UNCUT GEMS

A week ago, The Wife and I watched Uncut Gems (2019), directed by the Safdie Brothers.

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I'm thinking that this is Punch-Drunk Love (2002) on steroids and cocaine. And not a likable character in sight.

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Perhaps it's the anti-Punch-Drunk Love, a corruption of sorts of Paul Thomas Anderson's film. 

Adam Sandler is obviously the connection point, if this indeed the case. Barry Egan morphed into Howard Ratner. Business owners who end up in the midst of shady business because of their own sins. Extended families that are chaotic and overbearing and manipulative. A love interest who is lost for a time.

But all of the goodness and grounding of Punch-Drunk Love is perverted and degraded and amplified in Uncut Gems. 

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It's another minor echo, but the various color-filled molecular-level trips we take into the structure of the black opal—at the opening and closing of the film, as well as in the middle—remind me of the twelve "Scopitones" by artist visual Jeremy Blake that serve as "chapter headings" for sections of the story.

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The best thing about Uncut Gems is that it's inspired me to watch Punch-Drunk Love once again, one of my favorite films. 

JOKER

Tonight we watched Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips on DVD.

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Timing is everything, as they say. I think I should have watched this before the world really started to unravel.

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The colors in this film are so saturated. For some reason, I keep being reminded of the films of Todd Haynes. The two films couldn't be any more different in tone, but I keep conflating Far from Heaven (2002) with Joker, confusing Phillips for Haynes.

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Another film I'm reminded of is The King of Comedy (1982) by Martin Scorsese. Arthur Fleck as an alternate universe version of Rupert Pupkin. It's as though elements of the backstories of both the Joker and the Batman were laid upon the framework of The King of Comedy.

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I couldn't imagine that someone could play a crazier version of the Joker than Heath Ledger did in The Dark Knight (2008), but here we are.

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Joaquin Phoenix's laughter throughout the film caused me to laugh, not because it was funny or infectious but because it was oftentimes so inappropriate and absurd and uncomfortable.

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I actually felt a bit queasy at the conclusion of the film. It will definitely stay with me.

FORTITUDE

I'm six episodes (of ten) into season one of Fortitude. I'm just starting to get my footing.

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Implications. Infidelities. Loyalties and shifted loyalties.

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Visual rhymes. Visual slant rhymes. (Emily would be proud, if she could imagine television.) Pushing toward things. Pulling us from things. But not always necessarily where we should be. Subterfuge.

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"For an instant I thought the Gulf Stream in my head was whirling me away to eternity..."
—page 98, WHITE JACKET by Herman Melville

(This is what I'm reading. Somehow it feels like it fits with what I'm viewing.)

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The scene between Sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer) and Detective Chief Inspector Eugene Morton (Stanley Tucci) in the hotel restaurant over a bottle of whiskey is absolutely bonkers. Just watching Dormer's face in close up was worth admission to the entire season. The entire landscape of his face is tectonic.

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Blood on the ice. Blood on the snow. Blood on floorboards and clothing and potato peelers.

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Why is it that we are so fearful of the polar regions, the Arctic and the Antarctic?

I'm thinking of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. 2018's The Terror on AMC. Ivan Doig's "Winter of '19." The Endurance. John Carpenter's The Thing.

Perhaps because there is so little life in these regions, but much of it consists of apex predators—polar bears, whales, and the like.

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Long buried things now thawing and emerging once again. From the ice. From the people we once were.

Thousands of years of ice. Seven years of atoms being replaced.

Warming of a world. Warming of passions.

Is there a connection?

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Rilke just won't let go. The angels cry out to be noticed, recognized, categorized. A Monster Manual for the heavenly and infernal realms. (And The Duino Elegies have nothing to do with Fortitude, but Fortitude has brought them to the forefront of my imaginings again.)

THE MATRIX

Another viewing of The Matrix. More questions.

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How is one to view the machine-world "abortion" scene and the subsequent real-world "birth" scene in The Matrix, knowing now that the Wachowskis are both transgender women?

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Wonderland. Oz. The Martian "machines" from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Post-apocalyptic wastelands. Late night kung fu flicks. Wild West shootouts at high noon. "Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here." (Neo referencing a cartoon from the early 1960s.)

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Thomas Anderson. Thomas = twin. Andro = man. Twin of the Son of Man?

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"Neo" is an anagram of the "One," the first human in the Matrix, the savior who frees the first wave of those from slavery as bio-batteries and into the "promised land" of the "real world" (Zion).

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Belief and doubt.

