Monsters of Love and Sainthood

Saint Dymphna, Patron Saint of Nervous Disorders, Epilepsy and Mental Illness

It was the great poet and musician Leonard Cohen's birthday yesterday, and that fantastic website called Brain Pickings posted this on Literary Jukebox. 

Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Coupled with the most beautiful rendition of Hallelujah, Cohen's writing about sainthood makes for a perfect few minutes.

Worship at the church of poetry and song here. 

***

It was suggested to me this morning by the great poet Maya Angelou to be a rainbow in someone else's cloud. Miles Davis was playing while she told me not to complain and to make every effort to change things that I do not like. When I asked what happens if I cannot make a change, she suggested that I change the way you have been thinking. I generally don't like jazz -- kill me -- but Miles' played a perfect accompaniment to Maya's sonorous admonition. I wiggled my hips and even tapped my foot. Today, I'm changing the way I'm thinking, and this might be as simple as the bittersweet chocolate frosting that I'll put on the pale yellow cake, the nod of my head toward the next door neighbor's dog that continues to yip, the bean on the vine at the back of the garden, the dirty feet of the boy lying on my bed, the purple cloud of the jacaranda tree above and the carpet below, half sweet of rot and half of a new solution.








***inspired by literary jukebox

I stumbled upon this quote from the wonderful site Brain Pickings, and I can't help but think it'd be the perfect answer to my son Oliver's unique intelligence and accompanying hatred of school.

Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all the time. During these years, kids would live communally – doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside... Those four 'missing' years of school could be added on, at a much later age. At, say, age 50-54 everyone would have to go back to school. (One could get a deferment for a few years, in special cases, if one was in a special work or creative project that couldn’t be broken off.) In this 50-54 schooling, have strong pressure to learn a new job or profession – plus liberal arts stuff, general science (ecology, biology), and language skills.
This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom, neurosis; b) radically modify the almost inevitable process by which people at 50 are psychologically and intellectually ossified – have become increasingly conservative, politically – and retrograde in their tastes (Neil Simon plays, etc.)
There would no longer be one huge generation gap (war), between the young and the not young – but 5 or 6 generation gaps, each much less severe.
After all, since most people from now on are going to live to be 70, 75, 80, why should all their schooling be bunched together in the first 1/3 or 1/4 of their lives – so that it’s downhill all the way
 Early schooling – age 6-12 – would be intensive language skills, basic science, civics, the arts.
 Back to school at 16: liberal arts for two year
Age 18-21: job training through apprenticeship, not schooling

-- from Susan Sontag's recently released As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980