I just finished my first viewing of the 1944 film A Canterbury Tale, written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and I am feeling deep wonderment in its wake -- I do believe it has gone straight onto my Ten All Time Favorite Films list. If you've never seen it, I cannot recommend it more highly -- it's a plumb miracle of film making. Pure magic. Already I am longing to watch it again.

I was struck just minutes into it that you could take practically two out of every three frames from this film and frame them and hang them in an art gallery and accurately describe the resulting show as containing some of the greatest British photography of the 1940s, and by film's end that feeling had only deepened. Shot after shot after scene after scene is framed and paced and sequenced with an unfailing eye for beauty, proportion, aptness, framing, juxtaposition, contrast, surprise. The central structural metaphor of both the tale and the manner of its telling is the ancient pilgrim's road to Canterbury, its long, narrow, sinuous turning through a haunting progression of reveals, ever-new perspectives on the ever-unfolding countryside matching or inspiring or uncovering new perspectives within each pilgrim's understanding, and though this tale, set during the Second World War, only intermittently intersects the actual pilgrim's road of lore, the way the film unfolds visually and narratively mimics that old road's turning, especially the moment when the road crests the hill and at last fully opens to the eye that first magnificent view of Canterbury and Canterbury Cathedral in the distance. The story hints at, plays at the memory of deep blood and evokes it too, without fuss (virtually everything in this film unfolds as naturally and effortlessly), by bringing the human imagination to bear on points of human contact with and through the natural world, contact crossing centuries, millennia, human experience simultaneously reaching across and joined by such gulfs to touch and recapitulate human experience, fellow to fellow, across deep time. Bells and turning wheels and human laughter and plucked strings: where none rings.

I will not now précis the tale per se; this has been done quite well elsewhere. But there is a marvelous balance between the number of scenes depicting the conversations of women with women and the number of those depicting the conversations of men with men, and of women with men; it is of course the first combination that far too often goes missing in far too many films. And most of those conversations unfold with a delightful nimbleness and naturalness. The only dropping off might be with the children -- a gang of playacting boys (wargames of course) are parlayed by two of the men into helping solve a mystery, but there is no comparable involvement by the girls, save as expressive if mostly silent witnesses at stations along the larger Tale's winding way; yet the more I think on it the more I feel it is unfair to call that not comparable, for the witness is felt, it comes across. The balance, I find, remains, however dynamic and in flux.

The sheer variety of both cinematic and narrative situations is jaw-dropping, yet that variety never seems artificial or contrived, though of course by definition they are both. There is something very Oz-like about A Canterbury Tale, Wizard of that is, and yet one could argue the profundity of their differences quite readily and at length. But finally both films invoke the kind of magic that takes you home again, that restores you to what's deep in the blood -- which may be the only kind of magic worth wielding, worth yielding to.

A short story of mine (my first professional fiction sale, as it happens) was just published in the new issue (#11) of Black Clock, a trade paperback literary journal published by CalArts and edited by L.A. novelist Steve Erickson.

Don DeLillo describes Black Clock as "a journal of ideas, provocations and cultural leaps, with some of the best writing anywhere."

A single copy of the journal can be ordered here:

http://www.fictionondemand.com/cubecart/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=26

And the Black Clock page devoted to the new ish, with scrollable Table of Contents, is here:

http://www.blackclock.org/#/issue11

Samuel R. Delany once wrote that (to wildly paraphrase) we are most influenced by those writers we only partially read, writers we read at and dance around and dream upon, writers whose books we stop reading a third of the way through because it stops us in our tracks or launches us from hers and sets our imaginations flying with new possibilities, and Somehow we then can't quite settle ourselves down long enough to finish the book that so inspired us.

