Atheism on Mars, Imperialism in Canada

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got love of creatures?

(Got distaste for imperialism?)

Love of Creatures

War of the Worlds Poem

...Pause for Blog Identification

Bonus material

Epilogue

Love of Creatures

There’s a church hymn, a “Doxology.” You may have read it or heard it. I have the words in my annotated copy of The Secret Garden.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,

Praise Him all creatures here below

Praise him above ye Heavenly Host 

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost

Amen

Here is a link to some singers; they repeat the lines.

The Secret Garden is set in Yorkshire, the same region where years later a famous veterinarian, who also wrote It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, cribbed from another hymn for his book title, All Creatures Great and Small. Link to pictures as kids off camera are singing.

I must confess that after reading the doxology, my own poem seems dull. 

I composed in the shadow of the London Museum of Natural History, featuring respectful exhibits for Darwin and the balance of nature. The British even put Darwin’s ship on their five pound note: I think that’s because the British are, as a Columbian engineer told me, so empirical. They also had a coin (which I never saw) of Darwin facing an ape: I think that’s because they are “just saying no” to having Yankee imperialism from powerful Christians in the city of Washington and the state of Tennessee. 

Yes Virginia, the Yanks imperialize. 

Luckily, the United Kingdom is a “have nation,” as the U.S. federal government, in the name of "the people," denies aide funding to any nation where "the people" allow abortion. 

The republic of Ireland, 

(a catholic nation with an openly homosexual before-he-was-elected prime minister) 

last I heard, was about to “just say no” to the U.S. on that one, rather than have their innocent lonely girls going over to the U.K. for their (legal-in-the-UK) medical procedure) 

In my favorite “have nation,” Canada, according to the most recent Conservative party prime minister, abortion is legal and remains legal, with no opposing bills to be raised by the Conservatives in parliament, because the Canadian people do not want that can of worms opened. He did not, of course, apologize to our U.S. neighbours for our differing views on everyday life.

As for life far, far away from Earth, you may recall the sinister Martians of H.G. Wells were evolving into creatures with simplified digestive tracts (they only took in fluids) and great round heads.

War of the Worlds Poem

God’s Creatures

Camouflage meets eye

Stout armor meets teeth

Toxin dances with anti-toxin

Day mice dare the sky birds

Nocturnal mice meet the owl

A feather floats on currents of air

Centipede legs are fleet

Millipede legs will ram

Creatures circle and gyre

Island dodos grow larger

Across time dodos grow

Across space Martians grow

Heads grow as limbs shrink

Grow and increase and drink blood

Without God

...Pause for Blog Identification 

You are reading

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2020 

Bonus Material

Distasteful Yankee imperialism: 

During Obama’s administration, the U.S. built enough oil pipelines (according to someone I overheard) to reach to the moon. The only pipeline that was opposed? The one that would have reached over the U.S. to almost meet tidewater in Texas, to almost break the U.S. world monopoly on buying Canadian oil. (It stops at a refinery) Meanwhile, both Europe and the U.S. have oodles of pipelines, but Canada, with the longest coastline in the free world, somehow has no room for either of the three—count ‘em, three—pipelines that would have gotten the oil out to Canada’s tidal coasts, escaping American clutches. Two were killed, the last survivor has been on life support for a few years: We will see what happens. 

As for the one that stops in Texas, at least this week our province invested heavily to get that pipeline finally built. We'll see.

In Canada, when someone proposed to “follow the money” to see who was funding anti-pipeline efforts, it was the communists and other leftists who were opposed, and were quoted saying so in the newspaper. Sure, the leftists like transparency for others, but communism is an ideology, and as with any ideology, their reality is stone, transparency is opposed. 

Decades ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, was supposed to give Canadians permission to legally have their own culture. But I read once in the paper that U.S.capitalists keep winning every time they oppose Canadian culture in court, such as, for example, a Canadian country and western magazine, so that Yankees can make money selling their own music magazine across the border. 

Well, maybe instead of country and western, young Canadian guitarists can sing the blues. A pity, for I had always thought it was charming how Canadian western culture did not mean “wildness” or six-guns being worn. Truly the CBC would never make a violent TV show about Paladin on Have Gun Will Travel “…a knight without armour in a savage land”)

Incidentally, here’s a link to that Paladin song the kids sing in the Stephen King movie Stand By Me. I used to sing it 

For my U.S. readers, if you are pleased with having your plausible denial, then OK, but if any of you wish to take a grownup interest in what your government is doing to imperialize in your name, then I think you might painlessly start with the arthouse feature film State of Siege. 

