Great Paragraphs

Sort of a composite paragraph from Holly Millea's piece on Michelle Williams in the current (April) issue of ELLE magazine. Heartbreaking, poignant, sincere--unbelievable. If I could publish the whole article, I would.


This reminds her [Michelle Williams] of a favorite poem she discovered, "when I was, like, really skimming the bottom. I was in this hotel and I reached over into the bedside table for, I don't know what--a phone book, some matches, the Bible, something--and inside it was an old copy of The Paris Review. And the first poem was by this guy named Galway Kinnell. And I read it and I felt safe and understood by the world for the first time." So much so that she's become a Galway groupie, attending his readings. She even wrote him a letter. "There's this one poem called 'Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.' It's about being a parent--I loved it even before I had a kid--and the last lines are:

When I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand thing,
each scratched in time with such knowledge,
the wages
of dying is love.

"For a long time the last line utterly mystified me. The wages of dying is love? Like, the price of dying is love? The cost? No. For dying you're paid in love. Because you have to die, you get to experience love. Finally decoded!" She sighs. "You're going to die when you read this poem. He places so much esteem and knowledge in the face and the body of the newborn.

....

In New York, less than an hour later, the news broke. And after a week of grieving silence, she released a statement to the world, which read, in part, "My heart is broken. I am the mother of the most tender-hearted, high-spirited, beautiful little girl who is the spitting image of her father. All that I cling to is his presence inside her that reveals itself every day." How old must she feel now?

Williams has told us how Galways Kinnell's poem ends. Here's how it begins:

You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.


Love.
Seth

Fighting the Impossible: The Conservatives Never-Winning War

No doubt many of you have seen the video above. I've been passing it around and posting all over Facebook. But if you haven't seen it, here is your chance. Watch it. Absorb it. Then read the following essay written by my (very straight) friend Eric Mueller. After some minor edits on my part, I think we came up with something kind of poignant.


Fighting the Impossible: The Conservatives Never-Winning War


Eradicating all of the Jews is possible. Exterminating every last Muslim on Earth is possible. Killing every single last Asian person on this planet is possible. Even Caucasians are numbered…

There is a clear and defining moment when a race or a group or even a belief is wiped out for good. At that precise moment they are gone off the face of the Earth forever, basically extinct. With that in mind, hate groups targeting certain races or beliefs have some merit, I suppose. At least they have realistic goals, because the above-mentioned moments are actually attainable. One doesn’t need to cite the Holocaust or the atrocious genocides in Uganda or the Sudan to understand that eradicating a group of people based on something like race, which is genetic but also to a degree anatomical, is entirely possible. The dinosaurs died out. Dodo birds were poached to extinction. What makes any other race so safe?

However, when it comes to hate groups targeting homosexuals, I'm afraid I'm at a loss for logic. Homosexuals themselves are not going to change, if the last 5,000 years has shown us anything. Therefore what is the point of gay-hate groups? Is their goal is to eliminate the gay presence here on Earth? If so they are clearly biting off more than they can chew. To say it is a daunting task is an understatement, because the idea is nothing short of impossible. When we speak of total genocide, even that idea seems beyond possibility, due to the sheer numbers of individuals in race groups. But, if a group really dedicated themselves, who’s to say it couldn’t be done? If the annihilation is based solely on something physical, visible, the hunt itself is easy, and therefore well within the realm of possibility. However, when we try to apply the same laws to homosexuality, again, logic is lost. It goes without saying that every homosexual in existence is not or was not always open about or aware of his or her sexuality. Was Governor James McGreevy? Was Ellen Degeneres? Was the evangelist preacher Ted Haggard? Right—no. And two of them fathered children, meaning what? The trait was potentially passed and more homosexuals were, naturally, born. If they weren’t open throughout their lives, who’s to say they would be during an insurrection? Even if it was possible to identify and destroy every gay person in the world; a thousand more would be born the next day and a thousand more the day after that, and the day after that. Such an attempt would be futile and homosexuality would invariably continue to “spread.”

Gay, you see, is an equal opportunity impregnator. Gay has no bounds to religion or race. Gay is not some club you can close down, hoping its members disperse. Gay is not something that can be taught or untaught. There is no inquisition that will deter the Gays into becoming something they are not. Gay is not some problem that is going to go away with medication. Gay is as [non]curable as race, yet even then gay is more socially pervasive, erratic, unconquerable than race. At least race is predictable. I’ll even address those who will argue that homosexuality is nurtured or environmental. Where is the sense in that argument when seemingly perfect boys are girls are born in small, overtly conservative towns with absolutely no exposure to homosexual lifestyles yet they somehow “become” gay anyway? What is the variable in the gay equation that predicts the homosexual outcome? If you find it, let me know. But even if you do, it can’t obviously be human, so what’s next? Destroying anything that has the faintest scent of homosexuality? We might end up a pretty barren world after something like that. But of course this option would require vast amounts of resources that, quite literally, we as a species, at this point in time, cannot provide.

Who we are left with are those who claim homosexuality to be a choice. And to that I offer only this simplicity, as the idea of entertaining such an idea is far too inane: does a heterosexual choose to be straight?

This War has seen its peaks and valleys from both sides, but the major turning point happened long ago, I’m afraid. The gays have seen your rallies and have heard your speeches, your lectures, and your “message.” And they know you are afraid, even though you have no reason to be. They are listening and watching as you, interestingly enough, only preach to yourselves. “Preaching to the choir” is as good as doing personal inventory. You’re no longer out to “change” homosexuals, but rather try to rectify the “damage” this modern society is inflicting on your beliefs. It is as if you are checking in, so to speak, making sure you all still stand together on this issue while using God as a shield. God has been blamed enough throughout history without having this nailed to his good name. What possesses people to blame God for their hatred? Saying that you, personally, have nothing against Gays but God tells you to hate, therefore you do? Shame.

You are no longer trying to win this war but merely trying to stay afloat in a world that is everyday more accepting of them and less accepting of you. When an army is no longer advancing but in fact losing ground, there is a military term for such an event: retreating. So keep up your anti-gay slogans, your bigotry, your hate, your ignorance and your humiliation. Keep saying "it is a choice." Keep saying "it's God's will," and not your own, because we all already know the truth: it’s your side that is thinning in ranks, "changing", self-abating—it is your side that is ultimately going to lose.


So go ahead, fight. No one is going to stop you…we don't have to. It's now just a waiting game.

And that's how this War will end.

But A+ for the effort.

Before, I mentioned that it was impossible to kill all homosexuals. This is, in truth, wrong. Homosexuals share the same eliminating fate with another group of people on this planet.

Humans.

Now, we wait…