Ursula K. Le Guin has largely been that kind of writer for me, never more so than in Always Coming Home. When I first read the book's preface or prelude or opening prayer, "Towards an Archeology of the Future," it lit me up and set me ringing inside. It was and is among the most profound utterances I have ever read. At the time, I read it aloud to anyone who would listen, and practically memorized its cadences, the musicality of its sinuous word-paths, and the meanings those pathways sang me to haunt me to this day. I have not read it in years, though I dearly wish I had access to that text now. It still resonates with me as a sacred expression of an essential truth about the nature of existence, one I have never seen better stated anywhere; if I were to compile a personal Bible, it would go in. I consider those three pages of prose to be scripture, in the dearest sense.

I was never able to get more than a hundred pages into the novel that followed, and doubt I ever will, though I may try again one day. A few of the poems caught my eye and ear and heart; I loved the plainness of their truth-speaking. But however much I loved the design and layout of the Harper and Row first edition, and, more importantly, however much I loved the idea of the work as a whole, I could not bring myself to read it, beyond that opening prayer, which held everything in the gentlest of cupped hands.

Ursula was my fourth-week instructor at Clarion West in 1987. For reasons I have forgotten, unlike the instructors for the other five weeks of the workshop, she was unable to hold one-on-one conferences with the 22 students, so one evening, to make up for it (she said), she held court for an hour in the common area of the dormitory floor at Seattle University where most of the students were staying. We overflowed the couches and spread out in a semicircle on the floor around her. She sat in an armchair, tiny and radiant, and talked and answered our questions.

I asked her if she knew Pauline Oliveros; it seemed to me she must. Ursula spoke of an international meeting she had attended of women artists who worked in many mediums; I think it was held in Eugene, Oregon. And there was a meeting where all the women sat in a circle, with Pauline in the center. And while Pauline remained silent, the women began to argue about a controversial topic. The conversation grew heated and misunderstandings proliferated. Then a moment came, Ursula said, when Pauline spoke up, very softly, but instantly everyone fell silent; and Pauline said, "Let your experience be your truth." And from that moment there was a shift from arguing over the conclusions the participants drew from their experiences to sharing the experiences per se; the conversation blossomed into something extraordinary and the group achieved a deep accord. Ursula's story struck me then as now as being deeply characteristic both of herself and of Pauline; it was an honor and pleasure to hear her tell it.

Ursula K. Le Guin has deeply graced many lives, and her work will continue to do so long after she is gone. I am profoundly glad that she continues to dwell among us, and hope and pray she may long continue to shine her unique light into the world.

I woke this morning fully enough that it seemed that really that was all the sleep I'd be given and it was time to get up. But I resisted and after some time I slipped back to sleep and dreamt that I received delivery of some trunks and dresser drawers that had long before gone astray on some forgotten move, they were filled with old possessions of mine, many of which were quite precious, and as I dug through them, seeing what was there and marveling as old unused memories reasserted themselves, I finally found tucked amongst bed clothes a single book, round cornered and bound in some soft thin leather, pale crimson, its pages of a textured paper I cannot describe but which was luxurious and old and of a crimson paler yet, a memory of rose, and about half the pages were filled with writings from many hands in many colors of ink, and about half its pages still remained to be filled, still remain to be filled, still remain.

Buzz Aldrin took

the sacrament on the moon,

cup, wine, wafer, prayer:

cross made out of nothing

but bottled air

stirred into brief

cruciform presence

by an articulate hand,

human reverence

hovering in a bubble

above an ancient bone-dry sea

that knew more change

in a few life-pulsing hours

than in the thousand thousand

millennia that came before.

Neil Armstrong bore witness,

spoke not a word,

told no one what,

in that timeless, momentary

ceremony before their

long short walk,

he'd seen and heard,

a flickering cross of life,

or nothing,

on a briefly

untranquil sea.

Somewhere in dream this morning a bit of "Latin" turned up: longat tocsin. Well it's not Latin at all, of course -- googleplexing I discover that "longat" is Finnish for "many large clouds". I thought a tocsin was a siren, but I gather its best definition is a signal of alarm raised on (or performed on) bells. So: many large clouds clanging with bells. Or then again it could simply be "long at tocsin", long raising an alarm. Either way I seem to be giving myself a warning. Certainly the whole world seems filled with dire clamor, and damned distracting dire clamor at that.

