"Are you envious because I am generous?"

The Red Vineyard --Vincent Van Gogh

It is the late expansiveness with which the kingdom of heaven is occupied that speaks so vividly:

And he went out again around noon, and around three o' clock, and did likewise. Going out about five o' clock, the landowner found others…

This continuous occupation of finding workers, even up until the last hour of day, is the constant inflection of the kingdom of heaven; the way heaven works.

If Jesus spoke many parables on the kingdom of heaven, again and again reiterating: "The kingdom of heaven is like…", then there is something obviously here that Jesus knew we were particularly blind to. We see here the kingdom becoming more and more lavish in its outpouring, and not exhausted in the least, the later the day gets, which of course also implies the darker the day gets.

Who goes out to hire more workers when there is only an hour left in the day? Indeed, we ask this every time we wonder what the use is of doing something which our circumstances tell us it would be foolish and to no avail to do the labour. But this is the way Christ works, in His bride, the Church, in our daily lives. We build on what Christ has already established, and we cannot be saved without works. A great consolation in the discomfort of our labour is that Jesus has laboured already to free us - and His labour was far greater, far more discomforting. Our consolation is not only that Jesus experienced the pain that we will have to experience, though perhaps not in the same way or in the same intensity (granted we follow Him and keep His word); and not only that our pain is little compared to the pain Jesus experienced, but that Jesus has identified Himself to that suffering so that no amount of pain can separate us from Him; we will find Him there.

There is this astonishingly joyful sense in knowing we are the children of the eleventh hour. That our labour time is short, and our reward imminent. It is not only because our labour period is short that we find it joyful (indeed, we should be ready to give thousands of lifetimes of labour for the Kingdom of Heaven), but that the chaos within ourselves will be made short order of; that the despairing rush of machinating Time will be ruined, as the eternal depth and as-yet-not-comprehended end of our work begins to resolve itself - in the face of the ideological opposition of our enemies. Our work becomes some of the most intense because it is the pinnacle work, and because of it, the work most infused with abundant and miraculous graces.

The reading in its entirety, from Matthew 20:1-16:

Jesus told his disciples this parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire labourers for his vineyard. After agreeing with them for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. Going out about nine o’clock, the landowner saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You too go into my vineyard, and I will give you what is just.’ So they went off. And he went out again around noon, and around three o’clock, and did likewise. Going out about five o’clock, the landowner found others standing around, and said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They answered, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You too go into my vineyard.’ When it was evening the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Summon the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and ending with the first.’ When those who had started about five o’clock came, each received the usual daily wage. So when the first came, they thought that they would receive more, but each of them also got the usual wage. And on receiving it they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last ones worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us, who bore the day’s burden and the heat.’ He said to one of them in reply, ‘My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what is yours and go. What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous?’ Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

How easy to mistake this parable as an affirmation of equality; to take it to mean that in heaven there is no hierarchal difference in reward; that in heaven the work that was done on earth becomes irrelevant in the now bequeathed eternal equality; that the specific works on earth were just sorts of arbitrary ways for God to see if we would follow orders, and that now in heaven, He bestows some assembly-line dispensation of "equal" reward.

How easy to assume this and close up the parable and walk away assured and safe and sound from the formidable notion that in heaven there are mansions made to the specifications of a particular soul.

This is no example of the landowner being equal in his pay. It is rather an emphatic example of the landowner being especially and gratuitously generous. And not just generous out of some social-minded welfare pity, but so disinterestedly generous and gracious towards those who work for him, as to give the one-hour workers their wages even in front of the eyes of the other workers without thinking they would complain. And so disinterestedly generous as to be not generous in just one fixed form that is then divvied out, but increasingly generous; for remember the hired workers from nine o' clock and noon and three o' clock. If he was being generous in giving the same wage to the nine o' clock-hired workers, then he was being quite a bit more generous in giving the same to the noon-hired workers, in which case he was being even more generous in giving the same wage to the three o' clock-hired workers. And to the five o' clock-workers, he was being generous in the extreme.

If that weren't enough, he starts giving the payment to the one-hour workers first.

Again, let's reiterate: it is the late expansiveness with which the kingdom of heaven is occupied that speaks so vividly. And elusively. Yet nothing is more fixed and solid. God is innocence. As the day dwindles, God expands His gifts, His solace, His anointing. Is it possible that our material affluence and luxury has blinded us to this and kept us hindered from seeing and accepting it? We have mistaken stasis for security. But our one true security is the thunderclap of God's complete otherness.

