And so, in dream and limb we sing
Blown free from our constant notions
That hath in sense extension unerring
Belief and faith winsome ablutions

Nonsense saith some Puritanical hearts
That hath more will than trust in grace
And constraining men in all their arts
That would by God's own troth lay waste

To each and every good notion gave birth
By hope and love and skill, by belief's art
Each man made light and swift and whole by mirth
And even flesh and dirt given still some part

Herein breaks free the bubbling brook of life
That extinguishes fire of divine strife

C.M. Hagmaier 12/27/14

Meh.  Iambic pentameter doesn't come naturally to me, and I think I got a couple feet wrong there, but oh, well.  There's a reason nobody does anything in formal measures anymore.

Grain Liquor on a Chequerboard

Sissah said to the tyrant

All I have done can

Be paid by a grain of wheat

Placed double on a board

For chessmen, square

By square as your majesty

Deigns, filled row by row

Column by column

Doubled and doubled

And redoubled again

Though your granaries fail

Though the universe fail

Heavy with precision

The tasseled heads nod

Over your honor pledged

All your wealth spilled

Across a child's toy

Tipped over-loaded weighed

With the finite product

Of your vast imperial 

Fruited plains exhausted

And still your word not

Redeemed by the 

Feckless promise of  your

Ignorant imperiousness

So my thirst distilled

From every single grain

Wheat and rye and maize

Through the retorts of

Clever men and the

Art of bourbon-masters

Casked and even

The angels whose share

Spilled by the action of

Wood and wear and 

Time's long march

Through cooper's art

And warehouser's 

Patience and the fat

Fungoidal mass that

Growth from drunkard's

Environmental footprint

Darwinian god's imprint

On the wood of a 

Distillery's backlot.

So I am, so it is

All that thirst and despair

And the joy of a nightly

Drunken haze that kills

The regrets of a million

Wasted fruitless lives

Brown-tinted oceans of

Misery murdered in 

Alcoholic metabolic

Poisons, before the 

Liver reduced before the

Heart ruined before the

Stomach shredded the

Sorrow that murdered the

Rest killed by the hand of

The merciful distiller's 

Daughter, bourbon

Sweet as innocence

Sharp as the morning

Swift as the ending

That brings with it

That final finishing

Hangover which

Hangs over 

Lies of Eternity.

One cannot kill time

Without injuring eternity

Well;
To hell with 

Eternity which gifts us 

This taste of fire that

Burns on the tongue

To mind us of that

Lake of fire before

Our inevitable end.

M. Hagmaier

12/7/14

Ah, fill the Cup: - what boots it to repeat

How Time is slipping underneath our Feet:

Unborn TO-M0RROW, and dead YESTERDAY,

Why fret about them if TO-DAY be sweet!

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,

One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste -

The Stars are setting and the Caravan

Starts for the Dawn of Nothing - Oh, make haste!

How long, how long, in infinite Pursuit

Of This and That endeavour and dispute?

Better be merry with the fruitful Grape

Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

You know, my Friends, how long since in my House

For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

For "Is" and "IS-NOT" though with Rule and Line,

And "UP-AND-DOWN" without, I could define,

I yet in all I only cared to know,

Was never deep in anything but - Wine.

And lately, by the Tavern Door agape,

Came stealing through the Dusk an Angel Shape

Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and

He bid me taste of it; and 'twas - the Grape!.

The Grape that can with Logic absolute

The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:

The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice

Life's leaden Metal into Gold transmute.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald, First Edition

It's  insurance plan time, and we had a meeting at work on Thursday.  The company is picking up stakes and moving to a new provider, which is fairly disruptive to a lot of the folks at work.  Ironically, not for me, as my current physician, office and so forth was already part of the new network.   Personal pay-in is going up considerably, but it isn't anything I can't handle.  But I found myself giving out my doctor's name for several co-workers looking for a new home as their old primary care physician was left behind in the old network,  or in one case, because he hadn't had a primary care doctor at all, and the new paperwork requires it.

One of the higher-ups, who was a big Obama man, is apparently particularly feeling the pinch, and was less than thrilled.  Although that might have just been the laryngitis.

