America
Mary Morris,
Vincent Crapanzano, Joseph McElroy, Daniela Gioseffi, Giuseppina Oneto, Mary Ann
Caws, Amy Guggenheim, Ira Cohen, Thurston Moore, Molly Peacock, Stephen J.
Dubner, Tony Hoffman, Martin Rev, Helen Barolini, Graham Parker, Charles Plymell,
Mary Caponegro, Shay Youngblood, Vickie Karp, Jeff Tamarkin, Caroline Leavitt,
Mickey Pearlman, James Richardson, Anne Winters, Jorge Guitart, Rachel Resnick,
Gary Aposhian, Giulia Pianigiani, David Meltzer, Lori B., Gerald Locklin, Ellyn
Maybe, Rosemary Manchester, Suzanne Carey, Jerry Stahl, James Ragan, Kevin Smith,
Anne Beatts, Laurel Ann Bogen, Gerald V.Casale, John Shirley, Marjorie Perloff,
Rudy Rucker, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Jane Davenport, Gregory Orr, Tess Gallagher,
Marc Laidlaw, Gerald Nicosia, Mark Halliday, Ariel Dorfman, Robert J. Conley,
Robert Fripp, Steve Katz, Harry Mathews, Jo-ann Mapson, Janet Ruth Falon, Lynn
Emanuel, Jeffrey H. Weinberg, Arthur S. Nusbaum, Alice Fulton, Tom Callos, Kelly
Nicolato, Jay Ladin, Martha Coventry, Pamela Porter, Lynn Strongin, Michael
Hogan, Héctor Abad, Nestor Ventaja, Andrés Hoyos.
Mary
Morris
New
York, New York, USA
[The
American Pastime] It is the bottom of the seventh in a playing field in Park
Slope, Brooklyn - the opening day of the baseball season. It is cold for late
April and parents are shivering in windbreakers. Players jump up and down to
stay warm. My daughter who is middle school catcher shakes her head at me. Her
team is down l4 to 4. As I talk to her through the chainlink fence, our dog gets
off the leash and runs across the playing field. The umpire declares him out.
Laughter rises from the crowd until we hear the crack of a bat from behind us
where the boys are playing. A fly ball heads our way and we duck as Andrew
Giuliani, the son of the Mayor of New York, fields the ball after another
teammate has missed the catch. The mayor watches from a smoky-glassed limousine
as our boys score another run. A body guard with walkie talkie stands outside
the car, yelling at the coach. In the field next to us a team of Hasidic Jews
with yarmulkes, white linen shirts and long black pants, play hardball. And on a
grassy hill in a spot of sun a hundred yards away a wedding with a priest is
taking place. From the wedding a tenor sings as Italian aria. A man walking his
dog says out loud, “Since I’m going to the wedding, do I get to go the
reception?”. John, an old man who has been dubbed Mr. Baseball, is coaching
from the sidelines. “You gotta get your attitude up. You acts like losers. If
you act like losers, you’re gonna lose.”I have retrieved my dog and John is
lecturing me. “The problem was those early walks. You walk’em, then you
error, then you lose the game.”When I look up, the bases are loaded. Our team
is having a rally, a surprise turn of events at the end of the game. The cold
wind turns colder as the sun slips behind a cloud. Across the field the bride
shivers. A long drive to center field brings in three runs. Another fly ball
brings in a few more. The girls are jumping. The boys are gathering up their
bases. The bride is now married as the mayor’s limousine turns and silently
drives away.
Vincent
Crapanzano
New York, New York, USA
(I
was/am in New York City. The sun was shining, though it was unseasonably cool,
especially when the wind was blowing. Yet, given the wretched winter and early
spring, people were out in the street: underdressed)
Having
just come back to the States from Munich, I was jet-lagged and was waiting,
reading Peter Nådas’ “The House of Memory,” for the fatal moment to
arrive. Why fatal? Any stipulation by another (and perhaps by me, as well) of an
hour, a minute, a second, produces, at least in me, an anticipation (Angst would
be too strong a word) that demands acknowledgement of being fatally determined.
