"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI)is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding,safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.”
“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.
So, how do you beat the odds when it’s one against a billion? You’re just outnumbered. You stand strong, keep pushing yourself against all rational limits, and never give up. But the truth of the matter is despite how hard you try and fight to stay in control, when it’s all said and done, sometimes you’re just outnumbered.”
A chess game broke out. It turns out that Pugsley decided he wanted to learn to play, and has been on chess.com playing games. We played a couple, then The Boy (on college break) and I split a couple of games, and then The Mrs. was even coaxed into playing a game, too. So, you can see why I skipped out on writing Monday’s missive.
Christmas is over for this year, so we can begin to return to dealing with the problems at hand: The Narrative. First: who, exactly, is The Enemy? Oh, sure, the Ultimate Enemy is obvious to folks like me who are Christian. That doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about the minions.
One thing that’s become very clear is that the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is simple: the good guys want government and economic system to work for the people, and the bad guys want the people to work for the government and economic system. I’ve used the terms Left, Leftism, and Leftist to name them, but it’s a clumsy, inaccurate term. I think I’ll keep using the term, but I just wanted to recognize that it is an approximation.
In the real world, the actual Commie left has been co-opted. The goal has been to remove the economic from the political. That has been hugely successful. When is the last time that either party actually did something real on the economic front? The latest spending bill was nearly 4,200 pages, and most legislators had only a few hours to review it.
What’s in it? Who knows? It’s certain that economic policy isn’t debated, and the Federal Reserve Bank® isn’t federal, yet makes decisions that widely impact the nation and the world. Without meaningful oversight. Without significant debate. If politicians don’t control economic decisions, what chance does an individual have to change the system?
Economics have been pulled from political control. And what’s the goal? Whatever makes folks work for the economic system. As the World Economic Forum® stated, the goal is that nothing is owned, and everything is rented. Need a frying pan (to cook your state-approved dinner)? That’ll just be a rental fee of $1.50 for the night. There’s a cleaning fee if you don’t return the pan clean. And the food? Bugs. It’s not like there’s a great technology that turns bugs into human-friendly protein, called, “a chicken”.
The Far-Left (think the actual committed Commies in Antifa®) have been co-opted into being race warriors and fighting for “rights” based on fetishes. When they do this, they are no threat to the economic system, at all. The George Floyd riots weren’t about solving racial inequity. The George Floyd riots were about reprogramming the Left into something harmless to the system.
But even those fetishes are being sold as products. Think about the profit opportunity in just one sex-change surgery. The average transsexual is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the economy. That’s the goal – a society that looks like a pyramid, with just a few at the top.
What threatens the system? Anything that offers resistance. Anything that wakes people up. Anything that makes people upset at a system that is designed to transfer wealth out of their hands can concentrate it into the hands of a global elite. I understand that this is Evil, and wonder how many of them have actually made the decision to be Evil themselves. Ghislaine Maxwell went to jail over a client list that had to be sealed.
Why is that? To those not in the inner circle, it probably looks like people trying to create control, to make a profit. To do this best, you need international treaties that people can’t see or control, that are made without their knowledge or consent. This creates a structure that allows every important decision to be made outside the realm of politics.
See? No politics in the economics. And to do that properly, it has to be done so people don’t care. Trump was a surprise to them. Trump was always focused on the deal, yet he (either intentionally or by mistake) created a situation where tens of millions of people “woke up,” at least for a little while, to the system that was set up beyond their control or even knowledge. He was a glitch in the matrix, a spelling error in the Narrative.
I was recently reading a book, and in it, the author indicated that the reason that German propaganda failed in the Netherlands during World War II was that the Germans didn’t mindlessly repeat the same slogans like a Korean War Era communist concentration camp. No, they tried to appeal (according to the author) to reason. And when you appeal to reason, that leaves room to think and to choose something else.
That’s why COVID-19 became the litmus test – everyone was supposed to listen to the slogans, repeated endlessly. The slogans were calibrated, repeated endlessly from every source: “safe and effective,” “free and easy.” If there weren’t side effects on millions of people, it would have been bad enough. But it shows just how easy it is to control a population.
That’s also why Trump was dangerous. He certainly didn’t accomplish much, outside of several Supreme Court picks, but from the beginning, there was a hard push-back against him. Why? He wasn’t like ¡Jeb!, just another controlled candidate from the system-loving uniparty where the only decisions politicians make are the unimportant ones. And the only thoughts you’re allowed to have are those that don’t interfere with the Narrative."
"Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, that reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we live it. After all, Number One, we're only mortal."
Baltimore, Maryland - "Hasn’t anyone ever read de Caulaincourt? David Petraeus was on the TV this morning – hustling for more taxpayers’ money. The disgraced general (he gave national security secrets to his mistress, who put them in a book) was drumming up support for The Ukraine… or more specifically, for buying more weapons from US military suppliers to send their way. Mr. Petraeus is one of many spokesmen and shills for the war sector, one of America’s biggest and most profitable industries.
For decades, the war mongers have kept the pot boiling, always looking for enemies – foreign and domestic. And this past February, 2022, they finally succeeded in goading Russia into war. The long, sorry history of government in the Ukraine is beyond the scope of this blog. So, too, is it beyond the interest of Americans, generally. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen people in the whole US who care whether the Donetsk People’s Republic is controlled by the Ukrainians, by the Russians, or by the people themselves.
One of the goals of the war industry has been to make Russia the “them” that “us” has to fight. Though, in 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker had promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would “not advance one inch to the East,” by 2022, it had pushed Putin’s back to the wall. NATO’s missiles in the Ukraine were as unacceptable to Vladimir Putin in 2022 as Soviet missiles in Cuba were to John Kennedy in 1962. And when the Biden Administration brushed off his concerns, Putin took action.
Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who knows. But today, people all over Europe and America are flying Ukrainian flags, listening to David Petraeus, and treating Volodymyr Zelenskyy like a war hero. Even from the pulpit, we were advised to pray for Ukrainians, but not for Russians.
Unremarkable Allegiance: None of this is especially remarkable. In baseball and war, people take sides. Usually, they take whatever side is sold to them most successfully. In WWI, for example, Americans could choose to take the side of France and Britain or of Germany. But England had cut the cable from Berlin to New York. All the news coming from the war was filtered through the British propaganda service. And it wasn’t long before Americans were stoning Dachshunds in the street and shooting foreigners in the mistaken belief that they were German nationals.
Also not remarkable is that the world’s leading empire is going after Russia. There must be something about Russia; like a chorus girl on the make for a rich, old man, she seems to attract degenerate empires.
Charles XII of Sweden attacked Russia in 1708. He was an early proponent of the blitzkrieg – striking hard and moving fast with his cavalry. The Russians retreated, destroying all farm animals and food stocks as they went. Then, as they continued to pursue the Russians, the Swedes ran out of supplies. And in the final battle, at Poltava, the Swedes were decisively defeated. Only 543 Swedes escaped – including Charles XII himself – out of an original force of 40,000.
Click image for larger size.
Charles Minard's 1869 chart showing the number of men in Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign army, their movements, as well as the temperature they encountered on the return path. Source: Wikipedia Commons
A century later, Napoleon repeated the adventure, but with 10 times as many men. Similarly, the Russians retreated… using their same scorched earth tactic. And then, reaching Moscow, but achieving no decisive victory, the French were forced to retreat – in the winter – across the vast steppes. The Russians counterattacked. The Cossacks harassed the fleeing French. ‘General Winter’ did his part. And by the time the survivors reached safety, approximately 380,000 French and allied troops had died.
Then, in 1941, Hitler couldn’t resist. Again, he upped the ante, committing 10 times the number of troops used by Napoleon – 3.8 million soldiers. Same story, more or less. And the same outcome. He retreated, leaving about 1 million dead. It was in his defeat that the amusing story was told.
Lessons Unlearned: Armand-Augustin-Louis de Caulaincourt was a general in Napoleon’s army. He had previously been sent as a diplomat to Moscow and knew the country well. When Bonaparte announced his plan to conquer Russia, de Caulaincourt begged him not to do it. He described the distances, the poor roads, the savage, long-suffering people, and the unbearable weather. Still Napoleon was determined to attack and took de Caulaincourt with him. Of course, all of the miseries de Caulaincourt warned about – and more – soon became apparent to the French and the general later recounted them in a delicious memoire, “With Napoleon in Russia.”
In 1944, German troops were rediscovering the hell that de Caulaincourt warned about. A group of German prisoners sat on the hard ground as Soviet troops prepared to interrogate them. A Soviet officer with a sense of humor approached them. “What’s the matter with you people? Didn’t any of you read de Caulaincourt?” Curiously, at least one German general actually did have a copy of de Caulaincourt’s book, in his pocket, when he was captured at Stalingrad.
And now… Joe Biden and his allies have begun a ‘sanctions war’ against Russia, as well as a real shooting war, using the Ukrainians as proxies. What could go wrong? Have they read de Caulaincourt?"
