Platypus of Truth

Who can catch a forest of falling leaves? I think every New Englander is born hearing the drumbeats of Armageddon.  Those drumbeats are always there with them: a sound in the back of their minds.  The sound rolls on, soft but steady, without a stop; always heard and so never heard.  Every New Englander is a Puritan in the end: Protestant, Catholic, Agnostic -even Atheist...  Sometimes those drumbeats rise to the fore, and then the quiet hills and meadows erupt.  Ask Sasacus, Philip, Gage, Lee... I think all of us have some intimation of the Eschaton.  It comes to us when we're not ready: the sudden crack of starry banners caught in a celestial wind.  Then we remember that we are in occupied territory; that we were meant to be more than what we are.  It comes most clearly in our dreams: the first time we fly among the clouds, the sword fight on the tips of the bamboo, the morning we drank from the Firefall and danced.  Look at our dreams, ...

Trying to help the students envision what the monsters might look like.  Prior efforts can be found here .

It's another hot and green October in the American Southwest.  In Northern lands, the air is cooling and the leaves are changing while pumpkins ripen and cider mulls.  I caught a glimpse this summer of the old pumpkin patch.  Pumpkin picking was always fun -not to mention looking at all the weird and gnarly gourds.  If you could find the right place to stick those, they would dry and keep.  I never did find quite the right place.  Pumpkins occasionally got smashed.  More often they rotted and had to be unceremoniously chucked into the nearest patch of woods.  Still, their decaying bulk added that extra bit of color to that most colorful season. How much do I really remember, and how much is pictures and endless re-tellings of the same tired old stories?  Augustine thought that memory was a sign of the soul's distention in time.  How far can the members of one soul stretch?  How do I re-member?

There was a time when I stood at the top of my drive way on a boulder (it was the highest point I could find) and looked out across the valley all the way to Monroe.  It was Autumn, and the leaves were turning so that all the miles beneath me looked like a bowl of Halloween candy or a fire in a painting hanging on the wall.  That's a trite way of putting it.  Could you have been there, and felt what I felt you would know it for what it was: what Moses saw in the cleft of the rock, or Isaiah in the Temple: the oblique angle of the eschaton, the hem of the garment of the LORD.  But how does one catch hold of falling leaves?  It's not the passing garment of a Jewish rabbi.  If I can but touch the hem of his garment I will be clean.   How do I touch the hem of his garment? 

The Ballad of William Goffe I Raise the cry in Narragansett Sachem Philip treads the warpath Come to drive out all the English Burn their villages and townships. Who has heard of old Sassacus And the terrors of the Pequots Knows but Philip’s little finger; Like the bite of whips to scorpions Are those sachems to his chieftains. They will come with brands of fire To the men who burned down Mystic. Who of them shall bide his coming In the hour of God’s judgment? These the words that came to Hadley With the fear of Philip’s legions, Of the natives loosed upon them, By the anger of Jehovah At their arrogant presumption. Now from feast they turn to fasting, Turn from revelry to sorrow, To beseech the Lord Almighty That He turn from them his anger, Spare them from the wrath of Philip, From his sagamores and chieftains. II When the leaves first fell in autumn, Came the rumor down to Hadley: Now the natives are against yo...