I think most anthologies do this but I like it when a poet’s name is unknown until the end. And tonight I was not at all surprised to see whose name was at the bottom of this one:

Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand
by the window looking out
at moonstruck trees a December storm
has bowed with ice.

Maple and mountain ash bend
under its glassy weight,
their cracked branches falling upon
the frozen snow.

The trees themselves, as in winters past,
will survive their burdening,
broken thrive. And am I less to You,
my God, than they?

— Robert Hayden

The original “poem, prose, & praise” began as an email to an old friend. It was a practice I never did make regular; not yet, anyway. (Did I really ever only do four of them?) I came across that email today and a postscript I think should have been included…

PS—I like the use of nonce words. This week’s word is lucifactions. Context: “Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucifactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous…”

The quote is from M. Robinson’s Housekeeping.

The sky was whited by high, even, luminous film, and the trees had an evening darkness. The shore drifted in a long, slow curve, outward to a point, beyond which three steep islands of diminishing size continued the sweep of the land toward the depths of the lake, tentatively, like an ellipsis. The point was high and stony, crested with fir trees. At its foot a narrow margin of brown sand abstracted its crude shape into one pure curve of calligraphic delicacy, sweeping, again, toward the lake. We crossed the point at its base, climbing down its farther side to the shore of the little bay where the perch bit. A quarter of a mile beyond, a massive peninsula foreshortened the horizon, flung up against it like a barricade. Only out beyond these two reaches of land could we see the shimmer of the open lake. The sheltered water between them was glossy, dark, and rank, with cattails at its verge and water lilies in its shallows, and tadpoles, and minnows, and farther out, the plosh now and then of a big fish leaping after flies. Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucitactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous, and here things massed and accumulated, as they do in cobwebs or in the eaves and unswept corners of a house. It was a place of distinctly domestic disorder, warm and still and replete.

The Essay on Architecture provides a story of man in his primitive state to explain how the creation of the “primitive man’s” house is created instinctively based on man’s need to shelter himself from nature. Laugier believed that the model of the primitive man’s hut provided the ideal principles for architecture or any structure. It was from this perspective that Laugier formed his general principles of architecture where he outlined the standard form of architecture and what he believed was fundamental to all architecture. To Laugier, the general principles of architecture were found in what was natural, intrinsic and part of natural processes.

— The Primitive Hut

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An illustration of the primitive hut by Charles Dominique Eisen was the frontispiece for the second edition of Laugier’s Essay on Architecture (1755). … The message the illustration was suggesting was clear: that the essay would suggest a new direction or a new order for architecture. In the image a young woman who personifies architecture draws the attention of an angelic child towards the primitive hut. Architecture is pointing to a new structural clarity found in nature, rather than the ironic ruins of the past.

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Lovely to stumble upon this. One of those “I’ll read you next” books I’ve had sitting around the house is R. D. Dripps’ The First House (1997). Marc-Antoine Laugier’s “satisfying hut” is mentioned parenthetically on the first page, though it’s understood by Dripp to have taken on a speculative historical role rather than a guiding one. Either way, that long stitch embroidery piece I picked up a couple weeks ago is looking even more timely and fitting.

From the preface:

The disengaged or reductive quality of current architectural discourse unfortunately does not seem to produce arguments and theories sufficiently broad in scope and adventuresome to continue to address important political, cultural, and ecological issues. Thoughts, actions, and artifacts appear to be floating freely, with no apparent engagement with the intellectual and physical world they must have come from and which one would hope they might help to direct. Without a connection to the immense intellectual project of understanding the world and our place within it, thinking closes in on itself, producing hypotheses that are increasingly autonomous, hermetic, and diminished in reach.

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Matt Rota (source). What a loaded image!