"I suppose that this is a fitting way to end the year. 2022 has been a year of war, plagues, natural disasters, shortages and severe economic troubles, but up until this month we had not been able to add “an apocalyptic winter storm” to the list yet. Unfortunately, what we have just been through over the last week definitely qualifies. A “monster storm” that covered almost the entire country at one point brought blizzard conditions to much of the U.S. over the past several days. Temperatures dipped down to minus 50 degrees in some areas, and extremely high winds and heavy snow combined to create truly nightmarish conditions in certain cities. For example, we are being told that this was the “most devastating storm in Buffalo’s long storied history”…
“We had to send specialized rescue crews to go get the rescuers,” Poloncarz told “CNN This Morning” Monday, adding it was the worst storm he could remember. “It was just horrendous, and it was horrendous for 24 hours in a row." “We’re used to snow here, we can handle snow,” he said. “But with the wind, the blinding views – it was complete whiteouts – and the extreme cold, it was some of the worst conditions that any of us have ever seen.”
The storm has drawn widespread comparisons to Buffalo’s famous blizzard of 1977. Poloncarz said in Monday’s news conference the current storm’s “ferocity… was worse than the blizzard of ’77.” And in a news conference Sunday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called this storm the “most devastating storm in Buffalo’s long storied history.”
Buffalo has had a lot of really bad storms over the years. But this one takes the cake. According to a local news report, Buffalo has already received about 4 feet of snow, and snow is going to continue to fall until the middle of the day on Tuesday…"The blizzard began Friday, dumping nearly 4 feet of snow in the Buffalo area and making many roads impassable. The snow is still falling. Some parts of the county could see another 8 to 12 inches by 1 p.m. Tuesday."
I have never seen anything quite like this. Of course I have been using that phrase a lot lately. So far, at least 27 people have been killed by the storm in Erie County, and the overall national death toll from the storm is up to 55. But both of those numbers will inevitably go much higher because right now there are countless drivers stranded in their vehicles on highways all over the United States. What part of “don’t drive during this storm” did people not understand? Many others are without power and are slowly freezing as they find themselves trapped inside their own homes by colossal mountains of snow. Those that are in need of rescue could use our prayers right about now.
Sadly, it seems like whenever there is some sort of a major natural disaster in this country there are hordes of looters ready to take advantage of it. On Monday, the rampant looting that we just witnessed in Buffalo made headlines all over the globe…"Videos posted online show brazen thieves taking advantage of the chaos, trudging over mounds of snow to get into abandoned storefronts — like a Dollar General where shelves were overturned and items were scattered across the ground.
Residents filmed some of the thieves as they entered the store and left with handfuls of items like paper towels and toilet paper, as one shameless woman even posted a Facebook Live of her and her friends grabbing items from the store. Others were filmed hauling televisions out of stores, and security footage caught one man breaking the glass of a liquor store door, where he allegedly stole $500 worth of goods."
Zero Hedge has posted lots of videos of the vicious looting, and those videos are prime examples of just how far we have fallen as a society. As I have said so many times before, the thin veneer of civilization that we all depend upon on a daily basis is rapidly disappearing. If a truly horrific long-term disaster were to erupt that causes law and order to break down on a widespread basis, we will devolve into a “Mad Max society” very quickly.
Speaking of crime, someone just attacked four more electrical substations in Washington state…"Thousands of homes were left in the dark after four electrical substations in western Washington were vandalized on Christmas Day, local authorities said on Sunday, adding that it was unknown if the incidents were connected. The attacks on Sunday cut power to more than 14,000 utility customers in south Pierce County, near Tacoma, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office said. The burglaries were reported at two substations belonging to Tacoma Public Utilities and two belonging to Puget Sound Energy."
In a previous article, I discussed the fact that the number of these attacks has reached an all-time record high this year, and they are happening all over the nation. Utility companies are going to have to start hiring 24 hour security to guard their equipment, because this is a problem that isn’t going to go away. And that will mean even higher utility bills for all of us.
I truly wish that our society was not coming apart at the seams all around us. But this is where we are at, and denying reality is not going to make things any better. So why is our society in such bad shape? And why do so many bad things keep happening to us?
The end of the year is often a time of self-reflection for individuals, and it should also be a time of self-reflection for our nation as a whole. Because if we stay on the path that we are currently on, the pain that we will experience in the years ahead will be far more severe than what we have been through already. Good decisions lead to good consequences. And bad decisions lead to bad consequences. Wake up America, because time is quickly slipping away."
