Category: Writing

  • No Peacock Feather Required: the Luminance of “He”, a short story by Katherine Anne Porter

    Katherine Anne Porter

    The story “He” is one peacock feather shy of a Flannery O’Connor story. Only it is a Katherine Anne Potter story and has its own luminance, not O’Connor’s sardonic delight in the grotesque.

    Nonetheless, in her story, Porter puts in play more than a smattering of religious artifacts and allusions. She refers to the “simple-minded one” with upper-cased pronouns, in other words, not actually pronouns but nouns in the convention used to address deities or a supreme being.

    In this story, He, if it isn’t referring to the simple-minded one, most naturally refers to Jesus Christ. He is sounded out the same as the pronoun—if only in one’s mind—but one cannot fail to notice that on paper it is visually distinct. It creates an aural / visual dissonance, which Porter begs us over and over again to consider and endure. We sound out “him” but we see “Him”.

    The prominence of “neighbors” in this story is also extraordinary. Neighbors are a brooding presence from the beginning to the end. The word appears six times in the story, in the first paragraph, and in the last.

    A “neighbor” is more than a prominent word in the New Testament. It is the word chosen by Christ to represent an “other” in the supreme rule of “to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself”. Here supreme is meant in its utter literal sense. It is wildly significant in the context of the jumble of incongruous rules and laws and Good Housekeeping advice that make up the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, when then and now we tend to accord the laws a common weight, relative merit notwithstanding.

    How curious to love a neighbor when they seem (more on that later) as unlovable as the ones who appear in “He”, those who whisper behind the Whipples’s backs:

    A Lord’s pure mercy if He should die.

    It’s hard to imagine loving such a snarling brood as the Whipple’s neighbors. It puts a whole new spin on the task. It is closer to the paradoxical entreaty to “love one’s enemy”, which of course also comes from Him, now apparently the other “Him” in this story.

    The innuendoes pile up. What now is the engagement between Him and Him? How do They relate?

    At the very beginning, the story informs us:

    Mrs. Whipple loved her second son, the simple-minded one, better than she loved the other two children put together. She was forever saying so.

    We come to suspect that she is forever saying so because she is forever herself either unsure or incapable of this love she proclaims. We don’t know the nature of this love though we’re dropped a clue.

    When Mrs. Whipple says to Mr. Whipple that “it’s natural for a mother to have feelings about Him,” the narrative invites the reader to think of unconditional love.

    The simple-minded one, having few if any ways to reward his parents, in the form of report cards, witticisms, good looks, pleasing gestures, puts the unconditional love challenge to the test. Since such feelings are allegedly natural for a mother, how awkward for her when she doesn’t have them? And what if the neighbor’s find out!?

    When we ask, what does Mrs. Whipple love about Him? The question starts to make more sense in its full ambiguity, i.e. as Him AND Him.

    Now this is not the same as saying that Mrs. Whipple loves her second son. Mrs. Whipple is so utterly consumed by concern for what the neighbors think that we are forced to reckon with the other part of the dictum. Does Mrs. Whipple even love herself?

    Porter has got love of self, love of others, and love of Him all knotted-up as if she planned it that way.

    It also has a lot of “seeming” in it.

    A plank blew off the chicken house and struck Him on the head and He never seemed to know it.

    So in bad weather they gave her the extra blanket off His cot. He never seemed to mind the cold.

    Porter wrings a lot out of this innocuous word. Most of the seeming comes from Mrs. Whipple. For her “seems” ties back to what others might think. She has no internal source of confirmation. Her whole idea of reality is tied up with how her neighbors might perceive things, perceive her. Hence, how things “seem”.

    She has no perspective then on anything, most significantly on Him (the simple-minded one) or presumably Him (her savior).

    With scant notice, Mrs. Whipple’s brother invites himself and his family over for a big Sunday dinner (he dares her to “put the big pot in the little one”). There is nothing to suggest that the brother is not every bit as poor as the Whipples or likely trolling for a good meal. Who better than a sibling to know your witnesses.

    Mrs. Whipple, who is desperate not to look as poor as she desperately is, convinces her husband of the necessity to slaughter a pig for the meal over his objections.

    “I’d hate for his wife to go back to say there wasn’t a thing in the house to eat,” she says.

