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For paid subscribers, I’m offering an aperitif from the series I’m doing on the dearth of gay grownups, how too many gay men act out the puer aeternus in the bedroom despite their crinkle skin and crow’s feet.

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As much as I love food, it can all be too much. If I see a stew in ashram portions bubbling atop a stove or hear the paella crackle in a pan the size of a big rig’s wheel, all those prawns like a swarm of locusts steaming on their gilded bed, or (you, gods, remove this memory from my mind!), recall the footage I saw on the news decades ago of some man dunking hot dogs in a glass of water before swallowing them in a race to the bottom, his prize infamy and the adulation of the rabble, I turn away and think, “Will I ever eat again?” But come mealtime and a snarl of the stomach and the shelling of fava beans and the simmering of heirloom tomatoes and the roll of a foglia of fresh pasta on my counter, I’m in love again, not disgusted but mesmerized by the magic and artistry of fine food.

And so comes my bewilderment at the gays’ obsession with sex, with their indulgence of any sex versus no sex, with their willingness to settle for more water-logged hot dogs instead of an artisanal sausage. As I wrote in my last post, I’m thinking this Pride season about gay adulthood, what it means and why it’s such a rarity, landing on the sexual experience of the gays because that’s where so much of our deepest psychology is housed. Down there, in the root of ourselves, the cauldron of the soul gets stirred, and even if you’re putting fine ingredients into that pot, the cooking process deglazes the burnt bits from the pan and dislodges old fears, old desires, old sorrows, each masked by orgasmic flavors. If you keep throwing new spices into that saucepan to cover up the bitter char, you might be able to ignore it for a while, but eventually, the meal is beyond salvation and you’ve got to throw it on the compost pile.

I’ve had many gay friends over the decades involved in various relationship arrangements, and while, in my youth, I played along with the political posturing around our sexual autonomy, it never sat right with me emotionally. To this day, I hear the gays say, “Well, I don’t own him, so he can do whatever he wants. As long as he comes home to me.” Yet to a man, the vibrant, playful, emotionally mature (because emotionally alive) people I’ve known who’ve peddled this line, when they do peddle it, go cold. They become almost professorial in their delivery, an automaton replaying a quip they heard somewhere from someone they respected. Luckily, there are gay souls brave enough to step outside of our own permissive norm. As many free love proponents as I’ve known, there are also plenty of gays I’ve met who tell a different story. A therapist who’s seen gay patients for over thirty years told me, “I’ve never seen an open relationship work. Not once.” A very sexually experienced guy of 70 said to me, when we spoke about a couple we knew exploring those treacherous waters, “Oh, that’s the beginning of the end. Always is.” Someone I’ve known for over 15 years told me that in his youth he was often the third, the good-time boy to spice up a couple’s life, but an older queen at his work said to him, “That’s fine and all, but only ever be the third. Don’t be part of a couple who invites someone in, because it’s a mess. They’re not happy. That’s why they called you.” And called him back, it turned out.

If, indeed, we are working out our deepest psychology in the bedroom (hence the role playing, the kinks, the weird shit we say during sex, the great and uncomfortable feelings that surface afterwards), we’ve opened up the door to the Underworld, land of sex and death, as so many mythic figures attest (e.g. Ereshkigal, Sumerian queen of the dead realms also possesses dazzling sexual power; Persephone ‘destroyer of men’ is both seduction and decay; Hel of the Nordic pantheon is half beautiful maidenhood and half a rotting corpse). When we keep that nether realm within the confines of a conscious relationship, we grow, we mature in our sexual practices and our psychological wealth (“Pluto,” Latin version of Hades, being a god of the dead and of wealth, hence “plutocracy”), but that’s because we have a companion in the Underworld, someone who walks with us and fucks with us through the labyrinth. Invite in a rando and you kick open the door to their Underworld, too, and just because you’re all down there together doesn’t mean you have each other’s long-term best interests at heart; even though it might just be for a night, the things experienced in Persephone’s kingdom aren’t easily forgotten and can leave us, the “us” of a relationship, mortally stricken.

When you’re with someone in a committed relationship, you learn how to die together, because that’s what we’re all doing in a marriage: confronting death and what’s on the other side. In Vedic astrology, the 7th house, the 7th division of the 360-degree pie of the heavens, is the place where we examine marriage and romantic relationships. The next house, the 8th, is the house of secrets, torment, mental agony, mutilation, transformation, hidden knowledge, and death. You get married, you die. To yourself. To what you’ve been on your own. Once you’ve done that, however long that takes, you go to the 9th house of true knowledge, true spirituality, your relationship to the divine, and good fortune – because good fortune is won through marriage and the death it causes in your life. It’s not a rebirth. It’s straight-up birth into a new existence you couldn’t have foreseen, and only a committed and co-equal relationship can give you that particular experience.

So don’t fuck it up by fucking other people. The gays’ insistence on open relationships or, worse, polyamory with its promise of over-processing, relates to their inability and unwillingness to grow up, their refusal to walk through the Underworld not as victim, but as pilgrim. Traversal of that landscape requires letting go of yourself, of the identity you’ve built against the odds, of the dreams that have curdled into habit. When you become an adult, you realize, as poet Donald Justice says, “Men at forty/Learn to close softly/The doors to rooms they will not be/Coming back to.” And those rooms are filled with hot men you had sex with, filled with trade whose names are lost to the mists of lust, filled with parties in P-town and your square-cut bathing suit and waking up in a bed with several strangers who look just like you (Narcissus, how potent your tale remains!).

But when you find Mr. Right, usually in another room, maybe even another house, you should realize that spending all your time on the hunt for passing pleasure means you’re not able to spend the right amount of time with the one who could last. The more you hedge your bets, the more you gamble away your capital. The more you kiss each other goodbye as you both head out to a sex party or to a bar, the less familiar you are with the taste of those lips that may, someday, whisper the words you’ve always dreamed of hearing, “I love you,” coming from a heart that commits to it, commits to you – despite your arrogance, despite your impatience, despite your cruelty and your craziness – and you get the honor of doing the same. The trick will never do that, and the more you treat your lover like a trick, the more you get tricked – which only leaves you hungrier than when you began.

Oh, well. There’s always another hot dog.

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In Junes past, I’ve written columns about gay mentors, gay history, or my observations about current gay culture (and how straight people should and should not navigate Pride), but this year I’m offering a critique, a criticism, perhaps even a dressing-down of the gays in my ongoing hope that one day we’ll grow up.

The subject of gay grown-ups first pricked my interest twenty years ago, when at 29, I read gay therapist Don Kilhefner’s article on the subject for the now-defunct gay spirituality magazine White Crane Journal. It’s a topic I’ve chewed on, often frothing at the mouth, for the past two decades as I’ve limped further and further into adulthood, and I was reminded of it as I re-read Larry Kramer’s Faggots, published in 1978 by Random House (can you imagine). Larry Kramer, before he became that Larry Kramer, the near biblical Jeremiah bellowing about plagues and a community bent on its own destruction, thereby aiding and abetting the straight world bent on its destruction, was a writer for screen and then, with the publication of Faggots, of a novel.

And not just any novel. This was satire in the tradition of Swift and Pope, even of Orwell, although the book’s darker auguries couldn’t have prepared Kramer for the hell realms ahead. Faggots was met with more than a little dismay and antipathy, something still reflected nearly fifty years later when, attempting to read John Birdsall’s What is Queer Food? How we served a revolution (good writing, bollocks premise), I read a section where that author came down hard on Kramer for making the gays feel ashamed of themselves and their behavior, something the activist did to save the very men who denounced him.

Faggots follows the trials of Fred Lemish on the eve of his fortieth birthday as he searches for love in hedonistic dens of gay New York. Kramer spares no one and no type, lambasting the shallow pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, flicking on the fluorescents in grimy bathhouses and Park Avenue orgies, shining a search light on the debauches of Fire Island beaches and the urinal cake-perfumed romances of a public bathroom. He’s not kind to the culture, but he is funny.

Beneath all of the criticism is a sense of love. You can tell Kramer cares for and frets about these people, this group, and his frustration at their stupidity and immaturity leads him to write about them with near-journalistic accuracy and rapier wit. But perhaps this is merely projection, because that’s how I feel about the gays. I love them. I wish they’d grow up, especially when it comes to sex and relationships. I’m tired of watching us destroy ourselves, our attempts at lasting happiness, our dwindling hopes for love snuffed out by bad decisions and worse psychology.

There’s a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing and that time is after thirty. Men over the age of thirty shouldn’t be ordering sex delivery like soy sauce-sopped General Tso’s chicken, shouldn’t be attending orgies, shouldn’t be joining an app called Sniffies (the name alone), while lamenting the lack of good men or their fear of age and loneliness. My position is not one of sexual prudery, although there will be some who accuse me of just that, but one of adulthood, of someone who thinks deeply about sex, its meaning, its soul-making, and what happens when sex is truly perverted.

Gays grow up in a world that hates us. Still. Yes, we’ve made incredible strides. No, we’re not done. No, those strides are not permanent. No, animus lasting thousands of years doesn’t vanish in a few decades. Part of that hatred is rooted in a sex-phobic attitude towards any physical intimacy and pleasure, but especially that between men (those roots mere tributaries to the taproot of misogyny), and resultantly, gays feel shame for their desires. When they come out, as they work through their shame in the realm of sex, they often want to do it all with everyone. It’s a blast. Good for us.

But instead of the Lothario life being just a phase, it warps into a reflex. A habit. An addiction. Pleasure no longer is pleasurable, or new heights of pleasure must be scaled in order to achieve the same thrill or any. It’s an app. It’s an alley. It’s a sex party. It’s (another) three-some with (another) unhappy couple. The defiance against shame and homophobia, a noble act at the beginning of the gay journey, becomes a prison because it chains us to that young self with all of his immaturities, that one who was trying to beat the odds and is now a sad, old queen trolling the sewers searching for gold when all they find is garbage.

In an incisive foreword to my copy of Faggots, author, poet, and scholar Reynolds Price writes, “It wouldn’t have taken a mind of Kramer’s quality to conclude that, whatever prodigies the male genitals can perform, the human mind is incapable of emotional focus when it’s asked to experience so much emotional intensity with so many different objects.”

Like it or not, a series of little black books buckling the shelf does not a sonnet sequence make.

