“Oh Students, Students, ye that crumplest the syllabus and deletest those emails sent unto you, how often hath I longed to gather your assignments together, even as a hen gathereth her chicks under her wings–and ye would not have it?

“Behold, your grades are left unto you desolate.

“For I say unto you, ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, ‘Here is the tuition payment so I can register for another semester of English 101.’”

For the Haunted Places Challenge:

In November of 2010, my wife and I went for a drive through the mostly-deserted Pilgrim State Hospital grounds.

My wife is a social worker who works with the developmentally disabled.  Because of this, she is particularly sensitive to the kind of horror that went on in this place.

When Pilgrim State Hospital opened in 1931, it was the largest hospital in the world.  Built to take the overflow of New York City’s overcrowded psychiatric hospitals, this hospital had its own police station, fire station, cemetery, post office, and farm.  Underground tunnels connected the buildings.  It had over thirteen thousand patients.

Psychiatric treatment at the time was a horrible thing.  Electro-shock therapy was routinely practiced on the patients institutionalized there.  Two thousand patients were lobotomized–1 in every 25 lobotomies performed in the United States was performed at Pilgrim State.  Many were plunged into icy baths as “therapy.”  According to one source, as patient population stretched the hospital’s limits, doctors resorted to more aggressive forms of treatment to “cure the insane,” including “using large doses of insulin and metrozol to drive patients into a violent coma”.  There are many other stories of human rights violations and patient mistreatment/neglect at this asylum.

In the hospital morgue, painted on the wall, ran a quotation: “Let conversations cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.”

Scandals broke about patient treatment at Pilgrim in 1987, 1996, and finally in 2000–beginning around the time when public outcry led to the closing of the Willowbrook State School for similar reasons.  By then, however, the hospital had already begun to downsize.  Some of the hospital grounds have now become the campus of Suffolk County Community College, and on a very small portion of the grounds a much-reduced 500-bed Pilgrim Psychiatric Center still operates.  A good portion of the grounds, however, were simply abandoned.

Today, if you drive through the Pilgrim State Hospital grounds, you can still see many of the old buildings: wards, pharmacies, the water tower, the morgue.  They are shells of their former selves, on their way to ruins–cracked bricks, broken windows, peeling paint.

The doors are supposed to be locked, but urban spelunkers and curious teenagers have a habit of breaking in, and often times, the doorways yawn open like gaping mouths.

There is little inside.  Everything is stripped bare, except for a few bed frames or a hook used for pulling morgue drawers open.

Local legend says that if you drive through at night, you will hear screams, and see flickering lights in the broken windows.

Others have reported doors slamming randomly while they explored the gutted hallways, or whispered voices on the edge of hearing.

Some of the nursing students who work at the modern Pilgrim Psychiatric Center refuse to come back here after dark.

I, for one, don’t blame them.

It occurs to me that I’ve never posted these pictures on Xanga.

It seemed like such a charming little churchyard.  And some of those headstones dated back to the 1700s.  I thought I would stop in and take pictures of some of the headstones.

Apparently the cemetery’s Sentinel Tree didn’t like that idea.

The dead do not suffer the living to pass…

I was walking under the tree–on a mostly windless day, mind you–when suddenly I heard a snap-snap-crackle-snap above me.  Without stopping to think, I instinctively broke into a run.

I had been walking in front of that headstone only seconds before.

(Me for scale, while I was moving the branch off the headstone.)

Usually trees like me, but that Sentinel Tree was a cranky one.

It be that day again…

That day in which lubbers of all walks o’ life throw down their briefcases ‘n tear off their ties and, fer one day, indulge themselves in the bonnie life of a buccaneer.  Aye, one day be too short a time, ‘n there be many of us who wish we could life The Life Piratical all three-hunnred an sixty-fer days.

On this most awspishuss day, I be moved to write on a subject that gets me blood a’boilin.  I be referrin’, o’ course, to them sneaky-folk from the Orient, them sable-clad knife-throwin’ bilge rats what don’t talk.  I mean them ninjases, y’see.  (Some o’ them be han’some beauties, but they’re still lily-livered bilge rats, I say!)

Ye may ask, Why talk about ninjases on a day what’s dedicated to pirates?  I’ll tell ye–because opposin’ ninjases is at the very core of piratehood.

