Grace Independent

Last night, I finished my first ghazal (sort of, its already been through five rewrites and it is couplet not stanza) and you would have thought that I had won the lottery. My step was lighter, my mood was almost spastic and as I flapped and squawked my way down the city streets to get back to post it – I passed by the Ladd Observatory.

The Ladd was built in 1891. I have been in and out of Providence since 1984. A sizeable overlap in my life, but not really a blip in Ladd’s family album. And all this time I have said that I wanted to go inside on the nights that it is open to the public and never had. This time around because the gotpoetry.com open mic is on the same night. But I shammed out of that and wrote a ghazal and as I walked by I saw a small group of people literally vibrating with excitement that it was almost dark enough for them to turn the telescope to the moon. The full moon.

So I went in and went twittermanic about the experience.

We create excuses and reasons for doing or not doing things that most often, like any kind of rationalization, don’t really exist at all.

I have been having a small discussion with someone about how the sheer irrationaily of the reasons offered by her abuser were absolutely believable that to him they were real because they made absolutely no sense at all.

Rationalizations allow us to protect ourselves from truth. They let us avoid the weight of responsibility for our choices and actions. They let us rewrite the past to make it easier to bear.

Typical giveaways or rationalizations are such phrases as:

- that’s the way it has always been
- that’s the way God made it
- that’s the way I am
- that’s how it was designed
- because it can never be known
- because it is suppose to be that way

Now, if you think of your experience with asking any kind of question and receiving one of these answers, you can see how the answer is no answer at all.

Just because something has ‘always’ been someway does not mean it is right and good.

No person on earth can speak with authority on what ‘god’ made or did not make and what the motivations and intentions were.

Nobody is limited to being a certain way, that negates the human experience of growth, maturity and change.

No one is designed, you may be inclined but all inclination can be acted on or not acted on. Destiny and pre-destiny are dependant on action.

Every time we think something cannot be known some century proves us wrong, the unknowable becomes known when it is exposed to imagination.

Nothing is “supposed” to be that way. If someone is asking about it, it is usually because they can imagine it being a different way.

Imagination is the beginning of change.

The dream is the beginning of knowledge.

Poetry is the voice of the dream that becomes science.

Who in their right mind would have thought that someone, 100s of years ago could have built a building with a roof that could be turned by the hand of a child in order for us to see the moon more clearly? That is the stuff of science fiction, of dreams, of poetry…and then it became reality.

All this requires two things that especially in this day and age, seem to be hard for people to wrap their minds around – one: accepting responsibility for what is, and two: accepting the responsibility that you may be the source of change.

Birthers…

now…if you have been with me for a while you remember the Panic Sisters and that whole environment I once worked in. They are ‘birthers,’ which I find to be a very interesting term but I am not going to go there.

A birther believes that there has been a conspiracy to hide the origins of Barack Obama’s birthplace, enabling a foreigner to be elected President of the United States.

It does not matter that there is no evidence of this. It does not matter that all of the hands-on evidence says that he was born on American soil.

Birthers are getting a fair amount of coverage these days as their voice grows louder.

Why is this so important to them? You have to get beyond the issue of racism and potential religious discrimination to begin to understand why some basically sane people could come to cling to a theory that is insane (lacking in rational validity).

Rational validity, by the way, is not limited to the presentation of evidence – that is rational fallacy, rational validity means there is enough common occurrence that suggests that evidence has just not been found. And common occurrence is not shared opinion.

As the world has come crashing down around us, many of us have had to swallow some very bitter pills not just about the way we have been living, but what we have been supporting through our action or inaction and what it has done to the world as a whole. As part of that bitter pill, we elected a President who is having to go around the globe and make our amends and try to build towards a different future. Responsibility for what has occurred, responsibility for the change and at the core of it all – individual responsibility for what has happened.

If you cannot bear that…there must be some reason why…any reason and the easiest thing for people to do is (in a Peckian chorus now) scapegoat. The face of the change becomes the reason the history happened.

I had an interesting conversation the other day about the nature of memory, especially public memory and how hard it is to get people to hold on to it – as a nation, as a culture, as a community. Because memory, even group memory, involves a sense of individual responsibility.

We don’t like to be uncomfortable. We live in an age in which being “uncomfortable” or full of “dis-ease” is considered a fault. There must be something wrong with you if you suffer or grieve or are willing to sit through dark places in a quest to try to figure out what has happened and with no guarantee of a sunny light at the end.

Even our concepts of karma, reincarnation and the afterlife have been diminished by our expectation that it can only hold what we already know and perceive as the best of this life. That lovers will chase each other through time, that death ends like a broadway show with lights coming up and all your friends and family sitting around you and talking about how wonderful it was.

Birthers and their ilk, the conspiracy ridden, stop the process of life because they refuse to engage in imagining the unknowable and seeking ways for it to become known and insist that everything must fit into a paradigm that is known. As if all the possibilities for life stop at a certain age.

Poetry is the voice of the dream that becomes science.

Science is what becomes the light of the world
by which we write poetry.

When science denies poetry and silences the dream,
it becomes a mechanism of death.

When our dreams of what life can be like stop,
then we turn in circles and slowly wear ourselves into the ground.