Here is a link to Roger Ebert’s movie review, at the very end of which some U.S. companies are mentioned, including (“but not limited to,” adds my Yankee lawyer) the United Fruit Company.  

(As it happens, a business executive in my toastmaster club did a seven minute speech on the imperialism of the United Fruit Company) 

Or view ( link to Ebert’s review) view the mainstream feature film Missing starring Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek. 

Or view (link to) the comprehensive-to-a-fault C.I.A. documentary On Company Business.

You may wonder:

By my posting this essay, am I hurting the feelings of, offending, my dear longhaired leftist fellow Canadians? No, I’m sorry to say. No, because those imperialist leftists, according to my blog research, won’t read my site.

Epilogue

Speaking of church music, in these COVID days you may wish to have a virtual choir, like this Youtube (three minute) spiritual, which has how to make one at the top of the comments. 

This song is on the Odyssey-inspired 1930’s movie with George Clooney, Brother Where Art Thou?

Human Religion

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got religion?

Got the Spanish Inquisition?

Don’t worry, this essay is atheist-friendly

From my May 2017 essay Human Interest and Muslim Demons, this was a deleted 

SIDEBAR:

Speaking of God, I can imagine my European readers asking, “Why are Americans so patriotic; why are they so religious?”

For the patriotism, I don’t know, but here’s a thought: Maybe Americans have enough democracy to feel safe being patriotic, without being scared of any masters using their patriotism against them.

As for religion:

I’m aware that in Europe faith is not so important. In fact, I read in Reasonable Creatures that back when I was a boy, even when fascist General Franco was ruling Catholic Spain, the Spanish still had less church attendance per capita than in America. I shake my head. (Historical note: Franco wanted to join the Axis, but Hitler wouldn’t let him in the club)

I’m North American myself, but I’m not living down in the States, so today I won’t speak for folks down there. Where I live, my short answer for “why so religious?” would be that here in the bible belt, stretching over three lonely prairie time zones, with small towns dotting the cold landscape, where we measure the distance in hours, not in kilometers, the church is a big part of our life.

I remember, at my university, hearing the European students, in an LGBTQ (Gay club) meeting, being amazed at how Canadian students were so concerned, were spending so much of their precious club meeting-time discussing safe churches and efforts to reconcile their faith to their orientation.

The faith answers I still remember are: You can’t judge God by God’s followers; thou may not make a golden calf (to worship) out of old testament scriptures; Jesus has given us a new testament.

…So there I was, with a group of students milling around in the hall outside the college chaplain’s huge meeting room. We were waiting for him to come and open the door so we could have an open-to-everyone faith discussion.

One of the typical students who showed up looked a little ill at ease, and confessed he wasn’t Christian. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to predict he’d be feeling a little shy, foolish and “out of it.”

As we went inside and put our chairs in a big circle I wondered, “How could I help this guy?” How could I encourage him not to be intimidated by “real” Christian students? I believe in coming from a place of love, and “telling my own story” with “I” statements. Not “preaching at,” not telling a person what to do. The loving thing is to be honest and vulnerable.

And so, after the subject of “journaling” came up in our group conversation, I shared, “When I write in my journal I spell god with a small g, (not a capital G) so I don’t get mixed up with the “bad guy God” in the Bible.”

Well! Are you wondering whether the others got angry at me? They didn’t. In fact, it slowly turned out that roughly half of them had at one time resorted to using a code word for God—including the chaplain. I think it’s like how if a child’s feelings have been desperately hurt for years by her dear parents then, in adulthood, she’ll end up calling them by their first names. Same principle.

God bless us, everyone.

Sean Crawford

July

Calgary

2017

Poetics of Tygers and the Withdrawal of God

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I was entranced by the hated movie Tree of Life. I told a few people I liked it, but only folks I knew: It’s an art movie, I’m sure, although it was marketed as a mainstream movie.

By “hated” I mean I read in the newspaper that all over America angry people were walking out of the theatre. Not me. It helped that I was lucky enough, the very night before the movie, to read something by a famous essayist, either Dillard or Didion, (I forget who) about The Book of Job. As you know, Job was tormented by many misfortunes from God. Such as painful boils all over his skin, and Job’s servant reporting, “The roof collapsed and I alone survived to tell you.” The entire Book concerned the issue: Would a man maintain his faith if his God appeared to withdraw from him?

In everyday life, where we don’t have a lot of servants and animals, and where we live in a little nuclear family, never mind skin boils: The most devastating thing? To lose a child—I could never write an essay on what it’s like: It’s just too awful.

