Can you read this?

And by this, I mean that.

Confused? Me too.

So, I just went over to "My Life and Hard Times" to confront Drona...but he doesn't seem to be there anymore.

I'll do some looking around and see if I can find him or any clues tucked away in corners.

Let me know if you find anything by him today in some secret location.

Thanks!

Tea Party In Exile

We're having a tea party in exile! Lionofzion and dadeckr have already found me. I don't technically have tea, but I've extracted the filling from several pop tarts and am heating it up into a beverage. Mmm-mmm good. A pirate's life for me!

Please come find us. We'll set an extra place for you. And help us plan. I've considered turning to Google for help, although their recent track record undermining authoritarians isn't as strong as we'd all like. I've also considered finding some way to lure him out, but I have no idea what sorts of foods Drona likes. The public protest thing just seems to be making him angry so far, but maybe there's more to explore there. Perhaps I could turn to Mormon Midrashim and Caucajewmexdian for help, but what could they do?

Hmmm.....

2nd Counter-Manifesto: Why the Past?

Drona's "Manifesto on History" is worth some attention. I don't agree in any way with his conclusions, but I do think they are, in some respects, accurate descriptions of how we approach the past.

In 1850, Mormon settlers in Provo, Utah, where I work and used to live, killed a local Ute man they suspected of stealing a shirt, cuts his bowels open, and filled them with rocks so they could sink the corpse in the Provo River. When the Utes found they body, they were upset, and began shooting (or stealing?) Mormons' cattle. Local settlers sent representatives to Salt Lake City and, neglecting to mention the murder which had set off the conflict, secured an armed force and authorization to drive out or exterminate adult males in the local population.

My wife shares an article on this and other events in local history with her English class. I read the article a few weeks ago and just finished a set of poems about the surrounding events.

Why remember the painful past? While I was working on the poems, my five-year-old daughter asked what I was writing about. I told her I was writing about a very sad battle, where a woman got killed by a cannon shot. My daughter got upset and said "Cross it out!" Almost as if she believed that my silence would undo old suffering.

It can't. But my speaking of it, if I do so with an appropriate reverence and with the awareness that all people and societies are capable of making terrible mistakes, can help me have the "broken heart and contrite spirit" Jesus talks about.

We ought to remember painful history, I think, to learn humility. To get a sense of intertwined sacredness and vulnerability of life.

If we can learn to face terrible human tragedy without giving way entirely to denial or anger, I think we are on our way to more moral and intentional lives.

Will Write for Food

My situation in hiding has become truly desperate. I ran out of lemonade recently, and have had to resort to searching the floor for bugs in hope of a decent (broadly defined) meal. I miss Nicole's cooking. When I eat small creatures, I find myself thinking of cumin and garlic and all sorts of spices that make up the aroma of home. After that, dust mites just don't cut it.

So far, only lionofzion has found me, and though he brings lunch, you can guess who gets the lion's share.

And so I issue a plea to my erstwhile readers on my recently-hijacked blog--please find me! And when you do, please bring some food!

Suggestions on how to take my blog back would also be appreciated.

Top Secret Counter-Manifesto

I really can't compete with Drona's Manifesto stylistically--he may be a fascist, but what great prose!--but I feel obligated to counter it somehow ideologically, since that would piss him off.

Hmmm...what can I say about writing?

1) Myths matter. The stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves: all myths. Did you know that someone who is born blind won't gain sight in adulthood even after restorative surgery? They tried it when the medical technology was first developed and learned the hard way that sight is more than just visual input from the eyes: your brain has to learn slowly, carefully, to organize shapes and colors into meanings. Without that ability, all those impulses coming through eyes to brain just give a person terrible headaches! Doctors know not to try it anymore.
Why was I telling you this? Oh yes. Because myths are something like that. If we don't tell ourselves stories, life is just one long terrible headache. With stories, we can give it some coherence, make sense of how things work and why, sketch out how to live and what we want. Ask questions. Very important, myths.
Good writing tends to myth, which, as it turns out, is a vast and sprawling garden.

2) Scientists. Basically specialize in myth. They squint down at atoms, make up stories to imagine them with (say, Niels Bohr's classic about how an atom is like a little solar system), then try come up with stories that will become tests to see if the old story needs work or not. The best scientists come up with stories that account for all the other stories better than the old myths have--the atom-as-solar-system myth is replaced with energy fields and quantum quarks and maybe if I didn't spend so much time watching reruns of Black maybe I would understand it all.
Stephen Jay Gould was a great scientist because he modified a particularly useful myth called the Theory of Evolution with a myth-within-a-myth called Punctuated Equilibrium. Great stuff.

3) Despite the abundance of good and useful myths, we get all kinds of wrong-headed and hurtful myths in our heads all the time! This is inevitable, I think, and part of being human. Writers are wrestlers, who try to tackle what they think are the bad myths in your head, or else get them in a headlock, or flip them over upside-down.
That's the core of the craft: all the rest is commentary.

What do you do in hiding?

Full disclosure: I went into hiding and allowed my blog to be taken over by communist totalitarians mostly because it seemed like a good way to get a break.

But when you're shut up in an attic all day, it's a little hard to enjoy the mandatory vacation. I tried sipping raspberry lemonade and basking beneath a lamp today, but somehow knowing that I'll be out of things to eat once the lemonade runs out took some of the joy out of that. It's also pretty depressing to spread out a beach towel when you have no safe and reliable access to a shower.

But who I am to complain of hardships? I have time off work, which rarely happens these days except for Europeans and the unemployed, neither of whom are in much of a position to enjoy the reprieve.

Hee hee

Stalin will never find me here.

Will you?