    The simple-minded one gets the job of snatching the pig from its mother sow’s teat and escaping “with the sow raging at His heels.”

    Mrs. Whipple, who loves Him unconditionally, we’re supposed to believe, puts His life in mortal danger just to cover up for the “sin” of poverty.

    The pickled peach in the roasted pig crackling in the middle of the table comes from Him. He (He) is the only one who scrambles among the branches of fhe family peach tree. He gets in trouble chasing a possum or hunting for eggs as if the second son understands fully the abysmal state of their larder. He gets it, it “seems”.

    One suspects Mrs. Whipple doesn’t get the first thing about Him, her son. She makes a fuss out of serving Him first but is inwardly relieved that he keeps to Himself in the kitchen when He demurs and doesn’t join the rest of the family, his aunt, and uncle, and cousins in the dining room.

    The meal is briefly a success. Later after company has parted, she frets that “her own brother will be saying around that we made Him eat in the kitchen!”

    In a bleak winter, they borrow warm clothes from Him for His siblings who have to walk to school in the chill. For His outdoor chores, they arrange the loan of a coat from His father until he gets sick.

    In the spring, after he’s recovered, they send him to fetch a bull from a neighbor for breeding, a modest attempt at better living through husbandry. The simple-minded one succeeds on his mission with perfect calm.

    Whereas Mrs. Whipple sets him off on the mission with short-lived nonchalance. She goes from little caring to high-speed fretting in 3.9 seconds. Before He returns, she is in a self-inflicted lather that finally seems to expose her real concern: what people might say if He got hurt. It’s an incredible episode that is all whipped up in her head utterly divorced from the fact that the boy got back calmly without a murmur of incident.

    As their fortunes sink lower, Mrs. Whipple fears “they’ll be calling us white trash next.” These “they” are a powerful lot. By coincidence, the “they” are a prominent concept in Heidegger’s philosophy, who likely would conclude that Mrs. Whipple is living “inauthentically”.

    Their kids have seen enough. As soon as they can, they bolt from the farm.

    Effectively, they’re getting away from their poor white trash parents. The irony is that the only discernable detail that makes them poor white trash parents is Mrs. Whipple’s state of mind.

    The simple-minded son endures on the farm. Slips and falls on the ice. He has something like a stroke or a seizure. Appropriate healthcare: transferring Him expeditiously to a hospital by ambulance is frustrated and delayed. Instead, he goes in a “neighbors” ample wagon.

    On a tortured ride to the hospital, the boy is crying in the cold. He is not seeming to cry, but crying. Her last thought in the story

    Oh, what a mortal pity He was ever born.

    Porter with a “neighbor”, fellow Texas author, William Goyen

    This is extraordinary. The word “pity” bookends the story. In the beginning, Mrs. Whipple’s devout wish is not to be pitied by the “they”, the neighbors.

    In the end, pity means a regrettable circumstance. It echoes what the neighbor’s supposedly said all along “a Lord’s pure mercy if He should die.”

    At the very end, the reason the neighbor is “driving very fast, not daring to look behind him” is out of real pity. Mrs. Whipple’s love for Him was not what she claimed it to be. She did not love Him more than His two siblings put together. She did not love Him unconditionally, with “feelings more natural for a mother.”

    Her condition, we profoundly suspect, accords equally to her simple-minded second son and her savoir. She is utterly cut-off, isolated, and impossibly tragic.

    The neighbor cannot bear to bear witness.

    Special thanks to George Saunders and fellow members of his Story Club for calling my attention to this story.

     

  • Oversharer’s Delight: A “Brave and Beautiful Story”

    Author Live on Stage at Fitzgerald’s

    Got a call from Maureen Muldoon one day in January. I pitched her a story for the Voice Box storytelling series she runs with Cathy Richardson. There came a pause in the conversation. I had mentioned something about a recent, embarrassing little dust-up, why I don’t know. Naturally, that’s when Maureen asked me to backup and tell her more about “that”. I looked over at my girlfriend Terrie, who was seated straight ahead of me, making the international hand sign for “ixnay”. Maureen pounced, making short work of convincing me to tell the embarrassing, little dust-up instead. I spilled. The rest is now on record.

    In hindsight, the dust-up, while horrific at the time, is pretty much standard fare in the life of a writer.

    It was cathartic to get it all out on stage and reminded me how much I creed I give to the expression “put yourself out there” as motto and mantra.