My last lover was deeply, imperiously insistent on her interpretive prerogatives, and too often considered or treated contrary interpretations as attacks or betrayals. She's not alone. In Buddhist instruction last night, the point turned on the stance or attitude that events don't happen "to" us, but around us and with us and through us, and often yes we suffer or enjoy the consequences, and contribute our full share, but to personalize most events is to misunderstand them and worse to enclose ourselves in that misunderstanding, cut ourselves off. So too with interpretation -- the goal being to let go of it sufficiently to -- what? To simply dwell in I AM, pure being, hovering in and flowing through the only time and place there can ever be, the ground beneath, before, and beyond all interpretation. And possibly getting some work done while we're at it.

I dreamt John Clute was extolling the virtues of Little, Big to the Queen of England, who responded by disappearing inside her carapace, only to reappear tiny, vibrant, fairy-like at the balcony set into the crown of her head.

Recently a woman at one of the two churches I attend semi-regularly asked me to write a brief autobiography for an issue of the monthly church newsletter. The exercise was an oddly hopeful one to undertake, and had its surprises, though now I am most struck by its omissions. The piece was published on Friday in an edition of 250 copies, under the title (not mine) "The Person in the Next Pew: Ron Drummond in his own words"; here is what I wrote:


I appear to be full-blood Scots; both sides of my family made their way from Scotland to North America during the nineteenth century.

My mother's father was in the Canadian Air Force during the First World War; he was shot down by the Red Baron behind enemy lines, and in order to get back to the Allied side he had to walk across a battlefield with his wounded gunner slung over his shoulder. Got Jesus something fierce as a result, went into the ministry, became a missionary and spent a decade in Oaxaca witnessing to the Native Americans there and to soldiers in the Mexican Army. My mother, Joy, was born in Oaxaca in 1925. During her girlhood, D.H. Lawrence lived down the street. Her father warned her and her siblings to stay away from "that awful Englishman." Two of my mother's brothers grew up to be preachers like their father.

My father, James, was born in Portland, Oregon in 1924; he and his younger brother Bill both became prominent physicists when they grew up. My father and mother met at Princeton; they married in 1950. My Dad wound up at Boeing in the late '50s, where he founded and for sixteen years headed their plasma physics research laboratory.

I was born in Seattle in 1959, the fifth child but the third and last to survive childhood. In the '60s, at the height of the cold war, more than once Soviet scientists came to our house for dinner, together with their NSA escorts.

Science and religion were never considered to be incompatible or contradictory in my home as I grew up; both my parents are Christians and my father is a scientist. I learned to revere the scientific method, and developed a pronounced sense of the sacred in creation; I continue to swoon over beautiful sunsets to this day.

I was a writer from the beginning; I started my first novel at eight. For a few years in my mid-teens, my life's ambition was to become President. I coauthored technical articles on solar power satellites with my father. When I accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and savior in the summer of 1979, I discovered he was already there, in my heart, and always had been. Meanwhile I put 100,000 miles on my thumb, criss-crossing North America. I almost got arrested for playing "If I Were a Rich Man" on my flute in the capitol dome of the United States. I spent time in a Taoist monastery in the Colorado Rockies.

In the mid-80s, an editor at Bantam Books enthusiastically solicited a novel from me based on a single chapter; I lost my nerve and never finished it. I drifted from job to job, interspersed with strange adventures, including a year caretaking the land of a traditional Native American Medicine Man in the high California desert.

I worked as a contract proofreader for Microsoft in the early- to mid-’90s. During these same years I started a small press and published three books by two of the greatest living prose stylists in the English language, John Crowley and Samuel R. Delany, both of whom I've worked with extensively as an editor.

I became a classical music historian and advocate of forgotten Czech composers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, later co-editing the only modern edition of the eight Vienna string quartets of Anton Reicha (1770-1836). After 9/11, I devoted nine months of my life to designing and promoting a World Trade Center Memorial; an independent filmmaker in Seattle made a documentary about it.