OK, I don't feel comfortable leaving that on top for long.  What have I been up to recently?  Eh, not much really.  Watching the new WKRP in Cincinnati box set, with most of the original music relicensed.  It's been a real nostalgia trip, apparently we didn't miss a single episode of the first season, and there's just something... homelike about the whole production.  Despite the fact that I've never set foot in Cincinnati.  It's still an Ohio River valley town, perched at the seam between the Midwest and Appalachia.

Ave Maria

The blood stopped flowing

After the dream of angels

And all her promises of

Essene purity will be for 

Naught and worse than

Naught in the eyes of a

Judging censorious world.

Ave Maria

Gratia plena

Maria, gratia plena 

Maria, gratia plena

She had told him, the 

Elder who would have her

Hand without the promise

Of children to honor his

White-haired age or

Posterity or the promise

Of a future grown from

Their common seed sown.

That by the imagined

Grace of a dream-angel

Heralding her courses

Stopped, blooming

Impossibly

Told him all she 

Could offer, the 

Shameful pregnant

Virginal liar befoe the eyes

Of a doubting dubious world.

Growing within her

A new world burning

Every vein afire with

Impossible possibilities

The infinite encompassed

By her fragile human

Mortal womb stretching

Pains upon pains

The walls of the 

Unknowing world within

Her small feeble frame

The ramparts of all

That is and was and

Will be held within her

Flesh straining to hold

All of creation creating

Itself within her 

Created finite self

Infinities distilling into

A tincture of grace

The universe drawn out

Like a camel through

Like a fat man through

Like the world through

The eye of a needle.

And she will be the

Needle-eye of 

A world birthing itself

Into the world existent

And every worlds possibility

By her womb redeemed.

And the angel had told

Her of the myths and

Fantasies to be

The ramparts of legends

To sanctify her frail

Human self by 

Generations of monks

And bookish scholars

And celibate judgmental

Saintly men bound to

Justify her soon to be

Sacred generation as if

There was no blood in

Birth or blood in the

Veins of that which

Was wailing to be 

Born, born in mortal

Fallen flesh.

Ave, ave dominus

Dominus tecum

Benedicta tu in mulieribus

Et benedictus

Et benedictus fructus ventris

Ventris tuae, Jesus

Ave Maria

Immaculate!  Without

Sin or scar or 

Any of the taint

That any daughter of

Eve might carry within

Her moon-caught

Earth-born womanly

worldliness and want.

But what could be the

Point of a divine

Birth without flesh

Or blood or pain or

All the faults of 

Eve-knowing and

Cain's-marked 

Man and woman

Enjoined and born and

Bred.  And she had

Indeed been born and

Bred and descended from

Ten thousand generations

Of quarreling bitter 

Bastards and harridans

And selfish, squabbling

Vicious people, chosen

Or not, pious or not,

Blasphemers, murderers

Whores and whoremongers

Thieves and slavers

Slaves and sinners.

A daughter of Eve was she

Daughter in turn of a son of

Cain, no matter how the 

Stories invented notional

Seth to distance the

Laity from the direct and

Proper conclusion that

They all were born of that

Line that lived, and not that

Of childless simple 

Blameless Abel.

Ave Maria

Mater Dei

Ora pro nobis peccatoribus

Ora pro nobis

Ora, ora pro n obis peccatoribus

The birth was upon them

And she could feel the

Curse of Eve in her

Agony, and worse, could

Feel the infinite agony of

Which her horrible straining

Separation was but a

Distant and mercifully

Shallow echo

The birth-pains of a

Universe opening its

Human eyes for the

First time, and His

First Cry cracking

The firmament like a

Miscast bell struck by

A hammer too hard and

Sharp for the frail

Metal cast by a 

Smith too unsure of

His material and the

Purposes intended.

Infinity compressed

Within one small wailing

Infant and that wailing

Will echo across the

Whole of creation from

The first crack of 

Dawn to the last

Clang fading on

That final, lifeless

Worthless rock. 

