What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

Søren Kierkegaard

In the introduction to The Crucible, Arthur Miller suggests that the Puritans lacked a system for forgiveness and renewal; mistakes, then, were condemnable. The harsh reality of their lives might have called for tall moral codes that could not allow for any lapses in discipline. He suggests, further, that we [Americans] have inherited a system of unforgiveness from them. We have no real system for confession and renewal, and so many of us make a mistake and begin an awful rowing toward shame and resentment. The result is broken lives, broken families, broken societies, and stagnant culture. ¹

The scripture above² describes the way religionists tend to be “whitewashed tombs”; religionists keep up an outward appearance of righteousness–and can often live nearly spotless lives–while they are wasting away inside. They are like Napoleon on St Helen: an English servant is paid to put a pinch of arsenic in his wine, until he wastes away and dies. It’s like the wine of the eucharist (“good gift”) is gently-laced with arsenic–resentment, bitterness, shame, and a whole host of apostalary suppression–and the tribe slowly dies.

But this is not solely an endemic of organized religion. It is a trait of both the American secularist and religionist to adopt unrelenting, unattainable moral standards for himself and others, until we he hates himself, or the other, and dies  on island of the mother of Constantine.

This is where the misfits, outcasts, dropouts, failures, and fools come in. Through a black sheep’s estrangement, he has the power to redeem a family emotional ambassador. I’ve heard a number of stories of young women (and some men), who’ve overcome eating disorders and so scared the hell out of the family.

A system had operated, and one individual had inherited the shame of the family system, shattered the “idealized family” and emerged with emotional wholeness. These individuals are not only walking testimonies of the courage to heal, but they become emotional ambassadors for the culture. While their siblings and peers are amassing credentials, money, status–”righteousness,” if you will–they are suffering the slings and arrows of their outrageous fortune. The pain of feeling “less than” in their accomplishments is assuaged by their emotional power, and their emotional empowerment can and often makes them ambassadors in their homes.

They often become both the priest who “atones” for generational and social wrong-doing and the prophet who creates a vision and an atmosphere for healing. If you feel like a black sheep I’d consider the potentia (power-potential) of your role as an emotional ambassador; if you are a “golden child,” I’d consider the priestly and prophetic potential of your sibling or peer.

It’s good that our country has established precedents and infrastructure for reconciliations between nations. But we are an infirm nation, and our culture has devolved into a necrophiliac fascination with violence (Criminal Minds, Law and Order, CSI NY, LV, Fresno, wherever the hell), and  sadistic fascination with destructive sex. It is the broken, the misfits, the failures, the dropouts and the fools who have the powerful mandate to craft healing. This seems to begin with self-forgiveness, extends naturally to relational forgiveness. On the grandscale (and in the landscape of my imagination) this becomes a vision is for social forgiveness cultural renewal.

“I am only the echo in a certain part of my poetry of the anxieties of the contemporary world, of the anxieties of the Latin American world.”

Pablo Neruda

In Colombia I lived round the corner from “Iglesia Nuestra Señora del Café” (Our Lady of the Coffee Church). Great name for a film or a telenovela or something, but for the parishoners, it was their place of worship. They didn’t worship Mary or coffee, I don’t think, but they knew their livelihood was connected to the earth, and they believed that their earth was in the care of people, like Mary, who nurtured the salvation of the earth. The infrastructure in the town, Armenia, was sub-par. They used guadua bamboo to reinforce their buildings, and 12 years ago the downtown area was decimated by an earthquake which killed 1000 locals–most of whom lived in brick-and-mortar hovels in the shadows of the clawlike guadua.

But in the place of comfort, most took pride in la tierra Colombiana, the music, the food, the celebration of life in all it’s melancholy, solitude, absurd goldquests and ethnocides and fratricides and obscene governmental experiments. Entering this land was like a “venture into fantasy,” in which one writer on the “West Indies” claimed to have seen “hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons” ¹.

Colombia and its neighbors cultural integrity is proportional to its cultural remoteness. Solitary, but with an unflinching solidarity forged in shared melancholy and differed hope–of exiles, deaths, torture–and the murder of artists like  Víctor Jara, a man who sang protest songs for a land held hostage by desperate, sadistic men. Can we imagine what would happen if Bob Dylan received 44 bullet wounds to the chest for singing “Maggie’s Far m” or “Masters of War”? The amazing choice of the North American is protest and dissent. I do not mean that we need whine more or jettison food to Sudan (though the latter is more noble). But loving protest is connected to biophilia (the opposite of domination and sadism), and peacefully rejects the trends and the trendy that destroy the best of a culture. ²

Our attention has returned, for a while, to Colombia, because of some bad behavior by US men in the secret service. Their chastisement is warranted, but I wonder how much of the shame is the shame of the exceptionalist Americans fraternizing with desperate Latin American women. How can American men stoop so low as to prostitute themselves to Colombia through, well, prostitutes. They are there to stop the damnable drug war in a terribly backward country!