    Cathy and Maureen, as the co-conspirators behind Voice Box, a storyteller’s series which combines an intoxicating mix of “live” story-telling and music, have been “putting themselves out there” for ten years! Kudos to them.

  • On Revision and Jack Kerouac

    On George Saunders’s Story Club, a fellow clubber remarked on “the illusion of natural genius”. It reminded me, by way of contrast, of Edison’s “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” axiom. Some authors may be good at their craft but they’re also often good or even better at creating the “illusion”.

    Jack Kerouac comes to mind. It’s been to long since I read “On the Road” but I feel sure the image of him drafting his manuscript in a blinding flash of uninterrupted inspiration on a continuous roll of paper fed into a presumably scorching hot typewriter has done nothing to glorify the plodding Sisyphean nature of perfecting a short-story.

    Glancing over at the Wikipedia entry for “On the Road”. Contrasting his methods with the on-stage performances of Jazz musicians discounts the vast quantity of hours consecrated to “art” in the woodshed. I am not surprised that he has an essay titled “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”.

    (I have to stop to admire David Brooks’s commentary on its legacy:

    Reading through the anniversary commemorations, you feel the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus. All cultural artifacts have to be interpreted through whatever experiences the Baby Boomer generation is going through at that moment. So a book formerly known for its youthful exuberance now becomes a gloomy middle-aged disillusion.

    On the Road – Wikipedia

    Please tell me that you don’t love, “the Great Boomer Narcissus”!)

    Kerouac now occurs to me to be a worthy contrast in styles to George Saunders’s loving, workmanlike embrace of revision.

    Kerouac’s essay, per this synopsis on Genius (https://genius.com/Jack-kerouac-essentials-of-spontaneous-prose-annotated), is I suspect well worth the while. And the idea that we could someday write at improvisational speed is something we should always aspire towards.

    What is so wrong about Kerouac’s modeling himself off of bee-bop Jazz musicians.

    Charlie Parker as a role model (minus perhaps the addictions)? C’mon!

    Okay. Time to go back to the woodshed…

  • An Oversharer’s Cautionary Tale

    John Poplett @ March for Justice Chicago 2020

    In 2019 I decided I was ready to pitch my first novel, Schopenhauer in Love, to literary agents for the first time. I taught myself how to write a query letter, researched agents for those most likely to have an interest in a work of historical fiction about a 19th century German philosopher[1], read the best novels these agents had brought to light, wrote personalized letters only to those most likely to get excited by a book like mine, and tracked the letters I issued in an Excel spreadsheet.

    I wrote to seven top-flight agents, managing to convince three of them to read the manuscript. Nicole Aragi, the rock-star agent of rock star authors Junot Diaz, Rebecca Makkai, and Colson Whitehead, was among them. Three out of seven was an extraordinary result.

    But the rejections suggested I was a better writer of query letters than author of a novel. I needed a makeover, to shake things up. I needed either to become a better writer, a more interesting person, or both.

    I concentrated on reading mostly women authors, authors of color, or authors outside of the United States. I tried writing poetry. I joined George Saunders online short-story course “Story Club”, drove around the country in a campervan, took up French, and read books on the theory of the novel and fiction writing. I purchased an Internet domain name, biketoenddivision.org, and chronicled an attempt to ride a bike around Lake Michigan, raising money for West Town Bikes, a bike shop dedicated to supporting youth on the West Side of Chicago.

    I fooled around with the idea of teaching after a few of my friends encouraged me to try. I had started putting more time and energy into helping other writers improve. My mother had been a teacher. My brother taught. I have many friends who are teachers. I felt like there was something to it that resonated with me innately.

    Carolyn Poplett, my moral compass, in pearls!

    At my mother’s memorial last June, one of her friends remembered a motto that epitomized my mother’s moral foundation. It was:

    To lift yourself up, lift up those around you.

    Though mom ‘s sturdy example ingrained the principal of this motto deep within me, this artful expression of it made it brand new. I already knew the value of the idea. With mom gone, I was that much more eager to put it to use. Soon after a non-profit group that helps kids in the city discover their ability as writers put out a call for volunteers willing to work in their booth at Chicago’s 2022 Printer’s Row Literary Festival. I had taken their training a year earlier, passed a background test, and had been waiting for an assignment ever since. I wanted to establish myself with the org and parlay it into a gig teaching writing and running one of their workshops.

