favete linguis

letter to the editor

Some things are better left said by Philosophy Professors:

To the Editor (New York Times):

So the new pope thinks that the Western world is afflicted by relativism. When conservatives object to certain moral views, the fashion these days is to call those views relativist. But that is a misnomer.

Moral relativism is the idea that the truth of moral views is relative to what a particular person or group thinks is right. If one group thinks that something is right and another thinks it is wrong, it is right for the first group and wrong for the second.

Those who hold "liberal" views are not relativists. They simply disagree with the conservatives about what is right and wrong.

There is nothing new about moral disagreement. It is part of moral thought and can lead to progress. Nothing is gained by obscuring the disagreement with rhetorical labels.

Bruce M. Landesman
Salt Lake City, April 19, 2005

much has passed between us

The last few days I have been utterly aware of the Canadian geese. Mostly, I’ve been troubled, a certain undeniable sadness that always claws at my throat when I look at them. On my way home from my parent’s house a few days ago, I saw one next to Embassy Parkway, newly dead I'm sure because his feathers were thrust about like fake cotton snow. The other geese, I thought, were on their way to mourn their little comrade, like elephants do, sitting next to the fallen thing in contemplation - even if they were being hunted or risked missing the rain season. But they didn’t. They walked close to the dead thing and then just pecked around it looking for food.

Nin said that I shouldn’t worry so much about them because their brains are half the size of an eyeball. It does comfort me some. But what helped me even more to stop thinking of geese bones occurred yesterday on my way through the valley. I was crossing a large set of train tracks that lead into peninsula and the wetlands. I looked to my left to make sure a train wasn’t coming, and that was when I saw it: a Canadian goose walking away from the road, into the wetlands, along the tracks. I imagined that he had one of those knapsacks that Dust Bowl hobos carried with them on iron trains, the ones with the stick and the bandana. Maybe it was the way he was waddling, or maybe it was because he was using something that humans had made as an advantage, but I’m pretty sure THAT goose’s brain was as big as the whole eye.

vespers

We had our first spring storm this evening. It came suddenly like the vespers, like a worship service. The sky stayed dark from about noon until six when it finally cleared into a haze and then lightened. It reminded me a bit of last year, moving to the lake house a few days before the month of the most furious storms that Lake Erie had seen in the last few decades.

In a way I’m sad not to be there again this season, but only because I have a need for a water storm now and then, a certain fear that I could actually grasp a hold of when I saw the lake spitting over the breaker wall like a swarm of white bees. The whole thing makes me a little sentimental actually, and it got me thinking about poetry and photography: capsized tankers, shivering gulls, the smooth rocks on the beach after the high water settled, the things always left behind.

so they committed themselves to the will of god

There is a long, beautiful hallway that leads from St. Peter’s basilica to the Sistine Chapel. For years I imagined it without the tourists crunching their way through – just as it was when Michelangelo walked to work every day to climb on that scaffolding with his brushes. The walk, the hallway, and the Sistine Chapel were the only places that I didn’t take pictures when I was in Italy. It can’t be captured. Now the conclave is meeting and the stained wooden doors to the Chapel have been closed, and I wonder what those men are thinking among all of that beauty. Are they thinking preservation, doctrine, politics, faith? I don’t know. I wonder if they look around them, above them in that small room, and for just a moment sanctification seeps into their hearts; if grace, that warm quip of free and unmerited love takes hold - and they are quiet.

In honor of this moment in history, choosing the 264th successor to St. Peter, I’ve decided to post a few pictures from Italy.

something smaller

thank you, tea cup

Woman of the High Plains, 1938

Once, as a girl, I walked
to where the rolling begins,
and laid in the loamy fields
of bluestem grasses
blanketed by hackberry.
And I didn’t know it,
but the buffalo were following
the cry of the Apache
over the Canadian River,
leaving the land for the cotton tracks
and the valleys of black oil.
So you will understand
that I cannot cross again
into the canyonlands.
What is missing, I fear,
is part of me,
that truth, like the soil,
stripped and burning.