ON PUBLISHING ...

ON PUBLISHING: You write something, it makes the rounds, rejections are part of it. - I have mixed feelings about the process, but it's what there is. The danger is thinking that you have to write to be published rather than insist on being authentic - and I fall into that trap and then remind myself that in what I write I have to be true to the story as I see it and my sense of the craft, and if it never gets published, well so be it. I'll self-publish it.

I worked on it to be a good story.

Even what I’ve written that was accepted for publication ... I wonder who read it.

JOURNALIST ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA TARGETED PUTIN FOR CHECHEN'S "HORRORS"

More from assassinated Anna Politkovskaya’s dispatches from Chechnya in “Is Journalism Worth Dying For”  --

Focusing on Vladimir Putin and the Russian hierarchy regarding what she calls the “horror in Chechnya” and in border lands that Chechens faced:

From a diispatch dated Feb 16, 2003

“The co-called Renovation Board ... is chronically incapable of paying [laborers] for their work, but takes the ideological approach: ‘Build a settlement! Just do it! Putin has spoken!’

‘What work is that?’ I ask Supian Sambayev, who introduces himself as the site foreman. He and I walk over an area strewn with wooden structures and a defunct lattice of rusting pipes which is a battlefield for the image of the President as Architect for Peace in Chechnya.

‘For the houses,’ the foreman insists...

‘But what houses?’

Supian looks away ...”

From another dispatch, again focusing on Putin and the hierarchy -- dated July 5, 2005:

“First the profiles of the candidates for the War Prize, awarded for unleashing and fomenting the Chechen tragedy of 1994-2005. It has been founded by “Chechenskoye Obshchestvo,” unquestionably the best newspaper today published in Chechnya and Ingushetia, and the one most dynamically increasing its circulation ... The question, ‘Who bears the guilt for all this horror?’ is one the people ask themselves ...

But of course, who else could winners be if not Yeltsin and Dudavev? And who could be awarded the second prize, if not Yeltsin’s worthy successor, Putin; that No. 1 ideologist of blood-letting ...”

ASSASSINATED POLITKOVSKAYA'S DISPATCHES FROM CHECHNYA

Regarding the Chechnya connection for the two men associated with the Boston marathon deadly explosions, the assassinated journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote dispatches from Chechnya that illuminate the fierce breakaway and resistance situation vis-a-vis Russia and of atrocities by Russian federal troops -- in her posthumously assembled book ironically titled “Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches”
Politkovskaya wrote graphically of the atrocities executed during the so-called Second Chechen War begun in 1999, one of the exposés that are said to have led to her assassination in Moscow. She also wrote “Putin’s Russia.”
She observed in the text:

“I hate battle-pieces. In paintings, as in life, detail is what matters most. It is the detail which gives the measure of our humanity. How we react to the tragedy of one small person reflects our attitude towards a whole nationality, and increasing the numbers doesn’t change things much.”

Her details of the brutality of the incursion by Russian troops are graphic and unadulterated as I re-read them. They describe another episode in the long story of the terrible inhumanity of humans that continues to beget more inhumanity.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD'S MAP OF A DISAPPEARED REALITY

I love Baudrillard’s notion of “map.” Empire or theology crumbles, map remains. I imagine nostalgia, denial. 

Other side: Imagine a war map (precession of the simulacra), you end up with Iraq, Afghanistan.

Jean Braudrillard’s main notion here is “simulacra” -- Signs and symbols construct a perceived reality that ever changes or signifies only itself, cultural constructs become the reality, the reality itself disappears.

-First stage: The faithful copy -- it’s believed to show the real - “The Sacramental Order”

-Second stage: Hmm ... maybe not a faithful copy? Use it anyway. Hints the existence of obscured reality - “Order of Maleficence”

-Third stage: Masks the absence of reality, pretends to be faithful copy - “Order of Sorcery.”

-Fourth stage: Pure simulation/simulacra -- has no relationship to reality. Signs reflect other signs, they don’t have to reflect reality, the signs are accepted as reality - consumers lives, for example, are mainly artificial - “Order of Total Equivalency.”

Thanks to Wiki for refreshing this.

I think I’ve got it right.

THE SEEKERS PONDER FAITH MEANINGS IN A CHURCH BASEMENT

A group called The Seekers meets each Sunday aware of biblical contradictions and myths yet seeking meaning for faith by exploring those contradictions. They (we) also challenge the agist stereotypes. Among are two retired Hamilton County TN officials, a former professor, three who have Ph.D.s, and other smart active retirees. All have inquisitive and dynamic sensibilities, are technologically capable and have strong social-justice conscientiousness.

