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DANCING IN THE OFFICE (BUT NOT ON THE DESK)
Monday
May 14, 2007
Dear Betty,
I happened upon my friend Fred dancing in his office. It was late in the afternoon and most of the other school
district employees had left the board building. Fred is only slightly younger than me, of predominantly African-American extraction, relatively slender and unusually tall -- perhaps 6'8" in height -- and an unusually intelligent, friendly, well-spoken, even somewhat philosophical guy who mostly sits at a desk at a computer screen most of the day. But here it was, perhaps 5:30 on the afternoon of a long workday; and here was Fred, to the strains of soft soul music playing on his CD player, dancing ever so gently in his office, his gestures articulated just enough that one could call it dancing.
And it got me to thinking. Of lots of things. Including you, because of your being a semi-retired psychiatrist, and therefore, of how utterly healthy Fred's dancing this particular dance to this particular music in his office near the end of a long workday struck me as being. And how utterly healthy it would have struck you as being.
That was last Friday afternoon. As I try to remember that moment now, I'm put in mind also of that delightful little tragicomic William Carlos Williams poem in which he closes the blinds and dances alone in his room. Fred's dance in his office was even less rowdy than was the late poet-physician's in his poem.
But most of all, my happening upon my friend Fred dancing in his office (though not on his desk) left me with that feeling we sometimes experience when reading or hearing a devastatingly beautiful or profound poem -- that feeling of "often felt, but ne'er so well expressed." And yet it wasn't so much translatable into: "Gee, why didn't I think of doing that?" -- as it was translatable into: "Gee, why doesn't everybody do that?" It could turn out to be precisely the shot in the arm that the American office scene has been needing to put America back into our formerly competitive position in the global market place.
Or do you think that it may take something more than all of us dancing in the office?
HONEY BEES ON BUTTERCUPS,
Galen
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P.S.
Marie will be on a trip to Dallas from the 17th till the 30th. Would you care to have dinner and conversation the afternoon or evening of May 19th or 20th or 26th or 27th or 28th? I'd love to get together with you and at least begin to try to catch up. RSVP!!! /gg
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Sunday, June 8, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
X-Ray Visions in the Sanctuary (circa 1965)
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X-RAY VISIONS IN THE SANCTUARY; circa 1965
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TODAY'S QUOTES:
"As for his claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw man."
-- from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (Monday, July 16, 2007; page A13), "The New New Atheism" by Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, also teaches at George Mason University School of Law)
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It's the old story,
Every morning something different is real.
-- from "Second Sight" by W. S. Merwin (b. 1927), from THE MOVING TARGET (1963)
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Thursday
July 19, 2007
Dear Art,
Unfortunately, not every child is a curious child. Fortunately for me, I was a curious child. And, in hindsight, it now appears as if my x-ray vision were a nature biproduct of my intense childhood curiosity. Among my childhood and adolescent experiences which most vigorously fertilized this process, I must place my churchgoing experiences very near the top of the list.
Let us imagine together an average Sunday morning in 1965, the year I went from being 15 to being 16. Not that I was conscious of it at the time, but this earliest phase of my churching would be drawing to a close within the next couple of years. But on this paradigmatic Sunday morning in 1965, being unaware of this impending transition, I would have been sitting in one of three places, there in that enormous, posh, ultramodern sanctuary of Downtown Wichita's First Methodist Church. Perhaps I'd be seated in the choir loft, "up on stage," as t'were, in the tenor section of the Youth Choir, dressed in my tailored wine-purple choir robe. Or perhaps I'd be seated among a smattering of my age-peers, up in the balcony, where we could pass notes and whisper discreetly while the oldsters "worshipped" below. If I weren't seated in either of these areas, then I myself would be down below, very near the church sanctuary's front and center, amongst those
aforementioned oldsters, though not necessarily so much "worshipping" as processing what I was taking in, assimilating sense data, as t'were, at a furious rate, while synthesizing it with all that I'd already stored in my data bank ever since that final trimester of my gestation, those few years earlier.