Morpheus: "It means that the Matrix cannot tell you who you are."

Neo: "But the Oracle can?"

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Tank and Dozer. Brothers born in Zion. They don't have plugs. Yet they are named after machines.

Agent Smith is a sentient program, a machine. Yet he is named after one of the most common English surnames, after a person.

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Morpheus: "And you are?"

Agent Smith: "Smith. Agent Smith."

Morpheus: "You all look the same to me."

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Agent Smith to Morpheus: "You're like the dinosaurs. Look outside. You've had your time."

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Agent Smith to Morpheus on viewing humans not as mammals: "You multiply until every resource is consumed." Comparing us to a virus, disease.

Every time I hear Agent Smith speak these lines, I think of William S. Burroughs and his declaration that language is a virus from outer space. And if language is what (partially?) defines us, then are the statements the same?

DARK LIST

And the "hidden" theme of the list is—

dark.

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Pitch Perfect was the movie I was supposed to look for at the library for The Wife. But I kept thinking of Pitch Black.

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When I found the Library of America edition of Nabokov for which I was searching, the notes for Ada, or Ardor were written by Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov).

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Compass made me think of The Golden Compass, the first novel in the His Dark Materials series.

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And chocolate: I don't like milk chocolate. The darker the chocolate, the better.

LIGHT

Today is National Poetry Day 2015 in Great Britain. The theme is "light."

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I'm not British, but I thought I would participate anyway. I've decided to share some of the poets who have been lights in my life. In other words, they've influenced me in some way as a reader and a writer.

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This list is by no means exhaustive nor is it ranked in any way. It's also in no particular order.

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The list is by poet, followed by one of collections or poems of the poet that have been a light for me.

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Homer • The Odyssey

Alice Oswald • Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad

John of Patmos • The Book of Revelation

The Psalmists • The Psalms

Emily Dickinson • The Complete Poems

T. S. Eliot • The Waste Land

Victoria Chang • The Boss

Alta Ifland • Voice of Ice/Voix de Glace

Katie Ford • Deposition

William Kupinse • Fallow

dg nanouk okpik • Corpse Whale 

Nate Marshall • Wild Hundreds

Anne Carson • Autobiography of Red

Marvin Bell • Ardor

Robinson Jeffers • Rock and Hawk

Diana Khoi Nguyen • "Buzkashi"

Kathleen Flenniken • Plume

Greta Wrolstad • "Notes on Sea & Shore"

Mark Jarman • Questions for Ecclesiastes

Scott Cairns • Philokalia

Don Marquis • Archy and Mehitabel

William Shakespeare • Sonnets

Walt Whitman • Leaves of Grass

Caroline Knox • Nine Worthies

Michael Robbins • Alien vs. Predator

Carol Ann Duffy • The Bees

Edgar Allan Poe • Complete Poems

W. H. Auden • Poems 1927-1931

Evan S. Connell • Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel

MORE MAD MAX

Is Mad Max a zombie film? It feels like it with some of the relentless pursuit.

Immortan Joe as lich-king. War Boys as undead minions.

The ghosts that haunt Max.

"Birth, death, rebirth."

"Survive."

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Tree of Life.

We killed off the tree of life. It's dead out in the "Green Place." And Nux can't even identify it as a tree; the Fall has been that far.

The heirloom seeds of the "Johnny Appleseed" member of the Vuvalini. Passed along to her mirror Breeder.

New crops for the Citadel.

"Hope."

MAD MAX

I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road for the third time. Thoughts are taking shape.

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It's Mad Max through the Looking Glass.

Binoculars. Telescopes. Rifle sights. Windows. (Figurative mirrors.)

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Mirrors.

Max and Furiosa. Furiosa and Immortan Joe. Nux and Slit.

The Breeders and their Vuvalini counterparts. (In fact, one of my favorite scenes is when they first meet each other. There is joy on the faces of the Vuvalini as they recognize "themselves.")

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Symmetry. (Itself a form of mirroring.)

Max as involuntary blood bag at the open of the film. Max as voluntary blood bag at the end of the film.

Immortan Joe and Furiosa both stripped of their mechanical/metal pieces at the same time. (Fatal for Joe, wounding for Furiosa.)

The same actor playing the Toe Cutter in Mad Max and Immortan Joe in Fury Road.

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Echoes/references to the other Mad Max films.

The vehicle. The outfit.

The long hair at the beginning that reminds me of the Feral Kid of The Road Warrior and the Max of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

The Warboys referring to Max as one of the feral people (Feral Kid!).