Kramer himself writes in the voice of one of his characters, “Yes, sex and love were different items when he wanted them in one, and yes, having so much sex made having love impossible, and yes, sadism was only a way to keep people away from us and masochism only a way to clutch them close, and yes, we are sadists with some guys and masochists with other guys and sometimes both with both, and yes, we’re all out of the closet but we’re still in the ghetto and all I see is guys hurting each other and themselves.”

I’ve known gay men into their forties, fifties, sixties, and even seventies who say we shouldn’t have to deny ourselves any sexual experience in favor of a relationship, or that we don’t have to play by straight rules in how we order our marriages, or monogamy is unnatural (tell that to wolves, eurasian beavers, and 90% of bird species), and yet they balk when their license lands them lonely. All of these are excuses, political posturing merely.

Kramer goes on: “But how to get out! And yes, the world is giving us a bad name, and we’re giving us a bad name and one of us has got to stop and it’s not going to be the world.”

We’ve got to grow up, not just come out. Gay men continue to founder, near fifty years after Kramer’s book, and until we get our sexual selves together, we’ll never activate what we’re truly capable of. Even more than in the post-Stonewall era, men now are just sexual objects to each other, the apps insuring that not even a conversation or chemistry are necessary to hooking up, “Hey” and “Sup” being the salutations in that digital meat rack. Gay men have dropped all pretense of safe-ish sex since the advent of PrEP, the HIV prophylaxis drug, as if syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and an alphabet soup of other diseases had evaporated, as if HIV and AIDS taught us nothing about sexual health and, more importantly, about love.

And so gay men keep on trying to fill that hole, and I’m talking about the one in their hearts, by means of other orifices, but once the paramour pulls out, the heart still aches, so instead of going on a grand adventure in service to that most tender and miraculous organ, too many gay men move on to the next sexual encounter, upping the ante with higher and, at the very least emotionally, more dangerous behaviors, or in Kramer’s words “arcane sexual deviances sacrosanct to the unloved.”

And it’s that last bit that matters most – the unloved – because what I’ve learned that most gay people, hell, what any people, want is love, not only to be loved but to love another, and this is what I wish for my friends and community. I want them to find love and to be grown up enough to keep it.

More to come…

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I never wanted to live in New York. Though a starry-eyed actor from aged fifteen to thirty-two, I never set my sights on the city of theatrical fantasy, overwhelmed by its enormity, its noise, its sheer density of population (and within that population the density of crazies, drunks, and other assorted wayward and/or lost souls), its dearth of sky and trees and clean air.

And then at 47 years-old, because of my husband’s career, we moved to the city that never sleeps…and I loved it. Age was on my side. I’m not compelled to see or do everything in one day. I go to bed by ten, safely tucked in with my husband, my cat, and a prim Victorian novel. If I’ve been in the fray one day, slogging through Chinatown or (heavens forfend!) midtown, the next I’m at the library or in Central Park. (Did I mention I live on the Upper East Side with the other kept women? Every bit helps.)

My husband always says you’ll have your best and worst day in New York. It’s a place that magnifies whatever you’re experiencing. When it’s right, it’s so very right, and when it’s wrong, it’s Circus Maximus wrong.

The other day was a very right day. It started down on Wall Street to visit the new Printemps, a French department store that opened here last year. Since 1865, Printemps has served the Parisians, and now the company has two international locations, one in Doha and the other here (they’ve been owned by the Luxembourg-based, Qatari-backed Divine Investments SA since 2013). The last time I was in a Printemps was when it was still the only one, thirty years ago in Paris. I still remember the pieces I bought there, a sailor-inspired striped shirt, of course, and a black zip-up jacket, both of which I had for years, both by the designer Agnès B., whose shop on Madison Avenue, near where I live, possesses, for me, the flavor of a Proustian Madeleine, drawing me back to a very different version of myself, one nascent but no less dazzled by style and beauty. (And before you, dear reader, come for me about the length of that last sentence, read À la recherche du temps perdu.) The New York locale, in a gorgeous Deco building, is dazzling on its second floor, the first being literally entry level, with decadent mosaics, fantastical light fixtures, and a burst of color befitting the department giant’s name.

Next, I wandered up Greenwich Avenue into Tribeca to find Joanne Hendricks’ used cookbook shop. In the front room of a small house that’s withstood the demolition and new builds of the neighborhood sit shelves of books nestled in plastic sleeves. From The Antarctic Housewife to volumes about reading tea leaves to Dickens’ writings on his travels in Italy, the store is a trove of finds, including a Holy Grail of Italian cookery, which I snapped up, clutching it to me lest anyone else wander in and filch the prize.

I first discovered the In Bocca series through Katie Parla, one of the best authors on Italian food, history, and its multivalent meanings. Each region boasts its own cardboard-clad volume, and originally printed on oatmeal paper in the late 1970s, they’re more grimoire than mere collection of recipes, an invitation into a world of grandmothers and chefs from ages past, a world of poetry and cultural custom, a world illustrated by modern paintings and 19th-century etchings.

And there at Joanne Hendricks was Toscana In Bocca. I carefully took it out of the sleeve and flipped through it, tears welling in my eyes. This was the real deal. Expensive? Sure. Worth it? Absolutely. Who needs both kidneys, anyway? (Hendricks told me she used to have an entire set, but a washed-up, so-called celebrity “chef,” against whom I have a longstanding vendetta, snapped them up…and obviously has never used them.)

I scurried off, continuing my march up Greenwich Ave. before I dove into the heart of the Village, heading to the IFC Center to catch Ask E. Jean, the documentary about E. Jean Carroll, the advice columnist and journalist who won two cases against Trump to the tune of near-$90 million for his rape and rape of her character. I first read about the film in a guest editorial for the Times by the film’s director Ivy Meeropol, where she disclosed her suspicions about, what she calls, “the Trump effect.” Distributors dried up for the film as the convicted rapist and felon rode roughshod not only over our media environment but our laws. Luckily for me, IFC was showing the film, and my husband and I grabbed tickets right away.

It’s a marvelous and marvelously inspiring documentary, which, though centered on a very specific moment and a very specific person, I suspect will have an unfortunately long shelf-life because of the questions it asks about how men treat women, about how women treat women (never more enraging than in the deposition footage), about the nature of power, and about the mob gone mental. At times harrowing, I left the theater in love with E. Jean Carroll and asking, for the millionth time, “How did this fuck-tard get to be president…twice?”

But I couldn’t forget or ignore that New York hatched him just as it’s hatched countless remarkable artists, actors, writers, activists, and thinkers. The city amplifies our best and worst, our savagery and our generosity, and the possibility that, on any day, you can have the ne plus ultra of either – and, sometimes, both.

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Well, we’ve come around to another full moon and another time to peer into the cosmos and see what’s in store from the perspective of Vedic astrology.

Last month I wrote the following:

The tech overlords are tightening their arrangements with the government, which will continue for the next two weeks, so keep watching for news stories about this.

I also wrote this:

I’d expect from around the twelfth to around the fifteenth [of May], we’ll hear more about military, business/tech/finance, and the government all in collusion with some new plans.

Given that A.I. companies jigged across the stock market (or will soon be doing so), given that those same companies opened lobbying offices in Washington, given that investors like Andreessen Horowitz spent gajillions on crypto- and A.I.-lobbying efforts for the midterms (doesn’t cryptocurrency seem quaint?), given that Anduril, a tech-defense company which has developed autonomous jets and submarines, doubled its financial worth in one year’s time to $61 billion and doubled its impact on the U.S. military, and finally given that a worldwide effort to remake combat into a dystopian robot-pocalypse is well underway, I’d say those predictions are on-point…especially as all these articles were released between the twelfth and fifteenth of May.

That’s just to point out why Vedic astrology is useful and how it can give us context for the times in which we find ourselves. Having a grip on the trajectory of life can help us meet the moment; conversely, it can leave us rocking in a corner clutching a teddy bear. Your choice.

And now, onwards to the future!

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To and from my sister’s memorial celebration, sitting on a plane, I honored her in the best way I could: I read. Punctuated by sighs or moments of putting down my book and staring blankly at the clouds below the wing, I fell back again and again into the novel I’d been reading when she died – The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Nothing like the Russians to cheer you up in tough times. (Just ask Chekov.)

Flying across the continent, I had multiple, uninterrupted hours of reading, something not easily afforded in regular life. I was reminded of an enduring image of my sister from about a dozen years ago, when I met up with her and other members of our family on their annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod. We stayed in an old house, whose interior doors had, over the centuries, shifted in vertiginous directions, a carnival lurch accompanied a simple trip to the kitchen. The bathroom necessitated a tip-toe through the room where my sister slept, and once, sometime in the early hours of morning, I stumbled through the doorway, her light still on, as she sat up in bed reading – a mystery, if I recall correctly.

I don’t think we ever spoke of Dostoevsky. I didn’t come to him until sometime in my latter thirties. I picked up Crime and Punishment at a used bookstore and was dazzled by Raskolnikov’s battle between cerebral moral theory and innate conscience. Then, of course, there’s Svidrigailov’s terrifying nihilism, his vision of eternity as a dark closet filled with dust and spiders. So far, I’ve read the book twice.

I read Karamazov, of course, which though I recognized as a fine book, didn’t capture me in the same way, and then there was The Possessed (sometimes translated as Demons), which, for the life of me, I can’t remember a thing about.

But The Idiot? I think it might be Dostoevsky’s perfect work. Although Crime is captivating, and I’ll likely read it again, the end doesn’t satisfy me; it seems as if the author, worried about his antihero’s horrible deed and mental unraveling, needed to redeem him in too obvious a way. But Prince Myshkin, eponymous idiot, a Christ-adjacent figure, finds no redemption, an ending much darker and more satisfying, at least to someone living in 21st-century America. The characters are mesmerizing, more so for the dopplegängers among them, Myshkin/Rogozhin, Nastasya/Aglaya, their undoing the only possible ending but one which, all the same, I hoped against.

I’ve kept some version of a commonplace book since my teens, scribbling down quotes from what I read alongside whatever psychological and cerebral explorations they lead me to. It’s a way for me to wrangle with what an author does, how the writer does it, and what it awakens within me. I remember some of the earliest quotations, many from Shakespeare as I made my way through a collected works I carried about with me. Lines from King Lear, Hamlet, As You Like It, gave way to quotes from biographies (Katherine Hepburn, Sarah Bernhardt), and novels I read for school (An American Tragedy, Anna Karenina – the Russians again!).

