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

As under cover of departing Day
Slunk hunger-stricken Ramazan away,
Once more within the Potter's house alone
I stood, surrounded by the Shapes of Clay.

Shapes of all Sorts and Sizes, great and small,
That stood along the floor and by the wall;
And some loquacious Vessels were; and some
Listen'd perhaps, but never talk'd at all.

Said one among them--"Surely not in vain
My substance of the common Earth was ta'en
And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again."

Then said a Second--"Ne'er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy,
And He that with his hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after Wrath destroy."

After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
"They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"

Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot--
I think a Sufi pipkin-waxing hot--
"All this of Pot and Potter--Tell me then,
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?"

"Why," said another, "Some there are who tell
Of one who threatens he will toss to Hell
The luckless Pots he marr'd in making--Pish!
He's a Good Fellow, and 'twill all be well."

"Well," Murmur'd one, "Let whoso make or buy,
My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry:
But fill me with the old familiar juice,
Methinks I might recover by and by."

So while the Vessels one by one were speaking,
The little Moon look'd in that all were seeking:
And then they jogg'd each other, "Brother! Brother!
Now for the Porter's shoulder-knot a-creaking!"

 - stanzas 82 through 90 of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated(?) by Edward Fitzgerald, Third Edition

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

"Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth", Arthur Hugh Clough

Oh yesterday the cutting edge drank thirstily and deep,
The upland outlaws ringed us in and herded us as sheep,
They drove us from the stricken field and bayed us into keep;
But tomorrow
By the living God, we'll try the game again!

Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through,
Our swaying, tattered pennons fled a broken, beaten few,
And all a summer afternoon, they hunted us and slew;
But tomorrow
By the living God, we'll try the game again!

And here upon the turret-top the bale-fires glower red,
The wake-lights burn and drip about our hacked, disfigured dead,
And many a broken heart is here and many a broken head;
But tomorrow
By the living God, we'll try the game again!

 "To-Morrow" by John Masefield

Things you thought you knew, that just weren't so: British use of mustard gas in the Iraq Revolt of 1920.  I had read about this ten-fifteen years ago, and just assumed it was substantiated.  After all, mustard gas was part of all major armies' inventory right through World War II - an Allied supply stock of the stuff in Bari during the Italian campaign was smashed open in a German air strike and the cloud killed hundreds.  And the British were pretty open about their legal opinion that the Geneva Accords only applied to "civilized" opponents, and had just spent four years gassing and being gassed by the nominally civilized Germans.  They had even used chemical weapons in Palestine a few years previously.  And both the Spanish and the Italians used chemical weapons against North Africans and Ethiopians between the wars, so it's not as if this was unthinkable at the time... just maybe not actually true.

Well, the live trap caught an adult cat overnight.  Unfortunately, it isn't the mother, who is much smaller and still has a red collar from whatever irresponsible jackass didn't bother to spay their pet & then abandoned her to the wild.  My co-worker Brian H is overwhelmed, he doesn't know *what* to do with this cat.  It's too burly to be somebody's indoors cat, doesn't have a collar, and is surprisingly well-fed for a wildling.  Based on the coloring and so forth, it has to be related to the kittens and momma cat - it may be the father.  Hard to tell without propping the live trap up on a shelf and checking its junk, I guess.  It does *not* like being in a trap, it was frothing slightly, and had torn its claws fighting with the trap, enough to be bleeding at the paws.

We may have to go to the animal rescue people at this point.  We've also ran out of adoption slots for the kittens, everyone who can take one right now is full up.

So my cat, Otonashi's mother is still in the wild, and still having litters.  We've started trying to capture the current litter, and Brian H, a co-worker, bought a live trap.  He caught one of the 4-to-5 kittens last night with his brother, although I'm told they had to turn the trap upside down and shake it out, because it was clinging to the wire mesh like Spiderman.  They re-set the trap, and in the morning, there was a second kitten. 

Brian went to transfer the second kitten into a carrier, when he noticed the mother hovering in the bushes, hissing violently.  Then she started charging at him.  He shied a pine-cone at the enraged mother, but it didn't stop her, and she chased him into the building, the second kitten escaping in the chaos.  Reportedly the mother was pacing outside the office door for a bit.  Mind you, we're not talking about a big cat here, your average black housecat, a little on the small side.  But she apparently was doing the full-fang ready-to-kill charge.

Anyways, here's the captured kitten, who probably will go to another co-worker who just had her elderly cat die...  as you can see, it's pitch-black, and spot-welded to the back corner of the carrier.

Full Disclosure: within the past several months, I been hired by several hedge funds to advise them privately on the legal issues surrounding these events.