After a quarter-century of skipping church, I started going again regularly in early 2004, inspired in part by the atrocity of Mel Gibson's Passion, and immersed myself in Biblical scholarship. I moved to the capitol region of New York State in the summer of 2005, for complex reasons, and found myself living on a riverbank. After two and a half years of work, I’m now nearing completion of a museum-quality edition of one of the great novels of the late twentieth century, Little, Big, by John Crowley; I am the publisher, editor, and art director. At 800 pages, with a quarter million words of text, the book will also include close to 300 art reproductions from the work of Peter Milton, plus a 10,000-word afterword by Harold Bloom. Lord willing, we will finish work in May and send this lovely monster off to the printer. After that, who knows? I've been thinking about moving to the Czech Republic; but also about returning to an old passion of mine, advocating for the human push into space. All destinations invite words to roost.

Over on crowleycrow, in a comment on "Time for a change," tinacastaneres writes, "I just went last night to a fabulous science lecture in Portland (Oregon) given by Dr. Stuart Kaufmann, in which I learned of his conceptualization of the 'partially lawless, constantly changing, non-random creativity in the adjacent possible (always luring itself to greater complexity).' He (an atheist) says this creativity is what he'd like everyone to agree is God."

As it happens, I've been very slowly working my way through Stuart Kaufmann's Reinventing the Sacred. I find his work to be not only exciting but of a caliber I can only call essential, though his language is often highly specialized and a challenge to get through. The idea of "emergent properties," which Kaufmann develops, provides a profound rebuttal to the notion of reductionism. The universe is partially lawless, and it may well be that God will be the final emergent property – not the first, but the last – if we as a species can reform ourselves into a compassionate race and a force for spreading life and wisdom through the universe, and do so far into the future, which as dubious a prospect as that might sound is nevertheless possible, in my humble, because of what Kauffman describes as "the adjacent possible".

A fine, more readable companion to Kauffmann can be found in The View from the Center of the Universe by Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams. They convincingly demonstrate that an accurate understanding of the nature of the universe as it is can support a positive, meaning-filled, life-affirming world view as readily as any negative, life-is-meaningless-and-the-universe-doesn't-give-a-gnat's-ass-about-any-of-us world view -- and so the choice really is ours. That is the "adjacent possible", the wiggle room the very nature of creation itself provides us with in which to make the most soulful, imaginative, positive choices of which we are capable and to potentially unfold those choices down the long ages to come. Sign me up!

I occasionally read scripture as part of the services at a couple of local churches; folks seem to like it when I do. Yesterday I read Acts 4:32-35 and John 20:19-31 -- and, between them, with the pastor's permission, Thomas 51. I spent a couple hours the night before reading through various translations, and ended up choosing the Revised English Bible for the Acts and Willis Barnstone's lovely translation -- but with the names restored to their modern forms -- for the John. One unpublished translation, by a Greek scholar who is a member of the church where I read, provided an unexpected insight into a single crucial verse from John, so I looked deeper, consulting two Greek-English interlinear translations, and ended up doing my own translation of John 20:23.

The resurrected Jesus suddenly appears in a locked room before ten of his apostles; in Verse 22 he breathes on them and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit!" Then, in Verse 23, he tells them, in the REB's all-too-typical translation, "If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven; if you pronounce them unforgiven, unforgiven they remain." Willis Barnstone renders this "For any whose sins you forgive, their sins are forgiven. For any whose sins you do not release, they are not released." Dr. John Kalas translates this verse rather differently: "If you set right (forgive) sins, they are set right. If you hold on to them, they are retained."

The phrase "hold onto them" startled me; it's so personal! It's like something you can embrace, or hold in your hands. That's what sent me to the Greek Interlinears, and indeed the operative terms involve "letting go of" and "holding on to" "misses" (mistakes, sins) with what struck me as a fundamental mutuality of effect. My translation settled on the following phrasing:

"If you let go of the sins of others, they are set free. If you hold onto their sins, they are held fast."

The ambiguities of antecedent in my translation reflect fertile ambiguities in the original.