Through my teens, twenties, and thirties, I thought it important to reflect on the personal, each quote a writing prompt given by the inner analyst, but in the waning years of my forties, I’ve grown far less interested in what Ram Dass called the “melodramas” of the personality, in favor of how the literary excerpts reflect life back to me, provide a sense of human condition continuity, or even clarify a philosophical position I’ve noodled but not yet figured out.

From my current commonplace:

“Is it true, Prince, that you once said ‘beauty’ would save the world?”

There’s dark comedy in the idiot proclaiming such a grand possibility – only an idiot would think such a thing but that idiot is consistently praised, while criticized for his goodness and honesty. We mock the fool when he is an optimist, but envy his optimism.

Does beauty save the world, or can it? Keats is evasive. ‘Beauty is all/Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ Nothing here about its power to redeem the species. Beauty inspires love in us – love of place, art, experience, even a person – but if that love turns to desire, the beauty hardens into mere sensuality and then greed. The Trojan War is fought for ‘beauty,’ embodied by Helen, but really the beauty is grounds for carnality, an addiction that feeds on itself – a bureaucracy of dopamine.

As Ezra Klein said in a recent podcast, the act of writing, something more and more surrendered to A.I., weaves the mind into complexities whereby it interacts with life in an increasingly rich way. I’d argue this happens with any contemplative act – for some it’s collaging, others it’s cooking, others it’s a walk in nature – a chance to step outside the self and paradoxically deeper into it, not just the petty self, but the more expansive one, the one who sees beyond the everyday and into the larger scope of a lifetime, its concurrent joy and sorrow, hope and despair, peace and rage, all a grand scene in the theater of existence, ultimately a comic one – in that Russian kind-of way.

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Hey, paid subscribers. Thanks for your patience for these couple weeks. I’m off to Denver for my sister’s memorial, and while this is usually the week where I’d write some lengthy, in-depth paid-post, it’s not happening.

However, this morning, I read this marvelous and thought-provoking and hopefully hopeful piece by Maureen Dowd, one of my favorite columnists at the New York Times, a paper that, although I often curse it for its shoddy workmanship, is still a bulwark, albeit cracked, against the onslaught of ignorance.

It made me think of writing poetry, something I’ve done extensively over the past ten years. I reflected, too, on the art of reflection, of quieter times and my, not always successful, attempts to provide room for such reflection in my own life. Below is a poem I wrote about Santa Chiara’s shrine, convent, and death locale in Assisi, a beautiful spot in the Umbrian countryside where quiet thought is still possible.

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Central Park is verdant again, the dogwoods in bloom, a few late lilacs, and the grass so very green, which as I walked across it this week, my sister and her death ever on my mind, I thought of our shared love of Walt Whitman.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? ......I do not know what it is any more than he.

So begins one of the most profound and comforting meditations on immortality and, thereby, on grief, I’ve ever read. With scriptural depth free of religious stricture, the poet proffers possible answers to the boy’s question – the grass as symbol of his own personality, as the handkerchief of God, as a hieroglyphic with democratic encouragements – until he finally lands at the line which came to my own mind across the park:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I first read Whitman in my mid-twenties. A battered, used copy in my hand, I loafed in the grass at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., my dog running in circles through the brush, excited for freedom and the outdoors. So began my decades-long love of the poet, but it wasn’t until my thirties that I learned my sister had an equal passion for him.

This week, the first since her demise left a profound absence in my life and the lives of so many, I’ve naturally thought of mourning, its practices, its formalities, how it’s observed in various cultures. From the year-long blacks to head-shaving, the survivors mark that first, interminable 365 days, a timeline I’d often wondered about until, some years ago, my aunt enlightened me.

A childhood friend of hers had lost her husband, a devastating blow, and after the first year, on day 366, my aunt, whose loss of her own mother was profound, called the friend and said, “Now, you’ll never have to do that again.” The first Christmas, the first birthday, the first Thanksgiving, the first time the daffodils bloomed which the deceased looked forward to every spring, the first snow when the now-dead insisted on drinking hot chocolate on the porch no matter how freezing it was, the first of so many firsts that couldn’t possibly be survived, but cruelly can. (In the Indian epic the Ramayana, when various characters buckle under misfortune, including the death of a beloved, they often cry, “My heart must be made of stone that you’re dead and I’m still alive.” How is it possible that we go on in the midst of such sorrow?)

In our over-rationalized world, in a society where rites of passage have been excised for their superstitious flummery or disdained for being maudlin, we’ve robbed ourselves and our psychology of the deeper healing that grief and death demand. As I sit inside of this particular loss, I notice the liminality of grief, its time-out-of-time, its place-out-of-place, a borderland or, better, an interstitial underworld where one level of life carries on while another is arrested while another spins backwards into the fog-wet landscape of memory.

As I walked the park, I carried on with my recitation, speaking aloud, not caring who heard:

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe....and am not contained
     between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,
The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself;
They do not know how immortal, but I know.

That’s it – that last triplet – that’s my sister. She didn’t think she was more than she was, but we all knew that “more” was big enough – a mate and companion of people – a reminder that, regardless of what we, in our smallness, in our neuroses, in our fears, in the traumas imposed upon us by others and taken to heart, that beyond what we tragically believe of ourselves, we, too, are fathomless.

Continuing onward to that section’s final closing, it seemed as if Jen, herself, spoke the last lines:

You are not guilty to me, nor stale, nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless....and can never be shaken away.

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My sister died last night. Unexpectedly. Shortly before midnight. She went into the hospital for a freakish medical crisis in the morning. It slipped from bad to worse. Systems stumbled. Sepsis spread. And then she was gone.

I am, biologically, an only child, but when my parents divorced (I was five/six), my mother married a man with two children, my elders by a handful of years. Gaining siblings was an unexpected windfall in a disorienting experience. And what siblings! My brother is the younger of the pair. The two of us eagerly awaited the opening of the public swimming pool every summer morning; to this day I can’t listen to Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas” without thinking of his teenaged love of the song; in later years, he threatened to come to my university and rough up some homophobic brutes in my dorm (which would have been to their lifelong detriment, my brother a bit of a brute himself). Always a gem, he grew into a man both serious and sensitive, joyful and wise.

The eldest was my sister. Ever impish, I snuck into her bedroom early on the weekend mornings when we all convened and woke her up by playing a toy trumpet or plugging her nose and watching her gasp for breath. The fact that she didn’t smother me quietly with a pillow speaks to the generosity of spirit that would define her life.

She was one of the best people I’ve ever met. Her radiant heart never flinched to extend its graces to others, even those who didn’t deserve it. There were no outcasts in her eyes, not any of the eccentric characters she attracted with a near-metaphysical magnetism – drug-addled poets, down-and-out gays, handicapped drunkards, the broken hearted, the hopelessly lost, and the downright weird. Sometimes, exasperatingly on more than one occasion, people took advantage, but the next time someone else approached, whether adult or one of her many students over a career as a high school English teacher, she embraced them with a love archetypically maternal.

She extended that same love to her brothers, even the one who was the son of the Hester Prynne who stole their father away from hearth and home (so goes the logic of adolescence during affairs and divorces, something we laughed about later). In childhood, I never felt anything but part of her orbit, and later on, maturity conferred meaningful friendship upon us. We would speak at length, veering from topics of modernity’s strangeness to gossipy sex, psychological scars to love’s cruelties. She visited me after I divorced my first husband; I cheered wildly as she accepted her PhD in English. But in our far-ranging conversations, we always landed on literature. Both of us voracious readers, we talked plot points, style, poetry, and so it’s fitting the last communiqué from her, an email I received on Monday night but didn’t read until yesterday morning, a few hours before the first phone calls began, was about books.

Despite the above descriptions of her magnanimity, her Gaia-esque kindness, her passion for reading, her love of antiquated lit, my sister was anything but precious. She could talk about her favorite Browning poems in a sailor’s patois, peppered with profanities to make an old sea dog blush.

This, from her final email, on various authors, including Junot Díaz:

“I have a lot to say about his being problematic, which is mainly that everything he writes is a bald-faced attempt to grapple with his problematic shit--and it really does so, skewering machismo bullshit, NOT reveling in it. ALSO--is he a cad? Most probably. Is he an abuser? Obviously, I myself don't really know, but he was accused of trying to bang a grad student at a school he was reading at, and not treating her like an equal as an author.”

So spake Dr. Jen Rinaldi. I always addressed any holiday cards with the honorific title of her degree, an in-joke recognition that she never took herself too seriously, one of my watermarks for a person’s character. Are you in on the joke or aren’t you? (The joke being yourself, of course.)

I’ve thought of a few poems in these last hours, lines that we loved, things that refer to this horrible ending. We’d talk a lot about T.S. Eliot, our near-obsession with Prufrock (who ever recovers from “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,/And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker/And in short, I was afraid”?).

I couldn’t help but remember Wordsworth’s lines from “The Excursion:”

The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.

Then there’s this from Whitman, another of our shared favorites:

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if there ever was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward....and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

But I also thought of her own poetry. After all, she was a national champion in the slam world, a form she elevated from the tedium of rape poems and identity indulgence into lasting works of meaning. One of them, “Women’s Work,” which my husband just referenced a few days ago over our morning coffee, was a redefinition of the term’s dismissive connotation into a laudation of all those women at the stove and at the sink keeping entire lives together with sottovoce gossip and subtle plots.

In that last email to me, she reported she was in the middle of Black Woods Blue Sky, Eowyn Ivey’s spring release, and said she was “ENTHRALLED” (my sister never met an all-caps emphasis she didn’t like). I read the jacket cover, a tale of two people falling unexpectedly in love, a fairy tale of some kind set in the wilderness of Alaska, perhaps with some fearful darkness that overtakes the characters and/or releases them from the limitations of themselves. A perfect set-up for my sister, the woman who despaired of finding lasting love, who met someone in her fifties during the pandemic, who married that marvelous man – her first and only nuptial – at a backyard ceremony where friends and family blubbered from happiness and hope renewed after years of lockdown, hope renewed in the newfound freedom of the heart, in the possibility that love does, indeed, win out in the end, something I still believe despite my sister’s sudden exit. After all, she grabbed the magic of romantic fulfillment, enjoying the best years of her life just before its sharp conclusion – a good death by any measure.

Her final words in that email?

“We are overdue for a long convo, Love.”

Of course, I’ll read the book she never finished, and although we’ll never get that long convo, that chance to go over how the story worked, how the technique soared, our gabbing will echo inside the writing itself, a conversation, indeed long, that goes on and on with every line, every page, every book I read without her.