It is perhaps for this reason that I fell asleep minutes before the stipulated
hour. I was awaken, however, before the ten minutes were up by a call from a
friend in Seattle who reminded me that he was coming to stay for a couple of
days. I had forgotten. I had forgotten the dream I was
having when he called but remembered a feeling, a heavy feeling, like
leaden water, that accompanied that dream. Later that evening I read in “The
House of Memory”: “How can you get deep enough inot your memories so that
you won’t need to remember anything more?” I remembered, then that in my
dream I was wading through an underground passage, a sewer perhaps, in desperate
search of light. I would never have anticipated any of this and am overwhelmed
by the power the stipulation of a time can produce -- produces.
Joseph
McElroy
New York, New York,
USA
Something,
perhaps “house” perhaps “Time,”in the still-in-flux (lesson-in-itself)
3-page epilogue to my eighth novel Actress
in the House to be xeroxed tomorrow to send to my publisher, causes me to
turn, at exactly 5:50, to crane my neck and look at the clock high on the wall
to the right of my every Thursday booth in this Greek restaurant at the corner
of Amsterdam Avenue and West 86th Street, clear skies out the window,
and see that I’m late and have to get out of here to go meet my
eleven-year-old son who’s finishing his electric bass lesson half a block away.
Burroughs said Take a walk and write down everything you saw. Proust more to my
taste reflects endlessly on all he recalled. The waitress who has poured a
second ration of hot water on my tea bag having noticed that I’ve wolfed my
bran muffin exclaims about a ten thousand dollar prize offered in a radio
promotion and I wonder what she makes a year, not much more than twice that, and
I wonder if I can pay my bills with the advance on my new book the epilogue to
which I’m sliding into my bag, leaving a dollar for her. A woman facing me in
the next booth has left half her salad and is reading her paperback copy of a
Danielle Steele novel, and I wonder if she has ordered another course because it
doesn’t seem like it. She wears a wedding ring; so do I; she is sensitive to
my looking at the cover of her book - I’m all for reading, it’s active
though less active than what I’m doing at this moment . The owner, an ample
Greek who has clocked some mileage right here and is going to have back trouble
with that posture, is eating an untoasted bagel by the register and I wonder why,
since he could order spanakopita or moussaka or a tot of retsina to get him
through to dinner. But my time has come, and the waitress thanks me as I leave
this temporary haven and catch the light like a sailboat the wind (tho no wind
here tho early evening 60 cool) and I’m late among two kinds of people, with
and without enough time, and arriving at the lobby where my son will appear from
the elevator with his bass on his back, I’m early and think of closure, my
text not my mind, my thoughts not my life, the infinite number of sequences
Valery tells me I am at the intersection of, and the pleasure of ending a
sentence, and another advance soon to come from Italy on a translation of my
novel Plus. The elevator man has his
earphones on.
Daniela
Gioseffi
New
York, New York, USA
[Meeting,
You, Long Lost Sister, on a Rock of the Atlantic In a Vast Galaxy]
You are flying across the American continent
to meet me, Theresa, long-lost sister of many years,
you at seventy-three and me at sixty, after our mother’s death at ninety.
United by death, separated by many years and miles, we barely know each other.
You’re a shadow in memory, a face like mine and our aged mother’s
now seen only in a photographs as I bustle about preparing for your visit
dusting the soot of this vast Metropolis--mixed with the sweat
of sixteen million people scribbling on each other’s tongues
in every language of the globe--from my windowsill
where I water the greenery I keep there to remind me of earth—
our only mother swirling in space amidst burning stars
and flying meteors. You and I, Theresa, among the billions
of people and stars connected by our mother’s umbilicus
as you fly here across the country to settle family business and her dust
with me into the air and earth of time scattered as we all shall be.
We
will dream of what’s been and what’s to come
always as unhappy as Achilles in our longings,
husbands dead, children grown with their own,
we two sisters who barely know each other
after so long a parting. I wander shopping for your welcome home dinner,
wondering how we will feel as we meet in the bustling streets,
where steel hammers hum and subway trains rumble
under concrete and steel in avenues of brick and mortar,
where I pass warm spring gardens lovely and aromatic with daffodils,
cherry blossoms, and hyacinths whose aroma kills the caring heart with sweetness
amidst towering brick buildings here on this rock island at the edge of the
Atlantic.
Millions hurry through the avenues of streets as I wait for you
here on this piece of towered rock at the edge of the continent
on their way home from work, in the anxious bustle of laborers
coming and going from everywhere.