"I been hired by"? How can you expect to be taken seriously when you can't be bothered to have someone check your op-ed pieces for basic grammar?   Especially when you're shilling for a klatch of corporatist profiteers who managed to get caught without a chair when the music stopped.  The moral hazard of making fat income off of pseudo-governmental entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is that there's always the chance that those implied guarantees are actually poison-pills when the deluge comes and the government guarantors do their goddamn jobs for once and protect the taxpayer instead of crony big money.  Or, for that matter, they do the usual thing and favor some crony class *other* than your speculating ass.  Look up "risk", and always remember - politics is a risk.  You should *avoid* political influence unless you're the one swinging influence your own way, in which case - shame on you, you corrupt tool.

The Professor is talking up that Rowling pseudonymously written book, of which I don't quite understand the purpose.  The adoption of new nom de plumes is, I understand, now common practice for mid-list authors who have found themselves frozen out by underwhelming sale numbers.  Or,  I should say, it *was* common practice back in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the midlist. (I really should read through the whole of that Rusch writing-business series when I have a moment.)

Anyways, it makes sense to take a pen name when you're struggling or have been given the editorial kiss of death, but why would a massively successful best-selling author cut her own knees out from under herself like that?  Ego, I guess?

And really, building new snob-appeal menus based on per-Conquistidore Aztec diets?   How many times do I have to remind y'all that ritual and (possibly) dietary cannibalism was a common element of most Nahuatl cultures of the time, but *especially* the Mexica or Aztec? 

There's a Mexican restaurant in the county named "Rey Azteca".  I refuse to go every time someone brings it up... I don't want to set foot in an eatery that might as well be named "King Cannibal".

To continue this antechamber exercise, the Professor, who watches TV so I don't have to, saith they've found Zimmerman not guilty and lo! Fox News so reports.  If I'm lucky, I spend my weekends gaming with various friends, and if I'm not, drinking and watching Japanese cartoons. I've been doing both this weekend, as events and friends' travel plans dictate.  Neither has much scope for the close following of news on the weekend.

Anyways, the Professor sniffs that the much-feared race riots have failed to materialize. From that Fox report I see that this is not absolutely true - there's some minor vandalism in Oakland, and much gathering of crowds, well-culled by police departments experienced at dealing with Occupy vermin outbreaks.  But she's right in that the feral outbeaks anticipated by commenters like Icepick have failed to materialize so far. Although in fairness to Icepick, I see I was conflating his mild worries with some more... overwrought comments from folk I didn't recognize in retrospect.

We were talking Friday night at a friend's place about how video games had apparently lessened violence, and internet porn lessened rape.  How likely is it that blowing off steam on Twitter lowers the likelihood of real-world riot-incitement?  The producers of SyFy discovered earlier this week that just because ten thousand twitterers ironically love the idea of  your sharks-falling-from-the-skies B-movie wreck, doesn't mean that the general TV audience will watch it in droves, or even in the usual SyFy B-movie trickles.

The Professor notes a car-nivorous squirrel story.  Maybe there's just something about Sequoias that attract wild animals.   Is there something sweet or tasty in Toyota's paint composition?

Oh, you sci-fi boys, you think you are about technology and manly dreams of complicated machinery. But you want love. Dreamy, creamy love.

But, Professor, all advances and development of note are merely the carefully laundered sublimation of frustrated ardor, are they not?  Mock not the careful trappings of ferociously sublimated geekery, lest our entire swaying tower of technological prowess tumble and fall!

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
 For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!

So there's an angel with a burning sword standing before my door into Althouse's comments section.  She wants to out-source to our own little bloglet comments sections, and since I have let my blogspot account fall into decrepitude, I thought "why not?"

Last night, she asked the difference between a traveller and a tourist - and my first thought was that "traveller" is a synonym for "gypsy", and no-one wants a caravan full of those parked on their street.  But I suppose in the context asked, "traveller" is for that arrogant sort that hates to think of himself as an ugly American, a fat tourist wandering around landmarks in oversize sunglasses and baggy shorts.  (Some rogue spell-checker objects to the extra ell in "traveller", but nuts to that, two ells has more of a song to it.)

The other quote is from one of my favorite books, "Walden," by Henry David Thoreau: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord..." Concord! Not even Massachusetts. Concord. Of course, he didn't have a car.

 Walden again... damn, I'm a lot like Thoreau, at least in temperament, habits and prejudices, but every time I slam up against his Walden rubbish, I find myself hating those parts of me that I see in him.  Insular, pompous, incurious, misanthropic, narrow, indolent... I can't help but think that he might have been worth a pinch of owlshit if he had been kidnapped by gypsies as a child and had his outlook forcibly expanded by encounters outside of his own small sphere.

ADDED: A reader quotes my "Those who get paid for a particular type of work may find it hard to explain the value of the activity to someone who isn't getting paid but must in fact pay"

One quote deserves another, from Bujold's A Civil Campaign, which I once had taped up in my  cubicle back when I was the company bookkeeper:

Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear.

Insomnia takes you to strange places, looking on a whim for a painting to match the spirit of "Silent, upon a peak in Darien".