The intriguing question for me involves what brings us together in the basement of a small Chattanooga United Methodist church. The persistence of one woman might offer an answer, and except for me, I’m not indicating who any of us are. Social-conscientiousness might be another. So might the Big Question, what is the divine, how is it manifest, why does the sense of it persist, and what does one do with that? Another is the question of what the church is supposed to be. And finally, why us, at this time, this place? That last question is the most intriguing to me.

(So I’m up at this early hour pondering the meaning of that, thus the purpose and intention.)

REVERENCE FOR THE MYSTERY ...

I don’t try to give an identity to the spirit of life anymore. It seems beyond my senses and sensibility. Even though science seems to measure aspects of the universe’s creativity so acutely, it all falls still within the brain’s limits of perception and conceptualization. The religious wars are so insane. 

Yet something moves within. It remains a question, a mystery to explore and revere.

NUTRITION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE -- A WRITER'S DIALOGUE

I’ve been ranting about nutrition and health lately, right? [I've noticed]

And I’ve got a Ph.D. in philosophy in work that basically centers on social justice, true? [Indeed, Dr. Rehberg]

And there’s a relationship between nutrition and responsible public health ethics, wouldn’t you say? [I'd better say yes]

And also with the ethics of the medical community? [Should be, certainly]

And with disease. Including cancer.[Now you've made it a personal issue, too]

And I did teach of couple of medical ethics courses, plus have some background in health and wellness education. [It's on your transcripts, wherever they are]

So therefore I should explore the ethical dimensions in this area more thoroughly and maybe even write within this realm from a social justice point of view.  [That would be the Socratic way to put it. I noticed you've spent a lot of time lately looking into this.]

Hmmm ... [Hmmm ...]

PICKPOCKET A DREAM (a draft)

PICKPOCKET A DREAM (a draft)

It easily slides out of the pocket into my hands and I slip away.

Maybe the pocket of that person hanging onto a subway strap, eyes meeting his own in his reflection in the train window, tunnel lights flashing by, stroboscopic. Or the three others crowded together near the pole by the door. All I know is the pocket I reached for, as if to move people aside so I could pass through, the pocket my prey.

So what do I have as the bunched few shove to exit through the train door as it stops, a rush of air from the subway station, its sounds now more apparent in my thoughts, invading my curiosity for what I garnered. Stole. New passengers take their place. Which one of those who left did I pickpocket? Does it matter? I’ll imagine it the man looking at his reflection.

The train lurches and I spin and face an elderly woman older than me, face lined, standing because no one would offer her a seat, then another lurch, a bump, and I almost knock her down. I grab the bar with one hand, her arm with the other, and she is stabilized but glaring. I shrug as if to say, what do you expect, it’s the subway, this is the city. Don’t let go, she seems to ask with her eyes. I nod my head toward an empty seat. Another man taps her back. Take the seat, he says. He escorts her. I watch and smile feebly. The man ignores me. The woman leaves the train at the next station and smiles at me. The man leaves, too.

Stations go by and the train is almost empty. I exit. I’m parked along the river. I need a drink and pass a neighborhood bar. Go in? No. Cross the river to head back north. Why did I park here? A whim. I went to the art museum, got bored, left, walked through midtown, thought about a movie, no not that either - my treasure in my pocket as I think about this. It feels like something folded, hard, cardboard. I can’t look. It will ruin the surprise. There will be no disappointment. I imagine I’m stealing a dream. I’ll make of it what I want.

(To be continued …)

© 2013 Wes Rehberg

"VISION" - WENDELL BERRY -- for a holy week

A good time for "Vision" -- even for this holy week, from Wendell Berry:

A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows.  The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, and old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground.  They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting.  Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song, into sacrament.
The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling,
light.  This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

CARTOGRAPHY ... (A WRITER'S REFLECTION)

Cartography (a writer's reflection):
* A map is not the reality, it is a bounded representation, a simulation accepted as a reality.
- a mind map.
(Visit "simulacrum"}
* In 9/11 the mind map was moved to the territory of Iraq, away from the "territories" of its "truth," also maps in the minds of the perpetrators, thus the Iraq mind map preceded the war map and masked the maps underneath.
* When I read an assemblage of signs, say a report, the map it creates is a simulation that my mind map alters even further.
* We, no different from other animals, map our “territory.”
* Ergo ...