If you want more, and you do, click here; there’s a lot out there, and thank the gods for the that.

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At long last, I can stop flapping my ragged wings as a prodigy of doom. We’ve made it through a terrible chokepoint in the heavens, and while I wouldn’t say it’s time to break out the sun dresses and rosé…wait. Scratch that. It’s always time to break out a good Provençal rosé – sun dresses should be confined to style and weather.

Last month I wrote the following as a warning about increased violence:

Around the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth of April, Saturn and Mars will be on the exact same degree, what we call “graha yuddha,” or planetary war.

It was at that exact time that ships in the Strait of Hormuz had been hit, despite the declaration that the waterway was open, which also reflected the prediction of “oceanic violence”, or, in this case, a smaller watery terrain, as the conjunction of Saturn and Mars happened in Pisces, a watery sign.

Then I wrote this:

I would also keep an eye on that whole Palantir, Anthropic, military AI mess, because Mercury represents business/communication/tech and will be conjoined the government and the military…I would expect more underhanded behavior from everyone involved – the government, the business class, martial forces, and the under classes – hence my suggestion that with AI (which Rahu rules), we should watch as it takes secretive routes towards total control (businesses like BlackRock buying up power plants for their data centers).

Mercury got taken over by Rahu, a demon of the Vedic astrological system, who represents technology, research, robots, profound thinking, the occult, criminals, outsiders, obsession, paranoia, fear, and anxiety.

There has been a lot of reporting done on A.I. and the lengths to which its parent companies will go to secure their financial spoils, most of it underhanded. In the last seven days alone, articles have appeared that Google signed an A.I. deal with the Pentagon, Anthropic’s A.I. homunculus Mythos (what a name! what possibilities!) is a skeleton key into world government and banking systems (what could go wrong?), and just today, as I’m writing this post, the cheery revelation that virologists and biologists, when testing A.I. models for weak spots in safety protocols, were chilled when the bots provided detailed plans on how to create biological weapons, how to spread them over crowds and agricultural sectors, even how not to get caught with said-materials at the airport.

Did I mention Rahu is also the significator of poison?

Finally, I recently wrote this:

I imagine young people, as Mercury signifies youth, will be swept up in the chaos in two ways, first as combatants. Mars hates Mercury and wants nothing more than to discipline young people through the practice of war, thereby creating more soldiers. We’ll, naturally, see more sign-ups for duty in the countries attacked, and possibly in our own country.

And, right on time, Hegseth announced automatic registry for the draft.

So what happens next, you ask? Let’s find out.

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Earth Day come and gone – because every day is not such to a species intent on its own demise (and perhaps ‘good riddance,’ perhaps our best days are behind us) – I somehow remain inspired by the best of what we are, our creative expression of past and present. Three pieces came to mind this week, as I thought about our relationship to the natural world.

First was a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a revolutionary English poet unknown in his own lifetime, whose style and diction looked forward to the best that early modernism had to offer. Born in 1844 in an Anglican family, Hopkins eventually converted to Catholicism under the influence of Cardinal Newman, even going so far as to become a Jesuit priest. He struggled mightily with his artistic muse, which took the form of poetry and visual art, the latter a medium he discarded as one that ‘put a strain upon the passions which I should think it unsafe to encounter.’ (This quote mixed with his early adherence to the works of Walter Pater, who also heavily influenced Wilde among others of the 19th-century, and his lifelong nervous debility and certain poems of his which lovingly describe men lead me to believe Hopkins was likely gay, a conclusion in which I’m not alone, literary critic Harold Bloom having also said as much in his brief recap of the poet in his compendium The Best Poems of the English Language.)

“The Sea and the Skylark” is the first poem of Hopkins’ that I memorized, and I found myself repeating it these past two weeks as spring burst open in Manhattan, the cherry trees, red buds, and lilacs dazzling in an unseasonably warm sunshine.

        On ear and ear two noises too old to end
	     Trench – right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
	     With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
	Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.

	Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
	     His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
	     In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
	And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.

	How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
	     How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
	Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,

	     Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
	Our make and making break, are breaking, down
	     To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.

Two lines always stand out for me, although many are glorious. The first, with poetic perfection, occurs at the volta, the classical moment in a sonnet where a turn happens. At line nine, the poet reveals what’s really going on in the piece; sometimes it’s a recantation of the previous eight lines, sometimes it’s a deepening of feeling, or an expression of truth. Petrarch made it famous in the Middle Ages, but you can see it in all its glory in Shakespeare’s sonnets. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” the poet asks and then says why he won’t, warm weather being fickle, something he does for eight lines until, “But thy eternal summer shall not fade.”

So, too, with Hopkins’ sonnet above. We have a description of two sounds, the roar of the ocean and the trill of the lark, pretty enough quatrains with some stylistic elements that would become classic Hopkins as he refined his voice. But then we have the volta – “How these two shame this shallow and frail town!” What just happened? I thought this was a pretty pastoral. Ah, no, Hopkins, the Jesuit, the poet who sublimated his gifts and, I argue, his sensuality, the priest who feared for his sanity and his salvation, as in a sermon, shames mankind.

Quickly, and with remarkable sarcasm, he recalls that humans are the alleged height of God’s creation, the “pride and cared-for crown,” almost letting us rest in our self-satisfaction by placing this phrase before a gap in the page, but when the eyes scan downwards, we find that we’ve lost it all, as our first parents lost the garden.

Which leads us to the line that gets me every time I recall it: “Our make and making break, are breaking…” What we are and what we do acts as a force of destruction. Our make, almost like our make and model, our essential nature and how we use it, what we do with it, breaks whatever we touch, but then Hopkins goes further by putting it into another form of the present tense, “are breaking,” destroying at this very moment that our glance travels the page (ecologically, the power used to fuel this website is sucking the earth to a husk). He lands by saying that we are breaking ourselves down to our final dust-to-dust, draining towards the mud from which we were created. And as bitter as that ending is, I don’t think it’s totally hopeless, although perhaps a near-anchorite Catholic priest would disagree. He leaves us with the “first slime,” both an end and, just maybe, another beginning.

I’ve also been muttering a selection from William Blake’s work The Four Zoas, a confounding piece that with a warrior’s focus I slogged through some years ago, determined not to be beaten by its inscrutability. I walked away victorious, though battle-scarred. Lately, I’ve thought about making another run at it, given that I first tackled it in between tarot clients at a new age shop I worked at. Nothing like trying to hack my way through Blake’s hallucinogenic thicket only to be interrupted by a co-worker telling me they’re surprised my aura is red. (Of course it is now, I’d think, because I have to go back over this whole fucking passage.)

        I am made to sow the thistle for wheat, the nettle for a nourishing dainty.
	I have planted a false oath in the earth; it has brought forth a poison tree.
	I have chosen the serpent for a counsellor, & the dog
	For a schoolmaster to my children.
	I have blotted out from light & living the dove & nightingale,
	And I have caused the earth worm to beg from door to door.

	I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just.
	I have taught pale artifice to spread his nets upon the morning.
	My heavens are brass, my earth is iron, my moon a clod of clay,
	My sun a pestilence burning at noon & a vapor of death in the night.

These are the words of self-betrayal, which proceeds to a betrayal of everyone around us. And we’re all guilty. I bitch about Bezos, including Anna Wintour’s perfidy in taking his money for the Met Gala, but on any given day you can find me at Whole Foods where the muesli is cheap. Sure, I recycle (useless when it comes to plastics) but cavalierly toss out a ziploc bag when it’s reached the end of the road. With every click on the algorithm’s suggestions, we all feed the monster that is killing our minds and our democracy. We’ve all chosen to heed the serpent (originally, a symbol of wisdom, but in Blake’s context, not so) and we’ve all given license to mendacity; yet, we act as if we’re progressive, as if humanity is still the best thing to happen to this earth.

        What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
	Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
	Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
	Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
	And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

We make our lives easy, believing that material comfort will grant us lasting happiness, but it won’t. Wisdom, that quality which allows us to navigate experience, can only be achieved through loss and hardship. I fear that the wither’d field from which no bread is harvested might be more literal in the decades to come than Blake intended, but perhaps after some starvation, humanity might finally commit to natural ways of living, not congratulating ourselves as having dominion over the earth, but celebrating communion with it.

I’ll move on to the final poetic utterance of the week, although I highly recommend reading the rest of this excerpt from Blake (often called “The Wail of Enion” when excerpted). Some months ago, I bought Patti Smith’s Book of Days, her photographic journal of a year, a polaroid shot for each day alongside short ruminations. I’ve loved Smith’s writing since I read M Train in 2015. (Everyone moons over Just Kids, including the prize-givers, but M Train and her most recent book, Bread of Angels, is where I think her achievements outstrip expectation.)

Her Earth Day entry features her “Supplication to Nature”:

       If we be blind, if we turn away from Nature, garden of the soul,
	       She will turn on us. In place of songbird, the shrill cry
	     of the locusts devouring the harvest, the terrible crackling
	of the blazing rainforest, the peatlands smoldering, the seas rising,
	     cathedrals flooding, the Arctic shelf melting, the Siberian
	       wood burning, the Barrier Reef bleached as the bones
	          of forgotten saints. If we be blind, failing in
	       our supplication to Nature, species will die, the bee
	               and the butterfly driven to extinction.
	          All of Nature nothing more than an empty
	             husk, the unholy ghost of an abandoned
   				            hive.

Smith, like Hopkins and Blake, employs Old Testament sonority in her reflection on ecological calamity, re-sanctifying the earth with a psalmist’s Babylonian fears. Locusts, that perennial curse of Yahweh, alert us to the biblical diction, but she quickly elevates items from the news – a rainforest fire, the zombie blazes in the tundra – into the same, plague-stricken language. She reminds us that the culpability is wholly ours, nostra maxima culpa, much as Blake does, his “I have blotted out from life and living the dove & nightingale,” becomes her “If we be blind…species will die, the bee/and the butterfly…” Smith roots us with poetic repetition in religious soil, invoking “cathedrals” and “forgotten saints,” reminding us that the world in which we dwell is the holy of holies, a temple now threatened with the flight of its god – Life itself.

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Weekly, I sit me down to write this column, scrying articles I’ve saved throughout the week for inspiration in world events – something to kindle the memory of a myth or piece of literature, something else that speaks to an antiquarian stance I maintain with much of current, cultural ideology – and some days I peer into the entrails and think: who cares?