We come to one of the reasons why Jesus told parables: because they had a successive structure, as stories must necessarily have, that inherently informed the listener about the hierarchical way that God works. The way that God cannot work without somehow building on what came previous by His hand - and cannot build on what came previous without resolving more clearly its shape and colour, so that what came previous shows more clear than if it had been left alone.

But what if all this time we have not, in a certain sense, even arrived at the first work on which God has wanted us to build? Or arrived at it, but not realized it, which prevents one from building, or building with more abandon? It is never just the "moral" of the parable that matters, but the fact of the parable itself.

So, it is not a case of God equalizing every soul with the same pay. Rather, it is a case of God, first hiring the labourers in the morning on a just wage, and those labourers going into his vineyard to work for Him. Full-stop. Then God going out and hiring some people at nine o' clock. Full-stop. God then going out and hiring some at noon. Full-stop. Then God going out and hiring some more later. Full-stop. Then again, God going out and finding those who have not been hired, that is, the small, the invisible, the neglected, the spat out and forsaken, sinners and idlers, those who cannot prove to be removed from God's graces - in other words: us.

Now what God gives to each as their wages, it is imperative to see it the same way as God went about hiring them. That is to say, it is not God "thinking equally", but rather specially and distinctively in each individual hiring; such that though He is God and can see all things eternally in an instant, He has the full capacity, as the second Person of the Trinity, to enter into each specific situation as though He had not hired any other workers on that day. God is innocence.

He did not go out and hire the noon-workers until he had hired the morning ones. One might even say, in a mood of fancy that may not be too far wrong, that it was the hiring of the morning workers and the sight of them working in the vineyard that set the landowner with great delight and joy, so much so, that it sent him out again on the very overflow of that joy, to find more workers, who in their turn, would send him out for yet more.

Shall we put here the parable of the mustard seed?

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” -- Matthew 13:31-32

There is no equality in heaven but what usurps its desired dimension of being on the same ground of knowing about one another, is love.

There is love in heaven, but not equality.

What grants each soul in heaven the same amount of fulfillment and no one lacking, is Love, not equality.

We do well not to carry over our citizenry-rights into God's treatment of us - though our citizenry-rights be based on God's law. We should not presume. We should rather throw ourselves on His mercy - and generosity.

And the economy? What about the economy of the kingdom of heaven? It does not hoard. It does not make slaves. It does not give what will only decay and pass away. Nor does it entreat of each with bland equanimity and safe comfort. Nor does it risk its own balance by expansion. It gives what expands - on into eternity. Even while it is given, here, right here, on this material earth.

It is time to look and see it: the joy that we have been missing. And the work of the kingdom of heaven has a way of alighting on the most diffuse and unremarkable of things - and people.

Mother of our Saviour

Some beautiful photos of a small procession of Our Lady of Fatima (with a Lady of Lourdes statue) to be found here.

I'm always amazed at how a statue of Mary seen from various perspectives, or seen at different times, takes on noticeably different poises. Sometimes indescribably mild; sometimes tilted with sadness; sometimes radiant and queenly; and sometimes just...so humanly a mother, smiling.

Everything will be brought to light

Acrostic Poem (on Pumpkins)

Peter, Peter…well, perhaps he was a cannibal.
Unforthcoming is the rhyme - does not tell
More than it means to say. Sort of like the gourd
Plump and glowing in the fields, oddly orange,
Keeping to its selfsame shape, its own hearth-warm orb,
Indulging none with any word: and so we set
Nimble Jack's candle into it, quite lit, you see,
So further deepen the gourd's seat mystery.

Meditation

There is a word I am to speak. And it is the word I persistently fail at time and again. But it is, as persistently as I fail it, the one word that I am to speak. It even takes up my failure into the resolution of its countenance - and makes an even more demanding proposal.

The word is impossible to speak, for it is about the impossible that happened in our world. It is a sacred extension of that impossibility which really happened. It is about the Absolute becoming perfect man, not donning the form of man as a cloak, but becoming man incarnate - once and for all - and that Love extenuating Himself so much that His love went down to the floor of hell - and floored it.

In the rising flood of desecration, blasphemy and outrages against God and His ordinances, there are two reactions, which are hence mistakes. One descries, not completely wrongly, a coming Justice and coins that Justice as one's own personal retribution, or vindication. But that justice cannot be our own vindication unless we give ourselves to long-suffering, and intend to keep suffering long. The other which is worse is the lukewarm presumption that God's mercy justifies one's own complacence and ingratitude - that somehow, because of God's love, such blasphemy and outrage make no difference to God.

There is a third which is not reaction, nor inaction, and it is the best way. It is the one word I am to speak, and which I fail at time and again.