Every mother brings

Into the world two

Things: one life and

One death and all

That lies in between

Is out of her hands but

Still her gift given

And Eve bore a Cain

And Eve bore her Abel

And she bore the 

Burden of both

And she?  The new

Born mother, what

Burden for bringing the

Death of God into

A world split asunder

By the birth of that

Which could not be

Contained by that

Which nonetheless

Yet contained it?

The Church which

Was to come would

Remember and sanctify

That death as a

Passion, ritual upon

Ritual, play upon

Play, signifying the

Corn-god triviality of

A man's tortured 

Death as if death

Were something of

Note in our fallen

Failing world, when

All around them death

And pain and misery

March in endless

Serried ranks like

The hosts of hell

On the double-step.

Nuct et in hora mortis

Et in hora mortis nostrae

Et in hora mortis nostrae

Et in Hora mortis nostrae

Ave Maria

For the mother of

The infinite suddenly

And impossibly

Finite the one and

Only - horrible and 

Comprehensive and

Terrible - miracle was

Always

And always will be

That awful birth

Now and forever

The scream of 

Everything 

Aborning

World without end.

November 22, 2014

The very definition of "voter suppression"?  Some idiot property manager putting up "no trespassing" signs at both entrances to my local voting precinct at Lambert Hall, 03 Bellefonte South.  The officials were just sitting there, doing their ritual rather than doing their job and getting rid of the damn signs.  Who cares how closely the political signs are located to the entrance if you have to break the damn law to set foot in the precinct?

Trying to get a hold of someone w/ the party or the county.

Update: someone from the party called back & got the details, and is going to try and do something about it.

Tending Fires

Life and love are flickering flame

Smoldering futile in the half-rotted muck

Of a thousand years of bog

Or underground

Coal-seam sightless flaring

Or bursting dryrotted pineneedle crown-fire

That sucks up the air from the forest floor

A pyric malestromic inferno

Consuming all in fiery seconds

The annihilation of the woods.

But woodland will need

That passionate hellish harrowing

That bursts the fire-broke seedcone

That tears through the mis-formed

Dead-ended past made Solid

That incinerates that crooked timber

That never made anything straight.

Thus, one advocate

The acolyte of the forest-fire affair

And single-night couplings

And lonely aftermaths and

The fatherless son walking

Under strangers' skies

The flare that comes and goes

Leaving man-child mankind

A scorched chaos of livid wilderness

A patchwork of lightning-struck desolation

And desperate procreation

And regret and uncertainty

And nothing certain.

No! Cries a domestic promethean

And acolyte of another path

And makes her case beside

The opened kitchen-door

Burning brand in hand, 

Thus:

A careful hand wrapping paper

And accelerants in wax and twine

A boxes of matches set to hand

And the twigs tented below

An arranged cage of branches

All within the sturdy hearth

Bound in brick

Bound in iron

Bound in brass

A binding proscenium

Behind glass-door enclosures

And beneath a well-cleaned flue

Place your firestarter.

That ardor, the incinerating

Bursting

Passionate

Consummation

Comes and goes

Lighting the small-wood

Lighting the logs

Lighting the yule-log

Burning the year-log.

That year-log fire

Whose flame steadily glows

Burns what is given it

Burning guttering red-orange flames

In the sap-sweet spring

Burning the rich roaring-fire of

The long-months summer

Burning the steady cherry-red

Warmth of the autumn reaping

And gathering in for the long

Winter days' ember-fire

That fire, fed, that heats

The roof-timbers warm

No matter how heavy

The snows weigh

On the shingles above

The life-long fire

That burns the wood of your years

A prophesy of fire

A life teeming with life

With children grown

And your children's children

In their chaos and youth

The family kept safe

Within the home kept warm

By love's long fire's flame.

9/19/14

So,  Byblos is Jbail when it isn't working off its passport - the local name.  This city has been continuously occupied by people for at least nine thousand years, and possibly over ten thousand.   It's definitely the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.  As such, the city has collected names like a social butterfly collects online handles.  It's Byblos to the Greeks, Romans, and those of us who take place-names from classical sources; it's Jbail to the locals and Arabic-speakers, it was Gibelet to the crusaders and Genoans, Gebal to the Phoenicians, Gubal to the ancient Caananites, and Geval to those that wrote the Bible.  The name of the Bible itself is derived from this city, which the archaic Greeks associated with papryus and thus gave the product the name of the city from which they traded it originally; it eventually was associated with the book, and thus "biblos".

