This blog is about my struggles and redemption. There are tales of interpersonal conflict with men who I have dated. I would like to elevate the blog to healing and redemption, tools I have learned in my 12 step meeting.
I don't have time to write this one year lapsed blog tonight.
Tomorrow I will state these themes.
1. Mike should have been forced to fend for himself so he could not be enabled to continue to drink.
2. He was enabled to drink because someone gave into his demands and manipulation.
3. He is gone now, by his own doing.
4. If someone purposely sins and doesn't repent, will they go to heaven?
I won't go to my grave or lie to others in my life who let their bad habits seize their soul.
Three years ago, my son decided to go into the US Army. Of course, he picked the hardest job after dropping out of college 3 times before I could redeem his pell grant. The second time, he repaid the college and the third time, it was out near Barstow, California. I think he completed a quarter and decided not to go back.
An autistic child, who was strong headed, would not listen to me as his mother for sure. He joined the Army and succeeded out of Basic Training in Georgia. I went to his graduation and he seemed to understand his place in the Army, looking forward to his new station, Fort Irwin. He bought a powder blue Hyundai and made his way out to the desert. He had a desk job the first year and he said his life felt no different than working at Taco Bell, the last place he worked before entering the Army.
I would sit in my parents’ basement and watch JFK, RFK and MLK annual tributes to their life accomplishments examining the nature of their missions from 1963-1968 before I went to college. The Kennedy family was ingrained in me. RFK’s passion to alleviate the poor in Appalachia, the Mississippi Gulf region and intercity New York instilled in me a desire to go beyond one’s station in life to dedicate my life to others. In 1964, Senator Bobby Kennedy, Senator Javits and Mayor John Lindsay of New York City initiated legislative action to create the Special Impact Program, an extension to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. He created a 7 point plan that would be a national model for community development called the Bedford Stuyvesant Renewal and Rehabilitation Corporation, to help finance low income housing and jobs for the poor. The impact of JFK and RFK’s legacy affected my boomer generation well into the 1980s when Reagan disassociated most moral causes within government and shifted to the church helping the poor.
RFK, Jr launched his independent Presidential Campaign for 2024 on April 19, 2023. He has written over 8 books in his lifetime including “The Real Anthony Fauci” and “Vax-UnVax: Let the Science Speak.” Many mainstream political analysts and television pundits immediately discounted his candidacy, especially anti vaccinations for children. He had an uphill battle of getting an adequate amount of signatures in each state to get on their ballot. He is currently on the ballot in 13 states including California but he is facing challenges in Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Delaware and New Jersey, including direct lawsuits to keep him off by democratic candidates themselves. Only 83 electoral college votes are currently accessible to RFK, Jr.
He possesses the same determination as his father. He was at the Ambassador Hotel when his father was shot. He was 15 years old. He is now 70 years old and has had a lifetime of accomplishment in environmental law including cleaning up the Hudson River in New York after suing Mobil. He had a major victory cleaning up zinc mines in West Virginia while suing Dupont. He joined Riverkeepers and Natural Resources Defense Council. He won Times magazine title “Hero of the Planet.” The New York Times states in 2023 he has received over 7 million just for lending his name and expertise to environmental firms and causes. He made $500,000 working as the top lawyer for non-profit Children’s Defense Fund, protecting U.S. kids from further vaccinations. He earned three times the pay a normal CEO or top contributor would earn.
Americans and the media have underscored the major environmental influence and political appeal he has to disenfranchised voters. He has 14% of committed Democratic voters nationwide, just under 15% which would have allowed him to debate on stage.. Mainstream democrats refuse to look past the Biden-Harris ticket, fearing any vote sacrificed would be a vote for Trump. RFK Jr. has described himself as a Catholic, who overcame his drug addiction by reading up on modern psychologists who helped him think differently with new eyes. By self describing him as a “classical liberal,” anyone born after 1980 would not understand that term of having empathy for the poor. He has to upgrade some of his labels to modern thinking. I did not think voting for another Kennedy since Ted Kennedy in 1980 primary would be possible in my lifetime. For undecided voters, it’s good to look into alternative candidates you may identify with when frustrated with the two major parties. RFK Jr. is intending to reshape the Kennedy legacy.
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The Republic begins with Socrates explaining his claim that the just man is the happy man. Socrates argues that in order to have a happy and good life, man must first have an idea of the ends of human existence. Plato clung to an ideology in which he groped for a transcendent, supreme being who authored the idea of perfect forms that could translate common forms or objects into a divine realm of being, where they could exist at their highest perfection. However, Plato was discriminatory and believed that only few were capable of drawing this knowledge outside of their selves. He believed that knowledge was innate—it existed within and had to be cultured and refined through perception. There were three states: being, becoming, and non-being. The existence of being was eternal or fixed. The essence of becoming was a non-static state of changing particles in which forms participated in the nature of existence to provide some type of quality or value. What divided man’s perceptions or striving toward a better purpose or existence? It was simply his ability to conceive and perceive.