The reading went well. Afterwards I spoke with Frank, the choir director, and showed him Barnstone's translation of Verse 23 and then mine, and he said, "In the first, Jesus gives the power to forgive to his disciples; in the second, he recognizes that it is a power they already possess." Bravo! I would take it even further: In the first version, Jesus gives the power of forgiveness to his disciples because they are his disciples; in the second version, Jesus affirms that the power to forgive is a power his disciples already possess by virtue of being human. And unlike the traditional translation, this new translation strongly implies the interconnectedness of forgiveness, that it frees us as much as those we forgive; and that if we choose not to forgive others, then we are holding onto others' sins as much as if not more than they are. I firmly believe that all these implications are in the original and that the standard translations are seriously impoverished, if not outright wrong. Certainly they're misleading. More than once elsewhere in the gospels Jesus asks all those with ears to hear to forgive one another, and promises that by so doing they too shall be forgiven. Let one another go, and you set one another free.

With thanks to Ken James.

It was March 1988. He already had the cancer that would kill him four months later. I was working at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, working the front desk; I glanced down, glanced back up and suddenly he was there. A big man, clothes hanging. He was positively ashen. I recognized him immediately, but it actually took more than a minute for it to dawn on me who it was I had recognized. (Yes, I'd already read one of his collections.) Speaking softly and slowly, he said he'd been told a book he had ordered had arrived. No, alas, I don't remember the title. I went to the holds, found the book, brought it back, and he bought it; paid cash. He was scrupulously polite and gracious and spoke the absolute minimum number of words commensurate with that. His presence was both gentle and heavy; a subtle gloom surrounded him. I was struck by it at the time. I didn't see him leave; only ever saw him standing calmly in place, as deeply rooted as the blink of an eye.

The radio was playing in the next room; I was only half listening. Just as I became aware that the male voice on the broadcast belonged to John Clute, he said my name. But by the time I walked into the room the subject had changed, and Clute was talking about how he was rewriting the works of William Shakespeare to correct their pronounced deficiencies, and that he'd just finished the first, which he had retitled -- and he gave a long five- or seven-word title of his own invention, which I heard clearly but forgot upon waking, though it was obviously derived from one of the plays with a single-word title, and immediately there was uproarious laughter from the studio audience, from the middle of which rang out the unmistakable laughter of one Greer Gilman.

It has slowly dawned on me in recent weeks that Peter Milton's art, as deployed in the 25th Anniversary Edition of John Crowley's Little, Big, provides the people, places, and things upon which one might inscribe the text of the novel in order to memorize it, unless of course it's the other way around. Why I didn't see this sooner I don't know, except that I did see it sooner, and have been conceptualizing and articulating the relationship between art and text in that light from the very beginning. I just didn't consciously discover it until the arts of memory, however unconsciously deployed, tricked me into it. Not her but this park; not this park but her.

In its importance to the life of the soul, faith is second only to doubt.

I woke up this morning and drifted, thinking about everything I need to do today and in the days ahead. I thought about how precious and irreplaceable this day is, never to return. So too every day of my life. I thought of how precious few my days really are, and wondered how many days I'd been alive, knowing full well that those remaining were almost certainly much fewer than those already passed. So I did the calculations in my head, and after reaching the astonishing answer, I did the calculations again, several times, just to be sure.

Today, as it happens, I am exactly 18,000 days old.

Later I confirmed it using several different internet-based days-lived calculators. Which suggests that my brain must have already known, and decided to nudge me into consciously calculating it.

All the days I've lived, all the days I've pleasured or ignored, labored or slogged through, savored or pissed away; all the days still to come, as few as they are many. I'm eager for them.

The other day I imagined my way into that childhood bedroom
where my 5-year-old self has been waiting for 44 years
for someone to come comfort him, and spent a little time there,
holding his hand and telling him he's beautiful and precious and good,
and that he can come out anytime he wants to, and that the room
will still be there for him to go back into, if he needs to.

. . . and thirty-six daughters of Eve.