The doll's head on the back of one of the attackers of the War Rig at the end of the movie—like that worn by Ironbar in Thunderdome.

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The colors.

The rich oranges and reds. (And being mirrored in the massive dust storm.)

The blue of night/dark, with highlights/spotlights of yellow and orange.

That which is chrome and shiny.

The red and black "battle flags" on the back of Immortan Joe's car.

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Immortan Joe, the War Boys, and the promise of Valhalla. A critique of religion? Cults? Society? Power?

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The dependent masses depicted like the inhabitants of Brueghel and Bosch paintings.

LEGACY OF CAIN

When is it that King Saul becomes as though Grendel?

When is it that his heart turns toward murder, his hand toward taking the life of the beloved?

When is it that he becomes the monster who will break his own laws with the witch of Endor, who through her (and against her wishes) will summon forth the moaning spirit of Samuel?

LONGEST NIGHT REPRISE

I'm up because it's the longest night. It happens this way each year. I'm sure that it is mostly self-fulfilling prophecy, but "it is what it is."

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So I read.

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Online poems by local poets (Tacoma, Olympia) and those farther afield (Pittsburgh, Tallahassee) because the internet does not distinguish the distances.

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The songs of Hannah (1 Samuel 2) and Mary (Luke 1). Similar songs of the Lord lifting up the lowly and poor, while sending the wealthy away from the table.

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The final book in The Southern Reach trilogy, Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer. I'm drawing out this latter reading because I don't want the story to end.

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I hope that sleep will soon arrive. I hope that I will not dream.

FERGUSON

TWT is trying to walk a middle path tonight.

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I participated in non-violent religious protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. We walked down the middle of downtown Seattle streets on our way to protest outside the Kingdome's Exhibition Hall, where the WTO delegates were gathered. The police knew we were coming and put up temporary chain link fences as we marched. We had so many people present that we surrounded the Kingdome and the fences by holding hands and singing hymns.

We could walk down the streets because most of Seattle had been abandoned in advance of the non-religious protests that would follow the next few days.

But I don't understand protesters in Seattle tonight walking onto I-5 to stop traffic.

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I understand anger at a grand jury decision one doesn't agree with, but I don't understand how that anger leads to looting mom-and-pop businesses in the same neighborhood in which one lives.

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I hope that we don't become a culture of trial by social media. Or a culture of trial by the national news media.


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I've served on two jury cases—one an assault, the other a murder. They were both difficult cases. The evidence and witnesses in each led to different conclusions—acquittal in the former, conviction in the latter. But the amount of time and energy the juries spent on each was intense and one side in each case was unhappy with our decision.

The grand jury in the Ferguson case spent 25 days over a three-month period of time hearing from dozens of witnesses and sorting through hundreds of pieces of evidence. I won't presume to know what that grueling process was like, anymore than I will presume to know the betrayal that the family of Michael Brown feels after the grand jury's decision.

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This year, my family discovered that its family mythology, its genealogical record, and its DNA evidence are in a bit of conflict with one another. There was always some mystery and dispute in the former two, but the latter highlighted those mysteries and disputations (without necessarily solving them; in fact, it may have made them even more ambiguous and messy). We knew that there was Native American ancestry (although to what extent has been another mystery), but we weren't quite prepared for the possibility of Portuguese slave traders and West African slaves that now stares at us.

The discovery doesn't make me feel black or want to claim African descent, but it does open my eyes to a world that I am more related to than I once thought.

Native American ancestors and African ancestors stand alongside Western European and Northern European and Southern European ancestors. And now Eastern Europe ancestors also likely stand alongside all of the above. It changes who I am and how I think of who I am.

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Questions:

Is America the melting pot we like to claim it is?
Or are we different groups of people living next to one another?
Do we really know one another?
Do we listen to one another? (Or do we merely talk (or shout) over one another?)

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I don't have any answers tonight.

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Tonight, more than anything, I'm confused.

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The only thing I can do at this point is pray.

Pray for peace. Pray for understanding. Pray for systems to be changed, for all men (and women) to be treated equal.

INSOMNIA AND MUSE

Insomnia and nerve pain have me awake. I can hear the BNSF trains blowing their whistles in the dark downtown morning hours as they transport coal and cars and consumer goods from the Port of Tacoma to points unknown.

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And, as I lie on the couch, propped up on pillows, trying to achieve a minimum of comfort, her voice comes calling.