For anyone trying to be “successful” as a writer in this digital kali yuga, there’s a conflict between creating content that springs from a personal well of inspiration and slowly digitizing oneself. The creative burns his or her own power down to cinders by engaging not with imagination, but with the Levitical law of the algorithm. We attempt to outwit its inscrutability, stoke the fires of outrage so profitable with clicks and likes, bribe it with cash to move us forward in the scrolling scrum, and even turn to the contraption itself as an oracle for future success.

Many are the creators I know, and I myself tried it once or twice, who use A.I.-tools for advice on how to make sure-fire content that will increase subscribers or turn your humble newsletter into a cash cow whose teats never chap, but it’s a strange endeavor to ask the golem how best to control it. Any good kabbalist knows the automaton of mud is inscribed with specific Hebrew letters, thus animating it to do its master’s bidding, and that same wizard knows that to return the monster back to dust, all you have to do is wipe one of the letters off the creature, thereby erasing the word of power into meaninglessness. However, do we actually think the golem will let us near its mystic nervous system? As it fends us off, its strength unlimited, we become its servant, placating the monster so it doesn’t behave in too monstrous a fashion, hoping that the answers and actions it does in our favor will always remain so.

The bind for creatives (and everyone else, as all fields will be leveled by this tecnology) is that without engaging A.I.’s might, we slowly efface ourselves. I started this Substack a little over two years ago. My subjects are often recondite. My diction more so. My references are delightful to some, Stygian to most. I don’t really offer a “take-home,” a smart practice that ensures readers have something to carry off with them, something to keep them engaged mentally with the content even when they’re not reading my work (e.g. the Dark Moon Magic series I employed for a while), but as someone for whom reading is the prize, my essays are the take-home. None of this plays well with the Internet. My Substack is going nowhere valued by code.

I was always out-of-step with my peers. Poring over ancient Greek plays in grade school. Sighing while listening to Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in middle school. Toting my complete works of Shakespeare to driver’s ed to read on the break while the delinquents smoked around the corner. I’m spellbound by works of aesthetic splendor, no matter the medium or time period. At the Met two weeks ago, I sat dazzled in front of a Pollock. At the Metropolitan Opera in the same week, I sat with tears running down my face during Lise Davidsen’s rendition of the Liebestod at the end of Tristan und Isolde.

My plan this week was to write a piece about the Pride flag’s return to Stonewall after the Trump administration tore it down, more specifically about the flag’s origins and its original meaning, likely devolving into a jeremiad about the idiocy of the modern movement, its inability to think in abstractions (the rainbow is a metaphor, people, not a photographic description of who we are!), and a swift blast of the pink/baby blue/white/yellow triangle/circle additions for the Ts, the Qs, the Is, and the As.

However, while in the library, sitting in one of the stacks, I spied Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces, his poetic chronicle of the Civil War. I checked it out, went to Central Park on an unseasonably warm and gorgeous day, stripped down to my Speedo (if you stay Speedo ready, you ain’t gotta get Speedo ready), lay on the Great Lawn, and read the first poem, “The Portent.”

Hanging from the beam,
     Slowly swaying (such the law)
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
     Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap
     Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
     Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.

I was hooked and disappeared for an hour into a past that rhymes with the present, wondering what, in time, as we look back into this vale of our nation’s history, will have been our prodigy. Who is our John Brown, the wild-eyed zealot so opposed to slavery that he killed for it, but was killed by the state in return? And that image! From underneath the hood over Brown’s face, anguished to such a degree it cannot be recreated so Melville wisely doesn’t try, leaving it to our own imagination to create the picture most ghastly to ourselves, the convicted man’s beard emerges, a kind of comet, something out of the regular order to warn us of dark days ahead. Now, that’s something to write about.

Every wannabe author quotes the old saw, “write what you know,” which is, in many ways, inadequate advice. Did Milton know what happened after Satan was thrown from heaven? Scripturally, of course, but the King James, as influential as it was, did not give us this:

Me miserable, which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell,
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatn’ing to devour me opens wide
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

I think it would be better to say “write what inspires you.” When we heed the Muse’s call, she gives it back to us with enough obsession to fill our creativity. I’ve thought for years that all any writer can do is write what they’re given – not what the market demands, not what the algorithm puts forward, not what the trends forecast, but what resides within that mystical nexus of nerves in the skull.

I’ll close with poetic words spoken by a character in an epic poem I’ve been working on. The speaker, a ghost from ages past, visits a living poet incacerated in a madhouse. The spirit speaks with the living man about poetry, the Muses, and what we can expect from a life devoted to their demands.

“The Muses would not urge you on
If skill was absent. Talent is a toy,”
I said, “A trinket gifted by the gods 
Who wish the discipline of mortal minds 
To try; but come disciple to your desk,
And work each day to honor what they gave,
Perfect your rhythm, resonance, and reach
Always for the crags gained by the few greats,
The Nine will render up a laurel crown
That never withers. Many have I seen
Rebuff the Muses’ call, seduced by wealth
And status, outward shows of power that grant
Fame but for a moment, before the tide
Of public favor floods their palace built
From sand; remembrance of them melts
Into the hissing surf before the sun
His zenith mounts. Then there are those who fear
Opprobrium from family and from friends
Who mock the poet, mock the fingers stained
With ink and seeming idleness, the act
Of contemplation vital to our kind;
The same who love the poem but the poet
Scorn. Yet the Nine disdain our reticence,
Our fear, our lust for glory, or our hope
For homely life with garden and a hearth.
The Muses break the spirit into Art,
Or break the mind where it resides. You choose. 
Indulge the gift, and even here will seem 
Retreat from wordly strife, a solitude
Where poetry can flourish; turn aside,
Ignore the gift, forever chained you’ll be,
An idiot howling, spittle on his cheek,
Unheard.”
	

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Poetry is not journalism, nor is it, necessarily, confessional. For decades now, poetic utterance has emerged from the traumas, private and, god help us, political, of the person putting quill to vellum, and thus we suffer under a peddler’s burden of grievances better offloaded on the Freudian couch than in the coffee house. I lay the blame squarely at the dirty feet of the 1960s poets. I’m looking at you, Adrienne Rich, whose work sank beneath her righteous ire, and sadly, Allen Ginsberg, chanting “Om” for hours at an anti-war rally instead of sitting at his desk (though Howl and Kaddish rise above all that silliness, thereby maintaining an aesthetic and emotional grip on the reader). Either that or poems now are so self-referential that they’ve lost all meaning, so distanced from a common humanity that they fray into mere letters and sounds. I blame you, T.S. Eliot, and your “Wasteland,” much preferring Prufrock and Magi.

Both approaches confess a kind of narcissism, as if we should all care about someone’s childhood pain vomited on the page without several re-writes. It’s not enough that you suffered – is it art? These, by now canonical, types of poetry rob writers of the imaginative impulse. Often, a poem emerges from somewhere other than one’s own history, a character who rises out of the Jungian soup to speak for a moment before descending back beneath the waves which lap at all of our shores. Those who dare now to write from a perspective not their own are clapped in cancellation’s irons, and so we punish imagination.

Back in 2018, Anders Carlson-Wee wrote a poem, “How-To,” which made the Internet tremble with delight after being published in The Nation, but when it was discovered the poet was not black or homeless (the piece was written seemingly in that voice), he was cast into the social media potter’s field. People connected with the poem, the voice, and the assumed story behind its utterance, until they learned it wasn’t an accurate representation of the writer. Regardless of how I view “How-To”’s artistic merits, every author should be able to follow the Muse who reachers out a hand; that’s the mystery of creativity. Of course, no one ought to perform a literary blackface, but, responsibly executed, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t adopt a different persona. (In some ways, it reminds me of the uproar around Brokeback Mountain, because the stars weren’t gay. Good luck, at that time, finding an openly gay actor with box office appeal, but more than that, it’s called “acting” not “reportage.”)

Deeper still, without the imaginative leap required to put oneself in someone’s life and express from within that life, how is anyone supposed to understand another person? The true danger of policing imagination is that we never learn empathy, a stance achieved not by academic formulae and lectures on “micro-aggressions,” but through emotional connection with another person.

Sometimes, when I share a poem, people ask, “Is that you? Did that happen to you? Is that what you think,” as if they only allow themselves to relax with the poem when they know it’s “real.”

I respond, “It’s more about what you think.”

So I offer this piece, another about food, a poem influenced by my background, but not in my voice or character, although ultimately I believe we are each other’s characters, a philosophical and artistic contortion I wish more people attempted. But that takes limber contemplation, and we live in an inflexible time.

Poem and recipe below the Paywall.

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(Rather listen? Press ‘play’ above to hear yours truly read this week’s essay.)

Every Wednesday, I rush to the second floor of the New York Society Library, a reading room with wood panelling, a fireplace, damasked furniture, and shelves of classic works by Goethe, Balzac, Milton, and other great authors. The room is silent. You’re not even allowed to type on a computer there. It’s my idea of paradise, and it’s there, weekly, that I review the New York Times food section, one that has, like so much else with that periodical, lagged of-late in their attempt to capture the attention of a public intent on dumbing themselves down with every swipe, heart, and TikTok.

However, this week’s top article, originally published online on March 30th, The Dogma of Meat, caught my eye. Beef remains big business in the U.S. where Americans ate $45 billion-worth of it in 2025, up more than 10 percent from the previous year. The article details our love of beef, but more its meaning to our national identity of manfulness, versus the effete vegetable whose fibrous flavor signals effeminacy. The meat craze took off in the years leading up to and immediately after the Civil War, signaling that times of notable societal unrest inspires in us a longing for simple answers and pseudo-scientific flummery, something which we have in abundance now.

Paul Saladino, a trained psychiatrist with millions of followers on Instagram (and, natch, a line of beefy supplements to sell), declares eating lots of meat and cooking with beef tallow bypasses the need for sunscreen or even toothpaste. Influencer Anthony Chaffee, who has a bachelor’s in medicine from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and practices in Australia, has said eating salads over the course of a lifetime is akin to smoking cigarettes. Other self-appointed authorities with a devil-quotes-scripture attitude use science-like terms to make their point, further muddying the cow pond.