    Another great Carolyn motto is:

    Whenever somebody asks you to do something, always say yes. You never know where it will take you.

    This idea too had worked its way into my being.

    I signed up. It was a beautiful day in late spring in downtown Chicago. The festival had its own buzz and energy. It was great to be in the throes of so many books, book lovers, and authors. I bumped into a cherished novelist friend, hawking copies of her first publishing success, The Fourteenth of September, as I had hoped.

    I had a brief few moments to learn the pitch for the program, what they expected out of me on that day, and to acquaint myself with my peers who had also committed to the first shift on opening day.

    I was soon standing side-by-side with another more experienced person, either a volunteer or a staffer, getting people to sign up for our mailing list or to purchase a book of student poetry and art. As an unpublished author, it was easy to imagine and describe the thrill that young kids would get from reading their own words from the pages of a published book in front of a live audience.

    The booth work energized me. I was chatting it up with everybody, the people who approached the booth and the persons I worked with. It seemed like my partner and I were racking up good numbers in book sales and signups. We high fived each other a couple of times. I put my arm around her to get our picture taken together. By the end of our stint, I was happy and satisfied for what we had accomplished.

    I felt like I had inched closer to my goal of teaching.

    At Goldy’s bar in Forest Park, having a beer with my brother, I failed to choke down a goofy impulse to blurt out how he must be glad that our mother had died. I regretted it immediately not because it was crass but because it reinforced an old script of how he was put upon by his mother.

    We were in our cups. I doubled down on my stupidity, warning him “don’t be a victim, bro”, giving him an unsolicited lecture on why he shouldn’t go on blaming mom forever. The evening ended badly. I went home fearing permanently ruptured my relationship with my only brother.

    Soon after, the volunteer coordinator sent out a group email looking to recruit a crew to assist in running the annual fall fundraiser charity event. I again want to help, check coats, distribute paddles for the paddle raise, do whatever was called for. I wrote to tell them that I was interested and ready to go.

    When I didn’t hear back, I wrote a second email. The coordinator responded saying something vague about background checks which surprised me. They had the results of my original check on file. I found the results on my computer and posted a fresh copy of them to the coordinator. She wrote back to explain that they had already met their quota for volunteers.

    Maybe they didn’t need me. Although it was starting to smell fishy, I bought two tickets to the event and proudly invited a new friend to join me, not suspecting there was anything really wrong and wanting at least to support them as a donor and have a fresh chance of getting to meet some of the staff and chat with fellow boosters.

    Then, on a Friday, I got an email from the executive director disinviting me from the charity event. He explained that he was rescinding my tickets, having received a report from staff and volunteers of “significant inappropriate behavior”.

    It was a rude shock. As accusations go, or quasi-accusations, I had never experienced anything so damning. I was confused, embarrassed, and humiliated. I wondered what people would think I had done to warrant such an extravagant reaction. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. I jumped on the director’s offer to reserve half an hour on his electronic calendar for a one-on-one discussion. I picked a time for the coming Monday.

    Over the long weekend, I called friends and family on the phone, confessed my circumstance, and appealed to them for moral support. I called my new friend and suffered the compound embarrassment of having to give her the whole background to the story as a prelude to the explanation of why I had to disinvite her.

    The last person I called was my brother. Likely I was more hesitant to tell him my story. He was sympathetic, thoughtful and supporting. He heard me out. But before the call was over, he found a moment to admonish me without a smirk “don’t be a victim, bro.”

    Now here was change of the most exquisite kind. The kid brother schooling his know-it-all elder on the finer points of life. The kid brother outsmarting him with a dare to sample his own medicine. The kid brother showing the older brother how to listen.

    I woke the next morning, still thinking about that comeback, laughing my head off at this unexpected reversal. Who was doling out advice now? If this was a game of chess, my brother had just taken my queen.

    The next day the director confirmed that putting my arm around my booth partner was the crux of the complaint against me. I offered to write a note of apology to that person and entrust it to the director for delivery.

    I also offered to write another note to the rest of the volunteers and staff in case some aspect of my behavior had caused them to suffer in some way as well.

    We spoke of a future day, in a following month, when we might deem it appropriate to reevaluate my volunteer status.