"Attacks on nuclear bases; USA power grid attacked again; Korean peninsula on high alert; shots fired at Serbia/Kosovo border; China's massive incursion of Taiwan airspace; sleeper cells activated around the world; storms of the century; looting and famine. Get ready for 2023...
"No, hamburgers are not this big. What is pictured is a sharp telescopic view of a magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628, a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep galactic portrait puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, The Hamburger Galaxy.
The tantalizing island universe is about 100,000 light-years across and 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo. NGC 3628 shares its neighborhood in the local Universe with two other large spirals M65 and M66 in a grouping otherwise known as the Leo Triplet. Gravitational interactions with its cosmic neighbors are likely responsible for the extended flare and warp of this spiral's disk.”
"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."
"Food industry executives have just issued a dire warning to all Americans: buy food now because grocery costs will go up tremendously and things will only get worse in 2023. In 2022, U.S. shoppers have dealt with some of the steepest price increases seen since the hyperinflation crisis that marked the 1970s. We paid on average 20 percent more on meat, 40 percent more on eggs, 17 percent more on breakfast cereal, 11 percent more on peanut butter, 42 percent more on gas, 27 percent more on electricity, 32 percent more on propane, kerosene, and firewood, and 12 percent more on appliances. According to an estimate from Moody’s Analytics, soaring inflation forced American households to spend an extra $445 per month to buy the same items they did last year. And food industry executives say that conditions are going to get even tougher in 2023.
Supermarket CEO John Catsimatidis, the owner of Gristedes and D’Agostino Foods, warned that food giants such as Kraft Heinz, Pepsico, and Mondelez will keep on passing higher costs on to consumers in the next year. The executive had previously stated that double-digit price increases will affect thousands of different items, adding that the trend will not drop “anytime soon.”
Catsimatidis noted that inflation and supply chain problems will continue to plague grocery store chains and other retailers around the United States. “I see food prices going up tremendously,” he said, highlighting that in the coming months, promotions will become harder to find, and also revealing that food manufacturers are dropping the production of low-moving items, which will result in more empty shelves soon.
Meanwhile, Egg Innovations CEO John Bruunquell, who acquired the first US patent for reduced-fat and -cholesterol eggs, echoed Catsimatidis’ concerns that the lower supply coinciding with labor, freight, and vendor issues won’t be enough to meet consumers’ demand. Bruunquell said that his business is still filling at 100 percent capacity, but has asked employees to work extra hours or days in order to keep up with the market. “If that trend continues, it’s going to put us in a challenging situation with meeting the demand,” he admitted.
“Whether it’s the selectors, the drivers, the loaders, there are interruptions in the system,” Catsimatidis continued. During an interview with Fox & Friends' Brian Kilmeade, the executive urged Americans to "buy now” because food inflation will only get much worse. "Between price increases and shrinkflation -- where it used to be 32 ounces, now it's going to be 28 ounces – it's anywhere from a 12 to a 20% increase in food prices," the billionaire CEO laid out. He encouraged U.S. shoppers nationwide to stock up on their favorite products to "get a better return on your investment," especially considering that prices are set to soar over the next three to four months."
"FDA Criminally Approved Bioweapon as Safe & Effective Vaccine"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Karen Kingston is a biotech analyst and former Pfizer employee who has researched and written about many aspects of Covid 19 and the so-called vaccines. It’s now become obvious, with dramatically rising death and injuries, the CV19 injections were bioweapons passed off as lifesaving vaccines. Kingston has many documents from the government and vax manufacturers to prove this point. Kingston says, “In America, you cannot legalize murder. The original timeline was they were going to submit for FDA approval (for the CV19 injection) in June of 2025. Because they were trying to push the mandates, and Americans were saying you cannot mandate an experimental product, they said, oh, it’s now FDA approved. They moved that timeline up exponentially. The reason why that is a problem is that it is legally distinct from an ‘emergency use’ product. Once the approval happened on August 23, 2021 (Comirnaty), that broke the liability shield for the ‘emergency use’ product. So, the FDA fraudulently and criminally approved a bioweapon as a safe and effective vaccine.
People were under the impression they were getting an approved product, they were actually getting a bioweapon. If they never had done the approval, you could not bring these civil charges against Pfizer, and there are dozens and dozens of them as well as criminal charges. Call these shots what they are. They are bioweapons. I don’t care what our government said in the past. I don’t care what little memo they got from HHS or their employer. What they have done is wrong, and they need to be held to account.”