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Our Lady of the Celestial Seas speaks black psalms to me. She tells me of her eggs that hang in the night sky like stars. She tells me of the ships she has shattered and left on the shoals of various countries and coasts. She tells me of wearing others like rubber suits and stealing their final breaths.

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I try to gain a better glimpse of her and She inks and flees.

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I lie and listen for her sing-song as She calls from the night sky, from the cold shallows, from the unknown and unseen fathoms of the sea.

POP TART TWINS

Can industrial food be art?

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When I pulled these two chocolate chip Pop Tarts out of their packaging, I was taken aback for a moment. I've never had two in the same package that had such a similar frosting drizzle pattern.

ECHOES, REFLECTIONS, CONVERGENCES, WAVES

Shore Scene with Waves and Breakwater, oil on board, circa 1835, by J.M.W. (William) Turner.


Water Album - The Yellow River Breaches Its Course, ink on paper, 12th century, Song Dynasty, by Ma Yuan.

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In his 2006 book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, Lawrence Weschler writes in the introduction that "I myself have increasingly found myself being visited by similarly uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places." He is writing about art critic John Berger and Berger's "way of seeing." Almost every time I notice some strange echo in pieces of art or writing, I find myself thinking about Wechsler's book or Berger's Ways of Seeing.

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Or I may find myself thinking about "Pillow of Air: A Monthly Amble Through the Visual World," which is a new monthly column by Lawrence Wechsler for The Believer, where he explores convergences outside of the confines of his single (although fascinating) book.

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Anway, it was a tear, a seam, in the clouds over Puyallup that started this whole series of echoes and reflections and rabbit holes.

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Those clouds were haunting me.

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Then, while searching for images of "water" to use in a piece for work, I stumbled across Shore Scene with Waves and Breakwater by William Turner (pictured above) on the WikiPaintings Visual Art Encyclopedia. This painting echoed the seam in the sky I had seen, even though depicting waves crashing upon the shore.

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A bit further along, I find another picture of waves and whitewater—one of the twelve paintings of the Water Album by Ma Yuan. And there was the roiling and turbulence. And there was the seam.

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After work, I headed to the Puyallup Public Library to check out a book on Turner—The Art of J.M.W. Turner by David Blayney Brown. The small painting I'm enamored with isn't pictured, mostly because it turns out that Turner was a very prolific painter. But the same sense of turbulence in cloud and wave and light is present in many of the other paintings reproduced therein.

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It was back online to see if I could find anything out about Ma Yuan and Water Table. Contemporary artist Zhang Hongtu took Ma Yuan's twelve paintings as a jumping off point to remake Water Table, but to do so 780 years later and to depict the water as it would be seen today—polluted, filled with chemicals and oil and runoff from our modern lives and industrial lives.

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Another article has a quote by Zhang Hongtu, explaining the beauty that can be found in his "re-makes" of these classic paintings:

"Think about [J.M.W.] Turner's paintings of the Thames, he made them during England's Industrial Revolution; that fog is probably smog, but it's still beautiful. Only it's a sort of poisonous beauty, the pollution isn't obvious like tin cans in a river, it is in the air and water much more deeply."

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I just sat in my chair, staring at my computer screen, dumbfounded and silenced.

Cloud. Water. William Turner. Ma Yuan. Zhang Hongtu.

Centuries. China. England. The modern world with its art galleries and museums. The internet.

All collapsed into one small moment for me, seated in my living room, unable to move.

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Another day and I'm sitting in a class by a Pacific Lutheran University professor on "The Virtues of Christian Environmental Ethics" during an adult education class at my church, and we have already covered six of the seven classical and theological virtues—prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope—and are heading into love and a discussion of climate change, when all of a sudden we are talking water again.

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And then there was talk of baptism. Martin Luther. The Small Catechism.

"How can water do such great things?"

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And then there was the article in the Word & World "Water" issue about diatoms. ("Think Like a Diatom" by Evelyn E. Gaiser.) They provide 30% of the oxygen on earth. If we pollute water, which kills off diatoms, then we raise the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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And then there was the reference in Like a Hammer Shattering Rock: Hearing the Gospels Today by Megan McKenna. The Gospel of the Earth and the stewardship of creation we need to engage.

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And more waves. Psalm 104. The creation narrative. The roiling waters. The Spirit that speaks over them. The tehom (Hebrew) or the abyss (Greek) of the Great Deep. Tiamat. Jörmungandr. Sea monsters. Olaus Magnus and his map.

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And then I walk off into the white margins of the map. Into the seam that I see there amongst the waves, in the clouds.