    I wrote a formal apology, addressed to my erstwhile booth partner in an email, asking for her forgiveness for my affront. I did my best to put myself in her shoes. I sent the result to the director the next day and felt good about it.

    A few days after that, in a final spasm of agony, I wrote a brief follow-up email to the director thanking him for hearing me out and telling him I felt demoralized and we could drop the idea of reevaluating my volunteer status.

    I did not hear from him after that.

    The only other complaint leveled against me was an accusation of oversharing. People who know me would readily believe this charge. I don’t deny that I am in the eyes of many an over-sharer. Hell, a lot of people I know are under-sharers and I don’t hold that against them. I just don’t feel oversharing should be a source of shame. If somebody accuses me of oversharing and what they’re really doing is euphemistically telling me, I’m a bore… fine. Go ahead and shoot me. But if not, then it might mean that all I’ve really done is lead a longer and more interesting life than most folks.

    Coda

    This story was developed and presented at the first Voice Box performance of 2023 at Fitzgerald’s Nightclub in Berwyn, II. Our theme for the evening was “changes”, as inspired by the David Bowie song.

    Promo for an evening of storytelling

    A special thanks to Maureen Muldoon and Cathy Richardson for encouragement and a riotous, fun setting for “getting real”.

    1. They exist.

  • Metaphor and the Quality of Experience

    Aristotle

    The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

    Aristotle from the Poetics

    Abstract

    During a rare reunion, an old girlfriend tells me I have chronic foot pain because I’m going in the wrong direction, elevating figurative thought to the same plane as medical diagnosis.

    Durable truths are couched in myth and metaphor, not science.

    Eve’s so-called choice when she chooses to bite into the apple captures the paradoxical experience of free will and determinism better than anything in the thousands of years that have passed since that story was first told.

    So much of the language we use is metaphorical, it’s easy to forget by how much or how pervasive it is.

    Some of our most cherished beliefs are metaphorical (rebirth, the idea that in marriage which two organisms become one, a person with many gifts)

    The quality of the metaphors we use affects the quality of what we experience (life itself really).

    Metaphor and figurative speech are the go-to “tools” for poets and writers to broach transcendental topics including God.

    Text

    If ever I break up with a woman, I will call up my college sweetheart to ask her if she’s still dating that guy. When she says “yes” I am elated because Gene’s the one guy I wouldn’t dare trample over trying to get her back. Gene is her chosen one because he’s just that lucky and deserving.

    Leigh and I have had a face-to-face reunion once since we dated in college. It transpired in Chicago outside a favorite bar, the “Hideout”, where all the cool alternative music acts come to play. Robbie Fulks, a comically embittered singer/songwriter refugee from Nashville and a native of North Carolina, is my favorite. Neko Case used to tend bar there.

    Back then in the summer of 2013, I was vexed with chronic neuropathy and foot pain. That’s when Leigh made an out-of-the-box remark that it was a sign that I was going in the wrong direction. I was struck by the brilliance of elevating figurative thought to the same plane as medical diagnosis. Nobody had ever once suggested to me anything like it. The shame of it was I was already calling myself a writer.

    In the years following Leigh’s pronouncement, my awe for the figurative imagination has—let’s just say—blossomed. I have learned that the most durable truths are couched in myth and metaphor, not science. I have learned that gospel truth—the truth that emerges from gospel—has very little if anything to do with historic events and is instead rooted in stories that allude to transcendental themes.

    You will not acquire better insight into the nature of free will than you can by contemplating the image of Eve chomping down on that apple. I mean that whole thing in the garden and the serpent looks totally like a setup. How much of a choice did Eve really have when she “chose” to take the first bite? It’s a paradox, perfectly articulated, and nobody in the thousands of years since that story was first told, though many philosophers have tried, has advanced the debate on free will versus determinism.

    At the start of Cratylus, a dialogue written by Plato, which seeks to discover how words signify, i.e., accrue and acquire meaning, a thesis is presented that words are tools in the manner of awls and anvils. It is pleasant to think that just as awls and anvils are used to create halters and horseshoes, words create meaning.