What makes Homer, Homer for those previous generations?  That classical education which is two generations past now?  I've never quite felt that reverence or connection for the shadowy Ionian that that vet and his predecessors held for him.  A Homeric literary foundation is kind of unusual in Americans, even in the old days.  Allan Bloom claimed that Americans made the Bible their cultural touchstone, in the way that the British made Homer and the Greeks, and the French Pascal and Proust and Descartes, and the Germans Kant and Goethe and Hegel.

BTW, this is the painting I had in mind, Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog", it has nothing to do with the Keats sonnet, but then, a lot of the literature on that poem has to do with the inaccuracy of his factual constructs, and the importance of a pre-rational, emotional connection with literary culture.

"Darien" was drifting in my mind's eye from tonight's reading of a crummy Penguin Books collection of extracts from Lord Macaulay's History of England, specifically about the doomed Scottish venture in Darien.  Paterson, the visionary who also gave the Bank of England to the southrons, had this bright idea about inserting a Scottish commercial colony in the debatable lands between the viceroyalties of New Grenada and New Spain.  Sadly, his Darien was as phantasmic as Keats' Panamanian Cortez, and all such transoceanic trade plans for the Panamanian isthmus were scotched by ferocious disease gradients until the early twentieth century's advances in pest control conquered those difficulties, if only to a degree.

So, depending on how you define your terms, either I rescued a wild cat, or I've kidnapped a free feline-American and am holding her captive in a second-floor dungeon.  She had her first vet's visit and has figured out how the kitty litter box works, and has only bitten me once so far.  (Necessitating a separate trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot & antibiotics prescription.  No sign of rabies in either of us so far.)

She's been named Otonashi, for her generally withdrawn and quiet disposition.  I've yet to see her out in the open while there's someone around to spot her; when I'm in the room, she carefully lurks under the bed.

A rushing wind howls without rhythm and wild

Driving over the sere sleeping slopes

Rising and falling without pattern or meaning

Bringing up such a racket, percussive rattling of

The half-dead limbs and spidery half-broken

Twigs of winter-stunned wooded life waiting

Cacophony piled upon cacophony, yet the rattling

Brings rhythm into the previously-empty world

Emergent harmonies of limbs all more or less alike

Of a common length and flex and yet

Enough variance to bring high and low tones,

Fast and slow syncopations

Until the empty wood like an orchestra tuning

Stills

At the sound of three sharp cracks

A bough falls alone

Like a wand without conductor's guiding hand

And the wind and the wood sing forth in concert

For the sleeping squirrels and crows amazed awake.

Red skies at morning
Yellow and blackened
Blue in the west
The sun winks over the
Limb of the world
And is closed by
Pinked eyelid skies
The roaring is muffled
In swift cotton-swabbing
Rushing cloud-banks and
The kindled bronze
Slopes in the west
Flare and burn out
Storm rushing over
The troubled face of the deep
Sailors take warning.

In this predawn darkness
Defeated
Routed
In flight before the morning light
It roars overhead
Freight-train Fate
Crushing the air between
Steel wheels and steel rail
Howling affronted by
The dying possibility of
The night that was past
Cries judgment of the day
In the moment of its birth
Predestinate by that vast
Rumbling
Howl.

Let us look at her now, let us see her plain,
She will never be quite like this again.
Her house is rocking under the blast
And she hears it tremble, and still stands fast,
But this is the last, this is the last.
The last of the wine and the white corn meal,
The last high fiddle singing the reel,
The last of the silk with the Paris label,
The last blood-thoroughbred safe in the stable
- Yellow corn meal and a jackass colt,
A door that swings on a broken bolt,
Brittle old letters spotted with tears
And a wound that rankles for fifty years -
This is the last of  Wingate Hall,
The last bright August before the Fall,
Death  has been near, and Death has passed,
But this is the last, this is the last.
There will be hope, and a scratching pen,
There will be cooking for tired men,
The waiting for news with shut, hard fists,
And the blurred, strange names in the battle-lists,
The April sun and the April rain,
But never this day come back again.

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body, excerpt from Book IV

There are no apocalypses, no universal objective ends, not that we know of.  But for every life, there is a last bright August before the Fall, and some feel it, that cold whisper of winter in the pre-harvest heat of rank summer, the first leaf falling far in advance of the turning of the color, the weather turning for him and him alone.  Our endings are individual, no matter how we project them onto the screen of our times.  The best we can do is not let our times project themselves upon us, prematurely.  I would like to think that the Mayan and the Camping raptures were a passing thing, but such projections of individual ends of the world will no doubt continue, as failures mount, and the brightness fades from more family fires.

The hills are echoing with Feu de joie, and fireworks, but this year, they sing to me:

There is no future, there is no past,
There is only this hour and it goes fast,
Hurry, hurry, this is the last,
This is the last,
This is the last.

     That prison is ourselves that we have built,
     And, being so, its loneliness is just,
     And, being so, its loneliness endures.
     But, if another came,
                          What would we say?
     What can the blind say, given back their eyes?
     No, it must be as it has always been.
     We are all prisoners in that degree
     And will remain so, but I think I know
     This - God is not a jailor....