WHERE THE PROJECT NAME "WILD CLEARING" CAME FROM

How I formulated the project name “Wild Clearing”:
I opened to a page in my book “Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance” and found I wrote this:
“I am a resister of the oppressive and dominating political and economic order of the trilateral north, thus I call myself a resister and proclaim that. As a resister, I am insinuated to be a traitor to the dominating political and economic order, thus I am both a traitor and resister and accept that. As both traitor and resister, I am one who dwells in an uncertain space within the geographical limits of one of the prime movers of that order, the country that appropriates to itself the label that also denotes the hemisphere, ‘America,’ the United States … It is not a space I dwell in alone, others share it … The borders of this space are constituted by our capacity to articulate our resistance, and by the counter-resistance our resistance encounters.”
I then go on to call this space a “wild clearing.” the original genesis of the project name “Wild Clearing.”
Brave words in my Ph.D. dissertation of the same title and text as the book. How to keep up the energy to continue this …

The book's web page"
http://www.wildclearing.com/politicalgrace.html

SEEKING A HOLISTIC CANCER TREATMENT

Shouldn’t I be suspicious, knowing the cancer medication injected into me was cited in more than a billion dollars in government fines and penalties against its pharmaceutical company for illicit and illegal marketing practices?
With this suspicion in mind as well as the great amount of complaints by others so injected, I’m visiting a holistic Atlanta, GA, area physician Monday to see whether alternative methods I’ve researched and use are effective substitutes, not just to keep the cancer in remission but to get rid of it altogether.
Keeping it in remission using the injection of the medication has required now a second-round of a two-year regimen, which I’m part way into. Keeping it in remission this way also feeds Big Pharma’s appetite for profits so high that a company can write off a billion dollars in fines and penalties as the cost of doing business. Why should it look for cures, then, with such profits?
And keeping it in remission only works for awhile. The cancer cells may eventually no longer need the bodily hormone that the medication blocks to thrive. Then one is shunted off to a medical oncologist for an even more radical and painful treatment. And more profits.
I asked my regular physician whether he knew of holistic urologists in the Chattanooga area and he said he knew of none and that one needs to go outside tradition-bound Chattanooga to find an M.D. with this approach. A woman urologist in the Atlanta area embraces a holistic approach, so I’ll see what her point of view is on Monday.

This way of addressing my malady has become a trope, but yet a healthy exercise. Getting it out, keeping a fighting attitude, working on taking charge of my own healing instead of passivity in the face of “expertise.”

Formerly mentioned:
The government agency that ultimately rendered the charges and fines : the Department of Justice. The drug: Lupron Depot, which shuts off testosterone, which itself nourishes prostate cancer cells. The pharmaceutical company: TAP, at the time, 2004. It’s gone under corporate changes since.
Reflection to be considered in book-in-progress, working title, The Cancer Hole.

THOUGHTS ON INTERVIEW WITH "IRON CURTAIN" AUTHOR

 I keep reflecting on C-SPAN’s Q&A interview with Anne Tannenbaum. This is a summation I wrote of one aspect:

Chewable thought:
Q&A Interviewer’s question to Anne Applebaum who wrote “Iron Curtain”:
What did Stalin do first in eastern Europe nations to control them (1944)?
1) Establish Secret Police - nationally and recruiting locals too who knew their region’s special distinctions.-- target potential opponents.
2) Take Over the Radio (broadcast media) - the efficacy of their propaganda would be best transmitted this way. The printed press, too, but the radio was paramount.
3) Completely Control Civil Society - totally under state control, clubs, churches, charities, volunteer associations, any self-organized entity.
-- (Mussolini’s definition of totalitarianism: Everything in the state, nothing outside of the state).--
Heard on C-SPAN radio.

Other points Anne Tannenbaum suggested:
-- total control evokes dissidence, even in the face of highly punitive reactions, when it goes underground.
-- the ideologues and true believers of the Stalinist system began to lose faith when promises of this type of total control failed to be realized, while many yet espoused the ideology (No doubt true for ideologues of any stripe).
-- Many collaborators “zigzagged” -- for example, only partially or collaborating in insignificant ways when it became apparent their children would be denied entry into schools or a job would be lost.

