January 11, 2014

Fine hard rain on the windows.

W pushes forward with the house, and I allow myself to be pushed, knowing it is for the best in everything but my perhaps unhealthy sentiment for the plants in my garden. Will he honor the paw-paw trees? Will he root out the camellias? The children need a yard to play in. . . but, could the cyclamen be given a shay little corner? I’m making myself miserable thinking a year ahead . . . .

Meeting at university where we received our orders concerning Title IX. No one approves of violence or coercion or being “made to feel uncomfortable”– whatever that means– but the legislation undoes itself by allowing only one road to compliance. It replaces the discretion of the wise with a checklist in the hands of bureaucrats. All programs that do so– and they multiply– are doomed to damaging unintended consequences. We are assured the matters will be handled by “trained” personnel, but one understands that so much of “training” is the systematic elimination of healthy alternatives in order to validate someone’s doctoral thesis. Personal experience inclines me to some mockery in this arena, for the one time I was accused of inappropriateness along these lines it was an absurd lie– a handful of lies– protected by two semesters in which they were discussed by everybody but unknown to me.  When I could finally speak to them they were gone in a day, but certain damage was done. It was fascinating to hear that I was denied access to the accusations against me because, “Oh, he’ll just have some explanation and then it will go away.” That self-adoring hypocrite IG pleaded that I be denied promotion, presenting a time when I corrected in a meeting an error she had made as a “incomprehensible personal attack.”  All this was believed as long and as lip-smackingly as possible until light could be shed. Yet they were following the rules as they were then. There is nothing to stop a lie or a misapprehension from complicating a person’s life now, and the young lady who was explaining her rather extraordinary power to us did not fill me with confidence. Some people would like us to become a culture of informers.

I believe power differentials should be corrected or purified, not necessarily reversed.

God abuses me. To whom should I petition?

Circe sleeps, snoring softly. Under the rain it is a comforting sound. In my next life I would be content to be a cat, but it would have to be one of my cats.

Cats bring to mind an odd passage of the other night. There was a commercial about animal abuse preceding the part in the movie Pearl Harbor when the bombs begin dropping on the boys in the ships. Maybe it was just too many images of cruelty, but I began to feel such grief for the world that it cold hardly be borne. I felt like the Madonna, or Tolkien’s Nienna, weeping inconsolably over the really appalling wrongness of the world. This is hard for a Theist, for at some point one turns inevitably to the Silence and says, “You could end this, and yet you do not.” I have never doubted God. I have often hated him.

The space into which I move my archives at Riverside Industrial Park is equipped with sprinklers. I saw that and my heat sank. I whiff of smoke in the hallway and everything’s gone. I suppose I would take that as the world simplifying my life for me. Stripping it clean, which is an extreme measure of simplification.