The city is mostly Maronite, with some Shia, and at least one street's worth of Armenians, because I took a wrong turn and found myself in the town's small Armenian quarter, which turns out to be a single dead-end cul-de-sac on the bayside south end of the city.  My hotel was about a mile's walk from the tourist centre of Byblos, which I was told was a safe enough walk.  If you walk out where the drivers can see you, and you can see the drivers, it isn't crazy dangerous to walk the roads.  Assuming that you're walking in a place where the fumes won't choke you.  There were clusters of men  waiting for trucks to pick them up - day-labour, as anyone in the American South or Southwest would recognize.   The area was recognizably Marionite - there were the occasional tiny roadside shrine like this one, scattered every five hundred meters or so along the road.  This one was particularly battered, but the better-kept ones were usually of the Virgin Mary.

I got there too early in the day for the Souk to be active - the shop-keepers were just opening their doors when I walked through initially - but you can get an idea of how it looks.  Vaulted corridors separating brick alleys with sailcloth flying overhead to keep off the merciless August sun.  Lots of fossils, food, touristy trinkets, and for some reason, at least three places selling shoes.  I almost stopped to buy a new pair, since my current pair had almost blown out by that point, but I didn't have the energy to really get down to figuring out if they'd have any tennis shoes in my size in a reasonable color - they tended towards bright primary-color flashy trainers, not at all my style.

As I said, this is a Maronite town.  This is L'eglise St. Jean-Marc, a Maronite church with, I think, an attached school for young children.   It was quite a large compound, to the north and east of the souk and the ruins of Byblos of which, much more next time.

The day after the wedding, I decamped from Beirut to less expensive environs, and took a taxi to the Victory Byblos Hotel & Spa outside Byblos.  The drive north took us east through the Christian (I think) suburbs of Beirut and a series of good-sized coastal towns which looked from the road like a semi-continuous strip of flashy malls and high-end shopping districts along the coast, with the usual apartment complexes cresting each heights, except for a couple church complexes here and there.  Judging from the crosses, it was mostly Maronite country.  You couldn't see the old Green Line in Beirut from the highway, I'm not even sure when we passed it.  It seems to have been completely filled in

There is very little greenery on the Lebanese coast, none to be seen from the highway at any rate.  It's mostly very dense-packed housing and commercial districts as far as the eye can see.  As I've said elsewhere, construction cranes are everywhere, but there are precious few places left to build on the limited coastal flatlands available.  The cities and towns climb up the steep hillsides, which in places could credibly be called "mountains" without getting laughed at by actual mountain-state people.  (Don't ever call the Allegheny Mountains that in the hearing of someone from Colorado, btw.  They'll mock you mercilessly.)

When we actually got to Byblos, I discovered my driver had no idea where my hotel was, or even what it was named - I could hear him calling it "Byblos Factory" in otherwise-unintelligible Arabic as he asked every person we came across for directions.  The man had a functioning smartphone with a mapping function, I have no idea why he didn't use it, but still - we stopped at a half-dozen places, asking police, gas station attendants, other taxi drivers - until someone finally pointed us in the right direction and I arrived.  Sigh.

As I said, Victory Byblos.  It's a small hotel well outside Byblos proper, on a dusty exit above the coastal road seaward from the highway itself.  It's across the street from a pair of small beach resorts, which double as dance clubs in the evenings, complete with loud music you can hear from the second story rooms with the doors closed.  They like to conclude their nightly celebrations with fireworks, so don't expect to get to sleep early if you have a seaward view.  Because I showed up early, apparently they scrambled to give me a room and I ended up with a room which had been prepped for some newlyweds, complete with rose petals scattered all over the place.  The hotel cuts costs by including your room key in the room's electrical grid - there's no power until you stick it in the right slot.

Oh, well.  At least I was able to figure out their wifi, which is more than I could say of the Bayview Hotel's rather confusing Internet situation.  I spent a lot of time hanging out in the lobby working through email and checking on news.  Until the second day, when I was informed that there would be another wedding reception in the lobby that afternoon.  Apparently August is marriage season in Lebanon!

