Buzz's Axiom

I was texting with a friend shortly after the news broke that North Korea was proposing that it just might test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific. This, of course, came shortly after our own President's suggestion that he might "totally destroy" another society. Both of us, my friend and I, were wrestling with much the same question. Wait a minute -- we thought -- could something like a nuclear war actually happen? I mean, really? For all the bombastic world-weary pessimism I affect on this blog, my answer of course was no. Beneath it all, my doubts about the future are paper-thin. I may obsessively fear the worst. I may plan for it. But I don't really expect it. Perhaps I believe that by maintaining my intensity of fear I am actively preventing it. Every time I'm in the vicinity of Yellowstone, say, at least ten percent of my mind is trained on the seething caldera under my feet, and wondering when it will go off. But I'd be as surprised as anyone if it actually did.

Five poems written this summer

Bowling

Once you are grown and have left school
  you start to think
That some once-feared activities now are safe
Don’t be a fool

The Fever

On my way back from D.C. this week, where we were part of a vigil-turned-protest to defend DACA, I must have picked up something nasty on the plane ride home because I have spent this weekend with one of the worst fevers I can remember since college – when I was still living amidst the constantly recirculated air of dorm life (and full of the dubious microbes of dorm-mates). This is the sort of agony that can easily be diminished, of course, by a well-timed dash of ibuprofen. I have a private folk medical theory, however, – which checks out well enough, according to my sister and what she was able to find in a pinch on the internet – that the Advil works its magic in part by suppressing one’s immune response (of which fever is one manifestation), and this in turn allows the virus to survive longer. And so if one can spare the time to be incapacitated by fever, it is better to let it run its raging course unimpeded. The sickness will be more uncomfortable, but will be over more quickly.

Shusaku Endo's "Silence"

I was in the shower, and I knew I wanted to read Shusaku Endo's Silence. Just like that. Suddenly, after all this time. I've learned by now not to disobey these mysterious promptings, when they come, so I went out to purchase a copy shortly thereafter, but I was confronted as I left the house with two psychological obstacles to doing so. First was that I'd never wanted to read this novel before, despite having been vaguely aware of its existence and content since teenager-hood. The reason, I suppose, was that -- like all true sectarians -- my adolescent self shied away from reading any other sect's martyrology. I was only too happy to read about the socialist martyrs. The communist martyrs. The Unitarians and the heretics and the infidels burned at the stake, and so on. But Christian martyrs filled me with unease. I was far more comfortable seeing the Church as the persecutors rather than the victims.