NEWS NOWADAYS

"Then the item vanished from the press completely, as tends to happen with all news nowadays: people don't want to know why something happened, only what happened, and to know that the world is full of reckless acts, or dangers, threats and bad luck that only brush past us, but touch and kill our careless fellow human beings, or perhaps they were simply not among the chosen. We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don't want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people's misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: 'How dreadful. But what's next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we've won out yesterday's already.'"

—pages 34-35, The Infatuations by Javier Marías.

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I imagine the long, sinuous, languorous, ever-shifting oxbow sentences of Marías, as presented by his English translator Maria Jull Costa, to be as rich and challenging in their original Spanish. They remind me of Melville. They take time to arrive somewhere, but the places they go are oh so spectacular and rewarding.

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Marías asks us to play along with his characters. His works explore the realms of observation, perception, memory, and recall. We (along with the characters) become witnesses to what we sense; and each of us will notice different things.

BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE

I kept seeing a title of a book crop up on Facebook, Twitter feeds, local alternative newsweeklies, the websites of Elliott Bay Books and Powell's City of Books, and various literary blogs and review sites.  The book was Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot.

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One night, I found myself wandering the stacks of Elliott Bay, killing some time until my writing group began, and there it was: Blueprints of the Afterlife, its cream cover adorned with "AFTERLIFE" spelled out in the skyline of New York (Alki) under construction.

(The layout of the cover alone, both inside and out, is attractive and enticing.)

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On the front of the book: the sticker: "Autographed Copy."

And inside: a line drawn through "Ryan Boudinot," a few humps of squiggly ink lines, and a cat body drawn upon the Black Cat imprint logo.

Mr. Boudinot had read from Blueprints the night before, when I was unable to attend.

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The cover was strewn with names dropped and blurbed like nobody's business.  Comparisons are many.  Philip K. Dick (many times over).  China Miéville.  Kurt Vonnegut.  Charlie Kaufman.  Thoman Pynchon.  Neil Gaiman.  Neal Stephenson.  Chuck Palahniuk.  George Saunders.  William S. Burroughs.  Aldous Huxley.  David Foster Wallace.  Haruki Murakami.  J.G. Ballard.

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Other authors they could have name dropped and blurbed, but didn't.  Jeff Noon.  William Gibson.  Paul Di Filippo.  Bruce Sterling.  Rebecca Brown.  Kathy Acker.  Matthew Sharpe.

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Anyway, it looked and sounded like something I would read, so I skimmed a few pages, bought it, and brought it home.

I was instantly snared within its pages once I sat down and began to read.

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Blueprints of the Afterlife is one of those books that really defies comparison.  The authors that Boudinot were compared to speak in their own voices, as does Boudinot.  Even though he may share elements here and there with each of them, his voice is unique, his vision his own.

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"I tried to determine if these sad thoughts were just the results of growing old.  Probably, but that didn't make them any less real.  Maybe I had lost so much myself—my family, my friends—that I couldn't help but project my grief onto the world at large.  It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend.  Now my grief intended to encompass the planet."

—page 333, Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot.

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The novel takes place a couple hundred years in the future, after the Age of Fucked Up Shit, or FUS.  Time is measured as pre-FUS and post-FUS.  We get glimpses of the FUS—a marauding malevolent glacier apparently bent on eliminating human life, robot (newman) armies fighting against corporate militias (Boeing, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and the like) for the control of the United States, hinted-at cataclysms.  The world isn't in good shape, but has been somewhat put back into place, albeit with a lot fewer people.  Some areas have been rebuilt and some areas are abandoned.

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Much of the action of the novel takes place in the Pacific Northwest.  Bainbridge Island figures prominently as it is the site where New York Alki (a to-scale replica of Manhattan) is being built.  Seattle, Portland, Lake Chelan, and Vancouver BC all make cameos.

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To say too much about the story ruins it.  There are plenty of things that go unexplained.  The novel is a labyrinth filled with turns, twists, dead ends.  Its minotaurs are giant floating heads that communicate with some of the characters.

Strangeness abounds.

There are plenty of false starts and stops along the way.  Storylines are sometimes introduced or dropped without warning, although the core stories that emerge feel like the right ones.  In the end, the novel feels as "complete" as it's going to be, which, for me, was alright.

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Blueprints is a hypercube onion, with layers peeled back to reveal other possibilities.

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I feel a bit pummeled and sore (and sad) at the novel's conclusion.  What was it that I just experienced and witnessed?  It was compelling and unlike most other novel's I've ever read.  It reminded me a bit of many of the novels and short stories of Philip K. Dick, but perhaps was a closer cousin to Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex or the novels of Jeff Noon (Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice).