In the allegory of the cave, there is a group of people chained to a structure. They cannot move their head or limbs and are forced to stare at a wall. Behind them is a well-lit, continuous fire and a catwalk that objects move across. These objects can be animals or man-made things like vases or swords. Plato doesn’t define the regulation of these objects. He only notes that the people chained to the floor can only see the shadows created by the fire behind them as these objects move across the catwalk. The chained individuals start believing that the shadows are the actual forms, that the objects do not exist in material form. People begin naming these objects. If they hear echoes from outside the cave, they may attribute sounds to particular objects.
There are also stairs leading outside the cave, where one comes into the light of the sun. In Plato’s world, the sun is the perpetuation of enlightenment. The closer to the sun one becomes, the closer to the truth. The sun provides light but is not the light. The sun is the cause of sight itself. Man must will himself out of the cave by expanding his innate knowledge to conceive of more perfect forms. It is not necessarily contingent on a material world of objects but can include ideas like justice, ethics, and civil matters.
Is it in fact possible that all of our knowledge comes from within? St. Augustine believed in divine illumination, in which God imparts certain key knowledge to man. We live in a world now of standardized, text-driven education where thoughts and ideas are organized in a constructed formula, issued within a relative time frame of periodic intervals in which a student digests material and then regurgitates it. Plato lived in an age prior to the recognition of holy books like the Talmud or Bible. His conceptions were based on his own observations. Like many cultures around the world, he could conceive of a higher being who ordered and shaped the universe, but he did not ascribe it to a certain named deity.
I find that Plato’s flaw even in his allegory is that he perceives that man starts out chained with sketchy knowledge. Some people are born content and digest the world around them in a literal or abstract way but are not at odds with their environment. Nowadays, people construct their world not through distorted perceptions of discourse but by linear modules of television and social media through the tool of a sun-like source known as the internet. We define our beauty, our ambition, our careers through shared values that are exalted. In the U.S., the development of a career and the ultimate contributions to society we make are measured through our self-perceived gifts or ability to master certain subjects in school. We can also develop a sense of being by things we are drawn to, such as likes.
Plato’s inevitable distinction was that higher forms such as justice, ethics, and the organization of society could only be envisioned by a polished philosopher king who weighed these matters through discourse. As the sun is in the visible realm, the form of good is in the intelligible realm. It is “what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower.” Whatever knowledge we attain of the Forms must be seen through the mind’s eye, while ideas derived from the concrete world of flux are ultimately unsatisfactory and uncertain. Plato maintains that degree of skepticism that denies all permanent authority to the evidence of sense. In essence, Plato suggests that justice, truth, equality, beauty, and many other things ultimately derive from the Form of the Good. However, in the modern world, people’s perception of beauty and value, such as whom they love, is individualized. Congress continually has disputes over social value aiming at individual preferences of what government should provide or approve.
Thrasymachus argued that the unjust man demonstrates his superior intelligence in appearing to be just. Thrasymachus attempts to demonstrate that this type of individual always gets his way through the affronted appearance of justice. If man is smart enough to duplicate justice, he can deceive and put on false airs, according to Thrasymachus.
In conclusion, there is, as Plato says, a part of the world that lives in self-sustaining ignorance. In my perception, it is people who are chained to their own desires who cannot sacrifice for their own survival or for the common good. Yet there is no law or restriction in America for serving one’s own desires, as long as it is within the law. Plato left a permanent mark through his ability to imagine a higher existence and social entity, yet it is only through individual trial and error that we can gain wisdom. We live in an age when many of our physical needs are met, which may stymie urges of exploration to wander and discover. The definitive is everywhere and an imposition to place value on our lives. The struggle to interpret our higher thoughts as we are exposed to them or find them is within our realm.
Louise Erdrich’s words and imagination are large enough to freefall, swimming into the oceans of our minds, blend and awaken memories and hope for new life as well as qualify for three contemporary poetic categories – autobiographical, confessional, and multi-ethnic/women empowerment. Anyone who has reviewed her, can’t discount her, let alone detract from her cluster of language meant to liberate an elementally powerful emotional response, says Peter Stitt in the Georgia Review. Language, a streamline of a volcanic narrative of her being both past and present, melts its tapestry into the complacency of the North Dakota frontier into a conjuring of mythic images meant to overtake situation and soul. In a review of Jacklight, her first poetic work, Stitt states that Erdrich “arrives at an understanding of the modern world discovering patterns within the experience she studies--mythic patterns derived from her own Native American background “ The poems are narrative in structure, benefiting from a strong sense of both her land, of place and character.