After
dinner, we will stand on my rooftop viewing New York Harbor
and talk of our lost dreams and husbands, our youth disappeared
beyond the horizon where the sun has sunk,
where millions huddle on this rock and talk
of the coming night, our gardens bloomed and gone to seed,
our children planted far and wide
and scattered, our dreams swirled amidst the passing clouds
wafted through a grey and blue sky on stiff winds.
We
will look over the harbor at the skyscrapers of Manhattan,
the Statue of Liberty holding aloft her faltering lantern of Liberty near Ellis
Island
where our parents landed so long ago escaping famines and epidemics of Europe.
We’ll talk into the night mirroring our immigrant mother’s face to each
other.
She gone forever into dust connecting us amidst the billions of lights
we will touch with our eyes ablaze with the City of Light sparkling into the
night,
her bridges of steel like lit thighs over her rivers running rough with rapid
waters,
The Brooklyn Bridge to one side of our vista, The Verrezano Bridge to the other,
The Statue of Liberty with her wry French smile knowing there is no liberty
for the poor or people of color in a land ruled by corporate hacks, George W.
Bush
who reads nothing of history and whose family fortune came from the Third Reich
and I.G. Farben, the company which financed the building of forty World War II
Death
Camps
including Auschwitz, investments and profits from human skin segued into the
pharmaceutical companies that finance the Gnome project,
the cloning of the future
which uses science derived from Nazi Eugenics
You and I half Polish and half Italian will stand over this powerful New York
City
founded by the Dutch and English,
and try to know
and love each other
as we remember who we are
and where we came from
in all this glitter of night gazing into The City of Light,
amidst burning stars, the stuff of which we are all made
tiny earthlings connected by our mother’s umbilicus
turning to dust, as we are all come from the dust of stars, the children of
earth
now
if our grandchildren will have enough clean air to breathe,
water to drink, sunshine that will not burn them blind,
as earth our only mother groans now with greed and passes spinning into dust.
We
are sister of America, descended from Europe’s immigrants
living in a powerful and decadent nation headed towards Fascism
--where a new age of "Star Wars" lust explodes in military industry
under billions of burning stars, the stuff of which we are all made
living in the delicate atmospheric balance
of this spinning planet of swirling blue waters,
you of the Pacific Coast, me of the Atlantic,
worrying about our grandchildren’s futures
on this dying earth where skyscrapers’ windows sparkle into the harbor
like trillions of diamonds shimmering on the troubled waters
and we are given only a speck of
borrowed time in which to love.
MaryAnn
Caws
New
York, New York, USA
(Room 7395, on the
seventh floor of the Graduate School of the City University of New York, 365
Fifth Avenue. The weather outside is about 65 degrees, inside, about 75, I would
estimate)
I
am giving my seminar in Contemporary Poetics,with a class of a dozen students,
some of whom are practicing poets, others committed readers of poetry and essays
about it, and still others trying tocome to terms with what it is, might be, and
will be. We are reading one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “ terrible” or
“dark” sonnets, beginning: “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”
Someone readsit, and another comments that “fell” is
an ancient word for evil. I talk about how “feel” and the feeling
that “fall” is the next word both prepare the “fell” and the rhymed
response of “gall” in the first verse of the sestet: “I am gall, I am
heartburn…my taste was me”. “How can anyone write something that
strong?” asks one man. Others take it up. Discussionis lively, and no
one falls asleep or into a fell of whatever kind.
Amy
Guggenheim
New York, New York, USA
(Brooklyn.
Apartment; on the floor. Bright but cold. Exactly: 48 degrees, mostly sunny,
westwind 5 to 10 mph, becoming ‘light and variable’ late this evening)
Robert
called the minute after 5:50. 551. He said he’d run into Mauris who I had just
been hoping would invite us over to their house already, and Bob said, Mauris
had said he wants us to come over to their house and will call us. Soon.
There are so many things to look at. 2 and 3 dimensions. As I discussed with my
Korean friend yesterday. He asked me what the difference between 2&3
dimensions was. The question made me mad.
Just then, at 5:55, my pussycat jumped into my arms. I kissed-smooched her and
said, “I’m so glad to be here you with you. You smell just like a cat, you”.
And she jumped onto the floor and yawned a big, relaxed cat yawn that could’ve
lasted forever.
Perhaps I will do this 10 minute thing every day and see what happens.
