3. Bobbies Presentation – 1.16.24
Setting up a 20 minute focus session.
As I reflect this morning, on Bobbies presentation this week, I find that my notes have scattered to the wind, but what remains: a print out of Ezel Ballad of the Landman, and a reflection.
I reflect to that dark room, and the imagery of hard labor comes to my mind. Living in a mountainous place, quite, disconnected from civilization? There aren’t buildings, only the trees.
I think about the deep intelligence that responded to the proposal of the Landman as he pitched an offer. I think about what it means to own land, and I long for the lived experience of my grandfather’s wisdom that dug out basements. I’ve always told people that he could build a house from the ground up, but wasn’t all I saw an basement unfinished? Maybe, but not exactly – their surely was more.
What is the main questions in this play? Should these people sell their land to companies seeking to do fracking in the area? How will they survive if they don’t? What is civilization apart from money lenders and debt?
I think about the remarks from The 11 convention of the southern Christian leadership conference.
What number are we on today in 2025?
I fear the racial tensions that still seem to resonate following the assassination of a man like Martin Luther King, though I consider was there no parity and the death of Kennedy? Yet, how does a man or a society break the universal law: ‘Thou Shall Not Murder’ and expect to avoid the tumult produced thereby?
Again I thought about the cold and how natural gas is used to heat our homes and cook our food. I thought about the Native American who collected Ginsing, and slept in caves facing east for warmth.
I wondered about this whole effort, who has the intelligence and the capacity to effectively engage in such a sweeping industrial effort as Fracking? Are such things good for America, particularly in light of the formation and agitation of the Far East?
I think about Iraq and our relationships to the Middle East, about how deeply underlined these wars were by energy the need for energy, but after perhaps for power?
I consider this thing to be a manifestation of power in American, as the quote from Martin Luther King remains in front of me, “that power without love is reckless and abusive… (Does the land man really love the land its people?) … that love without power is sentimental and anemic.” (Is this land sentimental and anemic, do its people struggle for substance sustenance.)
What is salvation?
ah! A mighty final question. One that we must be present with each day. I’m thinking about how our work is part of something bigger. Like the basements your grandfather dug but the complete houses you didn’t see. Knowing what to do and how to do it–even if one doesn’t see the final product for the consumer–can still feel right and be good. Work well done What is harder, I think, is to know what is right even as we need to work toward it. Here is a poem I wrote when I was in my early twenties thinking about that question….
SNAKING THE DRAIN
In the night after I have spent the day
dropped to my stomach, the cigarettes burn brighter
across the street as the bodiless voices breathe.
The heavy screens around the porch,
not enough to keep out the exhaust, block the stars.
The street lamp brings dimness from darkness,
and from somewhere, perhaps from the sewer,
comes the smell of river.
How did I arrive here—
this place of bread-twisties, tampons and grease?
I live among the pipes that bring
in the clean water and carry out my shit.
My mother first brought me under and pointed to the darkness.
It did not welcome as I started into it.
Tomorrow or the next day I will go there again.
Beneath the house there are no voices
and the walls cling to themselves like yogis.
There the darkness has become my portrait
as I crawled and scraped in it,
carrying wrenches and wires, trying to see into the cracks.
Over the surfaces of pipes and foundations
I came to know myself
as someone who cared about where they lived,
someone whose hands could take apart and put together:
this is not only a cold storage place for old beds and rotten books.
I stop and breathe.
There is the light smell of clothes worn one day
too long and then worn again. I would rather spend a day
in this moist crate.
Old people without teeth, like my grandmother,
are what I have time for now.
Mortar and rust, the smell of mold:
I take all this into myself.
Under the house I keep myself from saying extra words,
though surely this would be the place to say them,
where they might be preserved,
where there would be nothing to compete with.
We all live under someone else’s name. Trap or shelter.
Ten years ago Bob Marley died of cancer
and under the house I could wail out a few good songs.
All the time I find proof that devotion is not crazy,
like the gutted church in Germany where shattered baroque statues
lean two hundred feet above the ground
and now they sell wine in the basement.
In mine, I just keep my pipes clean.
It takes nothing to put your mark on this world.