October 22, 2008

Back to work with a loud thud. For a day or two I was able to think of the light I walked through as Irish light, and the people I talked to as Irish people, and this was neither wrong nor a delusion. I was able to pull the worlds together and walk in them as one. Maybe it will endure today. It is very dark and the only thing lit is the lamp over my keyboard, so the day cannot yet be known.

DJ and I went to Reynolds High to hear a concert of the Bryants’ choir and band. Even if the concert hadn’t been quite so good, it would have been pleasure to look on the eagerness of those young faces. Jack of the Wood afterward.

Voted in the room provided in new Zeis Hall on campus, the first time I have been there, all unfinished with dusty stone floors and everything looking bare and pale and rather noble. The act of voting didn’t have the drama I supposed once it would have, for it seems at this point that Obama must surely win. My arrow will be lost in the hail of them. Indeed, he must win, for it’s difficult to imagine a worse outcome than the hair-trigger geezer and the evolution-denying housewife. The Republican party deserves to be permanently thrown to the periphery, and some new force arise on the right, which is not tainted by ambition, deceit, murder, high-handedness, profligacy, and–it might as well be said-- treason. That our present President and Vice-President, our former Secretary of Defense, and a handful of their advisers will not likely die in prison as war criminals and subverters of the Constitution is a disappointment this generation will have to bear.

The Irish, of course, are intensely interested in our election. They will say, “Who are you for, then–? and wait with apprehension in their eyes, lest you say the wrong thing. Perhaps the rest of the world should be able to vote for our president, since he has so much at least symbolic power in their lives. Maybe each nation should be given a certain number of electoral votes to be added into the mix. If we really want an empire, we must give it some rights.

The white Christmas cactus, which took in summer on the front porch, is about to bloom copiously.