentation concludes with "Only an angry tide of out-of-control youth can bring the world to its senses." I agree. And more, I think the activist heavy-hitters are wasting their time in Paris when they could be at home raising an army. 2. May the global economy falter & collapse: For a few days it was billed as a 'crash', which moderated (unfortunately) into a 'crisis' and thence to a slump and a blip. Oh well. A 'sober look' by the New York Times Editorial Board (no less) concludes that it was a market swoon, a 'mild correction' of 6.6% lost. As is most obvious in another recent editorial, these people are vitally hooked on the crack cocaine of growth (that is, fatally addicted in their inmost vitals, willing to give blow-job nonsense lip service for it) and terrified at any prospect of life without it. (They're doomed.) Gwynne Dyer (a somewhat less venal fellow) gives us hope that the main event won't be too long coming; especially if there's any truth in the NYT stories of Chinese Zombie Factories. 3. May Ottawa and all who live (and 'work' ) there . . . No, I'm not perverse enough to pray for sedition. BUT. If Ottawa were burning I would stop pissing on it. Hull too for that matter. This poor fellow, Tony Turner, the Environment Canada migratory bird scientist, who got the shaft when he sang his little ditty 'Harperman' on the Internet (you can watch & listen to it here) may very well be better off out of it and away. This headline says it all: Canadian families spend more on taxes than food & shelter, reporting on a study by the Fraser Institute. (And here we thought everything coming out of the Fraser Institute was Conservative spin.) Stephen Harper is the leader of the band and every party (including the Green) is playing his tune and dancing to it, and all of the party-leaders as well EXCEPT ELIZABETH MAY (!). I tell you what: When she walks into a room I stand up and applaud (and without looking around first to see what everyone else is doing). If we could make her Prime Minister we might just get out of this with a civilization more-or-less intact. Now there's a prayer for you. 4. May all the dilettantes & dissemblers spontaneously deconstruct: You may wonder that I number Alan Rusbridger among the dilettantes. Perhaps he's really dying of some horrible disease and wants to spend his last months on a Brasilian beach with his family, and if so I apologize (he could even have said so). But I don't think that's it. I think he stepped into his final Guardian 'project' and then stepped out of it again like Leonard Cohen's "five year old scientist" who simply "leaves the room where he has dissected an alarm clock". There are so many. Madame Defarge might quickly change their hearts with the threat of a guillotine ... but there is none such here at the moment (though there will be - or the equivalent - in decades to come); all we have is a reminder of Jorge/Francis' call for conversion in Laudato Si' which itself might easily be mistaken as code for some arcane religious ritual - baptism, or, confirmation, or something like that, circumcision, infibulation. The necessary conversion is nothing so mundane.

