Is it any wonder that in such a brutish time–a martial time–the lords of the world are trying to reach Mars? War is a god and it’s calling all our names.

Vote for me and I pledge to bring back city-states and then go find something better to do than politicking.

A bit sad to say I’ve finished Corbin’s Alone with the Alone. I’ll be buying a copy so I can have the comfort of its presence. Next up is the book I’ve been heading toward for months: Gregory Shaw’s Theurgy and the Soul. After that I’m returning to uncle Wendell’s fiction.

Now I’m remembering more: many of those who buttoned all the way up also didn’t believe in neckties. They were “adornment” and just as sinful as women’s jewelry.

Random memory: there were a large number of Holiness men who believed men should always wear long sleeves. Within this group there was a sizable contingent who believed in buttoning their shirts all the way to the top. (I remember these latter being mostly Oklahomans.)

Whew the black coffee from Hoosier Bloom is strong today. I feel a light electric buzz throughout my limbs. AMA. 😉

I’m in the final twenty pages of Corbin’s Alone with the Alone. I estimate I’ve understood a third, kinda understood a third, and not at all understood a third; it has, nevertheless, been worth it. There’s so much here to think about. Reading it took me back to those first few years after leaving the Holiness churches when I was reading academic theology that was way over my head. It pushed me in important ways, and sent me on so many side quests.

What led me to this book was a desire to have a fuller understanding of imagination/“the imaginal” as something more than “fantasy.” That led me first to Corbin’s lecture on Mundus Imaginalis (pdf) and then to this book. I think I have the beginnings of that fuller understanding now, for which I am very grateful to Corbin. Just don’t ask me to put it in my own words yet. :) That’ll take more time.

I don’t know if you can predict the winter by woolly bears but I do love seeing them. Also, I would be part of any club called “The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear.”

From a great piece by Ted Goia on Glenn Campbell:

[Glen Campbell’s] father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”

In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:

Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.

I took out a six-month subscription to The Budget, a weekly newspaper by and for plain Anabaptists (to quote the wiki). I probably won’t subscribe to it long term but I’m really interested in the scribe letters.