-Steven Vincent Benet, excerpt from John Brown's Body, Book 5

Lincoln really was a Hebraic saint, for the mid-century American modernists - a beau ideal for the Ugly American - not smart, not beautiful, not quick, but making a virtue of stubbornness and essential honesty. When did we lose our way? Was it when the Ugly American became a taunt and an accusation, rather than a quiet, self-effacing assertion of battered virtue? When the Quiet American replaced it in the hearts of the wise? When the educated and would-be elite spat scorn at the "middle-brow" staring back at them in the mirror?

So much for hopes and dreams.  Turns out, they were "the ghosts in the burning city of our time..."

"This is for you who are to come, with Time,
And gaze upon our ruins with strange eyes."

Nightmares and Visitants really is a heartbreaking book.  He saw death on the march, saw the tens of millions that would suffer, would break, and die.  He's largely forgotten now, which is another sign of our decline and coming fall.

We will not be saved, because we don't deserve to be saved.  We have more wealth than any people to ever trod this earth, and less wisdom than ever.  We have more people in school, than ever, and they seem engaged in the destruction of understanding and knowledge. 

The country wants to be a child again.  A simple majority has chosen to vote themselves back into the womb.  But they've put the management of that vast national womb in the hands of a chaotic crowd of imbeciles, incompetents and, I fear, at least a few abortionists.

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professorial-historical-economic and irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model T or even an early Napier,
They'd have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow,
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World! "
He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc and a dozen other scientists, writers, and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there'd never been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace) like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!
Take it nearer home," he said.
'Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skilful, certainly they created.
And, in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully till Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet and gunpowder and they had to get married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skulls, the handsome folk, the excellent scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with the sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucius, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander—'
Just to take half a dozen—
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"

He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Arcs, snouted for gas-masks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the pre-fabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In fact, you will not be saved."
Then he showed his hand:
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and the armies sprang up.

"Nightmare, with Angels", Steven Vincent Benet 1935

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.

excerpt from "Litany for Dictatorships", Steven Vincent Benet, 1935.

I woke to a dream of my whole neighborhood lined up outside the precinct, waiting for the doors to open.  They turned and asked me "where have you been?"

In this freakish, horribly nostalgic season of old miseries and old terrors, there are sad truths, and then there are persistent hopes.

In the pre-morning darkness, I believe in my neighbors. I believe that we haven't yet gone into that greater darkness which is behind the darkness.

I believe I see, in my mind's eye, that colored scrap of cloth above the scorched battlements, beginning to lift on the first faint breath of a predawn breeze.

Get out and vote.  Every damn last one of you all.

Well, that was relatively mild, at least so far.  Doesn't look like any major flooding in the borough as of yet.  The business park lost its power for an hour or so yesterday afternoon, so the office is covered in heavy-duty power cords leading back to the generator power taps.  Technically we're closed, but what am I going to do, sit around the house and watch anime all day long?

Jason woke me up last night to ask if town was on fire, apparently there was some sort of dramatic reddish-purple glow in the skies to his west.  Ended up going out into the heart of the storm, got a bit soaked, best anyone could guess - Jason wasn't the only one to see the glow - is that one of the transformers down at the substation northwest of town must have exploded, but not in such a way as to bring down the power, at least not in town.

Other than the creeks being up and a lot of rain, not a lot of visible damage, at least between here and home.

Long day yesterday knocking on doors.  A bunch of different neighborhoods.  Patton Township is kind of odd, one set of blocks looks like rural Florida, the next Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the next Park Forest, which is ironic, because the neighborhood is about two miles from, well, Park Forest. ^_^

One thing I encountered, which I haven't seen before, is two townhouse developments with enclosed courtyards and the "front door" hidden behind closed gates.  Like a dozen or two dozen one-family gated communities.  Like gated communities for hostile, suspicious loners and misanthropes.  Your front door is your window on the world, on the rest of humanity.  Hiding it behind a six-and-a-half-foot-tall gate is just... secretive and repellant.  One guy invited me into his courtyard, and I swear to god, sat me down with a pair of axes buried in a stump sitting behind me.  Very unnerving, and he was one of the more welcoming denizens of those particular streets.

Bad morning, better afternoon, fairly good evening as far as the fruits of my local corner of the campaign.  Ended up talking to one retiree for twenty minutes, which was interesting and all, but I was trying to beat the sun for the end of that particular neighborhood's strike-list.

Heads up, the Romney campaign office in State College (205 E Beaver, first floor on the left as you come in the main entrance on Beaver) had Romney/Ryan yard signs as of Saturday evening.  I spent about twenty minutes putting together signs that evening while I was waiting for the office manager to get back from dinner.  They also had R/R bumper stickers, I grabbed one because I don't have a yard to put a sign in.

Shortly after Brazier died, Obama issued a statement saying of the man he had once helped put 15 poor families on the street in the dead of winter:

"There is no way that we can replace the gentle heart and boundless determination that Bishop Brazier brought to some of the most pressing challenges facing Chicago and our nation."