Threshing Fall

Autumn sun, the burnisher of leaves,
is poured in flora veins and flushes forth
colours that are the light's pinnacle phase;
the seamless trace of its transforming graze,
untouchable, its exposure, and the shades
show where they weren't pierced, where leaves still are green
but on the same tree whose top is apocalypse.

Autumn wind, the banisher of leaves,
billows up branches, displays the blue beyond,
and as it further pocks the canopies,
comes with speech extended for the other fronds
of flames, portends them stricken on candles
like spectral sputtering ember-tonsils,
fluttering in jack-o-lanterns' fat gaping mouths.

The loosening of the leaves' last frail handles,
thus plucked, are grafted onto wind at night:
leaves' freewheel trails that take up the spirals
which they fill with their deaths and cause to burn.
The banished leaves set aflame their banisher;
set invisibility aflame,
in free air burn, in night air burn, above
the ground, in spiral wakes and ploughing droves.

Autumn cold, the desiccator of leaves,
sets into their beatified matter,
sets them for shattering; sets, sets, sets,
and leaves the matter bereft, for the coming
greater cold, the whiter, burning cold.

The child is father to the man

As a youngling I never got into Roald Dahl's books. I believe it had something to do with Quentin Blake's illustrations, which I found as attractive as a closet full of empty wire coat-hangers. I did read The Twits in grade six (no, not a class assignment), and vaguely remember that it just got weird, immersive though it was.

For me, and here we're talking grade one and two, the man was Bill Peet.

His illustrations had that entire inhabitable earthiness that I also found in Calvin and Hobbes and Winnie the Pooh and Pogo, though with Pogo I didn’t understand in the least what the characters were talking about. But that's beside the point, because it was their surrounding world which I wanted to inhabit. Like whenever Calvin and Hobbes (who I did understand; I had the 'collections' in book form) wandered through the woods and were at the creek; it was a landscape I inhabited. The same goes for a number of children's stories that I can't remember the names of, but the vivid mood of their worlds remain.

And then there was The One that now I have second thoughts about, or at least recognize some honest feelings I had about it as a child: Where the Wild Things Are.

No, it's not because its author and illustrator has revealed himself to be gay, having lived together with his fifty year partner, who was a psychoanalyst. No, it's not because one of his other books is one of the most widely banned from schools for showing the genitalia of the story's protagonist boy (a story which, by the by, I tried reading numerous times as a child and found it so not enchanting that it was as though some art-nouveau designer had his illustrations matched with the writing of some blurb writer from Sears catalogue).

It is because the book seems to be the love of Spike Jonze, who has made a movie of the book. Uhm, waste of time? I have no regard for his movies, to the point that if he takes something as the object of his affections, which was something that I had a liking for, I would then seriously question my liking for it. I think he makes a bigger ass of himself than M. Night Shyamalan. At least Shyamalan doesn't have that nasty sophisticated psychoanalytic slant which pretends to give Jonze's films credibility.

I want to be honest. Where the Wild Things Are has excellent illustrations that perhaps go beyond storybook illustration. It's like Henri Rousseau meets William Blake. Yes, inhabitable, and yes, a childhood favourite. Yet, and yet, there was something I vividly remember about this book. When it got to the ending, where the boy Max is back in his room and his soup is there, it left me with this hung-over empty feeling. I distinctly remember disliking how Max screams at his mother and it goes unresolved (this isn't to say I was some saint as a kid; I could throw a tantrum that would make Max look tame). There was something there that did not sit well. It's as though the story is about some kind of pre-adolescent transgression through determined isolation - like the discovery of masturbation. Which is something the films of Spike Jonze pursue with gimped, retarded relish.

I float that out there as 'thinking out loud'. I know and remember the way the book made me feel, and so I simply wonder.

Dappled Things out and about

Latest Dappled Things (Mary Queen of Angels) is out, right here.

I liked Dena Hunt's The Salvation of Glorianne. Crisp and pared to the essentials, the story yet holds real weight. Especially in its wonderfully understated ending.

Arthur Powers' excerpt from his novel Shadow Companion, entitled, Carla and Jaime is very well wrought with suspense and vivid description.

Incense cedar (Libocedrus decurrens)

Collected this handful today. You can see some of the actual seeds in the last picture, just above (click on either of the photos to see better close-ups). The capsules remind me of pistachio nuts. That's in appearance, not taste. They are inedible. They have a very delicate and faint apple scent.

As with many trees that are commonly called "cedar", they are not true cedrus. It is from the cypress family (Cupressaceae). Its genus is Thuja.

The shape of the mature trees remind me of smaller giant redwoods. Where I gathered these seeds there is grove of them, and when you're in their vicinity on a sunny day the smell will let you know why they are called incense cedar.