What be a ninja?  A ninja be a ‘ssasin, and a ‘sassin be a man what kills ye when ye don’ see him.  Them ninjases always go on about their precious honor, ‘n duty, but that be the long ‘n short of it–he’s a man what kills ya from be’ind.  (It don’ seem quite honorable to me, but what do I know–I be only a pirate.)  They’re always blendin’ in ter things, bein’ invisible and such.  Ye never hears a ninja talkin’.  Even in battle they may give a shout when they hits ye, or they gives one o’ them funny little bows, but they never talks.  (There’d never be a Talk Like A Ninja day, bein’ that it’d consist o’ sittin’ around sayin’ naught.)  An they have them rigid codes of honor and stuff, not guidelines like the Pirate’s Code but bloody rigid things, things like if’n they gone and done something daft they have t’ cut open their own bellies. 

So ye see, ninjases stand fer rigid and repressive rules, fer silence, fer standing ’round with no-one seein’, and fer cowardly ways o’ killins.  Arrr!  Unnatural things, all.  Standin’ up to the ninja way of life is what pirates are for, matey.

–Where a ninja be representin’ repressive rules, pirates have no rules ‘cept the Code, and even the Code we bend a little.  Pirates be free!  Ye’d never see a pirate cuttin’ his own belly open because he failed his cap’n.  (The cap’n might shoot him where he stands, or keelhaul him, or let him ‘kiss the gunner’s daughter’ for a bit–but that’s a different story.)

–Where a ninja be shy ‘n silent all t’ time, pirates live to let the world know of their presence.  Be it shoutin’ a lusty ‘YARRR!,’ or firin’ one’s blunderbuss in t’ air, or lettin’ loose with a broadside of long nines while lettin’ one’s signature Jolly Roger flap in the rigging: pirates be about the assertion of self-identity.  Make a noise, ‘n let the world know yer here!

(This ‘un’s me own Jolly Roger, t’ furl from me dirigible, the F.A.S. Pandemonium.  Yarrr!)

–Where a ninja always be blendin’ in ‘t things, pirates like to stand out.  We be comfortable in our identity.  Confidence be the word, matey.  Don’t be afraid t’ stand out, t’ wear a flashy silk sash or a gold-embroidered coat or even a bit o’ mascara.  No point in dissapearin’ into the background all t’ time.

–Where a ninja will kill ye from be’ind, so ye never see the face o’ the man what’s killin’ ye, a pirate is no lily-livered ‘ssasin.  Pirates kill ye from t’ front, with cutlass or blunderbuss, or from across the water with the big twenty-fours.  If we kill ye, ye’ll know we’re killing ye.  (Ye might even call it more sportsman-like that way… ‘ceptin we use so much powder that it’s not really sportsman-like at all.)

It be a sad commentary of our times what how the ninja way of life has crept into everyday living, matey.  So, fer this one day a year, cast off your ninjaish ways.  Be free, be unfettered, be bold and unshackled.  Cut a reel, or dance a hornpipe.  Throw a cup of grog in the face of the nearest lubber.  Quit yer job.  Kiss that buxom wench ye’ve been wantin’ to kiss.  Pick a fight, or finish one.  Shout yer name to the skies above with a crash of thunder and cannon.

Make a noise, me hearties, and pull wi’ a will!

They set up a television playing the news in the Student Center, by the Unispan, and a small crowd of students gathered around it, staring. The second tower had collapsed in the time it took me to get from my car to the Center.

My Intro to Philosophy class had a low turnout, but administration had not yet officially canceled classes–so tossing aside his lecture notes, my Philosophy professor asked us, “Why would someone fly a plane into a building on purpose? What kind of beliefs does it take for a human being to do that to other human beings?” We discussed and debated this for the duration of the class.

If you climbed to the top of the Library tower and looked out the western windows, you could see the smoke, dark against the obscenely blue sky. Driving home from school, it was hard to resist the temptation to watch the sky. It was so clear that day, but seemed to be menacing with hidden dangers.  We didn’t know what else might be coming.

A month or so later, a plane crashed in Queens. Later we found out it was just pilot error, but nobody knew that at the time–everyone thought the attacks had begun again. Several students left my Linguistics class in hysterics.

We were all so very afraid.

You don’t have to show me endless loops and reminders of the attacks in order for me to “Never Forget.”