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A rough note on some dots that ought to connect somehow — or that point at things we should want to connect:

• Kevin Bales’s and Michael Rota’s book Friends of God and Slaves of Men (Interview with the authors at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture)
  • “The fundamental fact of slavery, past and present, is that a person is reduced to ‘property’ and may be used, abused, exploited, bought, sold, or killed. Slaves today, because they tend to be much less costly than slaves in the past, are normally treated as disposable inputs in criminal activities.”
• Free the Slaves:
  • “Modern slavery is a result of social, cultural, and political conditions that make people vulnerable. Poverty, war and conflict, migration, lack of access to basic human rights, and many other related factors create conditions where the powerful have the opportunity to oppress and exploit the weak. To end slavery, those most vulnerable to slavery must have the knowledge and resources they need to protect themselves and their communities.”
• Carmen Imes’ “Bearing,” “Being,” “Becoming” series (Interview with Imes at OnScript — “This is God yelling.”)
• Amy Pope’s piece (and interview) on immigration and labor in Foreign Affairs
  • “When immigration is poorly managed, communities feel the tension. Yet when local officials receive the support and resources required to manage immigration, they are often the first to express their support for newcomers.”
• Luke 13:23-30 — “The narrow door and the table of God” (emphasis on “striving,” agōnizesthe, as compared to, say, excuse-making or “realism”)
• Sarah Susanka in her book The Not So Big House:
  • “Frank Lloyd Wright believed that everyone should be able to live in an architect-designed house, each on its own acre of land. Much of his life and work was devoted to the de-urbanization of America, with the single-family homestead as the basic building block of civilized life. Wright designed a series of houses that were affordable and smaller than the typical house of the day—interestingly enough, promoting the idea even then of eliminating the formal space of the house and integrating the kitchen into the primary living space.”
• Christopher Alexander’s Timless Way
  • “When a pattern language is properly used, it allows the person who uses it to make places which are part of nature. The character of nature is not something added to a good design. It comes directly from the order of the language. When the order of the patterns and the language is correct, the differentiating process allows the design to unfold as smoothly as an opening flower.” (Some mutatis mutandis required, but maybe not as much as you might think.)
• Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age:
  • “My main point is that the dismal economics of the self-employed vegetable grower are ultimately a reflection, if a slightly distorted one, of the real economy of nature and Earth systems, to which all of us are destined to return.”
  • “Instead of a politics of labour agitation that hopes to summon greater riches for workers out of capital, we need to degrade capital so that we can interact with each other in community as owners of our own labour and necessary capital, including land.”
  • “In view of the enormous uncertainties of the present meta-crisis, it’s worth everybody imagining themselves as a potentially friendless migrant.”
  • Also, Smaje and Michael Budde in the previous post

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And of course, words from a Silly Old Bear:

“I’ve been thinking,” said Pooh, “and what I’ve been thinking is this. I’ve been thinking about Eeyore.”

“What about Eeyore?”

“Well, poor Eeyore has nowhere to live.”

“Nor he has,” said Piglet.

“You have a house, Piglet, and I have a house, and they are very good houses. And Christopher Robin has a house, and Owl and Kanga and Rabbit have houses, and even Rabbit’s friends and relations have houses or somethings, but poor Eeyore has nothing. So what I’ve been thinking is: Let’s build him a house.”

“That,” said Piglet, “is a Grand Idea. Where shall we build it?”

Chris Smaje:

Thailand has been a relative economic success story in recent years, increasing its GDP per capita well above the global average. Historically, it’s had a large offshore fishing fleet, but with the country’s economic success it’s become hard to recruit Thais into the industry. Fishing is hard and dangerous work — who’d do it when there are better options in a growing economy?

Often, the answer is people from poorer nearby countries like Myanmar and Cambodia. Often, too, these workers toil in conditions of near or actual slavery. Slavery has been defined as a state of social death, and social death is easy to arrange on a boat in the ocean run by people from a different country and community.

When accounting the benefits of economic growth to Thais, it’s necessary also to account the price that’s paid by others from surrounding countries. The story of money as a power of oligarchic community and money as usurious increase is a book of violence and social death written on a global canvas, with people enslaved on Thai fishing boats one footnote among many.