Watch and listen to this short video by Ann Pickard and Shell's high-priced PR help at McKinsey & Company. A large, clever, admirable woman making a complete slag of herself. Even with such competition (and it is fierce what with climate hypocrite of the decade - Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama up in Alaska, and those bum-buddies Tony Abbott & Bjørn Lomborg) the lowest-hanging fruit of all is still ... our very own k-k-k Stephen Harper: This may seem crude, scatological, sophomoric even, and ... possibly so, but it is also par for every hole on this particular course. (Thanks to Gord.) The maggots!   God damn them all! We were told we'd cruise the seas for American gold, We'd fire no guns, shed no tears! Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's privateers. God save us all! (It's the same.) 5. Up the Laudato Si' !   Praise Be: (At least) two spiritual events following on in August; widening ripples: The International Islamic Climate Change Symposium, August 17-18 in Istanbul, Turkey; which issued an Islamic Declaration on Climate Change. Good on 'em!   A-and after such a long wait, after the good example of the World Council of Churches more than a year ago and many good examples among their congregations, particularly Trinity Saint Paul's here in Toronto (also more than a year ago): United Church to divest from fossil fuels (better late than never). Of course, any UCC resolution must be carefully qualified. First consider the foil resolution (the culmination of a series actually, all so extremely well considered and thought out with the assistance of that eminent moral philosopher Sid Ryan, spreading over the annual meetings in the last decade or so) to 'resolve the mideast problem'. And then ... well, you know, for Christmas one year the UCC got one of those junior-coin-collector books, the blue ones with a place for every penny, a slot (pardon the pun, entirely unintentional) as it were. Oh sure, I'm a bigot for mentioning it, but, well, you know, there does seem to be a pattern. You can always tell a politician, he or she is the one riding on someone else's coat-tails. We might pray then (if we were inclined to pray) for any scrap of momentum to help Laudato Si' avoid the black hole of Vatican/Roman Catholic inertia. The point is not that Roman Catholicism, or Islam, or some k-k-Canadian Protestant cult, is worthy of anything beyond contempt (they are emphatically not); it is that the common project of stopping carbon emissions IS worthy of any and every support. 6. May Davi Kopenawa live forever: Davi Kopenawa (a Yanomami shaman): Quando a Amazônia sucumbir à devastação desenfreada e o último xamã morrer, o céu cairá sobre todos e será o fim do mundo. / When Amazonia succumbs to out-of-control devastation and the last shaman dies, the sky will fall around us and it will be the end of the world. Shades of Ragnarok. (Because as long as he's alive there's at least one xamã still on the go and his prophecy won't kick in.) 7. May Dora Salvador be remembered and honoured: Ai! Ai! Ai! (See Amigos da Terra – Amazônia Brasileira: 18 de agosto; and, 2 de setembro.)   It's worth a few minutes' meditation (perhaps), idle contemplation, cursory reflection, on the seven serious sins:         Wrath (not anger per se), Sloth, Pride,         Envy, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust; and the seven (non-corresponding) virtues:         three theological:                 Faith, Hope, and Love;         and four cardinal:                 Prudence/Wisdom, Justice,                 Temperance, and Courage/Strength. As another brief exercise try looking up 'cardinal' in the OED and see if you can marry the etymology - 'hinge' - with the four main points of a compass. (I can't.) The cardinal virtues first came to me many years ago through E.F. Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful' where they figure in the concluding chapter. He was a coal miner's economist remember; and Stephen Harper is an oil driller's economist. Who can say what changes await our Stevie? Caveat Lector:   The first line of this post, "Our friend Jorge/Francis calls for ..." started out to be "Our friend Jorge/Patrick ..." and it stayed that way until just a few moments before I hit the 'Publish' button. I read it many times during the preparation and thought, "Ah, how nice to have an Irish connection besides wazizname? ... the CUPE guy? ... Sid Ryan!" I was also convinced that September 1st was Labour Day; didn't know it's a moveable feast and would not have twigged except the library posted a notice on the door that it'll be closed on the 7th for Labour Day and eventually I looked it up in Wikipedia. And I've not read 'The Nichomachean Ethics' although I knew a guy at McGill who did and he told me about it. I know you're not listening. It's OK. My father was a bourgeois man, but not quite entirely all the way through. He rarely swore or raised his voice but once or twice I heard him chuckle, "They wouldn't say 'shit' if their mouth was full of it." I think what saved him included a rural upbringing that extended into his late 20s. Even among my (very very few) old and intimate bourgeois friends, and my entire family of course, I have seen this propensity towards any euphemism, even outright falsehood or ... silence before mooting truth (and I mean lowercase 't' truth here) ... I have seen this propensity in practice as the almost seamless general rule. For the record I am just about exactly the same, certainly no better; except I've also lived for longish periods in places far from any city - cities being where the moribund bourgeois sensibility flourishes - and known some pipefitters, fishermen, unrepentant alcoholics, hermits, and beijos da rua who have not let me get away with it. (Part and parcel of preferring Christ to Socrates. It's so complicated sorting out types and antitypes eh?) I am waiting for a book to arrive for me at the library - 'Don't even think about it: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change' by George Marshall, 2014 - hoping it'll shed some light on this issue. Probably not. Maybe ... The Cicadas are still singin'. It seems wrong somehow - too late in the year - but I don't know enough about 'em to be sure; and there's something plaintive in their song, wistful. In Icaraí it was a loud imperative chorous impossible to ignore; here it's one and a pause of minutes and then, maybe again or, another or, not.

 
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Grief.

The day before the day before.

