Justin-A stupid history

Throughout the two millennia that the Christian church has existed, it has formed a pattern of helping new converts feel comfortable by absorbing and attempting to sanctify some of their customs.  The result of this has given us Christmas Trees, Easter Eggs and a whole plethora of symbolism that has little to do with the church and yet is fiercely defended by her.

To a point, the worst of these ties has been the celebration of fertility married to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Confusion abounds as the most holy day in Christendom is painted pastel and accompanied by a bunny bearing colored eggs. Even the name is pagan in origin.

          Christmas when viewed objectively is extremely confusing. Placed by the church in the wrong season, Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ in Israel using Nordic symbolism. Laying sacrifices before tree gods became gifts under trees. Conservative American evangelicals have picked up the call of “keep Christ in Christmas” generating the idea of a culture war concerning Christmas. A war that continues to be won by Christians every time someone writes the year with the letters A.D. The same group seems less inclined to keep the “mass” in Christmas.

          With the Christian Church’s history of absorption and adoption of other cultural holidays, it seems that Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve, would be a natural fit into the calendar. Regardless, a large group of modern evangelicals eschew the practice of Halloween because of its pagan roots. Some groups even go so far as to remove the name given the day by the church and call their celebration a “Harvest Party” which is exactly what the pagans of old would have been celebrating at this time of year.    

Jason - Stupid People

King Richard III

Some historians suspect it might have been the chemicals in the paint that tripped up the thoughts of Richard Lawrence. He had found work as a house painter in the Washington D.C. area and over the course of a few years he began to act erratically. By late 1832 he quit his job and and began to dress in such a way that the children in the neighborhood called him King Richard.

It is possible this was his intent all along. When he quit his job his sister asked him why and he said he didn’t need to work. He explained he was King Richard III and as such the United States government owed him a large sum of money. King Richard had been dead for some 350 years. She didn’t know it but this was a hint to a very dangerous train of thought. Richard reasoned that it was President Andrew Jackson who was stood in the way of him getting payment. So, he needed to be removed from office.

There would be a kind of justice, he thought, in the King of England taking the life of a President.

Not one but a pair of one shot Derringer pistols were hidden in the clothes of the Mr. Lawrence and he made his way to the capital, where the funeral of Congressman Davis would be attended by “Old Hickory” himself. There were a couple problems with his plan. First, these pistols were incredibly sensitive to moisture and the weather was rainy and generally damp. Additionally, even though the President was 67 years old, he was by all counts a formidable opponent.

The faux king waited behind the pillar he knew the President would have to pass by. One hand was inside his clothes in the grip of the gun. He waited and watched. He recognized his target by his shock of hair, let him pass them stepped out behind him. He withdrew the pistol, pointed and pulled the trigger.

The cap went off, sounding like a shot, but it was a misfire caused by the moisture in the air. Andrew Jackson, having been in some thirteen duels, knew exactly what this sound was. While those around him scattered, hid or got down, he wheeled around looking for who would dare. He eyes landed on the fop and with a grip on his cane, he charged.

Richard pulled the second pistol, pointed and again no projectile came from the gun. At this point it was too late. Swing after swing the President hit the addled man with his cane. It was then the crowd, led by Davy Crockett himself, tackled Lawrence and escorted the ferocious President to safety.

Tough Decision - Jason

With Care

My Mom and Dad sat just behind
Where single hand my arm could find
Perfect office
Perfect chair
But it was me they’d wrapped with care

The time had come to vessel pick
From pages glossy, bright and slick
Lives unravelled
Lives unfair
How do I wrap her life with care?

Can purple tell of mother’s love?
Will wood reveal the home above?
Diming thought
Diming prayer
I want to shout I do not care

I want to dwell in times gone by
Remember nights with starry sky
Memories lived
Memories rare
In times I now enwrap with care

We step in castle shadowed walk
With hands entwined we laugh and talk
Sugared visions
Sugared air
Like ornaments I wrap with care

We hold each other arm in arm
To fire light on uncle’s farm
Lifted union
Lifted there
More gifts in time I wrap in care

The tears they weigh upon my cheek
The waiting eyes insist I speak
Broken focus
Broken pair
So now I must wrap her with care

Justin - A Tough Choice

To Stand
Three stood knowing time was growing near
When they would have to make their loyalty plain;
To idol kneel or to endure the flame,
Action, or inaction would make clear
If they would submit to pagan king
Or if they would invoke his wrath so vain;
Like children to their ancient faith they cling.
  
