W. Grey Champion
From the Moleskine
My Moleskine accompanies me everywhere, for the purpose of catching those elusive thoughts that bombard one’s consciousness and may or may not be worthy of elaboration. I have shared these musings on my blog, From the Moleskine, each week for many years. Originally a Google blog, I moved it to this website when my third book was released. In The Weekly will be recent reflections I seek to record and to share with readers. Described here are other headings, also updated weekly.
Dokusan: In Japan, dokusan is a private meeting of a Zen student with his master. For background, readers must see my book, Conjuring Archangel: Chronicle of a Journey on the Path, because the conjuring continues.
In the Courtyard: As my collaborator on the blog, my friend Anna reports under this heading from her frequent forays to the village. We often meet in the courtyard for croissants and hazelnut coffee from the French bakery.
The Carriage Lamp: Evocative of those bygone, romantic days of horses and carriages, Anna and I, Sherlockians both, will on occasion include original poems, either hers or mine. The most recent will be at the top.
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The Weekly
Fervid
It would be hard to exaggerate the fervor here in the capital city on the eve of elections for a clean sweep of Congress after two years of extreme and blatant misrule on the part of a rogue administration. By all reports independent voters share this fervor, but can it be true, after so long might they really be waking up? The Congress has been unspeakably inert in the face of broken laws, transgressions of constitutional norms, meeting their responsibilities only with impudent smirks, and every careless whim of the emperor allowed. As I have reported in my dispatches, the city itself continues to be rubbled. Now scores of beautiful old trees are cut own so that the emperor can have his own TPC. The performing arts are choked off by fatal spending cuts and the loss of the JFK center. Yet are the voters wise enough to see the stupidity of right wing policies now fulfilled? Capricious tariffs on our best allies have nothing to do with trade deficits.They are punitive acts by a schoolyard bully. Now we must attack the Iranian mullahs yet again, so they do not get a nuclear weapon. Instead as the US depletes its arsenal and cuts oil supply chains, every nation that has depended on their nuclear umbrella will be making their own nuclear missiles. "This is the way the world ends,” with a bang not a whimper, notwithstanding T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”
A propensity for optimism in human nature may most often be beneficial, but in times like these must be balanced with a true appreciation of the darker aspects. Various of the essays in Ruminata deal with the danger of ignoring intractable human nature. Tribalism may be the most ancient facet of our inheritance. And where does it still thrive? The Middle East. Tribal war there is endemic. The Hebrew Bible is a catalog of such wars. In the Middle Ages came a great irruption of Islam countered in the Crusades. Still the modern world persists in the belief that this region can be pacified, that in these tribes a most ancient and intensely dark, brutally primitive native trait can be conquered.
Election results will be instructive: Were a sufficient number of Americans able to overcome their own tribal biases?
(As this is posted, the answer is a resounding "Yes!" God bless America! More on the message sent, the lessons learned, next week.)