From this article "vetting" the sitting president.   It's astonishingly awful.  The next time someone calls Romney a heartless plutocrat, point this out to them.

How the hell did they get away with it?  I'm pretty sure anyone trying to do so in Pennsylvania would be sued up one wall of the courthouse and smeared down the other wall like a nasty outtake from the Exorcist.

"The government is the only thing we all belong to."

Someone actually said that, put it in a video, and broadcast it at the Democratic National Convention, letting it go out over C-SPAN.  Intentionally.  That's horrible, sick.  That's a declaration of aspirational slavery, of willingness to be owned.

Man, I'm so glad I re-registered Republican when I bought a house in '09 and moved my residence.  I don't think I could take the shame of being a registered Democrat with that sort of thing being said in my name.

h/t.

New mainstream media stylebook definition of "a lie": a Republican national candidate accurately and precisely describing an embarrassing fact or narrative of events which casts a Democratic national candidate in a negative light.

Also, based on the report on the radio on the drive in this morning?  "independent fact-checkers" should now be taken to read "captive re-tweeters of in-house Democratic campaign talking points".  It's very strange - the convention coverage on NPR in the evening isn't especially over-the-top aside from E.J. Dionne - but the morning news is pure Mouth of Sauron, Democratic party propaganda plain and simple.

I went to the Romney victory centre in State College this evening, to make a few calls and watch the convention on their C-Span link.  The calls didn't go so great - they're still knocking the bugs out of the hookup for the phone survey system, and I'm just terrible at the scripted phone calling system.  I'm just not a salesman, and I'm  not good at scripts.  More interestingly, there was a journalism professor who thought it meet to send her students into the victory centre to pester the volunteers on convention week & find the less well-coached, well-prepared volunteers in order to harass them into silly arguments.

After the phone system crashed in early-days bug teething - typical for this time of year - I heard the professor baiting the least-prepared and most-voluble volunteer into all sorts of silly statements.  He's young, and unprepared, and pugnacious, and silly as all hell.  So I intervened.  I made the argument for limited government, Hayekian or even Burkean limitations upon government policy swagger, and quoted A Man for All Seasons, which the professora either had never heard of, or was willing to let me go toddling over the edge of the precipice.  Admittedly, I let myself riff randomly on my old, personal theory about Obama being a physical and moral coward, but towards the end, I managed to touch on the idea that the democrats are too fond of absolutist abuse of "Imperial Presidency" renunciation of small-R republican checks and balances, talking about the Obama administration abuse of executive orders in re: the workfare cancellation and the DREAM Act enactment via executive order.  Since I had a copy of Remini's third volume of his long-ass Andrew Jackson biography, I talked about his tendency towards direct-democracy pretensions and how that turned into a species of tyranny despite his claims to constitutionality and adherence to classic Jeffersonian limited-government constitutional piety.

I \dunno if I changed any minds there.  Most of her students had already left by that point, the only one listening was the young girl who had interviewed me earlier, whom I hadn't given really any thing of value.  The hard-shell ideologue who had baited the youngblood fool into jabbering about gay marriage and birth out of wedlock seems to have left long before I started debating her professor.  Which is a shame, because these were all journalism students, except for the professor, and really, somebody should have burned into their psyche the understanding that baiting some random young fool into a response you were looking for is in no way a valid goal for honest, objective journalists.  The idea is to bring forth the basic ideas of the organization under investigation, not to torment the young and foolish until they provide a hook for  your partisan distortion of what you think they're about.

We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:  the readiness is all.

That damnable neurological experiment showing a gap between impulse and decision which was used to suggest that conscious will was an illusion, an artifact of will rather than the thing itself - another group has come forward with further experimentation and evidence suggesting that the predestinates were mistaking a sort of wilful carrying wave of varying intensity for the act of choice itself.  That further suggests what laymen have long known - certain people have a property of faster, more decisive action, and that quality of rapid, sharp decision is both dependent on state of mind, and an exhaustible resource, which after long periods of use, leaves an otherwise agile and forceful mind flacid and incapable of further emotional and mental effort.

Of course, I, wanting evidence of free will, am more likely to accept this presentation as it re-establishes a predicate which I find palatable.  But should I reject a finding because it squares with my prejudgment?

h/t

So I went to see a matinee showing of The Dark Knight Rises, there was some talk about a mass shooting in Colorado on the radio, but I didn't hear until I got out of the showing that it had been in a midnight showing of the same damn movie.  That was... odd.

The movie was kind of a disappointment, BTW.  Much more like Batman Begins than Dark Knight - very much a movie of pieces, poorly digested chunks and scenes without any real integration or thematic consistency.  I don't know why Nolan finds the Ra's al-Ghul/League of Shadows storyline so engrossing, but it... just doesn't work.  At least not for me, but then, I react poorly to "all-powerful conspiracy" narratives, I tend to fear and respect chaos (the Shuler Joker) more than hidden order (the League of Shadows et al).  Mostly because I tend to think that man-directed hidden orders are inherently fragile and implausible.  Mafias don't produce terrorist political revolutionary conspiracies - political revolutionary conspiracies and terrorist cults degenerate into mafias and fissiparous criminal families.  Entropy only really works in one direction, and Eternal All-Encompassing Ideological Conspiracy is a violation of the second socio-political law of thermodynamics.