Ira
Cohen
New York, New York, Usa
Ok
here we go. It’s 5:50 p.m. in New York City on April 19th, the day after my
daughter Lakshmi’s 19th birthday & I just got a phone call from Gabriel
Rotello telling me to write 30 lines thanks to E-mail Communication. Since I
don’t have e-mail everything is moving on by grace of synchronicity, one of my
favorite things at the heart of good fortune, poetry & visionary flashes,
none of which I could live without. Just coming from a copy shop where I made
the above letterhead & spent $20 making laser copies of work for an
anthology I’m co-editing with G. N. Reilly in Glasgow, “Warrior Shamans
& Now Poets”. Laurence Weisberg just brought me two lovely photos from
Alice Farley of her work from “Erotec” & “The Human Life of Plants”
which I will add to my last envelope to Glasgow before printing begins. The gate
is still open! Synchronicity again. Will Alice be surprised - I see in the
newspaper that some professor declares that couch potatoes live longer &
even though I am walking from 50-80 blocks a day on a new regime, I take comfort
in my couch potato meditations. Perhaps I will live forever. At 66 I have found
my true love, Marina Marinera, who is my harbor & also my flight supervisor.
As long as you follow your heart’s desire you will be spared the vinegar of
regret. Let us take higher! The 10 minutes is up & I have a lot to do. My
dreams bring me to new responsibilities.
Who sees what.
Maya is never what you think it is. You can never not think of that sometimes.
Thurston
Moore
New York, New York, USA
I
sit here in the Sonic Youth Studio, lower Manhattan, 3 streets north of the twin
tower monolith and one 1/2 block east of a strip-joint called New York Dolls.
Upstairs a lame cover band is hammering out Eric Clapton signatures - they are
Wall Street habitués - upstairs is a service for Wall Street workers to loosen
their neckties and rock out with each other. There is a sign on the street
“leave your day-job behind and rock!” - or something to that effect. It is
an alternative to golfing. It is a dating service for financiers to meet and
rock n roll with whatever limit of technical capabilities and taste aesthetics
they can match. Sometimes it is hilarious and sometimes completely annoying/depressing.
Right now it is completely forgettable and melds with the sounds of the the
street, garbage trucks, sirens, shouting voices, car horns etc. -- We are 5
people, Lee, Kim, Jim, Steve and myself. We are in the midst of fine tuning our
connective rock tissue for we have three gigs coming this weekend. We are
playing a selection of material from our entire spectral catalog which is very
approachable and easy. We are used to delivering to an audience a whole set of
new penned music but lately have been revelling in “oldies”. The audience
seems to want this and digs it knowing that we could easily throw more
abstracted newness at them which we may or may not do soon enough. Whichever way
the music takes us we’ll be there. Forever and now.
Molly
Peacock
New
York, New York, USA
Having wasted five good minutes by the elevators with my kvetching neighbor,
I scramble toward 14th Street and Avenue A, thinking to leave my boring building
and walk quickly to something exciting - this is Manhattan, after all - when I
smash into my husband carrying his trench coat at 5:55pm on April 19, 2001. The
pink Manhattan air, caused by a crisp 52
degrees Fahrenheit and winds SW at 5 mph, stills for a second as I hesitate,
thinking I should I greet him after his day, but he releases me, whispering,
“Hurry up!”
However, in order to hurry I have to lean on the mailbox next to the bus stop to
tie my laces, and as I crouch, suddenly the Land of the Shi opens up. This is
the Land in the Irish fairy tales that you never have to travel to. It takes you
over at odd, observant moments. I know I am in the Land of the Shi in New York
City because in tying my shoe lace I have laced myself to the most unimportant
place in Manhattan, my own corner.
Now a deaf man passes, signing exaggeratedly to no one but himself.
The rush hour buses puff into the
stop, and a shiny young couple with straight black hair and straight black pants
forge through the crosswalk. A puppy yips, a plane sails over 14th Street far
above three pigeons diving iridescently, and a white ambulance from Cabrini
Medical Center howls past a blonde yipping to her boyfriend “But why aren’t
we going with Kim?” as three white boys with two black boys in big pants
barrel by, chanting “Bullshit, bull shit!”.
Clop, clop, a woman’s squat square heels on the cobblestone between the
mailbox and the bus stop make a hundred year echo of a horse who may have
plodded past on April 19, 1901, at 5:57pm.
“Enjoy your date,” a pudgy man says to another pudgy man snidely as the
taller and less pudgy one veers toward First Avenue. “Tell her I said hello!”