Ah, the Corniche.  It's a grand promenade along the north and northwestern shore of Beirut, between Saint George Bay and the coastal highway.  In another city, it would be a boardwalk, with commercial properties and the like, but aside from a few vendors selling fruit and corn on the cob and suchlike, there isn't much for sale here between the marinas every kilometer or two along the shore.  People walk, run, or ride bicycles along the wide pavement, which has more than enough room to not crowd anyone one, at least not when I was there.  There's a place renting bicycles and pedal-driven four-wheel carts about, hmm, two kilometers from the hotel, on the other side of the highway.  As usual, you take your life in your own hands crossing traffic, but that's really the only way to do it.  It isn't really a pedestrian's city.

The bay along the Corniche is a major hang-out for the young men of the city.  They climb down to the rocks below, and go swimming in the waters of the bay.  There isn't any beach to speak of - and that's too mild a way of putting it - it seems to be just knobby brown rocks and ocean down there, of varying depths.  I saw at least one young man with scrapes all across his back from some sort of mishap, but the vast majority of them were just cheerfully splashing about without any concern for, oh, I don't know, being smashed against the rocks by the current or waves.

And it was mostly young men, with some older men thrown in, and some kids here and there.  There was one section with young women in those full-body Muslim swimming suits swimming in a section next to one of the marinas, but that was the exception to the general rule that this was a swimming park just soaked in testosterone.  Some places the swimmers had thrown climbing ropes over the side of the wall, and clambered down to the rocks, and some places there were steps down to the water -

 presumably for the fishermen with their preposterously long pike-length fishing poles.  I'm not sure what they were fishing for - it can't have been for the tiny little baitfish which was all I saw them hauling out of the water.  But in other places there were tall, vertical rings of iron sunk into the rocks, for swimmers to climb in and out of the water, and steps driven into the rocks, so someone had gone to some length to turn the rocky shore into a semblance of a park pool.

There also seemed to be a sort of tradition for the swimmers to haul portable water pipes down to the rocks for a pre-swim smoke before diving into the water.  Here's a fairly good shot of a smoker toking up in the sun.  (I have no reason to not think it's tobacco, pot-heads.  I'm pretty sure pot and hashish are illegal in Lebanon, and I have no reason to think that someone would violate the law in public in a city where the cops carry assault weapons in the streets.)

Lastly, there was the crazy kids diving off of this set of guards along the rail, into a deep water hole between the rocks below.  Someone had wrapped barbed wire around the whole set of rails to *keep* people from doing this, but someone else had cleared the wire away from about a five-six foot section of rail, and the first day I was there, I saw kids climb up, sway precariously as they gathered their courage, and plunged off the rails into the water thirty-thirty five feet below.  The ones I saw emerged from their feat unscathed, but dang...

There are plenty of people out just walking, as well.  There was a local TV film crew doing man-on-the-street interviews.  The reporter came up to me to ask me something or other, but I had to inform her that I spoke no Arabic.  I guess people weren't kidding when they said that I could pass as long as I didn't open my mouth!

So, Beirut.  I stayed at the Bayview Hotel on Zaitunay or Saint George Bay on the north coast of the city.  Jeremy recommended the hotel as being relatively safe and reasonable, and I found it to be so.  The senior staff had enough English to help me navigate in a city where the primary language appeared to be Arabic.  This doesn't seem to be a city where people are eager to come up to you and attempt to practice their English.  As you can see in the background of this picture, there's a lot of construction going on in Beirut, there was a massive high-rise under renovation or construction above the bay to the east of the Bayview, tall enough to put the hotel in its shadow.  Building cranes rise in clusters throughout the city, and as I was to find, the single biggest import of Lebanon may well be construction cranes - they were springing up all over the coast, in clusters of two and three, over high-rises, apartment blocks, office buildings, beach resorts under construction, and in at least one case I saw, as jury-rigged loading rigs for a construction-supplies depot housing, yes, more disassembled construction cranes for transportation elsewhere in the country.  The construction crane could very well replace the cedar as Lebanon's national tree.