Also, the Miranda Tate character makes no sense.

Longmire is a pretty good cop show.  About a Wyoming sheriff in a county on the Montana border, lots of rural West politics, decent if not brilliant writing.  Nice to see Katie Sackhoff getting work, and Lou Diamond Phillips has gotten better with age.  They're going to have trouble after a season or so with believability, though - rural ranching counties just don't have that many murders compared to LA or New York.  It'll turn into a grittier version of Cabot Cove in short order, I fear.

This report that H&R Block messed up their joke Bruce Wayne-vs-Peter Parker tax comparison by totally blowing the charitable-deduction rule -  you can't deduct more than 50% of your adjusted gross income with charitable contributions, you can only roll the excess over to later years - doesn't exactly fill me with confidence in their tax-preparation service.  I've been using their cheap online service for the last four years, since it's relatively quick - takes a long afternoon - and the results *looked* good.  But now I worry about what might happen if I get randomly audited and it turns out that their code is based on wild guesses instead of solid tax advice.  I've never understood the way the "Making America Work" deduction works in their online software, for instance - did they screw that up somehow? 

I don't have a complicated financial life - mortgage, single, not that many charitable contributions, local and state taxes, no real income outside of work, few medical expenses - so I'm not *seriously* worried.  But... concerned, maybe.  Does anyone else have a favored, cheap tax-preparation service?  I can't see actually hiring a CPA, I just don't have that sort of cash flow to justify it.

(BTW, I saw that gag tax ad on a comics webzine a couple weeks ago.  Laughed, didn't think much about it past that.  But there's a difference between a webgag and a for-real advertisement for tax preparation services.  Screw-ups are fine for the former, all good for a laugh - but if you're selling your expertise?  Argh.)

via the usual.

Jay Cost argues that Roberts was playing a long game in the tradition of John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, leveraging a decision in favor of the current administration in order to advance the long-term interests of the opposition party.  That would be more strikingly clever if John Marshall's political party, the embattled Federalists, hadn't been a dead letter inside of fifteen years after Marbury v. Madison.  Their shattered remnants eventually were absorbed by one of the Monroe-era factions of the other, dominant party, and most of their policy goals were left drying on the rack for decades afterwards.

In the long run, we are all dead.

(Sean Trende, whom Jay Cost used to work with, gets deeper into the history of Marbury v. Madison here. 

We had a storm blow through last night about quarter to three.  Glad I woke up, because I had my windows open upstairs, and the floors would have gotten (more) soaked.  Not only could I walk in the dark by the lightning flashes, I suspect I could have read by it, the strikes were so rapid and sustained.  Limbs were down all over town, but the cleanup crews were going gangbusters, and no roads were blocked on my way in to work.

It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

Boy, Chief Justice Roberts really doesn't care about poor people, you know?  If they want to vote to burn down their own houses, he'll let 'em.  It's refreshingly anti-paternalistic, but also... kind of castle-in-the-sky.  Congress has become increasingly incapable of hacking through the tangled thickets of rank, over-grown legal code.  People had kind of hoped that the Court would help matters by cutting the Gordian Knot.  But the Chief Justice doesn't fancy himself an Alexander the Great, to take sword in hand and destroy the puzzle for us.

Anybody have a set of tweezers?

So, like everyone else with a political interest, I'm waiting on the expected Obamacare rulings today.  It's due sometime after 10 AM Eastern.  SCOTUSblog usually runs a live-chat during these sessions, I was hanging out there last Thursday and Monday for the last two of these sessions.

So, I went to the doctor the other day.  Relatively good news - nothing seriously wrong with me, I just have to change my diet.  No more eating like a college kid.  Sigh.  I've gotten fat again.

Update: Well, crap .   Looks like it was mostly sustained, 5-4.  They called BS on the "it's not a tax" thing.  But that was always happy horses**t, and everybody knew it. Only thing we got out of it was a talking point for the elections.  Between that and getting rid of the ACA monster, I would have preferred they killed the monster instead.  Politicians come and go, but the evil they do lives on after them.  This probably means that the ratchet has snapped into place, we'll never be rid of this remora.

I heard a lot of good reports for the Whedon/Mutant Enemy horror film the Cabin in the Woods recently, so I went out to catch the matinee.  I'm not normally a horror fan, and have completely avoided the recent trend in sadistic puzzle-torture-box franchises like Saw and Hostel and the like.  I don't even particularly enjoy your run-of-the-mill zombie-apocalypse flick, so perhaps I was being self-deluded in thinking this movie would be my sort of thing, but I've been fond of previous Mutant Enemy productions, and went in smiling.