A patrol car pulls into the bus stop and the partner cop adjusts his NYPD
sunglasses.
A girl with a leather coat with leopard cuffs laughs into her cell phone.
Across the street six pear trees in a row flower simultaneously, and on this
side a squirrel stuffs a paper bag in its paws - perfect nesting material!
On impulse, I join the leopard cuff girl and an elderly lady, her thinning hair
brilliantly hennaed, who leans on her frail husband in his buttoned up trench
coat. “Hurry up,” he says as we board the Abington Square crosstown bus.
When the bells of the Church of the Immaculate Conception ring 6pm, the
pink Manhattan air actually dims, for, as I recall too late,
the Land of the Shi never moves with you. As we slip our Metrocards into their slot, the scarf of the
senses folds and puts itself away.
Stephen
J. Dubner
New York, New York, USA
(Times
Square)
From
my apartment, I walk ten blocks south and enter the strange new heart of New
York. Times Square stands five blocks from one river, nine blocks from another,
and just three miles from the ocean. It is the center of an island but you would
never know it. On an island, the edges tug at you; here, it is Times Square that
does the tugging. Everyone is here. A marching band from Michigan in puffy blue
and white jackets. A flock of French teenagers in dark sweaters and flailing
scarves; a flock of American teenagers in Gap sweatshirts and baseball caps. A
hunger striker folds up his signs for the end of the day (his fourth day,
according to the signs). Stand still for thirty seconds and you will hear
Italian, Hebrew, Farsi, Japanese, Chicago. You will smell cheap hair spray and
expensive perfume and sweet roasted nuts and tangy cigarettes. (Since it is now
forbidden to smoke indoors, the sidewalks hang as thick with smoke as a saloon.)
Ten years ago, you walked through Times Square with one eye over your shoulder.
Now you look up, up, up: the MTV studio, the news zippers, the flashing
billboards that would take up half the main street back home. A new building
cannot be built in Times Square unless it agrees to wear a flashing billboard.
Far down Broadway, toward the ocean, the golden sunlight shimmers against
low-slung limestone buildings. In Times Square, the forest of new skyscrapers
turn the streets into a deep pocket of bluish gray. That way it is better. That
way the billboards can flash all the brighter and sell their soup and stocks and
whiskey. If you aren’t selling, you’re buying, and if you aren’t buying,
then what are you doing here? The
JVC clock flips to 6:00 p.m. Time to feed the baby, give him his bath. The same
clock tells me that, in London, it is 7:01 a.m. Who says that nothing is free?
Times Square has given me one whole minute.
END
END END
Tony
Hoffman
New York, New York, USA
[Intersections]
I
sit on a bench, east edge of Union Square, downtown Manhattan
late afternoon, breezy and cool, deliciously clear—one small cloud
above the Film Academy; another hangs over 4th Avenue.
Behind me, noise—they’re tearing up the road; in front of me,
cabs and buses rumble down Park Avenue past the huge toy store.
Nearby, beside a broken drinking fountain, a woman embraces a child,
greets a friend. I feel lightheaded, weak, and remember walking through
this park two autumns ago, during my misdiagnosis of brain cancer,
some small comfort in knowing that though I might die, my nephew,
the children, will carry on, and the wheel of regeneration continue its slow
roll.
At
my worst I suffer cogitophobia: terror of my own thoughts—
corrosion by acid heat of a mind turned against itself.
That’s one phobia that hasn’t made the lists.
In
front of me a couple embrace; my own longing rises, crests,
falls into empty space.
A
man lurches over from the left, talking to himself, as loud
as I am quiet; at first I think he’s drunk. He sits on the next bench,
sipping a Coke. I watch him sideways, wondering if he will
inject himself further into the final seconds of this experiment.
As my watch marks 6 p.m., I lift my soda for a sip.
Raising his Coke towards my Diet Coke, he toasts,
“My fellow man!”, gets to his feet and hurries off.