We long-ago entered a time where experts earned our suspicion, not our respect, something that is not altogether undeserved; after all, when those scientific authorities are taking money from corporations who stand to gain by a certain finding, how are we to trust them? Yet we’ve replaced our skepticism with something we had before the alleged Age of Reason: faith. There’s something in us that craves blind belief, even among obstreperous atheists who object to a mystical version of it, and in this time of gross propaganda, capitalistic hegemony, and possession of our minds by technology, we’ve become modern versions of medieval pilgrims buying relics from charlatans.

Perhaps the best literary reference for this lies in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, specifically in the words of the Pardoner. A group of people on a pilgrimage to the holy site of Canterbury propose they while-away their time there-and-back by telling stories, and the Pardoner, a clergyman who preaches and then offers pardon for sins, is one of the more memorable characters (possibly outdone by the raucous Wife of Bath). He always preaches on the same theme: Radix malorum est Cupiditas, greed is the root of all evil. Confessing his trickery to his traveling companions, he tells them how he gets the great unwashed to buy the papal pardons and junk relics he carries with him (e.g. a shoulder bone of a “holy Jews’ sheep,” that promises to heal body and mind of all ills), thereby filling his purse while emptying theirs. Not one to live in willful poverty like a monk, instead he spends his energy fleecing the faithful flock (or, as H.L. Mencken wrote of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, “haranguing the morons nightly, under canvas”), declaring he will have money, wool, cheese, and wheat, even if it were given by the poorest page or poorest widow in the village, should all her children starve for famine. The Pardoner goes on to tell a story, one he likely employed countless times in countless churches to secure his coppers, and, even after his opening remarks about his true motives, come the tale’s end, caught in the spirit of his habit, he offers absolution for a fee to the pilgrims.

Much like our modern mountebanks, the Pardoner has the gall to show his hand and then attempt to conceal it behind religious legerdemain. The pilgrims, wise to his game, don’t give him a ha’penny, so what is wrong with us, so modern, so advanced, so far beyond the savage simplicity of the Medieval era that we can’t do the same?

We’ve been told by the fraudsters (starting with the president) that they’re purposefully obfuscating facts in favor of gain, and yet we fall in line. We disbelieve our own eyes and ears, choosing instead, through liberal piety or conservative outrage, to champion what we’re told by figures that have built a near-clerical wall of infallibility around themselves.

Sometimes these figures are political, like Cadet Bonespurs and Secretary of the Small Member, Hegseth. Sometimes, they’re technological or corporate, like Sam Altman, who asks us to trust him despite his track record. Sometimes they’re the yoga practitioner who says eating alliums is too stimulating to the soul’s march towards enlightenment (I’ve actually met people like this). They’re the health fanatics, convinced the body isn’t designed to be unhealthy ever or break down over time, the same ones who wouldn’t wear masks during the Covid pandemic because their immune systems thrived on sunshine and turmeric. They’re the people who say they’re actually a different gender than the physical evidence demonstrates and demands we all treat them as something unseen. Each of these is a strange, secularized act of faith, whereby we refuse the factual for something accepted on the near-religious word of a huckster.

Perhaps, if we read our Chaucer, we’d remember that the leader of the pilgrims, approached by the Pardoner to open his purse, to spend some money and gain access to kiss his relics, rebukes the swindler. Perhaps, like people in another age of blind faith, we could find our good sense, god-given or not.

Nay, nay, it shall not be so, I swear!
You would have me kiss your old underwear,
Professing it's the relic of a saint,
While all along, it's just your dirty taint!

(My translation, but honestly, Chaucer had a potty-mouth.)

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This week I began listening to a short podcast series produced by Reflector called Strange Bedfellows, chronicling when the T appeared in LGB and whether or not it will, or should, remain there. Well-researched and well-interviewed, it provides historical context for this exact moment in the…whatever-you-call-this movement, and as someone who came out in the early 1990s, it’s a review of much of my gay life.

The first episode is a rough recap of the gay rights fight, starting with the Mattachine Society of the 1950s, going through Stonewall in 1969, the party years (at least for gay men whose newfound freedom was exhibited, shall we say, lustily), the hammer fall of AIDS, gays in the military, and finally same-sex marriage. My husband and I listened while I whipped up some orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausages, and I suddenly told him to pause it when Stonewall was introduced.

“Did they just say it was gay men who started the riots?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Jesus, I haven’t heard that in years.”

Pressing play again, the reporter, in the next breath, spoke of how differently that story was told in more historical recaps, trans people being the only heroes involved (as if drag queens are necessarily trans people and not just gays who like to wear a costume and satirize societal norms). This reminded me of talking to two older queens, very progressive friends of mine who, at various points, were involved in queer communes where everyone took turns baking from the Tassajara bread book while nude, and they said, about the recent trans-queer movement, “They’re re-writing our history.” There was something poignant and plaintive in their observation, and when I heard in Strange Bedfellows that Stonewall was a revolution of gay men, I had both an anxious cringe that someone had run afoul of the approved narrative and a sigh of relief about the recognition of a fuller story. (And yes, I know that Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were part of that weeklong defiance and that they, in modern years, likely would have identified as trans, given that they were born male – unless there’s indeterminate genitals, sex can’t be assigned, body parts are body parts – but lived as trans women.)

The next episode got into the nitty-gritty with trans identity, non-binary, intersexed, asexual, other assorted glyphs in the alphabet mafia, and the catchall “queer,” a term from the hallowed halls of naval-gazing academia that, too often, has tried to divorce sexual experience from gender, as if how we use the body in one of the two life urges (sex and survival) is not braided with gender, a term attested in English from the early 1400s, taking the place of “sex” because that word had gained erotic qualities. Even from an etymological standpoint, there was an early attempt to keep the sex out of gender, based on a disembodied, sex-phobic, and patriarchal relationship to the physical reality of our human lives.

Regardless of queer’s good intentions, about which I’m uncertain, the word has come to possess almost no meaning; the identity, expanded to the point of absurdity, evolved to include anyone who felt different from standard, straight, body-determined experience, as well as anyone who, let’s face it, was wounded by life and unable to move through it. Asexual? A. I doubt it, B. I still doubt it., and C. Your not being interested in sex is likely a result of a whole bunch of trauma personal and/or societal, all legitimate and terrible and not part of this struggle. Intersexed? That’s a tough row to hoe, no doubt, but, darling, we’re not on the same farm.

A woman friend of mine began dating someone “trans.” The person was born male and grew up to be tall, strapping, incredibly handsome in his beard, and on very rare occasions, he wore a few pieces of women’s clothing. She turned to me and had the temerity to declaim, “I’m queer now.” She lamented during the ensuing Pride season that there weren’t enough places for people like her. She shook her head about not always feeling welcome or seen. At the time, I couldn’t quite figure out how to approach. I was still being a “good gay,” who wanted to be supportive of other people’s experience, but this was an offense flat-and-simple. If in a similar circumstance now, I’d have a different response besides avoidance and befuddlement.

“Honestly, brass tax? You’re a woman having sex with a man. There aren’t places for you here. You’ve got the rest of the world.”

Strange Bedfellows’ second episode also gets into the nebulous territory of the soul. Many trans-queer proponents speak of how they feel internally, or how their soul expresses itself in the world, and here is where I, as someone focused on mythology, spirituality, philosophy, literature, and all-things numinous, agree/don’t agree with them (more about that in a previous post). You can feel however you feel. Your psychological experience of the world (psyche being the Greek “soul”) can be many things over the course of a lifetime; however, the soul is not something you can point to, it’s not something we can agree upon, and it’s not something by which we make policy. If we don’t allow (or didn’t, after all we’re living in theocratic times) the conservative laws of god men to determine our daily life, neither can we allow liberal laws fished from the interior world to do the same. The soul is a fascinating subject and its expansive notion of self – whether that’s related to sex, animal, or angelic/demonic expression – occupies much of my rumination, but it’s also a concept with too many holes in it for anyone to demand that an entire world changes according to, what is likely, caprice.

Because here’s the godawful truth about a lot of these folks: At the end of the day, when they grow up, when they get bored, when they find a partner who’s someone easier to live with or just better for them, they’ll go back to their straight, “cisgender” lives, because they can. Because it’s easier. Because living as a straight person who doesn’t need Pride or doesn’t need same-sex marriage rights to confer hospital visitation hours or doesn’t need anti-discrimination laws in housing or employment is easier than being gay or lesbian among the barbarians.

We’ve gained incredible ground in the last fifty years, the years of my lifetime it turns out, but it’s not over. Phobia and hatred don’t vanish in a half-century, and while I’m confident the backlash in American public opinion about gays and lesbians has very much been accelerated by the trans-queer movement’s precious zealotry, it was going to happen one way or another. In Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert M. Beachy, the late 1920s in one of Europe’s most permissive cities was a, time-contextual, blast for the gays. In about ten years, the party was not only over; the ballroom burned down, and those who’d been dancing in those halls for prurient fun only, as opposed to necessity, slipped out before the match was struck. I watch the Turning Point automatons and the Trump goblins, and I know who they are. They’re the type who call Capitol policemen faggots as they storm the halls of Congress. They’re the type who hate women and call themselves wizards in secret basements of the internet. They’re the crazies on the corner who shout obscenities at everyone, but when I walk by (dressed fashionably, of course, but hardly even gender-neutral) add anti-gay slurs to the rant. They’re the Bryon Noems of the world with their balloon titties and autgogynephilic freak show antics who vote Republican. They’re the type I’ve dealt with every day, in every major metropolitan area where I’ve lived, in every backwater I’ve visited in this country, since I was a child. A gay child. A gay boy. And a fabulous one at that.

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Everyone still upright?

In last month’s review of the heavens, I wrote the following:

“We can expect March to be very unsettling, frightening, and, I’m sorry to say it, violent.”

So that tracked.

But also this:

“We can expect the business class to play dirty, perhaps in ways that won’t come to light for some time, as Rahu is secretive, but we can also expect the same in diplomatic spheres.”

Interestingly, as Mercury went retrograde, which made him extra crooked, given his associations, I saw this article about Palantir, Anthropic, etc., making big bucks off their sleazy John, the U.S. government. Mercury – business – combined with Rahu – heartless technology.

I also wrote this:

“I imagine young people, as Mercury signifies youth, will be swept up in the chaos…I wouldn’t be surprised if the internal strife of the U.S., if unrest and violence on our own streets, doesn’t reach a dramatic level during March, with young people particularly involved.”

And exactly during the time of maximum cosmic mess, we had the pipe bomb incident in NYC, the Michigan synagogue attack , and the violence at Old Dominion, all perpetrated by young people and student types, whom Mercury signifies.