I am not going to cater to anyone's highly sensitive NO SPOILERS sensibilities, for either the Cabin in the Woods or Tucker & Dale Vs Evil so please don't read further if that's a problem for you.

Anyways, I went in expecting something half-comedic, since that was the sales pitch that everybody was making.  I did *not* find it to be particularly funny, but then, nihilistic slaughter-porn about elder gods, evil bureaucracy, and metafictional commentary about slasher pictures probably shouldn't be funny to anyone with a functioning moral sense.  The Cabin in the Woods has a close didactic relationship with its contemporaneously filmed peer Inglourious Basterds, as both of them are essentially j'accuse diatribes against the target audience, with evil villains who watch satirically nasty filmatic depictions of abomination with sadistic enjoyment, so that when those paper villains are subsequently horribly destroyed by each film's nominal protagonists, the audience is primed to applaud their own condemnation-by-proxy, just punishment, and symbolic demolition.  The proper (and probably intended) response to both films is a combination of sickened revulsion and shame, a feeling that one has participated in something vile and degrading.  Both movies are in effect anti-spectacles, aimed at destroying the audience's emotional connection with the genres they are satirizing, namely, war spectaculars and slasher pictures.

Mind you, both films are spectacularly well-constructed, well-made, and highly polished - marvels of technical competence, especially in their screenwriting and script-doctoring aspects.  This emphasis on the Cabin in the Woods's supposed surprises and secrets is exaggerated, really.  The lack of any strong characters or emotional provision of connection to those characters leaves the audience with plenty of time to take in the fairly broad hints and suggestions which serve in place of explicit explanation of the premise.  It's pretty obvious from about ten-fifteen minutes into the movie that the story is one of ritual sacrifice, the details which are filled in afterwards are just that, details and justifications.  Instead of elder gods, those "downstairs" might as well be the actual viewing audience - it would have only made the movie just a hair more metafictional.

Some people have noted that the film sort of acts like a hard-R long episode of Buffy or Angel, with the nameless corporation running the ritual sacrifice acting as sort of a vicious blend of Buffy's Initiative and Angel's Wolfram & Hart.  The problem here is that the Initiative season was the weakest season of Buffy, unsatisfactory and overpoliticized, and I, at least, had as much of Wolfram & Hart from the Mutant Enemy crew as I ever cared to see.  Furthermore, the Cabin in the Woods acts as so much of a literal Bottle Show that there's no sense of how the events interact with a greater world.  So, when (SPOILER!) the surviving kids destroy the world, the movie almost gets you to celebrate; the script certainly acts like it wants you to buy-in to the conceit that "we've had our turn", so wipe out the world, sure, fine, kill everybody!  It only works because the kids are shown as having no family, no ties, no human life beyond their status as, well, status-seeking college grinds.

That leads into the next problem, which is the writers have built into the film this conceit that society is "sacrificing youth out of envy", that torture-porn slasher films are all about hatred of the young, vital, and beautiful, that somehow the inevitable demolition of Hollywood, music-industry, and other entertainment flash-in-the-pan celebrities are baked into the cake.  Now, this may be some sort of reflection of the creative industries themselves - there's been some ripping horrible stories of systemic child molestation, prostitution, and epic "using" coming out of that sector in the last three-four years or so - but it's a total non sequitur for describing the world in general.  Furthermore, given that the audience for slasher pictures are usually (or at least traditionally, among a segment of "geek culture" the youth-culture genres of their youth end up becoming increasingly creepy and age-inappropriate as they fail to let go of their expiring youth) teenagers and young adults.  Normally, these films don't cater to the middle-aged and elderly, you know?

But basically, my complaint about the movie is that it just made me sad, upset, and depressed.  I don't go to movies to feel bad, and I don't like movies that are trying to get me to agree with the thesis that "people suck and should be allowed to self-destruct".

That brings me around to a movie I also had heard some good buzz about, but which never made it to theaters in my section of the country, or came and went without me having noticed in time: Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil.  I used the "rental" feature on Amazon on Demand, and watched it yesterday afternoon as a palate-cleanser.  The evil murderous, bigoted hillbillies were presented without any real irony or sympathy in the Cabin in the Woods, they were just vicious, clownish animals used by the evil conspiracy to destroy the victim college kids, they had no moral agency of their own.  Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, on the other hand, is made from the view-point of a pair of clownish hillbillies, the Tucker and Dale of the title.  They, themselves, have bought their very own Cabin in the Woods, and they've just blown into the woods with a trailer and truckbed full of horribly dangerous sharp implements, planning on renovating that sucker into a nice "vacation house".

