Children Afraid of the Night

"While the Citizen can entertain aspirations for the society as a whole and take pride in its achievements, the Taxpayer, as presently imagined, simply does not want to pay taxes. The societal consequences of this aversion - failing infrastructure, for example - are to be preferred to any inroad on his or her momentary fiefdom."

From "What Are We Doing Here?" by Marilynne Robinson

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Dear Alex,

Lately I have been startled to mid-night awakenings, once usually at 2 am and another nearing dawn, my mid-aged mind moaning, bemoaning. I blame my sleep-hijacker on perimenopause, anxiety, nature on nurture. As I write now, this is one of these choppy nights.

I am seeing a rhythm of rationales in my sleep irregularity. Stuck between genres in real-time drama, I am reeling back in delayed persistence of vision. Frame after frame of faces flashing in my psyche, I watch in indigo tinge a makeshift sequel to the passing day on reels of memory soaked in aniline dyes. I hear mighty images streaming and sloshing in my skull, pummeling pillow with purpose imagined.

Melatonin deprived, I press onto nights faded but affirming: I have been listening to an essay in audiobook by Marilynne Robinson - “Save Our Public Universities". I have also been watching Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” along with my trudging through the last chapters of “The Reader”. On sleepless starless stretch of a night, these mega pioneers speak softly in conviction and urgency. There is no spark to waste. Awake you must. Or risk missing Christmas.

The profundity of these original masterpieces, each focused on themes sprawling in seismic scale, makes you grope in grime, not glamor. Hypocrisy, violence, insomnia and paralysis are all ground up into a giant meat ball to chew as cud, compelling us to ruminate our civic, familial and individual roles transcending culture and stature, age or experience. Something moves you towards real change because it makes you really suffer. Here in crisp increments, the storyboard leaks out character and chaos at slow-cooking pace, elongated in punctuation, brevity on fashion, twisted for truth. In his first U.S. tv talk show, Boon said by translation: “I’d like to say as little as possible here because the film is best when you go into it cold.”

To re-awake at near death of the old year during this 2-week countdown to Christmas is to go to the cinema or a book and watch none other than yourself as Citizen, Taxpayer, Dad, Student, Single Mom, Drone or Immortal in vintage and vivid clarity.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

December.  Everything is moving in a way to knock things down.  There're drivers on the road that I swear who are going for the kill.  And pedestrians who would dare them to.

You've written quite a bit there--knocked a few things down too, maybe?  I too am in a hurry, afraid of missing out.

"Christmas."  We give December a name like she's a baby.  But it's The Baby that we don't know what to do with.

I was telling my pastor that I am reading possibly the "best book ever" on Advent and he asked me to explain my enthusiasm.  I am too busy reading to do that.  The long and short of it is I am hungry.  The sort of hunger that makes the palate ever more discerning.  A starved tongue knows when it touches gold.

One third of December is gone, a lot of "Christmas."  I know I am missing out.  Something great is happening above and beneath the knocking-things-down and here I am picking my nose trying to figure out a new fun way to dispose of my effort.  What a waste of life in the name of living life.

Faces along the bar Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

Auden knows the war without and within.

It is going to be a long night, tonight.  And then tomorrow a long day.  I'll need to slow down and gather myself after that.  I wanna eat a lot without choking.  But there's a feast going on I know and I can't miss it.

Yours, Alex