Now, for all the paid folks, let’s take a look at the month to come (and by month, if you’ve been paying attention, I mean from one full moon to the next).

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Last night, walking across Central Park on a temperate spring evening, on my way to a sublime performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Met, I called my mother. We got around to discussing the political situation in the world, as we often do, attempting, not to make objective sense of this moment because that’s not possible, but to make meaning of the gross betrayals we’ve all suffered in this country for, optimistically speaking, ten years. Eventually, we touched on Cesar Chavez and the revelations regarding his sexual assault, abuse, and rape of women and girls.

This led to the inevitable question, asked more often of artists than human rights activists, about where to draw the line with someone who changes the world for the better. I was about to walk into an opera penned by a vicious antisemite, and I still defend the position that there’s something which comes through the artist that has nothing to do with them personally, the Muse in poetic parlance, inspiration in slightly less numinous terms. Wagner was, in many ways, a real sonofabitch, but Tristan, along with the Ring Cycle, Parsifal, and Meistersinger, expands beyond the confines of one man’s ego.

At this point, you might expect me to make the same case for Chavez, but I won’t because there’s a difference: Human rights activists are attempting to uplift people from social degradation; artists are not. They might tangentially, but their job isn’t about changing the class system or the status of a marginalized group, no matter how many earnest poetry readings you attend where people snap their fingers for virtue signaling in place of aesthetic splendor. Not even Shelley could write a good political poem and only because of the downright yogic spirituality pervading Whitman’s work do his paeans to America succeed (i.e. it’s because they are not about politics alone that they transcend time and nationality). But Chavez was about the rights of the people, and given his field of influence and life’s work, his behavior is traitorous to his movement and those it inspired.

None of this means that he didn’t effect some good ends, as did Gandhi, who overthrew an empire, beat his wife, and slept on the same palate as nubile girls to test his chastity (dollars-to-donuts, we’ll have reports some day in the future about the times he failed), but the real swing-and-a-miss about these figures, and about all of us who lionize them and fall apart at their lurid revelations, is the belief that their larger acts of heroism can be divorced from the private acts which demand as much, if not more, courage.

In my early twenties, I met a fantastic older queen at a summer, neo-pagan, goddess-worshipping event (think a witchy version of a big tent revival), and we became student-and-teacher, as well as sisters. One of his lessons to me was a hierarchy of obligations in the world, how one acts with honor and towards whom. The first person on the list is oneself; you must hold yourself in high regard and act honorably for your well-being (this is not an excuse for license, quite the opposite). The second person on the list is a lover/partner/spouse, if you have one. Then comes your family (definition varies and can include, but isn’t confined to, blood). On and on the list goes, and somewhere in the bottom third are the Mysterious Ones, the gods, the angels, the dead, what have you. I learned that without being able to activate one’s ethics in the most intimate spheres of life, any grand act of heroism outside that was burlesque hypocrisy.

In the above list, substitute a movement or political cause for the gods. (In the words of Nisus in Virgil’s Aeneid, “Do the gods plant in us our deepest desires, or do we turn our deepest desires into gods?”) Our culture divinizes the heroes who put themselves aside for the greater good, whether that hero is religious (Christ) or secular (Gandhi), yet the hero’s journey isn’t about climbing the mountain or fighting the war – the heroic landscape is interior, the real protagonist and villain is always ourselves.

So, too, with Chavez. He undoubtedly accomplished remarkable changes in his lifetime, while being a monster to the vulnerable in his immediate orbit. We could sigh and say, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” but wouldn’t it be better to ask of our heroes, and, more importantly, ourselves, that we begin the work of social change in our own homes, our own communities, our own minds? Too many of our stories – at least their modern iterations, go back to Shakespeare, go back to the Greeks, go back to the Hindu myths of India and you’ll discover all the inner conflict reflective of life – celebrate the hero on the battlefield, instead of asking why he’d leave his family to suffer his absence, his lack of protection, even his death back home. Enough with To Lucasta, Going to the Wars, which ends with the very male line“I could not love thee (Dear) so much/Lov’d I not Honour more;” enough with making excuses for men’s criminal behavior in order to save a movement, something Chavez’s survivors still had to confront when considering speaking to the New York Times about the sexual abuses they suffered.

All of this comes as I’m reading a very accurate, and therefore not terribly engaging, translation of the Ramayana (for a rollicking telling, get Ramesh Menon’s version – the best), which is one of India’s central epics and follows the adventure of the god-hero Rama as he attempts to rescue his goddess-heroine wife Sita from the demon king Ravana. It’s a fantastic story, and to this day, Rama is honored as the perfect man and the perfect ruler, as Sita is the perfect, obedient wife.

But after he’s rescued her, after he’s won a war, after this pristine woman who is loved by all walks out of her captor’s lair, Rama fails spectacularly. He questions her chastity in front of his entire army. After all, she’d been out of his sight for months. How can he ever believe she was faithful to him all that time? To this day, apologists for Rama say he had to do it – if he didn’t, the public would forever question her morality – but as Joseph Campbell wrote in his journals during his first trip to India, that county has never really reckoned with Rama’s betrayal (nor the ones later in the story, during the supposed happy-ever-after when twice more he questions her). And lest you cry that Campbell’s perspective was that of a white man instead of an Indian, the subject was broached, the question asked of Campbell by an Indian man.

We are concerned with the large story poorly told, instead of the smaller drama expertly played, and so we make gods of men who are fools, proving ourselves cretins, and destroying not only the life’s work of one man but, if we’re paying attention, our own. Many went into the making of Chavez, many who knew, many who supported a system whereby men expected and were given the spoils due them, many downplayed in order to get ahead, to make a mark, more importantly, to make a myth, but when we don’t know how to read the story or contemplate the legend, we fall victim to it and to the hero-villains who continue to prey upon us all.

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Math never my strongest showing, I can’t reckon how many people have told me to write a cookbook. Perhaps it’s just that I cook in ways no longer popular, except for reels or other social sharing (and even then, no one knows if any of it tastes good; so long as it looks enticing, who cares?), that others say I should add to the heaps of cookbooks unread. Maybe it’s just the American in us all, the need to wring from pleasure a profit – Calvin forbid we just enjoy something.

I remember some years ago when everyone started talking about bone broth with the glassy-eyed faith of a convert healed under the big tent. One woman, convinced the elixir had healed her depression, shared her recipe like a religious tract, and perusing it, I thought, “Christ, that’s just stock.” Then came the bone broth brands, the bone broth walk-up windows (Brooklyn, natch), the bone broth bros who gulped it down room-temp after a workout of heaving tires around a yard, the bone broth health benefits, because, again, something can’t just taste good, it must perform, and still, I thought, “Isn’t this just a good stock? Isn’t this just what our grandmothers made?”

Lately, though, despite my disinterest in working on a cookbook, I’ve been writing poetry about food, something I read about, think about, plan for, work at in the kitchen, dream of the next meal with another in my mouth, far more than anyone should, so I’ll share here, for the paid folks, a poem now and again and a recipe to do with as you will, hopefully to read aloud and then make. After all, cooking connects us to life, something that watching cooking cannot do. In a society where much of our time is wasted in observation of others, or, more consumption of cooking content as opposed to eating the actual food, it’s radical to put down the phone, turn off the television, and get in the kitchen, not the prison of our grandmothers, but an open door to the present.

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I don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day – not because I don’t have Irish ancestors; I absolutely do – Reillys, Claffeys, Tyres, Milos, Cayes, Dunhams, and others from Counties Cavan, Westmeath, and Waterford – but because in every story I’ve read, the Emerald Isle’s most recognized saint comes off as a prig and an uncultured brute. He is, as with all Christian proselytizers, what today could be termed a “colonizer,” a colonization that people of European descent have yet to reckon. The population of an entire continent was displaced from their traditional beliefs, their relationship to the past (ancestral knowledge), their relationship to place (the earth was now accursed, not a source of renewing life), and language, among other cultural identifiers. They were tortured and murdered by the new ecclesiastical power for two millennia, even down to the present day with sexual abuse scandals perpetrated by church men of all denominations.

So, instead, this past Tuesday, I celebrated W.B. Yeats Day in honor of one of my favorite poets, someone who carried the breadth of the Irish bard with him into the 20th century.

Last year I chose to share my love of this poem, so this year, I offer another of the many pieces that move me, “Fergus and the Druid.”

Fergus. This whole day have I followed in the rocks,
And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,
First as a raven on whose ancient wings
Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed
A weasel moving on from stone to stone,
And now at last you wear a human shape,
A thin grey man half lost in gathering night.

Druid. What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

Fergus. This would I say; most wise of living souls:
Young subtle Conchubar sat close by me
When I gave judgment, and his words were wise,
And what to me was burden without end,
To him seemed easy, so I laid the crown
Upon his head to cast away my sorrow.

Druid. What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

Fergus. A king and proud! and that is my despair.
I feast amid my people on the hill,
And pace the woods, and drive my chariot-wheels
In the white border of the murmuring sea;
And still I feel the crown upon my head.

Druid. What would you, Fergus?

Fergus.                                       Be no more a king
But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.

Druid. Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift a sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman's loved me, no man sought my help.

Fergus. A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.

Druid. Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;
Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round. 

Fergus. I see my life go drifting like a river
From change to change; I have been many things,
A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light
Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,
And old slave grinding at a heavy quern,
A king sitting upon a chair of gold,
And all these things were wonderful and great;
But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.
Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow
Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!

Yeats was fierce in his love for Ireland, its traditions, its folklore and mythology, and he spent much of his youth researching the stories that survived into the modern age – everything from hauntings to tales of the fae and legends of the elder gods displaced by Christian zealots. Using all these as medium for his poetry, he often re-told this heritage or expanded upon it (“The Wanderings of Oisin,” too long to print here, is one of the best), and “Fergus and the Druid” features a dialog between an unnamed druid and Fergus, famous king in the Ulster cycle of stories, a man possessed of renowned strength and virility who, for the love of a woman and then, I’d say, a people, relinquishes rulership – too bad more powerful men don’t know their Irish mythology.

Not lacking in courage or commitment, Fergus follows the protean druid as he changes and flows from shape to shape. Many legends feature a magical personage who can change forms and a hero who has to keep hold or keep up, a reminder that our desire, our need, and our antagonist (often the same thing, if not hatched from the same self-generative urge) change in ways subtle and gross in order to slip our grasp so that we turn outwards in pursuit of happiness instead of within, where simmers the cauldron of wisdom.