Letting this sink in more. One thing apparent though, civil society isn’t under total control of the state in the United States. And dissidence and its expression -- such as in demonstrations -- may be infiltrated and rebuffed by police force in some instances, yet it still has its obvious outlets, though these may be manipulated, for example, elections. Economic control and thought control and their ideologies are another thing, though.

Thoughts to start off a Sunday morning.

"HITS AND FITS" AND HOW IT "PLAYS"

When I taught a university advanced photography course decades ago, I needed to work out a simply stated method so students could know where I came from when looking at a work, I said something like this: “Shoot what hits and fits, and remember that everything in the frame plays.”
“Hits and fit” refers to a person’s sensibility, how an image strikes a person’s authenticity. A better word could the Spanish “sensibilidad,” which includes both sensibility and sensitivity, still very nuanced words
“Everything in the frame plays” refers to how to compose, what to leave out and leave in, how to arrange what’s in the image. So “hits and fits” then is how an image presents to oneself and “everything in the frame plays” is how it’s presented to another from the artist’s viewpoint. A viewer attends the image similarly, in this view. The two can become simultaneous.
I’m now realizing I could have applied these two more diligently in filmmaking and now, as well, in writing, or authoring.

Morning Reflection 02/15/2013

Morning reflection 02152013
I'm going to make it a habit to write a reflection each day, like warming up before exercise, even if this is all I might write. I've decided to put filmmaking aside. The experimental work has only had a very narrow positive reception, the documentaries the same. Not enough to live on. So I've put a camcorder, tripod and large camera bags up for sale. I'll keep a smaller DVC tape camcorder which can double as a still camera. The effort and money involved in a production and the upgrading needed as the technology improves makes creating this way prohibitive, too.
Still photography is an interest, a love actually, I'll continue to pursue that, mostly in a documentary/photojournalistic way. I'm not going to chase after expensive equipment here, either. I can use a mobile device, a small Canon consumer camera and the camcorder I'm keeping for this. I've got prints from the '60s-on that record my history with this medium as well as a slew of digitized images, most snapshots. Telling a story with style is the main aim.
Writing I go on and on about, but basically, even though here again reception is sparse, I'll keep at it. In the long cosmic run it doesn't matter given how the universe churns and how stars and planets form and die - from what we know at this time, all human enterprise will pass on when the Sun does, the planet does. So will its creative (and destructive) work. In the short run, it matters, though. Still, the ephemerality is liberating. Or I can pretend it does.

TIME AND THE PASSING OF A FRIEND

Time and the passing of a friend.
There's a hint of Spring this February time in Chattanooga. An elm shows buds, daffodils bloom, the rosemary is green, and dormant grass that leaves a tan-orange hue to the front lawn displays greening blades.
Northeast in New England and New York, winter storm Nemo's ferocious snow and ice shut down highways, air traffic and power. Southwest of here, another band of weather will shed rain and perhaps tornadoes again to the Southeast. Extremes more prevalent, attributed to climate change, an arctic melting that brings a slight enough rise in the ocean levels to change the relationship of the planet to its atmosphere.
Rotating, orbiting, speeding around a small star, we ride a life on an orb probably 4.5 billion years old in the way we measure time. In this hint of Spring, I walked to a rose of sharon now taller than me to see whether it had budded yet, a gift from a friend, Ralph Anderson, who died of the cancer I know. It will bud, a life beyond his as trees surrounding here live beyond other human lives, of other friends who have passed on, even all of us who will share this day today.
Weathering the time. As the oceans rise.

DRAFT OPENING - CHILDREN'S BOOK "VACANT BUILDING"

Rough draft chapter one opener - "Windows in a Vacant Building" - a children's storybook for adults too.

"That one," Jennelle Jones said as she, her twin brother Jesse and father James walked past kennels in the Riverview County Humane Society shelter.

"He's too small," Jesse said. "And look at those little legs and fluffy white hair. Not for me!"

"It's not a he, it's a she," Jennelle replied. "And what's size got to do with it? This dog is special. Besides, look at the name tag on the cage's door. It says 'Jillie,' with a J. She fits right in."

Jillie moved closer to the three on the kennel's gray concrete floor, looked up and wagged a tail that looked like a plume.

"J for 'Jerk' would be a better name for this dog," Jesse said.

Jillie barked in a way that almost sounded like "Hey!" Their father laughed.

Jennelle felt an impression in her head that mystified her, like an intuition. She looked at Jillie and the dog winked an eye and conveyed what seemed to be a smile. "I'm the one, you're right," Jillie seemed to say.