From the idol their worship they withheld,
To not betray their people or their God.
They watched as the approaching soldiers plod,
The coming troop they knew their doom did spell.
Again refuse to kneel to idol king,
Bound, they stumbled forward at the prod,  
Holding faith in face of death’s hot sting.

Sitting knowing time is growing near
A posture shift I will be called to make; 
To stand and sing with pride inspired, fake
Or kneel with those oppressed by hate and fear.
And yet I feel my heart divided torn;
My pride would not entirely be fake
When viewing waving symbol tired worn.
  
But if I'm called my nation to adore,
Then should I not her people also love
(A nation of the people not above)
The oppression of her children to abhor? 
How can I hold this shred of pride I feel,
And fly with hawks circling round the doves? 
How can I stand while brothers, mourning, kneel?

The prescribed patriot’s posture now has changed

And frenzied furnace flames no longer leap,
Yet worship to the idol we upkeep,
Only symbols have been rearranged.
Beaten by your country though you feel,
Weighed by injustices that daily heap.
The one sin not forgiven is to kneel.  

Justin - the Best and Absolute Worst so far.

I have heard artists of various stripes say that ranking their pieces is akin to ranking their children.  I found this to be true; it is very difficult for me to pick my favorite, whereas, the worst is a constant nagging noise in the back of my head that will not leave me alone. That being said let me start with the worst.

    Early on in this project, the fourth week, the current president was a candidate that many of us thought was unelectable.  Regardless, he was gaining some popularity and I thought we should write something about him.  It failed, hugely.  It was bad enough that in my write up about the writing I admitted that it was both not funny and that it was probably a swing and a miss.  I tried using actual Trump quotes and placing them in a false interview with a pretty snarky interviewer.  Reading it now, it looks like the kind of thing that a middle or high school kid would piece together when they first started becoming politically aware.  That is, there was an idea of understanding of the problems, but no solutions.  There was no real handling of the problems I was trying to highlight, just sarcastic comments about them.  The bottom line is it was ill conceived and poorly written.  I don’t think I imagined I was going to change anyone’s minds about Trump, so I’m not really sure what I was thinking.  It was the kind of piece that at best would land with half of the readers, and that’s only if it’s done well, which it wasn’t.    I heard an interview recently where a songwriter responded to the compliment that one of his songs had “great lyrics” with “not great but clever.” I think at the beginning I thought the idea was clever, but even as it was published, I knew it was not good, definitely not great, and not even clever.  Those of us who were there talk about it like one might talk about a terrible car accident that they were in; we’re still alive, but we don’t really have anything else good to say about.

It’s harder for me to pick my favorite.  I’ve managed to narrow it down to two pieces that I am fairly proud of.  The first was the conflict ballade, Ballade of the Flood, from May of last year.  More than a year of writing later, this could still be my favorite poem. I managed to capture the imagery and idea and execute the form well.  I prefer strictly formed poems to free verse, and I’m pretty proud of this one.  It was hard writing and in my commentary, I mention that I started with four different concepts before settling on the final idea.  Sometimes poetry flows, sometimes it’s an uphill climb.  This was a climb, but I think it’s better for it or at least I appreciate the result more because it was such a challenge.

The second piece is A Dark Solace from May of this year (maybe May is just a good month for poetry.)  This one was not a climb; it was not a fight.  It flowed quickly, I knew the ideas I wanted to use and the words fell easily into rhythm.  At this point, we had stopped doing commentary on the project blog, so I don’t have a record of the exact process, but I remember the editing of the poem after I had flown through the original draft. There was specific word choices that I changed and I added punctuation (something I comment about intentionally not doing in the ballade.) Also, although it follows a strict form, it is not a fixed form.  I picked the form and my instruction was a poem, written in sestets, at least X amount of stanzas, envoi is allowable.  So, this seems more like my own work than many poems written in a fixed form and I find myself very attached to it.  Also, the poem is about depression, something that I have dealt with intermittently for most of my adult life.  That makes it more personal to me and, although I don’t think good art needs to be about personal issue, I think in this case it helps.

So, that’s that.  Like children, it’s much easier to find the worst than the best, disappointments are heavy and there’s a lot of mediocrity in the middle.  Overall, I wouldn’t give the project up for anything, but next time I get the urge to write about a living politician, I might instead carefully construct a performance piece allegorically bashing my head into a brick wall. 