(Related Reading:  1 and 2)

There seems to be a great deal about Balance in movies these days.

I’m thinking of the third Matrix movie, of how Smith turned out to be Neo’s opposite number, his counterpart.  Neo asks the oracle what Smith is, and she tells him, “He’s you.”

I’m thinking of the Star Wars prequels, where the prophecy about Anakin was that he would bring Balance to the Force.  And he did, in a sense–killed off Dooku and Maul, killed off all the Jedi, until there were only two Jedi Masters and two Sith Lords left.  It sucked for everyone concerned, but it was Balance.

I’m thinking of the pop culture understanding of Christian cosmology, with Heaven and Hell evenly matched, with God and Satan as equals, with Balance.  Read Good Omens or Piers Anthony’s books about the Incarnations or any such stuff.

This was posted by someone on a Catholic/Protestant discussion forum I frequent.

“I believe that the spiritual world is in balance.
The tree of knowledge has two sides, good and evil. Both limbs are of equal length.
Westand in the crook of this tree seeing both limbs, one on each side ofus. We must start our lessons on good and evil by starting to climbthese limbs. Witch side do we start on. The easy side off goodness orthe harder side of evil.
From Eves point of view, She already has anexample of good in the garden. God has already stated that it was good.Will she chose to learn about something she already knows. In climbingterms one leg is already up on the good side.
The natural progression then would be to climb on the evil side in order to balance.
This is the choice she made and it was the right choice.

Why is it so hard for Christians to understand this simple truth.

This would indicate to us that we must identify evil and name it beforewe can climb the other good side of the tree to find the good answer towhatever was found to be evil. This seems to be the logical thing to do.
Why is this simple fact not understood.

Todo otherwise, or the opposite would make us look greedy for the goodside while letting the evil side go hungry for solutions and answersfrom us. This would cause imbalance and seen in physical terms, theclimber of the tree would have one leg way too high from the other andhis stance is quite uncomfortable.

If Eve simply stayed on theside of good, the tree would eventually bend towards that side andeventually break. Not God’s plan.

She took the right path for humanity…”

It all sounds so right.  Balance.  Gaining knowledge was the right thing to do.  Keeping the peace between the two extremes.

The problem is that it’s dead wrong.

…

Now don’t get me wrong.  Anyone who knows me knows that I’m all about Balance.  The Golden Mean, the Happy Medium, all that.  I’m a political moderate, a peacemaker, a mediator.  I’ve been Switzerland in a dozen relational disputes, I’ve carried messages between and given advice to feuding boyfriends/girlfriends, I’m always careful not to take sides in a fight that’s not my business.  The Celtic knot that I use as a sigil–the one that’s on my signet ring and on my wallet and that I seal my letters with–is a four-sided knot, symbolic of the four elements or the four seasons or the four winds or the four cardinal directions: equal and opposite forces contained within a whole, oppositing vectors canceling each other out, Balance.

But when it comes to morality, when it comes to alignment, you just don’t want your Good and your Evil to balance out. 

Thoughts?

Critiques are welcome: this is still rough.

Weary Hands

 

Hwaet!—now weak    are weary hands

that hardly hold    the hilt of sword.

Hoar-frost on beard,    hoard-silvered head,

and vellumed skin    all sing the tale

of far-fled youth.    Full fifty winters

have I sat     with  crown-ringed brow

since Heardred’s death,    and costly weregild

claimed by spear    from Sweden’s son,

Onela king.    

Then last I drew

a blade from belt   in battle-blood.

Many a battle     won I when young;

now I am old.     I used to swim

all armor-clad     for countless nights,

so strong was I.     I could not now.

And do the sceopes    sing hero-songs

of how the king,    Ecgtheow’s bearn,

sits aging here?

                                    These harrowed nights,

when sweat-soaked dreams    drive waking cries

from shadowed sleep,    I oft bethink

that kinder death    had lingered there

in Grendel’s maw,    or had the hag,

the demon’s dam,    drowned me deep.

Age is more cruel,    a grimmer gaest,

that spills no blood,    yet makes a king

but half a man.

                                    I wait alone.

There is no Cain-kin    left to kill,

and every steadt    is stale with peace.

E’en the wyrm     of Earanaes

a sleeper is,    unsoured by dreams

of youthful years    and waning strength.