I am temporarily resident in the City that has voted for Barack Obama by a wider margin than any other city in America -- with the possible exception of Chicago. Tonight it was a joy to wander among the growing crowds in Times Square as the first results came in from CNN on giant screens there; to negotiate the well-dressed press at the New York State Democratic Party bash at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street. But when Obama broke the 200-electoral vote barrier, I knew it was time to head for Harlem.

On the ride over, those of us on the subway car heading for Harlem found one another and the vibe of community just grew stronger as we got off and walked out and down the long avenues, our many rivulets joining into streams joining into rivers. In the plaza outside the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building where Bill Clinton minds his post-presidency, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue (better known there as the corner of Martin Luther King and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards), another two-story television screen had been put up, and a stage, and the place was so jammed it was almost impossible to move, and the crowd's growing overflow was running ten deep along MLK's far bank. The crowds were so packed that for the first few minutes I thought I may have made a mistake to leave Times Square, where the crowds though bigger had more room to spread out and more screens and better viewing angles -- but that notion soon vanished.

As Barack's count moved closer to the magic number the joy in the crowd just grew. Every race and ethnicity under the sun could be found there, in goodly numbers and every shade and shape and phys, it was a rainbow of humanity and it felt like a rainbow too, so many happy strangers newly minted brothers and sisters -- an awesome feeling, an awesome experience to see that fellow feeling overflow when the screen lit up and held on the words "Barack Obama Elected 44th President." There was a long beat before we reacted, as if everyone had to read it twice, and then the cry went up, and from that moment it seemed all the rest of Harlem that hadn't yet arrived at that intersection began hoofing it there at that moment, all traffic was diverted as the people took joyfully to the streets, the cops were great, they went with it, they ceded the ground and facilitated the redirection of traffic away, traffic honking like crazy everywhere. A brass band pressed through the people, trumpets singing "O-ba-ma," leading chants. Bands of drummers were everywhere. CNN and MSNBC with their talking heads and long views of the huge crowd at Chicago's Grant Park awaiting Obama alternated with feeds from our own stage, as the greatest black politicians of New York's recent past and present came out to talk to us, Charles Rangel and David Dinkins and several African-American members of the state assembly and senate, rap stars and Baptist minsters, a Moslem cleric and a rabbi, and finally New York Governor David Paterson, who spoke eloquently about how African peoples that had first come to this continent as chattel had now centuries later produced a man who had just been elected president of the United States, that a long-lingering wound was finally starting to heal; Paterson said it was only a matter of time before the first woman was elected president, the first Hispanic, the first Asian-American. And just as he finished, on the big screen Barack Obama and his family came out, and the roar we let was of such delight and relief and collective affirmation, affirmation of Obama but even more of one another, that very sense was most palpable of all, you could see it and hear it in every face -- we had done this thing together, and that was the foundation of meaning that would inflect anything and everything that Obama does from now on. Listening to Barack deliver a speech that bore no whiff of triumphalism or self-congratulation but was humble and thankful and calmly serious and full of eloquent reminders that the need for our collective work had not ended but only begun -- was to cry (for me and for others) and to shout and to listen, with full hearts. The inspiration is ours -- everything crucial to what we can create together is ours, and Obama's potential as a leader lies wholly in his ability to bring that out in us, something already innately in us, bring it out not for him but for us, for all of us, for the good we can make together, which is something we have long and often lost sight of. Let us find it again, in the making, in our uncommon common effort.

Afterwards the huge crowd streamed down the middle of Harlem's Martin Luther King Boulevard, block after block of it, laughing and hugging and high-fiving and shouting and beaming, so many glorious lovely human smiles, upturned and lit. And down in the subways, cheering at the passing trains, train conductors honking with us, and slowly the great human river breaks into streams which split into rivulets, and here now in the wee hours of a restored America, in the solitary tributary of living blood pulsing through me ten thousand foremothers sing, I hear them once again: ten thousand foremothers sing. And in their song are days to come, the myriad ways we modulate with dawn, the myriad ways dawn modulates in us: belong, they sing: be long.