The poem “Train,” expresses the sense of self which determines the speaker’s progress through the world. Many authors say Louise Erdrich is presenting images of empowerment of woman but she is really translating life. She is transforming in that perfect, written moment present tense, and becoming things she may not know she might become. In “Before,” she says, “It happened to me first, the stain on the linen, the ceremonial seal which was Eve’s fault in the church of Assisi. I prayed, I listen to my Brother Francis and I took his vow.” In this poem, receiving her period was a loss of innocence and perhaps an oath of chastity. In this autobiographical poem, she goes back to the time of St. Francis of Assisi to fully embody what receiving her menstrual cycle meant. Both holy and stained, she continues, “The girdle of green silk, the gift from my father slithered from me like a vine so I was something else that grew from air and I was light, the skeins of my hair…..my mother divided with a comb of ivory were cut from my head and parceled to the nesting birds.” This passage if filled with Christian symbols, a fortitude of meanings that is often integrated with Native American imagery. Girdle of green silk could symbolize the earth and life, “slithered from me like a vine” is an image of Satan as a snake in the garden; hair parceled to birds could be the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as those near the Cross bartered for his garments. In “My Life as a Saint” the poem states: “I saw the house wrens gather, dark filaments from air then the cup was made fast to the body of the tree bound with silver excrescence of the spider….. We have the least mercy on the one who created us. Who introduced us to the hunger.” The house wrens gather is close to a biblical prophecy in Matthew 24:28 which says, “wherever there is a carcass, the vultures will gather.” Also, the passage of the cup was made fast to the body of the tree is a symbolic sentence of communion. In the New Testament, Jesus’ body is representative of the tree, the vine. In a review of the poem “Bidwell Ghost” by Laura Kryhoski, Ms. Kryhoski states “In folklore, the tree is symbolic of the feminine nature. Erdrich’s work relies heavily on the image of the psychic tree to create movement in the poem, movement set in motion by milestones in a woman’s experience during a reproductive lifetime.”
Erdrich, like Terri Witek, draws up some connections with past figures. In her book, Baptism of Desire, she gives an introduction to a poem by describing how Saint Clare left her parents in 1212 to go live at a Benedictine Convent. I feel this is a historical person Erdrich could relate to, who gave up her mortal life for a higher spiritual sacrifice. In King of Owls, she writes a poem based on a French King, who was bored with life so his inside court created cards to entertain him.
The male voices in Love Medicine, her novel, are very strong and legitimate. The book ends with a male voice.
“Yes. I don’t know why that is, but they just seem to be. You don’t choose this. It just comes and grabs and you have to follow it.” In another interview I read she says her characters choose her, she doesn’t choose them.
In the poem “Whooping Cranes,” legend-time and modern times come together, when an abandoned boy turns into a whooping crane. There’s a sort of cross-fertilization of past and present in legend.
The cranes cross over the Turtle Mountains on their way down to Arkansas, Texas. We always used to hear how they’d see the cranes pass over. No more, though. I don’t know if they still fly that way or not. Another theme I see strongly in Jacklight, and in all of your writing, is the theme of strong women who become more than what they seem to be. Transformations take place--in some cases, mythic transformations.
That is true of women I have known. We are taught to present a demure face to the world and yet there is a kind of wild energy behind it in many women that is transformational energy, and not only transforming to them but to other people. When, in some of the poems, it takes the form of becoming an animal, that I feel is a symbolic transformation, the moment when a woman allows herself to act out of her own power. The one I’m thinking of is the bear poem.
I feel in some ways, even though Ercrich emerged about ten years after the end of the Confessionalist movement, she is a confessionalist because she takes her past and creates character and depictions of herself regenerating, through native and religious strength.
A shift away from an assumption that traditional forms, ideas, and history can provide meaning and continuity to human life has occurred in the contemporary literary imagination throughout many parts of the world, including the United States. Events since World War II have produced a sense of history as discontinuous: Each act, emotion, and moment is seen as unique. Style and form now seem provisional, makeshift, reflexive of the process of composition and the writer’s self-awareness. Familiar categories of expression are suspect; originality is becoming a new tradition.
In “Family Reunion” (1984), a drunken, abusive uncle returns from years in the city. As he suffers from a heart disease, the abused niece, who is the speaker, remembers how this uncle had killed a large turtle years before by stuffing it with a firecracker. The end of the poen links Uncle Ray with the turtle he has victimized:
Somehow we find our way back,
Uncle Ray sings an old song to the
body that pulls him toward home.
The gray fins that his hands have
become screw their bones in the
dashboard. His face has the odd,
calm patience of a child who has
always let bad wounds alone, or
a creature that has lived for a long
time underwater. And the angels
come lowering their slings
and litters.