The wood is resistant to decay and, among its many uses, pencils are made from the wood.

I wonder how many of these seeds will be viable. Here's hoping a lot.

I went in search of some old movies...

How is it that since DVDs replaced VHS in video rental stores, especially chain outlets like Rogers (a telecommunications company), the actual selection in films has dropped dramatically? You walk into a Rogers now and the one thing you notice, aside from the images of horror and porn on the covers, is that overall, the guts have been sucked out of what used to be an alright selection.

Hyperbolically speaking, it is sort of like a Victorian leaving his living room for a few days and coming back to find that his ornately carved and lushly padded furniture has been replaced with Ikea skeletons. Hyperbolically speaking.

It is strange because supposedly DVDs take up less space than VHS. Part of it is the onslaught of video games, which now take up a good portion of the store. And of course an entire side wall must be devoted to gadgetry, and wires and parts for the gadgetry. And another wall for television series.

On top of that is the sometimes dismal ordering of the movies. You can't trust the employees anymore to alphabetize the movies in a particular section; or even to keep the movies in their proper section. Sort of like the way that hardly anyone on a cash register now can count out change if it's given to him or her. We can thank the internet for that, and the surplus of gadgetry. It's not lack of brains but sheer lack of ordinary patience, the inability to focus on normal concrete things - like coins.

Everyone is buzzing and humming like a computer in a thin, pallid present. It's the latest season of this or that television series, and if it's a movie, it's the latest, most vapid one yet. After all, I don't feel like thinking too much tonight. As if anyone ever does on any night. I feel I feel I feel...I feel just like a funny one...Oh! How about this latest Jack Black?

And then there is the alternative for these ones who feel they've been having too much junk food: Documentaries. Since when did the documentary section become relatively inflated? It used to be a weeny sub-section, generally and properly unnoticed. Now it seems to be growing.

Excuse me while I say it: Documentaries' increasing popularity is a symptom of our culture's collective sickness. Documentaries are a chilly blight that comes to wreak havoc on the lowered immunity of fiction's body. Documentaries are intellectual fetishism at its worst. They are one of the reasons for adolescents and young men and young women entitling themselves to the intellectual pursuit as though it were something they themselves could just add on to their disconnected "lifestyle" of culturally nomadic consumption. Hehehehe...Jack Black is so funny...screw you Bush, I'm smarter than Aristotle! I know so because I understand Chomsky! I became a pro on the subject in two hours, and while eating popcorn too. And chai tea non-fat latte.

Documentaries are the worst form of film. I have in mind here particularly the psuedo-intellectual/political/social-awareness type. Yes, even the ones I would agree with. Expelled? Haven't seen it yet. There's its "rebuttal": Expelled Exposed. Haven't seen it, don't care. I'm still waiting for Expelled Exposed Exposed.

That is not to say there can't be any good ones or downright interesting ones, because there are. Hoop Dreams, for one. There are Herzog's. I do not like his documentaries that proclaim to be so. Because they are not. He adds and changes stuff according to his slant. But his films that utilize straight documentary footage and put it together to form a film that is not documentary but ecstatic sorts of filmic poems - those ones I like. Like Fata Morganna and Lessons of Darkness. I've seen lots of good ones. But they are not the apple of film's eye. They are not its brains or heart or hands or feet or back.

Fictional representation, even when based on true stories, is the home of film. Do you remember those years 2001-2003? Those years that were connected by something so sprawling and immersive and enchanting and deep on movie screens? What was it that excited people so, barely containing themselves to see the next one? Ah, the sprawl of first seeing The Fellowship of the Ring! And going back to see it again. And again. And anticipating the others. Yes, there was quite a bit that was done not very well with these films (in fact some days I'm inclined to say their virtues are minimal), and some that was done just really badly, but because they are the Lord of the Rings and sincerely so...well, even if they did everything in their power to screw it up, they probably still would have ended up with good films, given they retained the story's arch. Because of Tolkien. Because of his story. His imagination. His sub-creation.

We are sick. Sick to do death with ourselves. Documentaries on the rise are a sign of the dwindling of creative production. They are the sign of a people who are chucking out their treasures and resorting to a kind of narrow barbarism, a false centralizing of our intellectual and imaginative resources. Where is our ability to lose ourselves in order to gain ourselves? Story come back to us.

Leeks

Yesterday, a desire for leek soup came out of nowhere. I searched and found this person's recipe.

The taste is delicious as the soup is simple. I got my mom to make it that evening and I helped. You can use half-and-half cream instead of heavy cream. And we found you don't need to mash the potatoes.