The twins' father wondered why the small dog occupied a large kennel with much bigger dogs as neighbors. He walked over to an older, taller man in jeans mopping the floor of any empty cage. He could smell the disinfectant.

"Why is this dog in such a big kennel?", he asked.

"Oh, that's Jillie," the man answered. "She hated the small kennels and let us know about it."

"What do you know about her?"

"She's odd, that's for sure. People take to her but she shies from them. This is the first time I've seen her be so open toward any visitor," the man said as he removed his ballcap and brushed his gray hair. "How old are your kids?"

"Both twelve, they're twins."

"I'd bet she'd be great with them. Look how she is."

James turned and saw Jillie on her hind legs, panting and touching the kennel door below the latch that opens it. 

Jesse laughed. "She's trying to open the gate," he said.

"Dad," Jennelle yelled. "This is the one. Can't we bring her home!"

...

Writing Using Cloud Experiment

I've been changing how I write now with options expanded at little cost. This I'm writing with a Logitech keyboard hooked up via Bluetooth to an old version of the Galaxy Tab using the ColorNote app. Type is easy to read, the method is ultraportable, and I can upload drafts to Evernote or Google Drive for eventual transfer to Scrivener, the authoring program I use on a old refurbished MacBook Pro for final composition. Or I can paste the text into a Word and Pages program if I wish.
The key feature this way is portability. I can write wherever without lugging around the laptop. Plus, with Evernote and Google Drive I can skip this step and write on either of these, or edit while the draft resides there. Connected to the Cloud, there's little hassle. So, now, I'll upload this and add text in Evernote.
Okay, now I'm in Evernote where the view of the type is smaller but readable on the 7-inch screen of the Galaxy Tab. Many more lines are viewable, which helps in viewing what I wrote before. So I can actually compose a draft here as well. Now i'll copy this and create a new file in Drive to see how that works.
Back in Evernote, I discovered that writing on Google Drive in the Galaxy Tab there is laggy. I tried the same going cross-platform on the laptop with no diffiulty. But I'll now exclude Drive as an option on the Tab and use Evernote instead. I haven't tried Drop Box on this trip. Now I'll copy this and return to ColorNote, where I'll upload this experiment to Blogger.
It uploaded fine. I'll leave it here for now.

THE WORDS COME OUT HALTINGLY ... (EN ROUTE)

PROLOGUE DRAFT: CHURCH AND HOLY PAIN

PROLOGUE DRAFT: CHURCH AND HOLY PAIN

When I pray these days it is to a mystery, a mysterium tremendum that cannot be named but who I call Gracious One as an intermediary. To me it is also guardian and guide. It makes sense to me that it encompasses more than I can imagine and represent. It also makes sense that it embraces human notions of compassion and wisdom, common characteristics among many religious and spiritual expressions. But I make no dogmatic claims this way. The magnitude of uncommon understandings and religious attitudes about this mystery prohibits any singular claim. 

Also, the brutality, wars, vicious attitudes and cultural rigidity that have resulted from dogmatic claims about how this mystery may be represented further prohibits a singular claim, characteristics that make absolutely no sense when I consider it in the context of wisdom and compassion.

I write this as both believer and skeptic, as a person who once underwent a late-in-life struggle to be an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church, as one who knows that the story of Jesus Christ has not been accurately represented in scripture and in fact has been misrepresented both in oral tradition and in what eventually became what some argue is the "gospel truth."

My struggle about this, part of the “holy pain,” has been with the "gospel truths" of religion and the dogmatic assertions that have resulted. I prefer to live in the question rather than the answer about how the mystery should be represented. The answers may have provided people with assurances but they have also resulted in unspeakable agony and outrageous charlatanism. 

In a sense, the book is about my lifelong difficult relationship with church and its representations of holiness and humanitarianism. It’s also about alternative and sometimes radically outrageous ways to seek an understanding of the holy, research into what I called political grace, human rights efforts I thought to be holy, disappointing difficulties as a pastor over a divided 10-year period as well as with the ordination process, occasional overenthusiastic adoption of theological stances, and a continuing resolve to pray to and try to understand what I call Gracious One.

My own story with religion isn't one of unspeakable pain but has been acutely painful at times nevertheless. It has also been enlightening, passionate, assuring. and at times ecstatic. What is written here is autobiographical then, my notion of holiness and how I relate that to the notion of “church.”