When people angrily walked out of the showing, it wasn’t because they were religious, or atheist, and it wasn’t because they couldn’t relate to the 1950’s family of Brad Pitt. It was because they didn’t “get it” that the whole movie thoroughly explored the issue of maintaining faith… backwards and forwards, in time and space.

Question: Does losing a child mean losing faith? As Pitt’s family is shaken, the movie depicts the glories of the solar system implying, maybe, the existence of a Creator; the film shows two dinosaurs, surely to explore whether God’s creatures, and by extension God, can “give a care” about life, and other life forms, such as mere humans. Tree of Life was not intended to be a brief narrative of a 1950’s family, but to explore the questions Pitt’s family in their despair would grapple with, over time, even unto middle age, as does the grown son played by Sean Penn. It is fitting that Brad Pitt is presented so sternly—“It’s your house, sir,” says a boy—just like the Old Testament God.

Even if you are a modern atheist, not living in the 1950’s, you can still empathize with the family’s plight. At least, I would hope so. Too bad some unwilling movie-goers brought their expectations of an economical Hollywood “straight line between two points” story, a story they thought was “supposed to” begin and end in the ’50’s. An art movie, like any art, requires one be willing to sit with the art, to see the art on its own terms. I thought the film was well done.

All religions, I think, see God as ultimately unknowable. The Christian faith, as I understand it, sees God as deliberately not proving his existence. No fiery letters in the sky. No, lest faith be displaced by certainty, thereby destroying free will. (If you know there’s a hell, then where’s your choice?) Of course, in Jewish-Christian theory, God wants humans to have free will. There was an old Star Trek episode that explored the horror of a society without such freedom. (Called Return of the Archons) In that story it was speculated that a totally unfree people would require, in compensation, a “Red Hour” of freedom to sin, venting their base nature. (Captain Kirk discovers God to be a computer that, as Kirk puts it, is without a soul)

In our age, I once read, there is the question: Where was God during the holocaust? Free will then implies the answer: Where was man?

…Here in the west, with our democratic freedom of thought, individuals touched by divine mysticism can freely ask classic questions. I’m thinking of William Blake, the poet, painter and reformist. Here’s his poem:

The Tyger

Tyger, tyger, burning bright,

In the forest of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, and what the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art?

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when that heart began to beat,

What dread hand, and what dread feat?

What the hammer, what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil, what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And watered heaven with their tears

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger tiger, burning bright,

in the forest of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2015

Footnotes:

~I think if you “sit with” the poem you will instinctively slow down for the verse with the stars. I find I start speeding up until that verse.

~I typed “and” in a couple places where Blake used the ampersand, “&,” because some computers will not accept that typewriter key from the Internet. (As I have found out the hard way)

~The movie dialogue line is from memory: Probably wrong, while true to the movie’s spirit, since I haven’t seen the show since it left town after its run.

~The holocaust question and answer is one I read long ago, but I forget where.

~Roger Ebert, up to his usual standard, reviewed The Tree of Life. 

Poetics of Airy Sacred Gnomes

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Like last week, I will present the poem before the essay.

Like two weeks ago, I will follow the essay with some light fiction from “free fall” (as explained in this month’s Dr. Fell post).

Vocabulary: The word “glen” is from Scots-Irish meaning a narrow valley. At home, where the bow river eases through a spread out flat prairie landscape, I chuckle to refer the area of Glenbow.

The rest of the airy poem is in the footnotes.

The Fairies

By William Allingham

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen

We daren’t go a-hunting

For fear of little men

Sacred (essay)

Strange to think of an airy land being sacred, although I did read a story as a child (Perhaps in Alfred Hitchcock Presents) where there was a remote valley sacred to the indigenous God. A rich hunter persists on going into it, following some game. Luckily the white-man God comes into his camp at night and gives him a little totem. I imagined the hunter’s God as wearing a blue plaid jacket like my father wore.

I suppose an atheist might think there is no need for sacred, just as, to him, there’s no need for religion. I answer: Not quite. While I would never advocate religion to an atheist, sacred is something else. I would ask the person: Do you have a study desk that is just for studying? If you are associated with the armed forces, then do you have a parade square that is sacred, a square you would have to go walk all the way around rather than casually amble across? In both cases you beheld an object, or a place, to set your intention to study or train.

Sacred needn’t mean blindly religious. At your study desk you might do arts and crafts on a pre-Christmas weekend; if it’s dark late at night on an army base, then, after boozing in the bar, you might dash across the parade square to get back to barracks. I admitted doing so to a military policeman, while under interrogation, and we both laughed. (The MP was trying to track everyone’s movements on that night)

To me cemeteries are sacred, in a semi-religious way, but if scientists ever had a reason to believe an old graveyard might contain useful information on the origin of the deadly Ebola virus, then I would be first in line with a shovel. “The dead must serve the living,” I say. Again, sacred does not mean rigidly religious.

