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Che

The times are too difficult right now to offer any comments other than those of revolutionaries.


  • Photo: Marc Hutten, the death of Che Guevara, 9 October 1967, the higuera, Bolivia

When you know I’m dead
Don’t pronounce my name
Because he would stop
Death and rest.
When you know I’m dead
Say strange syllables
Pronunciation Flower, bee,
Lagrima, bread, storm.
Don’t let your lips
Find my ten letters.
I’m sleepy I loved,
I have reached silence.
(Che Guevara)

And so it is with me, the same with the ten letters.

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Once More, Into The Breach…

I don’t know; wish I did. All that and oh well.

  • I seem to have floundered off the page again. I would be worried if it mattered.
  • Strange places in the hovel of memories: 1. Years back—where? Was it Michigan? When I lived in the house on the 10 acre woods. The first dream was that of the whippets. Whippets had long been of some significance although I didn’t know of what. They frequently appeared in my life and were witnessed by the boy and the girl. And then, I dreamed I found a pair of them and took them into the garage there, to the house on the edge of that wood, to wait for their people to arrive and rescue them. (Whippets always appeared in a pair, in reality and in dreams.) And so they did. The next day, out walking with Kate-the-golden-one, down that country road, appeared two whippets, trotting alone and in tandem. I coaxed them into the garage and phoned a radio station then playing at the house, to give the information and request an announcement. The song to go along with the find was “The Happy Wanderer.” (It was a station of oldies.) Not long after the announcement there was a phone call from the whippet people who then came to get them. Of course they had just lost them, of course they just happened to be listening to that station.
  • 2. The dream that night was of the raven. Raven or crow, I tend to favor ravens. I found a raven on that very country road, a wounded creature who could not fly. I took it in and gave it great care and nursing. When I was not at home I kept it in my utility room so it could be enclosed and yet have some room. Safety, freedom, and constraint. Noble intentions, noble gifts. Except the beautiful iridescent creature tore a hole right through the wall. There was a plaster and dry wall and two-by-four mess blown clear through to the kitchen. The next day, walking down that same country road, a neighbor came out to ask me if I wanted to take in a crow. He had found an injured one and couldn’t care for it himself. Was I interested? I gracefully declined. I didn’t want the mess of the feathered beauty tearing apart the house, leaving the white mist of drywall powder to cover us there.
  • It is after all, a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens.
  • I told the kids who told me I made too much of such things, which I did. I was crazed to know the meaning of them. I had one foot on shore and one at sea…into a fog of meaning and being, into a dream world not called, delivered without quest or anchor. But I could not read the sign. How will I ever know if everything was a dream, if anything was real?
  • Last night I got up at four a.m. to read The Winter’s Tale. I wanted to understand what the king said at the end, when he touched the statue of his wife—old now, and gone—and he said she was warm. Who does that—this waking to read? Isn’t that crazy even for me?
  • Credit Not Given

Still, it looks like red rock canyon. So many places of country roads, so many places left behind. No one then to love the pilgrim soul, or the moments of sad grace.

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Ramblings At Small (vs. At Large)

  • Math. An accomplishment of vision. Art and math and science are all bridges between the human and the divine, beauty a means of access to grace. Mathematics, Simone Weil wrote, “is first, before all, a sort of mystical poem composed by God himself.”
  • I don’t know much math, certainly not higher math, but I have always felt that shiver of acknowledgement when thinking of the room that belongs to Pure Mathematics, the thoughts that would cause the mind to wheel and gallop and explode there. Generating enlightenment. A spiritual experience.
  • Lizzy Fig is on the patio wearing her lovely new do of a lion cut. She is still so tiny though not the wee one I was afraid of stepping on. Her current concern is the catching of bugs. I believe that is an occupation of note. To be so engrossed is the gift we long for.
  • Once again last night I was at university in my dreams. Ah! So now it occurs to me why I was thinking of math today. In the dream I was in a math class for a test. Interesting—the first ex was sitting next to me and we were both taking the test tho we had not been in the class together. Of course I had forgotten there was an assignment and test due and did not study at all. I knew nothing. And yet, when it came time to do the work I opened my booklet to discover the layout of many forms that I had begun. All I had to do was draw the line between them individually. I understood that I understood even tho I did not currently have the knowledge with me.
  • Perhaps math is such that it is because that’s what made the Universe.
  • I read somewhere that the things or occupations at an expert level that will drive men insane are philosophy, chess, and mathematics. My brother suggested we add astronomy to that. All of course enlist the search for Truth.
  • I’ve just now come back from an hours long trip around the bend of various articles and pages saved—the trip that begins with looking up a single thought and ends up with riding a monster tail. I do love monsters.
    • 42
  • P.S. I’m going to check into:
As Posted On Amazon
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Ohio

Because I lived so long in Michigan I thought of Ohio as a midwestern little sister. One in competition with football, baseball, and countryside. I don’t know how things stack up anymore.

Rob Blair Photography

Sunrise over Lake Erie yesterday morning at Beulah Beach in Vermillion, Ohio.

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Treason And Dates

It seems incredible to me that Angela Davis is to be honored as an inductee in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Incredible not because it isn’t deserved, but because wasn’t it just yesterday—?

In the late 1960s and early 70s, to say the name Angela Davis meant to picture a beautiful Black woman in a full afro with right arm extended and a closed fist giving the power salute of Black Panthers. She was the powerful voice and vision for activists of feminism and equality during the Civil Rights movement.

If you look up Davis on Google or any other search engine, you will find her described as a former Communist, Activist, and Black Panther supporter. Communist at least until the 1990s when she officially left the Party. In 1970 she purchased guns and supplied them to her own personal security guards. The guards then—as members of the Black Panthers—used those guns in an armed take-over of a courtroom in California. Four people were killed during the takeover and kidnapping, including a judge. The deaths occurred during a chase by government agents.

As a result of the deaths, Angela became a fugitive wanted by the FBI. At that time J. Edgar Hoover listed Davis on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List; she was the third woman and the 309th person to be listed.

She was eventually captured, imprisoned, tried, then found Not Guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping. The question of course became one of prior knowledge and intent, to say nothing of the originating point of the bullets that caused the deaths.

Although she was found not guilty at the trial she was dogged by accusations and negative press for years. California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969 attempted to have her barred from teaching at any California university, given that she was an avowed Communist. He was not successful then or later when Angela went on to become a professor and scholar at UCLA, California. She was and is a continuing voice for feminism and civil rights, and an author of serious merit.

Others to be inducted to the Hall of Fame include attorney and activist Gloria Allred, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Native American lawyer and professor Sarah Deer, actress and activist Jane Fonda, United States Air Force officer Nicole Malachowski, former member of U.S. Congress Louise Slaughter, composer Laurie Spiegel, biologist Flossie Wong-Staal, and artist/activist Rose O’Neill.

I list the others not just for honors earned, but to note the inclusion of Jane Fonda. Why? She too was accused of treason by an enraged public during the Vietnam war.

A picture of Jane Fonda on a Ho Chi Minh tank. A photo of Angela Davis with the Black Panthers in a power salute and in defense of the Soledad Brothers. Both led and inspired protests for and against themselves. The country was divided and loud then, just as now. Both were accused of treason.

Davis went from an incarceration of over a year—initially in solitary confinement—before she was granted bail. She was America’s Most Wanted criminal. Now she’s a professor emeritus and a Hall of Fame honoree.

It was Cardinal Richelieu who is credited with the saying: Treason is just a matter of dates. Indeed.