There sails a young man still …
I can no longer hold my water and itch in places I haven’t scratched these twenty years for the clownish stiffness in my bones. It’s Reginald that has to swab my bum and deems the task a means of grace. I’ve got an old dam’s dugs. My privities hang loose as poultry from a hook. My head wags to and fro. There’s times my speech comes out so thick and gobbled I’d as well to save my wind. But the jest is bitterer yet, for deep inside this wrecked and ravaged hull, there sails a young man still.
How I rage at times to smite with these same fists I scarce can clench! How I long, when woods are green, to lark and leap on shanks grown dry sticks! Let a maid but pass my way with sport in her eye and her braid a-swinging, and I burn for her although my wick’s long since burnt out and in my heart’s eye see her as the elders saw Susanna at her bath-her belly pale and soft as whey, her pippins, her slender limbs and thistledown. So ever and again young Godric’s dreams well up flood old Godric’s prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear.
Godric, roughly 100 years old, speaking in Frederick Buechner’s Godric
This is my first time reading Buechner. I don’t think it will be my last.
Asperges me hyssopo
Asperges me hyssopo
the snatch of plainsong went,
Thou sprinklest me with hyssop
was the clerical intent,
not Asparagus with hiccups
and never autistic savant.Asperger, mais. Asperg is me.
The coin took years to drop:Lectures instead of chat. The want
of people skills. The need for Rules.
Never towing a line from the Ship of Fools.
The avoided eyes. Great memory.
Horror not seeming to perturb –
Hyssop can be a bitter herb.
Les Murray, The Tune on Your Mind, New Selected Poems.
Murray was an eccentric and on the autism spectrum. He also was a brilliant poet. (Caveat: Some of his poetry is a tough sail for someone like me, unfamiliar with the flora, fauna and geography of Australia.)
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 