And now, O Best Beloved, as I reinvest myself in North America, I am haunted by my memories–a crushing nostalgia–that makes me wince and writhe in the face of the masses ignorantly chasing their own swirling tails of elusive ”perfection.” With William Faulkner, “I decline to accept the end of man,” but sometimes I wonder if something half-cataclysmic would turn our attention from ourselves and toward the still bleeding soul of the resilient masses in the Southern Hemisphere–Latin, African, and Asian. Up top we can see so far, but choose comfort over courage. We escape from our own freedom nursing our fetishes for power, fame, money, and status. My repatriation–my reinvestment, in US soil, will not be taken lightly. I’m not here for the frothy meringue gilded world of classy comfort. The plumbing here is great, but there is little infrastructure for our souls.

I’ve imported, then, 100 years of the staggering solitude of Latin America. I feel an agent of cultural renewal, only when, in silence & solitude I find my heart’s true home, and am energized to partner in the reinvention of a world of peace and beauty and trans-hemispheric justice.

“I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”¹

THE IRS demanded that I tell them the days I was on US soil during the fiscal year, 2011. Since I had no access to a spotless memory of my year of travel, I went to my passport and thumbed through the pages looking for all US stamps that had been punched into my thick, sloppy nine-year-old wordless travelogue.

Suddenly my “render-to-Caesar” angst dissolved, and resolved itself into a sweeter angst of memory and loss. I’d never have quick access to Rio or Bogotá, nor is there a purpose for my passport in the foreseeable future. This sounds spoiled: I have not had to live on US soil for nearly five years, and now, hemmed in by the deathless lands of death-taxes and suburbs, I could hear something–in the silence–like to the clipping of swallow-wings.

I suppose these are luxury sorrows, but “going back” takes as much courage as “setting out.” Inertia is the only migration that doesn’t take courage. One of the great tensions at the soul of each of us is the harrying desire to move and yet be staid. We would have a home and a life that functions, records kept for April 17th, 2.5 bath and 2.5 children; and yet there is this howling call to adventure, a wild heart, that we usually suppress by “keeping it all together.” And then, there is the return, when you know you’ve been too-long too-far, and you need to unpack, and be staid for a time, while knowing that the places you’ve been and the friendship-seeds you’ve sown, will soon be ghosts in the memory to sweeten the thoughts of old age.

I never need to go to Rio again. Hell, I never need to go to L.A. again. But how to rationalize this dual desire for home and travel? Wherefore this restlessness in the place where I was born and breathe and have my being? I remember seeing a picture of Albert Camus in front of the massive Cristo o Redentor on the Tijuica national park. I wonder what he’s thinking. Perhaps it’s of the restlessness of travel–to see and then see more. Perhaps he’s thinking of the strangeness of the diversity of the human experience. Perhaps he’s feeling the common sublime anxiety of looking at the Bay of Guanabara, in the shadow of a 130ft representation of the savior of the world, poised to do an epic swan dive into the sea beyond Copacabana beach. As the Redeemer, perchance, decides to swim to some far shore to which we’d all like to follow.

But, as always, I digress–

Why do the writers who describe the human condition so well (viz. Camus), have this lurking sense of homelessness? Why do they travel, love their culture, and yet feel themselves a stranger in any land? My passport is tucked away, and after 15 hours of work, I have proven to the US government that I no additional taxes, nor do I merit a return. I lived and paid plenty of taxes to the Caesar in Brazil; I paid plenty of consumer taxes in the US. In a “far better country” this could have happened in a five minute honest face-to-face conversation over tea. But we, the USA, are too far-gone into the doldrums of bureaucracy to keep the high-human touch in most of our affairs.

This is where I live now, but it will never be called home. My passport packed away, I turn on Sigur Rós and imagine I’m in Narnia

In “Wise Blood” Flannery O’Connor writes of a character who had “a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”

I met a man in Paranoa, Brazil, who was filled with thoughts of high-human benevolence, and low, corrupted desires. He was a “sinful man,” and so thought quite highly of Jesus. His “bad thoughts” are insubstantial: all men have bad thoughts.