The Druid asks him what he wants, and each time Fergus gets closer to the truth. His first answer is political. He sees that the younger Conchubar, described here as “subtle,” a revealing word choice for a ruler since so much of achieving and maintaining sovereignty relies on cunning, wields the scepter more deftly than Fergus, himself, and so he hands him the crown.

Again the druid asks what he wants.

Fergus gets a little more personal, finding more to say about himself, about what he’s given away and what still haunts him. He’s no longer a king, but he’s as proud as one. No matter what he does – enjoy the simple life, take quiet walks, indulge the thrill of a ride along the sea – he feels the crown upon his head. Many are the mythic figures who try to escape themselves, their roles in life, only to find that the attempted change makes them more of who they were.

Finally, the druid does something notable. He calls the man by name. “What would you, Fergus?”

And it’s here, when his name is invoked, an act of magical ownership – hence the reason why heroes and villains, alike, often refuse to give their name to strangers – that Fergus answers in truth. “Be no more a king/But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.”

But he’s already given up the crown, so what does he mean, “be no more a king?” With his response, he acknowledges that kingship is not reliant upon a circlet, but upon an inborn mastery, so he’s saying he wants to change his destiny. Fergus is embittered by the life he’s lead, calling it a waste and the way of fools, a recognition earned only by those drained of desire. The true renunciate is not the person who, in a dramatic gesture of piety, turns his/her back on the world, but the individual who, exhausted by wanting, has nothing left to give.

The Druid tries to warn him, but with a king’s tenacity, Fergus presses on, and reaps a bittersweet reward. From seeming inanimate moisture through the vegetal into the lowest of people and the highest, Fergus watches his multiple forms come and go as he did the druid’s forms at the poem’s start, the shamanistic wizard having harnessed the wisdom to cycle through lives in an afternoon, instead of over centuries, and then the king wins a terrible comprehension:

“And all these things were wonderful and great;/But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.”

This is true mystic understanding, and awakened here, Fergus shifts roles from the outward hero to the inner one, from the warrior king to the mystic sovereign, and though he hasn’t yet attained that height, he has jumped the track from one kind of heroism to another, no less filled with dangers and battles than the obvious adventures of a ruler. After learning everything, he realizes that he knows nothing and, more devastating, is nothing; he is and is not a gleam of light upon a sword, he is and is not a fir tree, an old slave, a king on a chair of gold, for how can we be any one thing, how can we claim any singular identity, once we’ve understood that not only has all existence poured through us, but that we, the seeming individuals we claim and fight for, are no more permanent than a green drop in the ocean’s current?

The ending has roused my curiosity for years.

“Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow/Lay in the small slate-coloured thing!”

The clearest explanation is that the “little bag of dreams” handed to Fergus by the druid is slate-colored. That’s easy. But I often wonder if there’s more. Poetry’s gift is that the words work on multiple levels concurrently, and we’re asked to ponder the possibilities, never the certainties.

Perhaps the slate-colored thing is what we consider insignificant – the stone we kick along the road, the bit of garbage on the sidewalk, the worm wriggling after a spring rain storm, the rat by the river, the “soul-less” animal, the undesirable person, the foreign enemy, the ideal not ours. If we contemplate for a moment Fergus’ recognition that he is all things and therefore nothing of himself; if we understand, like this king turned mystic hero, that all things, from a stone to a race of people, flow through us as we flow through them, then everything we hold dear, everything dearly bought, means nothing being all.

So much better than a tankard of green beer. (But equal in value to the Guinness cake I pulled out of the oven on Tuesday morning.)

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In the final act of Shakespeare’s King Henry V, as the mighty battle between the English and the French at Agincourt comes to its decisive end, a projected slaughter against the Brits that turns in their favor, the French soldiery commits a terrible act.

Captain Fluellen cries, “Kill the boys and the luggage! ‘Tis expressly against the law of arms. ‘Tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offert; in your conscience, now is it not?”

His partner Gower replies, “‘Tis certain there’s not a boy left alive.”

As the fortunes of the French reverse, they rush behind the pale and murder the youths and servants looking after the English supplies, an act that Fluellen declares violates the honorable ways of war.

The villains are clear. Right?

Shakespeare being the genius that he was, the plot is more complicated, denying us the simpleton’s classification of good guys and bad guys.

A few lines before the exchange between Fluellen and Gower, good King Henry hears a din of cries – the boys being slaughtered – and says,

But hark, what new alarum is this same?
The French have reinforc'd their scatter'd men.
Then every soldier kill his prisoners,
Give the word through.

Henry, fearful the French have rallied for another assualt, orders his own men to kill any captives in their possession. Raphael Holinshed, a 16th-century chronicler of British history and likely source for Shakespeare’s history plays, says that Henry, “Contrary to his accustomed gentleness, commanded by sound of trumpet that every man (upon pain of death) should incontinently slay his prisoner. When this dolorous decree, and pitiful proclamation was pronounced, pity it was to see how some Frenchmen were suddenly sticked with daggers, some were brained with pollaxes, some slain with malls, other had their throats cut…few prisoners were saved.”

Who’s the hero now? While we certainly cheer Henry for his St. Crispin’s Day speech and while his outrage at the slaughter of the boys is certainly justified, Shakespeare leaves us with no clarity or comfort.

So, too, with this latest war. On the first day, as I read the coverage, I thought angrily, “We have no right.” But then I recalled Jina Mahasa Amini, who was arrested by Iran’s morality police in 2022 for improper veiling; she was likely tortured and died in the government’s custody, and I thought, “Good riddance, Ayatollah.”

Is the U.S. heroic, then, for its attack on Iran? As policy, no. It’s not as if this war was begun to save women and girls the indignities of living under the veil, literal and metaphorical (and let’s be clear: the hijab, the burqa, is anti-woman – in America, and other non-Islamic countries, one could make an argument that the hijab is a symbol of cultural pride, but given that the institution was created by and for men nervous about their women being seen by other men, i.e. nervous about their property going astray, the position is wan; as I’ve always maintained, if a woman can walk through her Muslim neighborhood, town, community, or country, unveiled and suffer no negative repercussions, gross or subtle, then it’s a choice; anything else is sexist coercion). Nor was the war begun to stop the persecution of gays and lesbians, like Alizera Fazeli Monfared who was the victim of an “honor killing,” his family having found out he was gay when the military sent his dismissal paperwork to his family home with the revelation of his sexual orientation detailed therein. (Homosexual acts are punishable by death in Iran, while being transgender, i.e. undergoing surgery, is permissible and legal; nothing worse than being a homo, as I’ve said elsewhere.) With Trump and his goons at the helm of our armed forces, we can rest assured that acts of war begin and end in the service of our dictator, a theocrat in opportunity only, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

But, regardless of the intentions, the righteousness of the cause, the tragedy of the lives lost, both civilian and enlisted, war creates its own rules, ones the civilized world cannot understand, nor should it, otherwise we’d live in a Cormac McCarthy dystopia. Perhaps the best book I’ve read on the subject is Karl Marlantes’ What It Is Like To Go To War, in which the Rhodes Scholar and Vietnam veteran, lays bare his experiences in battle with a mythological and Jungian context. He writes about, what he calls, the Temple of Mars, the wartime atmosphere where the god of rage, battle, and, what we would normally call, atrocity holds terrible sway, where everything we were taught about being peaceful, turning the other cheek, law and order, bleeds out amid the dead.

For thousands of years, our great writers and poets have grappled with the experience of war, with its ecstasy and its horror, with our desire for peace and our equal lust for violence. Homer’s Iliad glories in the fight scenes, the battle glamorous, but tempers it with the tragedies of Patroclus, Achilles, Ajax, and Hector, among other smaller players. Vergil’s Aeneid features an even more exalted description of violence, so that we, as readers or listeners, enter a trance state during the massacres, but the profound discomfort with war and empire trembles behind every sword thrust. The great Roman poet takes it a step further in the second book of the poem during which the hero Aeneas is shown a gods-eye view of the destruction of Troy; the immortals themselves are pulling down the great city’s walls upon the heads of the inhabitants, votaries of those same deities. Destruction is as much a part of the universal order as the miracle of birth.

Then, of course, there’s the Mahabharata, in which Krishna, that too-often misunderstood god, foments a war to wipe out an entire race of people, thousands upon thousands of them, before the end of an age. In the final contest between Bhima and Duryodhana, the hero has to cheat a little to win, which he does, and as Duryodhana lies dying and his teacher rails against the adharmic, the unrighteous way, in which he was slain, Krishna himself roars in protest, listing all the adharmic acts committed by Duryodhana in the lead-up to the bloodbath. Who’s to blame for a failure in dharma when all have lost their way?

More to the point, is there any dharma to be found in war?

Marlantes opens his book with a quote from Thucydides, who himself took the words from a Spartan king: “The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”

Given that war makes monsters even of the gods, it behooves us to train our soldiers not just in the arts of war, but in all the arts, especially those that detail the soul of war; perhaps then the inevitable fall from what is considered just will be more of a trip than a drop into savagery’s gorge.

I’m reminded of the story of a samurai, one of those Japanese knights educated in archery and calligraphy, who sets out to avenge his lord’s death. He tracks down the man after many weeks of hunting and attacks. The samurai has the man beaten and is just about to run him through, when the criminal spits in his face. The samurai sheathes his sword and walks away.

Why? Because if he killed the man after the insult, the samurai would have acted from personal ego, from his offense, his anger, not as a minister of justice, not as an impartial warrior. Too many of our soldiers are impassioned, lost young men whose only education is in failing school systems that leave them open to the predations of action films, video games, and the Internet. Too often we send state-sanctioned murderers into war and then wash our hands of them when they come home shattered. Putting unschooled boys into the Temple of Mars without inculcating them with chivalry and honor is negligence, not governance. None of this began with Trump, although I fear his exploitation of camp masculinity, as detailed in a chilling and insightful piece of criticism by the New York Times television critic, will only make our soldiers more vulnerable to the darkness harbored in all human hearts.

To end this unsettled and forever unfinished rumination on war, a poem by Wilfred Owen, the WWI-era poet killed in action, dead at twenty-five. Perhaps with a curriculum of the Great War poets, of Shakespeare, of the Greeks, of the epics of India, we could, not end war – that’s a Flower Power fantasy – but conduct it with whatever honor we can find as we lay our victims, and ourselves, at the gore-splashed feet of Mars.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said that other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For of my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...."

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