I've observed elsewhere that there are two species of TV police procedural, one made by creators who fear chaos and the world, and one made by creators who fear the devil and evil designs.  The latter is filled with wicked conspiracies of the rich and malign, like Castle;  the former features protagonists always struggling against a tide of petty evils and wickedness, marinating in a bubbling cauldron of stupidities, selfishness, and desires gone awry - shows like the Shield and The Closer.  The Cabin in the Woods is very much an exemplar of a conspiracy show, a Manichaean fable of corporatist, bureaucratic demiurges building a wicked world in a bottle within they plan to destroy their children.  Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a chaos story, wherein the innate craziness and emotions of the children are the problem, the threat.  The eventual antagonist of the latter movie is a Knight Templar gone horribly, horribly wrong.  He rants and raves about Evil, with an explicit "E", and his paranoias, stories about old murders, and seething hate for "hillbillies" - born out of his mother's survival of a previous massacre as a Final Girl - spark the second, accidental massacre.

In the Cabin in the Woods, the college kids are manipulated towards their bloody ends by a careful conspiracy of banal evil, a corporatist act of puppeteering.  The college kids of Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil are panicky, ignorant, and horribly, horribly careless.  They *are* the children running about in the rye field by the cliff in Salinger's evocative metaphor, bound to go charging blindly out over the abyss without some careful adult to catch them before they fall.  Or, at least, by a pair of dimwitted, amiable country boys just looking to help.

In the Cabin in the Woods, the college kids' stupidity is carefully crafted, created, and pr-ordained by evil intent - the monstrousness is so by corporatist agency.  In Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, their stupidity is innate, the result of kids being kids, addled by adrenaline, fear, paranoia, pot, and massive, comedic carelessness.  The hillbillies have their own faults, aggravated by too much alcohol, stupidity, and their own adrenalized outrage, but the kids are the drivers of the confrontation, and by and large kill themselves or each other.  In the end, the movie's incidents are described by the media as an inexplicable mass suicide, and to a certain extent, that's the truth.  Only one kid is saved from the cliff hidden in the rye, but at least she's saved.  It's the distinction which saves the movie, keeps it from being another sadistic exercise in torture, humanizes it.  As much as Shaun of the Dead, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a comedy in the end, a buddy picture, and something of a romance.  It isn't one-fifth as well-made as the Cabin in the Woods, and is full of plot holes and okay-sure-whatever arbitrary scripting, but at least the core emotion is marginally uplifting.

So, I've been very, very inactive.  Sorry.

Senatorial primaries today.  Rohrer has been getting on my last nerve, Smith just sends glossy mail, but the damnedest thing... Welch called me personally last  night, or at least, someone of about the right age and accent claiming to be Welch, so it must have been him.  I said I was worried if a US Senatorial candidate was calling individual, not especially active voters on Primary Eve, but he was the candidate which most closely matches my personal inclinations.  So...he's basically a Toomey guy, young, successful entrepreneur - runs some sort of med-tech manufacturer down in Chester - and is more than a little defensive about having been a Democrat in 2008.  I told him I agreed that the important part was campaigning for McCain in the General Election, which he did.

So, go out and vote Welch?  The other guys either aren't trying, or are kind of obnoxious.

Doing my due diligence on the convention delegates , I'm thinking Styn, Haas, and Corman for the delegates, and Settle, Flavin and Salmon for the alternates.  Maher for Auditor General, because his opponent seems to be simultaneously a dilettante *and* a banking lobbyist, which isn't what I'm looking for in a glorified Head Accountant for the Commonwealth.

A technical exercise:

The dream repeating in every night
Dreaming emptily and lightly of darkness
Deeper and deeper until the waking light
Afloat like embered paper-scraps burning
Over warm and scented gusts of wind
Ends my restless and loveless waiting

Within, the dream-walls echo, waiting
Wherein, breathing, some fragment of night
Drawing the air into lungs this wind
Exhaling heatened, the air to the darkness
Unknowing embraced by that silent burning
Unseen in those long moments without light

Oh, how long are the hours between light and light
How often do I spend those dreaming nights waiting
The candles too dear to waste in burning
Away the looming unseeing walls of night
And the heatened chambers, even in darkness
Stifling without the charity of a chilling wind

And what would I do, in those nights without wind
If in that restless sleep of slender light
Those rustling dreadful legions of darkness
slipped past my opened window and candle, waiting
Tumbled lit into the curtain to bring the night
Into a sudden furious holocaust burning?

That harsh and solitary burning
Flicked into life by some wicked wind
Flame asunder this peaceful night
Kindled blankets combusted under flame-lit light
And burn away the flannel under which lies waiting
My unknown soul hiding in darkness?

Better then to lie alone in that darkness
And forebear this tempting candle's burning
Spend rather these nights in restless waiting
And lock the casement 'gainst a vagrant wind
In timid fear of careless wax-lit light
And dream alone of endless night

Hold, darkness - birth me a passionate wind!
Spark a slumbering ember into burning light!
And fire! Consummate this waiting night!

Reading a set of annotations on Bujold's A Civil Campaign, I found myself reading about sestinas, and decided to write one to understand the form a little better. Back when I was writing bad poetry, someone accused me of being a "formalist", although my actual knowledge of the traditional forms was appallingly slight. I figured I ought to try my hand at this at least once.