If my atheist friend confuses sacred and religious, then perhaps it is because the sacred intention being set is so often religious. But not always. I would point this out to my friend by rhetorically asking: Where is the religion in a preserved French battlefield where one is directed to neither laugh nor sing? Where is the religion in bowing as you enter the martial arts dojo? And what of that special area of an awesome intention to reach out, not for the religious but for the spiritual?

Ah, spirituality. 
In our day and age, “spirituality,” as you know, is freely individual. Scripture-free. It’s not organized, not coercive and certainly not oppressive. How sweet to peer through the veil between this world and the next, or to seek a connection with another realm, or to seek a higher power whom some would call God, or to seek to transcend our common mundane life—Give me airy Gnomes and Fairies!

Perhaps spiritual is what I mean by sacred, and perhaps my meaning differs too much from the mainstream. Then again, our words change as our understanding changes.

I think there are things undreamed of in our everyday philosophy, things that, like a dream, cannot be grasped as solidly as we would grab a shovel handle. I sense this.

In the Pacific Northwest the indigenous elders would wrap away their sacred carved masks until next year, not to preserve their “specialness,” not like a store packs away seasonal decorations, but, rather, to preserve for their people the opportunity to connect with the spiritual. I’m sure the elders were practical hunters, serious and realistic, yet also willing to see something beyond the horizon. 

“If the spiritual did not already exist, we would have to invent it.” (Paraphrasing Voltaire)

Gnome (Fiction)

I’ve mentioned my free fall group before. Our “prompt” one morning was “something heard on a public conveyance (bus or taxi)”

I’ve been a bus driver for a long time—of course I like my job. I always half regret when they change my route after every six months, because by then I’ve gotten to know Margret and Maggie and little Meg.

One day, of average summer weather, after the commuter crowd had dwindled, and I was waiting at my time stop, I heard a voice from the bottom of my stairs, saying “hello.”

I said hello back, guessing that it was a man, not a woman, just don’t ask me what age, a man dressed in a gnome costume, complete with tall hat.

The fellow continued, “Do you gnome the way to San Jose?”

I said, “I’m going right there. I guess you mean the San Jose Jotel, right on top of San Jose Pizza.”

“Yes,” he said, climbing the stairs to sit nearest me. “I’ve got a lot of friends, and there’ll be a place to stay.” He sat down with a lumbering motion of the older, but not the coordination of the oldest, and not the flop of the youngest. Then he leaned forward with the posture of a chatty customer, my favorite type.

I pulled the mighty swivel lever and swooshed the door, asking, “Have you been here before?”

“I’ve been away too long, too long among the mundane world.”

“Oh. Well, where do you hang your hat?”

“This weekend, with my fellows at LepreCON, the convention for the non-mundane at heart.”

“Hold that thought,” I said as I pulled out to the road.

He added, “Normally my hat is in a lot of closets, for I’m such a Gnomeo at heart.”

Peering into mirrors and the distance I said, “I can’t nudge wink to you, I’m driving… Have you a philosophy, oh Gnomeo?”

“Yes, yes I have come to believe that life is a great big freeway, and we are all free to travel the less mundane road, if we like.”

The road rumbled while we pondered this.

I said, “I see you like wearing green.”

“It’s not easy, being a gnome, but with a dream in your heart you’re never alone.”

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2015

Footnotes:

~It was when she played the voice of Juliet in the 2011 animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet I first learned who Emily Blunt was. It’s a fun show. (Emily’s also the heroine in that 2014 Tom Cruise sci-fi movie, Edge of Tomorrow, and she’s in the fairytale musical Into the Woods)

~I can’t resist saying that in Edge Cruise does not just smile pretty but is a good actor, as a reviewer at Roger Ebert’s site notes. Cruise plays a uniformed noncombatant, a jobnik, a public relations flack named Cage (No doubt because he’s caged by the war) Writes Matt Zoller Seitz , “Cage is a complex and demanding role for any actor. It is especially right for Cruise in that Cage starts out as a Jerry Maguire-type who’ll do or say anything to preserve his comfort, and learns… By the end he’s nearly unrecognizable from the man we met in the opening.” Link to the review.

~My poetry policy, for all these past posts, is only to present what I have memorized. For today’s poem, I can only recite the first verse, so that’s what I posted. For the rest of it, here’s the link.

~Sometimes stuff, rather randomly, makes it onto our FreeFall Fridays blog. We post it as it was written that day, not revised. (Except for spelling and punctuation) Here is the link.