But with João (we are calling him João) was unique because the thoughts that so naturally passed through his mind also fluently passed through his mouth (in a wildly calm commingling of English and Portuguese).

One day he spoke of the great promise of Brazil to re-humanize the world; the next he spoke remorsefully of buying $300 Nike “tennies” while in debt; he cursed and applauded the Brazilian stock market in concert with its undulations; he told the story of the poor woman from the impoverished “extorior,” and of his valliant fight to give her a place and a purpose within the system; one day he decided to buy a plane for skydiving; the next, more prudently, of buying a house “in the boondox,” so he didn’t have to live with his dad.

One day, with dejection in dripping from his eyes, he said “maybe I’ll just be a bad man. I build a brothel and traffic drugs.” Shameless and honest.

I do not believe his desire was to “be bad,” but he was facing many problems, and was very frustrated with a system that had betrayed him; he was frustrated that he betrayed himself; he was frustrated by the betrayal of the woman. “The bandit,” I wrote in my journal, “is a rebel in his most natural state.” Unless a man sets his will upon evil, he is not a bad man. He is discouraged with the poker-faced world and keenly aware of his impotency to effect change in a culture of corrupted power.

People who live a philosophy of liberation are often pirates and vagabonds and Martians and guerillas–the agitated, the holed-up, the despised and the rejected. Joan of Arc. Martin Luther. Che Guevara. Elsa Brandström. Simone “The Martian” Weil.

French philosopher Michel Foucault did not visit asylums and prisons to collect data and sit in his study and write and say “hm, well, isn’t that interesting! Oh, how bizarre…”¹ In the padded rooms and the jail cells were prophetic messages about the failure of “the regime.” Blinded by the “dazzling light” of the outlier’s vision, the term “social deviant”–the mad, the bad, and the lazy–dissociated them from the marketplace.

It’s not, then, the “sinners” that get me worked up so much as the people who are so in loved with their damned righteousness: “Avoid sin,” O’Connor might say, and you can avoid the gaping thirst of the haunted soul of the “bad man, mad man, and the deviant”

The “bad men” I’ve met–in all their subversions of morality and order and law–are, at worst, victims of a regime of “sinless” good men that has fetishized money and means. They can hide well; they may even have unregistered arms.

Bad men don’t hide in bushes and sleep in gutters or scream in hospitals. Bad men drive on the 405 in their Buick Regals, wearing pressed Façonnable, wafting of eau d’Drakkar Noir. They look polished and sinless.

Bad men are hard to find.

“COME IN” she said to Dylan, “I’ll give you shelter for the storm.”

Whether this was an imaginary romance in an Elysian wood, or the product of the signer’s imagination, I do not know. In any case, the desire for shelter, for places of refuge, is universal. I believe that the “lack of refuge” is both cause and symptom of a sick society.

I think Mick Jagger was also getting at this in “Gimme Shelter.”

In the West, the cafe replaced the tavern; the cathedrals became masoleums for the dull, round druids; retreats became all-inclusives; cabins became hotels; hearths became furnaces; cafes became Starbucks; taverns became sports bars; books became the internet; and the internet something handheld; now people take shelter in the company of Angry Birds.

Many churches, if I may, have become cinematic: “religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluester make a man dear to God.”¹ The cinema, then, has become a place where, if the movie is silent (cf., The Artist), there is a place of shelter. I have paid $ 20 (BR) to sit in a lounge chair for 130 minutes and tune out. I meditate while I run. Atheists, ironically, are propsing the construction of godless temples. Oxymoronic though it is, it speaks to (a), our spiritual bankruptcy, and (b) our longing for places of refuge.

The tide is rising, and it’s rising still, and I think before we revisit a  wilds of Noaic impulse, there is hope for a post-suburban cathedral.

Contemplation, if I can get all etymological, literally means the act (-ation) of entering (con-) the temple. We can contemplate in a yoga class, but it comes with a sense of “crossing a threshold into the sacred.” “Come in,” she said, and we want “shelter from the storm.”

To redeem the time will be to reclaim the deafening power of the silences.

It is a world of vampires
One of toil and blood
Where the vultures eat the dying
On the roads of fire and mud:
We’re standing in the wilderness
Creatures void of form
“Where is there,” I say again, “shelter from the storm?”