My byrnie rusts,    and Naegling’s blade

sticks to its sheath,    as unused as

my fighting arm.

When final breath

escapes my lips,    and leaves me lying

ashen-white,     who will welcome

Geatland’s king,     conquered by years,

overcome by time,    no sword in his hand—

No battle-dirge,    no bloodstained shroud,

no wealth of foes    beneath his feet?

What barrow shall board    this broken body

that fails with age?

                                    Be it not so.

I’ll turn on Time,    that dauntless devil,

and like old Grendel    tear his arm.

He shall not claim me.    To the North,

to Earanaes,     I’ll thrust my thrall

that he may plunder    the wyrm’s warren:

my end be writ     in wrath and fire

before I’ll bow     to Man’s decline.

Drag up the drakon,     the deep-sleeper

from golden bed,    and let us dance.

“On Saturday 19 September 1931 [C.S.] Lewis invited two friends to dine with him in Magdalen.  One was [J.R.R.] Tolkien.  The other was Hugo Dyson…

…after they had dined, Lewis took his guests on a walk through the Magdalen grounds.  They strolled along Addison’s Walk (the path which runs beside several streams of the River Cherwell) and here they began to discuss metaphor and myth.

Lewis had never underestimated the power of myth.  Far from it, for one of his earliest loves had been the Norse myth of the dying god Balder…  But he still did not believe in the myths that delighted him.  Beautiful and moving thought such stories might be, they were (he said) ultimately untrue.  As he expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed in silver.’

No, said Tolkien.  They are not lies.

Just then (Lewis afterward recalled) there was ‘a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining.  We held our breath.’

When Tolkien resumed, he took his argument from the very thing that they were watching.

You look at trees, he said, and call them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word.  You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it…  But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently.  To them, the world was alive with mythological beings.  They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music…

…man is not ultimately a liar [Tolkien said].  He may pervert his thoughts into lies, but he comes from God, and it is from God that he draws his ultimate ideals.  Lewis agreed: he had, indeed, accepted something like this notion for many years.  Therefore, Tolkien continued, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth.  In making a myth, in practicing ‘mythopoeia’ and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller…is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light.  Pagan myths are therefore never just ‘lies:’ there is always something of the truth in them…

…Christianity (he said) is exactly the some thing–with the enormous difference that the poet who invented it was God Himself, and the images He used were real men and actual history.

Do you mean, asked Lewis, that the death and resurrection of Christ is the old ‘dying god’ story all over again?

Yes, Tolkien answered, except that here is a real Dying God, with a precise location in history and definite historical consequences.  The old myth has become a fact  But it still retains the character of a myth…  For, Tolkien said, if God is mythopoeic, man must become mythopathic.

…Twelve days later Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ–in Christianity.  I will try to explain this another time.  My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.’”

–from The Inklings by Humphrey Carenter, 1979

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/31/protests-fail-to-silence-anti-gay-sermons-from-christian-preachers/?hpt=hp_c2

Read the article carefully.

If you didn’t catch it, I’ll point it out.

‘When a Christian pastor in North Carolina told his congregation on Mother’s Day that the way “to get rid of all the lesbians and queers” was to put them behind an electric fence and wait for them to die out because they couldn’t reproduce, hundreds of people demonstrated against him.

But the protests are not silencing other preachers who believe homosexuality is a sin condemned by the Bible.

On Sunday, Kansas pastor Curtis Knapp preached that the government should kill homosexuals.

“They won’t, but they should,” he said, according to a recording of his sermon posted online.’

Transitions are connecting words or phrases which indicate the relationship between ideas.  “But… other…” indicates that the following object is in the same category as the subject of the previous sentence.  That is, that those preaching that the government should kill, isolate, or otherwise oppress LGBTs are in the same category as “preachers who believe homosexuality is a sin condemned by the Bible.”

I’d like to remind the jury that these are not necessarily the same thing, thank you kindly.

Source: Staples eReader Department

As a former college professor (and for that matter, former high-scoring college student), I suppose it makes sense.  I did, however, have to put my reading glasses on to see the text as quickly as I used to.

Now, will they have a Comprehension or Analysis test next?  That’s the one I’d like see–how much the average reader can grasp nuances, detect tone (such as sarcasm), understand humor, and project implications.