I had a friend in my teen days whose English parents made leek soup from the leeks in their garden. If I remember right, leeks will stay in the garden for a while into late fall, maybe even winter. They are perfect for soups for those cooler gusty darkening days.

I can see this soup going better with sourdough than with french bread. I can also envision this going well with fried crumbled bacon sprinkled on top. Then, with some red wine (in a tumbler, not a long stem) you're all set.

Make it a double recipe and put some in the fridge in jars for it tastes even better reheated later.

Signs of justice

So, Friday's verdict that found O.J. Simpson guilty of 12 charges which included robbery and kidnapping, occurred thirteen years to the day after his acquittal of the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Perhaps the jury was aware of this impending date and held off for a while just to give the sentence that added vindication. But the entire coalescence of the trial that brought it so close to that date? God knows what He's doing. Things like that simply do not "just happen".

One world, and then another

The domes that are the scrubs are surged with green
and fleck the margins of expansive fields.
Because the green sea’s vestured weaving
we do not see the windows and the doors,
the countless circulating corridors
in the singing scrubs’ interiors.
But see the birds, slashing airborne crescents
over the field’s green sea’s fire?
They know of every opening one of them.

The woods that are about to lose their leaves
pivot them sadly back and forth like the queen
waves her hand; or tremble further faster
to hiss and seethe like fire, that hottest
at its peak will even roar in wet wind.
The birds who weave about the ruin of the woods
forget about every opening, the green secret halls,
the full-bursting out into widely smiling fields,
but in the woods' widening, leaf-loss, seize on still berries.

Ship-shape

Life is a heap of rejection slips for the poems you wrote.
Brunt reality's unwieldy retort strangely does not revoke
the life of your poems; does not kill, but which wants you
to receive life first receiving its hardness, which is you;
that is to say: one's hardness must be broken, which we find hard.
Where one seems soft often is where one is hard - a sneer that hasn't happened yet.
Unwieldy reality asks for the significances
of them (the poems) on freedom's hard pat ground, without due acceptance,
but with the odd exceptions of acceptances
for the ones you tossed off in a spell of lightness.
To wield them and write them with light
that is not from you, with light and for Light
through a glass darkly; find and find again
lightness is a hard thing that is not frivolity.
Reality's splendorous and modest that suavely
opens for one a path, first requires rejection's air to breathe.

Overhear

“…He has known grief” was the end of what was spoke
about a third between two beings at my bedside as I woke
at three in dark and tried to hold in mind
the things they said before this, but my mind
in waking would not retain it, only: “…He has known grief”.

Memory seen by eyes

Like the ground was water to him
that to me was talcum caked trail
wobble-wise in woods, either side
girt with fern, rusted layered furls:

he lay as one dead; and it would
seem he was so, were it not
the up-tilt of his head, held
above the floor one hairbreadth,

cooling himself? What doing there
in diffuse noon’s again again
leaves-refracted lights that jounced,
did a jig over all the path and him?

Even with approach – close, more close,
he would not alter, would not extend
his sides with breathing; but when I
pushed a clip of dirt with a twig

towards his tail, his other end flickered
wan violet flame. Instantly he
poured out odour that brought back times
when we would grab such, sun-loose

in field with hands bare, often in
weeds that stung, demanded pay
for taking these cool sliding braids;
nettle more hurtful than our prey.

Star-bursts in grass, whose prickled beams
would not seem to hurt what we sought,
sometimes cloistered them. These, rare times seen
from winging owls, like seaweed

would hang from a lifted sea log.
We never kept them long, extended
catch and release, in his or mine yard,
sometimes found later, unforeseen,

when lifting a clump of light grass
like a tangled toupee from off
the composting heap: expose one, still
as a lump of lead, in dull brown scales,

wound around itself in frozen vortex.
They were the initial surprise
from looking at the singing floor,
and we would carry on in our

own trajectories: lore on lore
of old games made new, new sights made
familiar, familiar sights
reseen with new or old games.

Then the summer lore comes back, in
sudden stops of eye-catch, on ponderous
walkway whitegrey; and where to go,
for the one on floor and I both,

caught in the quiet of the woods?
Junction sweet; his patience bettered mine:
each second held his fate, whether
sailing off and find a feast, or

caught up and talon flown, to be
beaked to pieces by owlets.
All held. I tried the twig once more. Along
his sides were hair-thin lines of lime,

with which he of a sleek sudden
struck away, out of the margins
that enclosed him: no ballyhoo,
reverberating snap or scare;

no again or to or start or from,
essence derived from winding silk
could one from seething silk, let blood,
like the ground was water to him.