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I highly recommend this novel.  It is not one you will soon forget.

And don't let the list of science fiction authors Boudinot was compared to on the cover of the book scare you away.  This is not your dad's science fiction, and definitely not your grandmother's.  This is a good, solid read that will make you examine your own life, the culture we share, the world we live in, and what we are currently doing to each of them.

BLUR

"We all stretch the truth and tell lies by omission. Just getting along with people involves both. Humans are hardwired to deceive. We deceive when we're competing with other members of the same sex; we deceive when we're trying to attract the other sex. Deception is more the state of nature than not deceiving. In the animal kingdom, virtually every species deceives all the time. Why don't we lie even more? It helps our reputation for people to know they can believe us."

–page 67, aphorism 197, Reality Hunger by David Shields.

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Aphorism 197 from Reality Hunger, Remixed HERE.

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Emphasis last line: "It helps our reputation for people to know they can believe us."

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See: Anthony Weiner.

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See: Gay Girl in Damascus.

GO FOR A WALK

I am exhausted by people saying that everything they watch on television seems like a dream. That tsunami happened. You can see the cars and houses and buildings being swallowed by the raging waters of the sea. It's real!

You don't live in The Matrix. This isn't Inception. James Cameron isn't directing your life. If you keep comparing natural disasters that you view on your television to blockbuster films, then I question your imagination. That means it's time to turn off your screens, all of them—TV, computer, tablet, smartphone.

Go for a walk. Visit a museum or the library or your city park. Order a coffee or a hot chocolate and hang out in the coffee shop until you finish drinking it. Ride your bike. Chat with your neighbors. But, for the love of God, quit complaining about how unreal everything around you seems.

NOT FORGOTTEN

The Republican attacks on funding for Planned Parenthood have ripped open an old wound for me. I have never dealt with or received services from Planned Parenthood or any other organization that provides reproductive counseling to women or families. Even so, I felt as though these mostly aging white males and I were at war with one another.

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The Wife and I suffered two pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. Two children never to be born. Two children who died late in the first trimester. Two children never, in some sense, known, although loved.

The Child and I found ourselves at Woodbine Cemetery on a winter day filled with sun and cold. We found ourselves at the Good Samaritan bench for those who have lost children to miscarriage or stillbirth. We paused and stood in the sunlight and the cold breeze, the sting of both letting us know that we were alive in a realm of the dead.

"Why are we here, Dad?"

And then the explanation of lost siblings tumbled forth.

"Well, I'm glad they're dead. I don't want brothers and sisters."

I felt rage rise within me, rage that was already present and manifest as I thought of out-of-touch old men with money and position and influence telling women what they would not and could not do with their bodies, claiming a moral high ground because the issues they were attempting to legislate would never affect these same old men. They were distanced by power and wealth and gender.

I paused and let the raw honesty of The Child wash over me, flow and then ebb away again. I stood firm against its waves.

"Let's not be glad they're dead," I finally spoke in a quiet and calm voice. "You can be thankful about being an only child, but don't be glad that those who would have been your brothers or sisters are dead."

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The Child had as much right to The Child's thoughts as I did to mine. I had to honor that, but in a truthful and gentle way that also expressed the pain that I felt when people said things about those two children that they didn't have any right to say.

"It's all for the best."

"God has a couple of angels in heaven now."

"You can try again."

"Well, at least you already have a child."

In those moments, I am usually quiet as the words "Fuck you" come to the forefront of my thoughts and I hold them back at the locked gate of my clenched teeth and white lips.

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The Child, if anyone, besides The Wife and I, does have a right to speak of these two lost children. They would have, and perhaps do, influence the life of The Child in ways known and unknown.

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Still.

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We stood for a few more moments in the sunlight and winter wind staring at the memorial bench, next to one another, silent.

Then, I spoke. I spoke of what those two children meant. About possibilities and joy that turned to dead ends and sorrow. About how our life as a family, as individuals, would have been different, without knowing how, without defining to what extent.

I spoke in language that The Child would understand but that also conveyed what I felt about life and death; lost children; abortions; reproductive health care for women; gender inequalities; loving the neighbor as one's self, which means that one must love one's self first.

"I'm sorry, dad."

We stood there for a few more moments.

"I know you are."

I am too.

NYT

Remember when The (Sunday) New York Times contained news coverage?

Remember when they employed journalists?