So, Oft In Theologic Wars

“The Blind Men and the Elephant” is one of my favorite poems. You remember; it's the one about six blind men – duh – each feeling a part of the elephant and guessing that's what the whole animal is like. The guy who feels the tail says it (the elephant as a whole, not just the tail) is like a rope, the guy who feels the ear says it's like a fan, and so on. “Each in his own opinion/Exceeding stiff and strong,/Though each was partly in the right,/And all were in the wrong!” I imagine this is also true of the natural wars we and our youth are called upon to fight, all the while wondering what the purpose of our fighting – Why We Fight – is, and what would happen if we got everything we wanted.

Ok, I need to get busy so I don't have time to worry. So let's go … despite Sarah throwing up in her room early Monday morning (apparently on the Ramen noodles she was so proud to have cooked herself, that is sad!) and despite my cleaning it but the scent either lingers or doesn't depending which way the wind is blowing – we have issues with a window – she's well enough to go to school and get into the daily fight with her brother. Usually it doesn't hurt anything, so I try not to “break it up”. Whether this gets me into “Parent of the Year” finalist competition or not I don't know – I still promise to change the locks on our house when the kids turn eighteen,

 

 

which for Sarah is in one decade! And at least I don't believe she or her brother (or we!) will be in danger of the draconian measures taken to control population in The Wanting Seed (SBN 345026543125), Anthony Burgess' OTHER near-future novel also published in 1962. While having finished this story told alternately between Beatrice-Joanna Foxe who's just lost a baby and had him leached for nitrogen and her husband Tristam the history professor caught up in a phony war doesn't make me rush to re-read A Clockwork Orange (the OTHER, which I first and last read in 1989 when I was a junior in high school) and make the connections between the two, it's got its own … charm.

The world of the English-Speaking Union and Russian-Speaking Union where homosexuality is encouraged, one child per couple is the limit, and a phony war is used to justify vast controlling measures might seem more of a shock to me if I'd read the book when it first came out. But I was -9 years old, and as I recall, I didn't find Clockwork quite the shocker its critics led me to believe it would be. Unintelligible in places, yes, with Alex “your faithful narrator” alternating between the English we're familiar with and the Nadsat slang he himself uses. But compared to the movie that I found really disquieting and viewed a few years later on a Saturday night, a challenge.

Tonight, Martha will have completed two job interviews to move to a different position within Trinity Health where she currently works as a courier and I will meet her and the kids over at Splashdown, the indoor water park inside Sleep Inn that adjoins Dakota Square Mall. What happens with that, we don't know … but Splashdown's where the kids of Jeffrey's Cub Scout pack will meet to swim, likely find out the end of the year stuff, and (we hope) eat! And we must remember to catch up on our reading, mustn't we? I did not think of that when I said Jeffrey would read to us tonight … oh well, they will run off their energy and we will rejoice!

The disputants, I ween,

David