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So you see, an unexpected addition to the bespoke 7-11-13-17-22 being 30 - second last day of the year and all. Not a happy year, though I still rise with a song - even if for the last weeks it has been Stephen Foster's 'Hard Times (Come Again No More)' with resonances from Mavis Staples' joyful rendition. That and 'Hello Young Lovers' from 'The King and I'. Last month there were meditations: responsibility, guilt, and shame; and Martin Buber's essay Guilt and Guilt Feelings. Grief and grieve come from Latin gravis - heavy, via Old French gref - with positive links to grávida (Portuguese), gravid - pregnant, heavy with young. Grief: hardship, suffering; deep or violent sorrow caused by loss or trouble; keen or bitter feeling of regret for something lost, remorse for something done, or sorrow for mishap to oneself or others; Grieve: to sorrow deeply. About as old as English itself; OED citations from the 13th century onwards including one from Chaucer, variously interpreted as: "Tel me of youre grief parauenture I yow may in youre meschief conseille or helpe," and "Telleth me your grief; paraventure I may, in your meschief, conseille or helpe," (Shipman's Tale lines 127-8). [Enter Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms, Edgar, Captain, and others following]. Lear: Howl, howl, howl, howl! ... Do you see this? Look on her! look! her lips! Look there, look there! [He dies.] Except for Job and a couple of the Prophets the word is not much in evidence in the KJV - almost not used at all in the New Testament. Do you see how quickly I run away, put it away? Put it out into the OED, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Launcelot Andrewes ... anywhere but here and now; anything but what it is. The only useful part is recognizing that quick avoidance. A friend of mine used to tell me that she often/always felt herself 'de trop', heavy and unworthy. He covers his eyes. So not to see? So not to be seen? If the latter then is there an element of shame? The 'remorse' in the OED definition may also be a (weak) link to guilt. My mother had a remarkable transcendent notion around carnal knowledge - she believed it's a lifetime and unbreakable connection. Some of this may have come from her personal history - that my father was her only lover - and some of it may have come from ... somewhere else. Whatever the background, this wonderful idea (which corresponds so nicely with Maritain's "Au lieu d'un chateau fort dressé au milieu des terres, il faudrait penser a l'armée des étoiles jetées dans le ciel.") is, of all she gave me, what I thank her for most. Naturally I've gone on with it (ad absurdum of course). Sex is not the only intimate and significant touch - much of what goes on between loving parents and children shares some similar quality. Sight (including glances and sometimes photographs), certain sounds (particularly music), even certain written passages; seem to me to expand the network - l'armée des étoiles being a network of sorts. And in my silly way I attach all of this to the word 'saw' in Luke 10,33. (I do draw a firm line excluding anything to do with computers and smartphones - but anyone who reads this blog already knows I'm a bigot. :-) So ... Buber's heroic practitioner who "must lay his hand in the wound of the other" becomes for me the authentic healer, not only of guilt, but of shame and grief as well - perhaps even the only authentic healer. Echoes & reverberations of the 'laying on of hands' but with the Holy Ghost divested of divinity and properly transmogrified into the human will. tOad's perfect puns strike again! and ... ... a rock'n roll band called Inner Animas.   A few words on Lima from Gwynne Dyer; and a few more from John Ibbitson (in the Globe of all places). A suite of reports from The Guardian on profligate plastic (beware: 'micro' in this context does not mean 000th; and the stuff is in the beaches as well as in & on the water):    • 2013-11: Marine plastic pollution: the threat pervading Australia's waters;      • 2013-12: Mounting microplastic pollution harms 'earthworms of the sea';      • 2014-12: Full scale of plastic in the world's oceans revealed for first time;      • 2014-12: Microplastic deposits found deep in world's oceans and seas.   I remember collecting salt bags on the Marticot Back Cove beach (we used them to start our kitchen fire in those days) and finding them turned to flakes & dust in the sun & salt. And thinking, "Ah! So that's where they go."  Don't want to forget Thais Santi: This long interview (in Portuguese) - originally in El País, and translated (poorly) by Google - tells a story well worth the time it takes to understand. Thais Santi (who has been mentioned here previously and here) tells us much about the development of Belo Monte - and also much about herself and some of the changes that have come to her in the process. In the end she admits that most of what we can do is bear witness. She also makes the link - through Hannah Arendt - between the environnmental armageddon and Hitler's Holocaust. People I try to talk with about this connection turn their backs on me so it is good to hear it from such a source. This woman is no flake - she was Professor of Law before she came to Altamira - and given the situation for activists in Brazil generally but Pará state particularly, we know, without the fear of contradiction, that she is courageous in the face of personal danger. She uses the term 'State of Exception' which makes me think she may have read Giorgio Agamben as well. Someone I respect tells me I'm just being politically correct in my ranting craziness. 'Cept ... there are observations which may only appear (human rhetorical skills being as fallible as the rest) to be judgements. Some are stoutly tied with a knot and some with a bow - I prefer the silk ribbon. Two films: 'The Good Lie': I weep from start to finish, not because the story is a sad one - it's clearly U-shaped from the start - but because I (selfishly) wish some tribe would show me such compassion as these children consistently show one another. There. 'The Last Ocean': The makers keep a website where you can find more about it. The copy I watch comes from the library - there are no torrent copies anywhere that I can find, wish I knew how to make one. Meanwhile in the EU: Fishing quotas defy scientists’ advice as they increase quotas and relax regulations around dumping bycatch. taka yo ler a mi, akuni ler a mi laka lo laka lo laka lo pung ai yo karra tak, khauto kata khalu tak laka lo laka lo laka lo The end of it is in this tiny story. I betrayed him. Ai ai ai. He lived for years in the north with the people, around Frobisher Bay maybe, knew the language, raised children. He would have known about the old & frail walking off into the ice but I never asked. Such a tradition seems reasonable - and in that culture, walking off into the ice would have a context, be comprehensible, understandable ... not walking quite entirely alone then. Here it's nothing like that. If you say to someone, "You are not able to understand this but ..." it's a sure way to get their back up. Most of the time these urban muggles like to imagine they are able to understand everything, anything; which, of course, they aren't. Oh well. The danger is not the loss of faith & hope, the danger is not despair; the danger is that no one will notice and take interest, understand, comprehend, appreciate, be true. There is a calculus of spirit though it is not mathematical and so is not suitable for engineering. When it comes to grief (beyond guilt, shame, remorse) isn't it mourning that's required? Maybe this can be accomplished privately by well founded individuals - for me (who is not) it's a process requiring common confirmation, some kind of shared experience (I shudder at the phrase but there it is). 'The Pawnbroker' for which I imagined, remembered, explicitly remembered, an entirely different denouement (in which Sol & Tessie mourn together). The joke's on me.

 
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