Sitting in church on Sunday morning, as well as on sundry other occasions throughout my late childhood and early adolescence, is one of those catagories of experiences which we humans tend to remember fondly, despite the fact that we can also remember much about them which was not really so very fond at the time. Anyway, there I was, listening to the playing of the merry organ and the (mostly) sweet singing in the choir, to the ministers' well-miked voices, reading, preaching, praying, etc, etc, taking it all in, letting it wash over me, year after year -- and incessantly asking myself more questions than I could recount in a stack of thick journals. Until . . .
. . . until I gradually began to see through things. Not just the women's clothing. Not just the invisible "ties that bind . . . " etc. Not just the abstract design in the enormous stained-glass window which constituted the entire southeast wall of that circular sanctuary's massive magnificent interior. But into the hearts and minds of my fellow congregants, into the words being spoken and sung, into the ideas inside those words; and through that sanctuary's thick walls, out into the "real world" of 1965 where a larger history was happening, swallowing us -- as I prepared to see through it, even as we were all being swallowed by it.
YOUR BROTHER IN THE SEEING THROUGH,
Galen
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X-RAY VISIONS IN THE SANCTUARY; circa 1965
%%%
TODAY'S QUOTES:
"As for his claim that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, Mr. Hitchens makes great sport with an old straw man."
-- from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (Monday, July 16, 2007; page A13), "The New New Atheism" by Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, also teaches at George Mason University School of Law)
-----
It's the old story,
Every morning something different is real.
-- from "Second Sight" by W. S. Merwin (b. 1927), from THE MOVING TARGET (1963)
%%%
Thursday
July 19, 2007
Dear Art,
Unfortunately, not every child is a curious child. Fortunately for me, I was a curious child. And, in hindsight, it now appears as if my x-ray vision were a nature biproduct of my intense childhood curiosity. Among my childhood and adolescent experiences which most vigorously fertilized this process, I must place my churchgoing experiences very near the top of the list.
Let us imagine together an average Sunday morning in 1965, the year I went from being 15 to being 16. Not that I was conscious of it at the time, but this earliest phase of my churching would be drawing to a close within the next couple of years. But on this paradigmatic Sunday morning in 1965, being unaware of this impending transition, I would have been sitting in one of three places, there in that enormous, posh, ultramodern sanctuary of Downtown Wichita's First Methodist Church. Perhaps I'd be seated in the choir loft, "up on stage," as t'were, in the tenor section of the Youth Choir, dressed in my tailored wine-purple choir robe. Or perhaps I'd be seated among a smattering of my age-peers, up in the balcony, where we could pass notes and whisper discreetly while the oldsters "worshipped" below. If I weren't seated in either of these areas, then I myself would be down below, very near the church sanctuary's front and center, amongst those
aforementioned oldsters, though not necessarily so much "worshipping" as processing what I was taking in, assimilating sense data, as t'were, at a furious rate, while synthesizing it with all that I'd already stored in my data bank ever since that final trimester of my gestation, those few years earlier.
Sitting in church on Sunday morning, as well as on sundry other occasions throughout my late childhood and early adolescence, is one of those catagories of experiences which we humans tend to remember fondly, despite the fact that we can also remember much about them which was not really so very fond at the time. Anyway, there I was, listening to the playing of the merry organ and the (mostly) sweet singing in the choir, to the ministers' well-miked voices, reading, preaching, praying, etc, etc, taking it all in, letting it wash over me, year after year -- and incessantly asking myself more questions than I could recount in a stack of thick journals. Until . . .
. . . until I gradually began to see through things. Not just the women's clothing. Not just the invisible "ties that bind . . . " etc. Not just the abstract design in the enormous stained-glass window which constituted the entire southeast wall of that circular sanctuary's massive magnificent interior. But into the hearts and minds of my fellow congregants, into the words being spoken and sung, into the ideas inside those words; and through that sanctuary's thick walls, out into the "real world" of 1965 where a larger history was happening, swallowing us -- as I prepared to see through it, even as we were all being swallowed by it.
YOUR BROTHER IN THE SEEING THROUGH,
Galen
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