Kingston goes on to say, “I know people are saying anyone who says there is technology in these shots is a conspiracy theorist or crazy. I just showed you Pfizer says on their website that this is technology. The lipid nanoparticles are technically called biohybrid microrobots. That sounds bad, so they call them lipid nanoparticles to make it not sound so scary. So, there is technology in the CV19 injections.”
The CV19 bioweapons can cause a variety of deadly health effects. Kingston thinks, “25% of the fully vaxed could die of a heart attack or end up with severe heart problems such as Myocarditis.”
Kingston lists many other deadly or debilitating effects of these bioweapons such as neurological disease, autoimmune disease, extreme and fast spreading cancers and severely weakened immune systems, just to name a few. The shots did zero good and massive damage that people are now waking up to. According to Kingston, this is what these CV19 bioweapons were supposed to do.
Kingston says, “More experts are coming together in January and calling these bioweapons. They will be sharing this evidence from the manufacturers and our government. People also need to recognize there was never a virus. We were attacked with a nano-weapon. Not only is the so-called vaccine a bioweapon, you cannot vaccinate against a technology. The whole thing was a lie.” There is much more in the 1-
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with biotech analyst Karen Kingston as she gives an update on the bioweapon injections and criminals behind them.
"Don't wonder why people go crazy. Wonder why they don't. In the face of what we can lose in a day, in an instant, wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together."
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
"The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have
no other use for language than to make themselves understood.”
Karl Kraus, "Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths"
"Things, possessions, life on the installment plan or credit card. This is the season to buy, to accumulate more folderols, to give things to one’s children and each other, which, we like to believe, will bring joy. It’s make-believe, of course, an adult lie conjured up out of guilt and fear that our lives, the stories we live, the stories we dream, and those that dream us, are insufficiently meaningful to bring our children and ourselves the joy we say we seek.
Driven by a pure sense of guilt devoid of any sense of redemption in a capitalist materialist culture, we buy and buy, accumulate and accumulate, in the vain hope that such tangible “gifts” will bring a magic that we can possess. Our exchange of gifts is a consumer culture’s parody of the true meaning of a gift: that gifts are given to be given away, to be passed around, like the peace pipe of native American Indian tribes.
As Lewis Hyde writes in his extraordinary book, "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property: "…a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is its constant donation.” What we are given, in the inner and outer world, must be shared, allowed to circulate. But we like to own, to stop the flow. As a result, we have become stuck, selfie people who can’t understand that to possess is to be possessed. Stop, pose, click. Got it!
Describing art as a way of life, or walking life’s way as an art, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it thus: "Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous consciousness , namely the period of childhood."
The truth is that we are sustained by stories – oral, written, existential – not by things, as a commercial civilization would have us believe. From infancy to old age, we crave stories that will allow us to make sense of our lives, to give them shape and spiritual significance.
And the greatest gifts we can give each other are stories that draw on the mystery and sacredness of existence, stories that express, in ravishing language and a musical spirit, clarification for our lives. Stories that help us resist the nihilistic ethos of our times, the violence and deceit that defines them.
For example, long ago a Jewish boy was born in a stable because his parents couldn’t get a room anywhere. The parents then had to flee with the boy because the government was murdering children and was out to get him. Later in life, this child Jesus, became a radical opponent of church and state, preached peace, love, non-violence, and living by faith, not money; he embraced the outcasts, condemned the hypocrites, and was finally executed as a radical criminal by the state. But his spirit was undefeated; he conquered death; and his name has become synonymous with love and kindness to such a degree that we celebrate his birth as the light of the world as the darkest days of the year turn brighter.
It’s a beautiful story from beginning to end, and if heeded, would bring massive resistance to the way things are throughout the world. No wonder it has touched the hearts of so many for so long. Sadly, however, Wordsworth put it perfectly when he said that, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” And the consumer-gift-stories we indirectly tell our children by participating in the madness of holiday shopping are tales unfit for young ears. To live to buy is to tell them lies.
Our children (and all of us) wish not things but stories that will help them face life with enthusiasm and courage. When I was a young boy, my father would ease me to sleep with “Jiminy Cricket Stories,” imaginary improvisations on Pinocchio and his conscience. They were in no way trendy like the most recent Pinocchio film adaptation, but fundamentally sound as in the song "As Time Goes By "– it’s still the same old story.
I can’t remember any of his stories today, but what stays with me is their underlying theme, their spirit: to become a real boy, a genuine person, one must determine to tell the truth. One must be brave, truthful, and unselfish. Yet even more, when I think of them, I feel my father’s unconditional love and the timbre of his lilting voice.