This is the view westwards along the Corniche from my hotel room.  The Corniche is a promenade along the side of the bay, between the ocean and the coastal highway, which is a very busy divided highway, and must be a holy terror to drive during the day.  Lebanese drivers are infamous even by third-world standards, but I found their reputation somewhat overblown.  They didn't strike me as all that much worse than, say, Roman drivers, although late in the week I did come across a SUV which someone had driven full-tilt into a two-foot-tall block of concrete, crumpling in its fender and launching it high enough to leave its front hanging in the air, propped up as if a giant had just left it leaning there like a dog leaning on a divan, looking for a treat.  Anyways, Lebanese drivers tend to signal by carhorn, which is something to watch out for, and probably one ought to give everyone a bit more space than you normally would if you were in a more... Teutonic country.  They drive by Mediterranean rules here.

Walking around Beirut, I don't think I ever got to Hamra proper, and I wasn't familiar enough with the neighborhoods to identify where I *did* go, once I got out of the hotel district.  I think I was mostly in the the higher-end district to the east and north of Hamra.  As you can see, there are plenty of high-end shops, and lots of expensive European cars.  Cars are a big deal in Beirut, they're all over the place, and finding places to park them is a serious business.  Every parking lot has at least two attendants, and one of them usually was in something approximating military fatigues, presumably.

Which brings up the subject of the military.  They were all over Beirut when I was there, manning checkpoints, guarding buildings here and there - including a Maronite Church, a cluster of banks, some government buildings (I think) and, for some reason, an entire squad camped out along a street next to this children's park, on the other side from where I took the photo.  Presumably there were government buildings or party headquarters or something over on the other side, because I can't imagine why they'd be out in such force for a park.  A remarkably nice park, mind you, but still a park.  Beirut is very much an Arabic city in that greenery is a private good, locked away behind compound walls.  Some of the only shade from the August sun was to be found from the dense bushy foliage pouring over this wall or that.

The section of Beirut I walked was, I think, Sunni, but honestly I don't know enough about the differences to be able to tell a Shia mosque from a Sunni one.  There were a number of small mosques here and there, but there was a fairly large one across the street from the Bayview which broadcast the muezzin call to prayer via loudspeaker.  Not oppressively loud, but I had been told that this did not happen in Beirut, which obviously was misinformation.  As I said, there's a lot of construction going on, but few parts of this part of Beirut are run-down and slummish.  It's a city sloshing about with a lot of construction money, even now.

 The exception being this relic of the Civil War, the ruins of the old Holiday Inn Beirut, epicenter of the Battle of the Hotels.  It was heavily shot-up, rocketed and shelled during major fighting in the mid-Seventies, and seems to have been one of the few parts of the city which hasn't been torn down and replaced or renovated.  But then, there's so many other active construction sites - I walked past at least a half-dozen in a single morning - that this one could just be the result of ambigious property ownership, lack of interest, or the fact that it's way the heck back from the rest of the hotel district and the active areas of the commercial districts around it.  The city just has developed away from the old Holiday Inn.  But like I said, you have to strain to find signs of the old Civil War wreckage and divisions in Beirut, and this is the exception to that rule.

So, now that I'm back in the states, I thought I might mention to the world that I've been in Lebanon for the last week.  A co-worker was marrying a local girl, and they were having a ceremony outside of Sidon at the Saida Country Club.  Lebanese weddings are spectacular.   This particular display during the cake-cutting (with a sword, can't believe they let Jeremy have live steel) caught the grass on fire.   But only a little bit.

I have a bunch of photos, but I think I'll be working on organizing them over the next week or so.  I visited Beirut, Byblos, the back country of Sidon, and briefly, a little hill-town between Batroun and Tripoli called Hamat that my Uncle Ron's family comes from.

Good to be back, folks.  Travel is interesting, but draining.

How small those mountains looked from space! Little wrinkles on the skin of a globe he could cover with his hand, all their crushing mass made invisible. Which was illusory, distance or nearness? Distance, Miles decided. Distance was a damned lie.

- "Mountains of Mourning", Lois McMaster Bujold

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire 
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

- T.S. Elliot, "East Coker", Four Quartets