Michael Budde:

Among the most contested terms in the Western lexicon, “development” cannot be understood adequately unless one accepts that it is a violent, coercive process. … It involves the coerced reorganization of societies, peoples, lands, and practices. Sometimes that coercion is obvious, in the form of soldiers or police or private violence that pushes people off their land, prohibits them access to needed sources of food and materials, or kills people who disagree with the ends and means of actors who drive the development process. In other times and places, the coercion takes less easily perceived forms, from changes in tax structures designed to push people from self-provisioning activities, to those dependent on wage markets, to legal processes that replace traditional land tenure systems with those that benefit the favored agents and outcomes of development processes. Moreover, this violence is not an originating practice that, once its grim work is accomplished, can be replaced by a more civilized sort of cooperative or voluntary set of interactions … but is a necessary and ongoing function throughout.

Development has and continues to be an unrelenting war on the ability of peoples to provide for their most basic needs—food, water, shelter, and more. It has been called the war on subsistence, and this five-hundred-year battle continues to push people further into depending for their survival on labor markets they do not control, investment policies they do not control, and ideological systems they do not control—all of which presuppose the intrinsic inferiority of subsistence activities relative to modern market relations in terms of efficiency, productivity, and freedom. However much they disagreed on other things, the need to destroy subsistence systems made allies of liberal capitalists and authoritarian state socialists, investment bankers, and most well-intentioned nonprofit organizations throughout most of the modern era. As Adam Smith knew but refused to say—it was left to his contemporary, Sir James Steuart, to say it explicitly—people first had to be made desperate by the destruction of subsistence activities before they would “voluntarily” agree to sell their labor power to the wealthy on whatever terms they could manage.

I want to get right with my brother

And be a refuge to the rest.

I want to sit down with a stranger

And learn about his life.

Cuz we’re all broken sometimes

And we’re all going to die.

We’re all broken sometimes

And we’re all going to die.

…

We’re all broken sometimes.

…

And we’re all going to die.

Carmen Imes:

The world feels so heavy and ugly.

The Epstein files

Minneapolis

Iran

Surgeries, hospitalizations, and mental health struggles of dear friends

Deaths. Too many deaths.

But today I held a newborn. She fit between my elbow and my hand, absolutely precious. Beautiful and perfect in every way.

Hope incarnate.

Interview with Carmen Imes:

One of the texts that reminds me of that you pointed out, and I hadn’t noticed before, at least I hadn’t noticed the Hebrew dynamics in, is Exodus 22, where you… It’s funny because for those Hebrew nerds out there, I was in my Hebrew class just teaching on the infinitive absolute, which is used to create emphatic clauses in Hebrew.

So you put an infinitive absolute next to an imperfect, and it creates this emphatic clause.

Like bold, underlined…

Yeah, exactly. Like in Genesis 3, if you eat from the tree, it’s: “in the middle of the garden, dying, you will die.” So it uses the same verb twice.

And in that verse [Exodus 22], as you note, the focus is on the widow and the orphan and God’s extreme response if the people oppress the widow or the orphan. And it uses the emphatic three times.

Yeah, so we’ve got three infinitive absolutes in a row, which I don’t know if there are any other verses in the Bible that have three in a row. You’d know that.

I don’t know of any.

So yeah, Exodus 22:21 begins with reminding them of their story. Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. You should know better. You have lived this story. You know what it’s like to be an outsider, to not know the language, to not have the resources, to be the object of everyone’s suspicion.

So don’t take advantage of people who are foreigners among you. And then verse 22: Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. So this is members of a household where the patriarch, the father figure has died and they lack representation. Maybe at the city gate, they don’t have somebody to fight for them or protect them.

And it says in verse 23, if you do — and this is the first infinitive absolute — if you do do this, like you actually oppress someone and they cry, cry out to me — crying they cry out to me — then I will certainly hear their cry — so: hearing, I will hear their cry.

And again, I don’t know of another verse that has three in a row of these. This is God yelling. […]

This is a message we need. People talk about the angry God of the Old Testament. And I want to say, let’s pay attention to what makes God really angry. When you are brutal toward someone who is vulnerable — whether that person is a foreigner, whether they have been widowed or they have been orphaned — you are putting yourself in the crosshairs of God’s most strident judgment.