    But it is also clear that Plato—feeling compelled to use metaphor to get at how words work and perform their magic —has flung us so to speak headlong into the thicket.

    r/oddlysatisfying - This Infinity Spiral Staircase That Goes Nowhere

    It doesn’t take us long to sidle up to the suspicion that we are trapped in metaphor and get queasy about feeling caught in a trap. It is a little too much like an Escherian staircase.

    Maybe already we’re starting to think that the quality of the metaphor colors the quality of experience. Or let’s just say, life itself.

    The prosaic, secularist way we describe a moment with profound transformative potential is a “midlife crisis”. But if words are tools and all we have to work with is this pallid phrase “midlife crisis”, woe-betide our forlorn souls. I mean, damn-it. How does that help a person to cope?

    The concept of liminal space gives us something slightly more useful than midlife crisis to reckon with. Moreover, it is faintly metaphoric.

    Dante’s dark forest (selva oscura) is the metaphor par excellence of a midlife crisis. We see the figure of Dante, the pilgrim, paralyzed by terror and fear in the very first canto as he is thrust back twice by allegorical beasts in his approach to the gate to hell until Virgil, his spiritual and poetic mentor, comes to his rescue. In the 1st canto, Dante already has us immersed in metaphor: sleep, hell, dark forests, mentors, and above all a “journey”, the metaphor supreme for spiritual growth.

    well, hi.

    Rebirth, replete with spiritual and religious connotation, trumps midlife crisis for utility. You can picture it. You can go to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and, on any given day, see unborn chicks under the plastic dome of a huge incubator trying to crack through their shells[1]. You can see with your own eyes the struggle to survive begin at the very instant of birth. The rebirth metaphor comes with pictures. It’s very easy to understand what it’s all about[2]. Try coming anywhere near as close with “midlife crisis”. Who invents such phrases? Milquetoast sociologists?

    A legend exists that the protean mind of Goethe was so vast and domineering that it sent many a would-be poet scurrying to seek refuge of as philosophers in the halls of academia. Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, so saturated intellectual thought with doubt that, by the time Kant came along, it was fashionable to doubt the existence of God. When Kant promoted the distinction of the palpable world and a world beyond sense, which he designated the phenomena and noumena, it was hypothesized that the noumena was radically unknowable and by corollary God. Then for decades, guys who might have made decent poets dashed their brains out trying to invent a logic that could punch a hole through the invisible wall between the noumena from the phenomena just to rescue the idea of God and prove that He exists. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer built a career out of mocking these attempts, knocking them down like a Stanley Cup goalie knocks down pucks.

    But any half-baked, warmed-over Calvinist could tell you that we are too puny and insignificant to apprehend anything so luminous as God. And the poet William Carlos Williams would exude “No ideas but in things.”

    So, the only way to approach transcendent objects is with transcendent tools and the go-to transcendental tool of poets and writers is metaphor. This is why fundamentalists are so fundamentally frustrating because they insist on the historicity of things and nothing that the imagination can produce.

    From the Greek, the word metaphor breaks down into the components: “meta”, meaning near to and “phorein” meaning to carry.

    Iconic ampora cup

    The iconic New York City coffee cup, the amphora cup, is so named because it has a picture of an amphora on it, the Greek name for a two handled vase. In Greek an amphora means literally something that is carried with two hands. The “phor” suffix is the same as in metaphor. It too derives from the root “phorein” to carry.

    I like to imagine that metaphor is like an amphora, or James Bond’s briefcase, or the so-called football in which are carried the nuclear codes. Only the codes are all forgotten. What’s inside is unknowable (the noumena in Kant’s nomenclature) and the only evidence we have of it is by the case we carry it in (the phenomena). Whereas science constantly frustrates itself trying to get closer to the root of all things, poetry takes a different tack and says this is close as you can get. It is ironically far more practical when it comes to spiritual truth.

    A good metaphor is the airplane rule, the one where people remind you to put your mask on yourself first. How many lives have been improved by this metaphor? And what is it really other than an apt retelling of the old admonition to love your neighbor as you love yourself?

    When I went to the doctor for a checkup some months ago and we were discussing the obstinate nature of the injuries to my left foot, she turned to me and pointed, “this foot is a metaphor you know.” My doctor was schooled in the Western tradition and though she is less occidental by the day, I smiled. Inside though, I was laughing my head off.

    1. Watch Baby Chick Hatching at the Museum of Science and Industry

    2. More daunting still is the New Testament imperative “Ye must be born again.”