The links to my top two are below, I am not including a link to the Trump piece, if you want to dig it up, you can, but for my money, it’s best left buried.

http://brothersweeklywriting.blogspot.com/2016/05/justin-conflict.html

http://brothersweeklywriting.blogspot.com/2017/05/justin-dark-solace.html

Jason - Previous Posts

The Best Times and Worst of Time

In the time Justin and I have written this blog, there have been some really good pieces, some really bad pieces and a bunch of stuff somewhere in between. This is the nature of the beast. We set up this weekly writing challenge in such a way that on any give week one of us picks the topics while the other picks the style. This has given results that are a little unpredictable. There have been piece that I thought would be funny, that ended up kind of blah and there have been topics with difficult poetry types that have turned out surprisingly good. We have had weeks were the results are wildly different and other where we are so close we use the same color and the same unusual word in a poem. This is all part of the fun.

I would like to tell you I always enjoy the process, but the truth is sometimes it is really hard. I would like to tell you it is always rewarding, but there are times I have gotten to the end and I thought, not really happy with that. There is lesson to be learned from even these.

I have to say I hesitate to tell you about the worst week’s writing, for fear of stirring some political rants, but in my mind, of all the work I have done, one piece falls to the bottom. It was meant to be funny, but the jokes didn’t really fly then and they certainly are less funny now. It was supposed to have a historical bent and while the quotes are historical quotes, they didn’t really fit together as well as I had hoped. Of all the pieces we have posted, if I was allowed to remove one, this would be the one I would remove. This travesty was the 5 minute play on Trump.

To start with I was pretty excited about this piece. I thought doing a piece where I placed Trump, who was a candidate it appeared destined to lose, in the midst of past presidents would be funny. I could lampoon him a little bit with his own words and I could include great presidential quotes. I thought I would place him in the midst of Jefferson, Lincoln and Eisenhower, that I would be able to look up a few quotes by each of these guys and the piece would weave itself together. In short, that did not happen. The characters didn’t easily talk to each other, the quotes were often so tied to their time, they had to be bent to work together. There was no banter. They didn’t talk to each other and they never really talked to me. Worse, I couldn’t strike that balance of genuinely funny with Trump. I knew not everyone would agree with my handling of him, but if you do it right you should walk away with people saying, at least is was funny. He came off as mean or stupid, pompous and war mongering, but never funny. So I made him a character Trump supporters would hate that I had written him so and Trump haters would point at and say see, but not laughing, not seeing it as funny. This was not just a miss, it was a miss I took extra long to write and I would have no idea how to fix even today.

If I am telling you about the difficulty, the disaster, I think it is important to write about the magic that sometimes happens. There is a moment that you can not create, that there is no ritual to summon, that happens so very rarely, but you wish it would happen all the time. It is a moment when you are writing a piece and you lose yourself to it, that you stop wrestling the word to the paper and instead they reveal themselves. When you are done you feel almost as if the writing come from somewhere else. There are nuances and details steeped with meaning that even as you read them, read the very words you wrote, you are taken by them. You wonder how you could have written them. For all of the assignments, for all the works, both easy and difficult, this has happened only completely to me once.

It started as a simple piece, a letter meant to be written to an inanimate object. I don’t know how to tell you about it, so I will tell you what was going on as I wrote. It had been just a few months since my wife had passed away and I desperately wanted to know why. I was hurting. So, as I wrote a piece to a spruce tree, written from the master violin maker who was cutting it down, I was, in a way giving reason to my own experience. I started with research, but by the second or third paragraph I was no longer writing, the words were writing themselves and I was crying a grieving in a way I need so much at the time. Additionally, I found when I shared this with people it helped them grieve, too. I don’t know if it was because they saw my pain, felt there own, or somehow got an answer they themselves were looking for. Even now, it is the kind of writing I wish I could do all the time, but I fear it was a special piece written at a difficult time, just when I needed it most.

You can find that piece here: http://brothersweeklywriting.blogspot.com/2016/02/letter-jason.html

Jason - Procrastinate

Studies Wasted

In knew in just two weeks there’d be a coming test
So days in study spent so I could do my best
The time it came and went, so new ideas were born
Like never do today what you could do tomorn

Times

Sometimes I work the trials to articulate
Hard times trying my thoughts to domesticate
Two times I have my body Incarcerate
Life times are spent while I Procrastinate

Deadline

Supposed to publish Friday five o’clock
I’d like to claim my brain the words did block
And oh to claim the lines were hard and hazy
But truth be told I failed because I’m lazy