I Dreamed, I Saw
What an evening at Starbucks! The long table at the end of the room was full. Over an hour and a half of impassioned exchange of ideas followed. The conversation was in the main about the “great chain of being” with a segue into Mandelbrot fractals, a demonstration of which we enjoyed from Gary’s computer screen. Fractals are mystical in effect: worlds within worlds. Strangely this impressed me as directly related to our topic under discussion. We are fascinated, mesmerized by the repeating patterns; our higher faculties of judgment are stimulated by the beauty, the life-like repetition of forms. Yes they are life-like though in fact the patterns are generated by a simple mathematical formula. We’ve seen the like before, perhaps in a flower petal, or in the breaking of a wave.
Our discussion also entailed stories of Bob’s involvement assisting young adult gang members to break the dysfunctional and destructive thought patterns to which they were habituated. I’ll remember his telling of how the subjects were told that it did not matter what they chose to believe or not to believe. They only had to help one another, if they were to get out of incarceration. The answer: Fraternity. Or to put it another way, in Bob’s words, convert the gang culture into a family culture. Amen!
I’ll conclude by offering a fragment of another Wendell Berry poem, this one composed in 1997. Perhaps these lines are more on point now, than when they were written.
II
…..The once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best-paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all
enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the
destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the
way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who
ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the
ground and covered over.