Martin
Rev
New
York, New York USA
(80
degrees, a lot of sun, some wind, no sea)
BEWILDERED
VICTORIES
CRUSHING
PLEADING
PESTILENCE
DRIVEN
DRY
WARNINGS
VANQUISHED
COMFORTS
GLORIOUS
LIGHTS
BLAZING
ECLIPSE
Helen Barolini
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, USA
(It was a pleasant evening in my town
of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York on April 19th, 2001 and I went down to the
riverfront - for as the name implies, the town is on the shore of the Hudson
River in Westchester County, just 20 miles north of New York City. Between 5:50
and 6 p.m., this is what I observed:)
The
light blue sky had a sprinkling of thin, wispy clouds and there was a little
chill in the air though the temperature was a pleasant 52” (fahrenheit). The
wind was brisk making gentle waves on the water and there was a white path from
the white sun which was settling down over the mountains on the far side of the
river to the West. In the riverside park where I sat, trees were budding. It was
four days from Easter and spring was here - every year’s reprieve and more:
renewal, revision, reward.
Bird calls mingled with kids at play and the buzz of a saw at a nearby building.
I thought: I am drawn to the water, to flow, to change.
One other person strolls down to the water -he is a young man who looks at the
river and drinks from his bottle of beer.
I
think of one of my favorite books in the world: Virginia Woolf’s “To the
Lighthouse” and the I think of the triumph of Art over life. Ars longa, vita brevis.
Graham
Parker
Catskill Mountains, New York, USA
(Sunny
but chilly. Breezy. 55 Fahrenheit)
My
dog Bud has just eaten a baguette that we were planning to make garlic bread out
of tonight. He is old and becoming senile.
He forgets where he is.
On the phone behind me, my daughter is talking to her boyfriend.
Not yet 16, he can play 7 instuments and when we jammed on guitars
recently, he made me feel like a caveman with arthritis.
My daughter plays drums Monk, Ellington.
Stuff I can barely comprehend. What
brilliance have we spawned? What have we begot? She tells me her boyfriend
downloaded lots of my songs from Napster. Yes,
Steal This Music, why don’t you? It
is not a physical thing. It may not
even really be there anyway. It is
in the imagination and collected briefly on those tiny hairs in the ears that
pick up vibrations and make sense of them.
Not real, you see.
Now my son taps on the keyboard of another computer behind me.
He is only 5 and handles it like a pilot flying a 707.
I need a cup of tea, but Americantea bags merely dye the water brown.
Charles Plymell
Cherry
Valley, New York, USA
Cherry
Valley, New York, in the Mohawk Valley between the Catskills and the Adirondack
Mountains, in the country of the Six Nations, sunny and cool, about 50 degrees,
winds were calm. Time to all good people to come to the aid of the planet.
Our planet is, in fact, an orphan; therefore, its growth of humans is orphaned.
It is, according to physicists, slowly going out of orbit, it’s destiny is
catastrophic at some point when chaos begins. The human tenure has not been that
helpful to the planet; probably we are a cancer upon it.
The Age of Apostasy has set in. It takes a few years into the centuries before
signs become obvious. Like the seeds of the 60’s were planted in the late
50’s...and so on. While it is difficult to shake the old knowledge, that is
based on old stories, legends, etc. Religions are either abstractions to comfort
the orphans. Or they are crusades devoted to manifest themselves. Why, on earth,
I wouldn’t know.
All the fables, prophecies, stories have been told. Literature and philosophy
have run their courses. Nothing more to say. Mathematics ended in the eternal
loop. Art has been dead, at least since Warhol. In the latter part of the past
century literature. Poetry especially was highjacked by the governmental and
academic cultural institutions.
What was the song in the 70’s. Do You Believe in Miracles (you sexy thing) Yes,
since I believe only in belief, I will concede in miracles. But it is obvious
now that the old knowledge is still poisoning the well, so to speak.
Actually continuing to poison the air, water, the earth, our health. Most of
Earth’s population areas are obviously unawares, ignorant, or unaffected. I
remember an old Sci-Fi movie where the aliens peeled off their human faces.
Do we Earth Orphans know who we are? The stories all told. Our science will
probably be able to replicate the human being, but that’s about it. And where
do we go from there? Even space travel will leave travail to the earth.
The religion that interested me were the Shakers. I speak of them in the past.
But there are a few left. I think they were wise not to allow breeding. I liked
the way the leaders shook. To shake out the devil. Shake, Rattle, and Roll was a
song from my youth.
I
think it is a good practice to give up possessions. I think it will prepare us
to be formless, to be absorbed in the great light. It think that will make it
less frightening. And fright is probably with us all to some degree. I think
those who are the most frightened are those who like to do others ill. When they
use force they allay their own suffering. To the most sensitive, there is some
pain in not knowing and not manifesting it as a force upon others.