These stories about truth and bravery contained hard but vital lessons for a father to pass on to a son, but he did it in such an entertaining way that I took the lessons to heart. Ever since, in gratitude and wonder, I have been trying to make my story adhere to that spirit of truth. Trying; for as we all know, truth is a hard taskmaster. We never hold it, only seek it, and can only approach it if we are possessed by language and allow its musical spirit to carry us on into the unknown.
When I became a father myself, I tried to pass on to my children a love for stories and the words we use to express our lives. Without words, and the ability to use them meaningfully, we are lost in the world of things, a place where consuming replaces creating. So from infancy onward, my wife and I would read to them, and eventually I began to tell them imaginary stories of my own, “Willy Daly Stories,” inspired by a boyhood pal. They would hang onto each word, and swing into depths of reverie as I strung them together into tall tales.
“At the bottom of each word/I’m a spectator at my birth,” wrote the French poet Alain Bosquet. Entering into this creative spirit, Susanne and Daniel would ask me. “Is that really true?” And I could not lie and say no. So they would laugh, I would grin, and we would go on.
Like all children, they loved these stories, the ones I told and the ones we read. They entered into them, and they, into them; their inner worlds germinated. When they were very young, each started to read, not haltingly but fluently and with amazing comprehension. “Out of the blue” something clicked (and neither was “taught” to read, but was read and talked to by my wife and me as though they comprehended everything, even the most abstruse words), and from that day on the words that they previously heard became theirs. They received the gift, even when they didn’t understand the meaning, they grasped the music.
Now it has passed to my grandchildren, Sophie and Henry, who are children of the word, lovers of the epiphanies stories can disclose. “The bright book of life,” as D.H.Lawrence called the novel, opened to them. Novel: New. New life forever arising out of the old. Miraculously (is there any other word for it?), they were in possession of the gift of words that they could pass on; they had the power to hear and tell their own stories, to understand their lives, not as the pursuit of things, but as the pursuit of meaning. They felt proud and I felt blessed.
“Art tells the truth,” wrote Chekhov. Indeed. And the wheel of life turns with the seasons. The gift of stories is passed on. Christmas turns to New Year’s. People pass on, but so do stories. The things are forgotten.
The wordsmith Leonard Cohen sang in his song, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” that “I hope you are keeping some sort of record.” The words stick on the page, but the beautiful melody carries them into our present and into the future and we imagine stories carrying us on as the music and the words don’t stop and we keep humming the tune and imagining as we move along to that which cannot be said and about which it is impossible to be silent, to paraphrase Victor Hugo.
My daughter: Susanne. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne: “There are children in the morning/they are leaning out for love/and they will lean that way forever/while Suzanne holds the mirror.”
My son: Daniel. Like brave Pinocchio being swallowed by Monstro, and Daniel in the Lion’s den, the stories of courage and derring-do, told indirectly.
Daniel Berrigan, S. J., a friend and mentor, the puckish fierce poet of beauty and peace, whose fierceness belied his tenderness.
The Biblical Susanna, the falsely accused, and Daniel her liberator.
Names contain multitudes, tales never told, stories traveling on. The gifts must be given away, like playing or listening to live music. Here and gone; one time only. Like life.
I recently saw a book for sale at my local library – "From my Father, Singing" by David Bosworth – a beautiful book, a true work of art. I read it once at the suggestion of my storyteller father, and have just reread it. I am grateful to Bosworth for his gift and to my father for passing on the word. It is a tale in the form of a letter from a father to a son, a father in search of the meaning of his own father’s life, that elusive gift that can only be found in a story, in the telling.
The letter writer, our author, is in flight from a life lived “according to script,” a wife in love with money, shopping, and things, his dead-end job – “the place where I pretended to earn our living” – a life of pretense and lies, a living death in which all efforts were made to deny its meaninglessness: “to have fun, to keep busy, to buy something, to face the bleak descent of Sunday evening by preparing already for the following weekend.”
In order to explain himself to his son, a young infant, he explores his own childhood, the life he lived caught between his parents’ conflicting worlds. In the end, by fashioning this letter, by putting word behind word behind word, he comes to understand and appreciate his father and consequently himself; he composes a letter to his son (who cannot yet read but whom we know will) “intended as a gift, a living legacy in words.”
Yes, art tells the truth. Pass on the word, the true gift. Here is Billy Joel’s gift to his daughter:
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