There are stairs called “Nancy’s Steps” at the London Bridge on the Thames where Nancy used to walk up and down from her den to the world, back to the den to live a life God cared less with neglect with nothing more than her untainted heart flowing milk of kindness and compassion into the neverending faith of humanity alone Even if it betrayed her and bullied her in tatters; She pitied an orphaned boy named Oliver And protected himself from the world under Until the blindfolded Goddess Fortuna span The Wheel of Fortune to the fateful turn To which all her wishes were forefeited As her already wretched body was battered With the compass of the wheel bludgeoned Her life with the heart cherished with love; With the blows upon her still young head all her hopes for the beauty of life shattered and her tears rolling down her cold cheeks turned into liquid drops of pearls and crystals, and then, with a cry of the heart, she departed. or thought she, for she knew not what happened from dusk till dawn, wandering and waiting on the fateful steps, asking if you’d seen the boy.
What technology would you be better off without, why?
Being a transient generation privileged with the Dolby system on CD and DVD to the digital sound of streaming music and movies, I opine that a fax machine with manual feeders should be enshrined in the Museum of Civilization for Posterity. 🤓
I have always thought of the Catholic Church in the U.S. as a league of immigrant churches founded by the faithful of the old world diasporas uprooted in the New World. The American Catholic Church is, in a way, an outpost of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, with its offsprings sprouting and flourishing in their ethnic enclaves, thus resulting in less spiritually cohesive, culturally solidifying characteristics in the form of different ethnic Catholic communities within the Church in the U.S. Perhaps that might be one of the reasons that there are so few black Catholics, excluding the immigrant blacks from the overseas because the Church ignored their existence as human beings except for their labor as a lucrative resource to expand their organizational dominance.
Swarns is also mad and sad about the cruel truth about the Jesuits, whose motto was to educate the souls to train as God’s soldiers were the leaders of the slave trading in 19th century America in efforts to create America’s finest Jesuit high-education establishment called the Georgetown University. The number 272 signifies the number of blacks traded as slaves to fund the university’s administration in zealous ambition to build the Jesuit Empire in the New World. While Pope George XVI condemned slavery in his apostolic Church in 1839, blindsided by the expansionist vision, the American-born and bred Jesuits continued to ship out the blacks in their care to Louisiana by disintegrating the black families and communities to form their cultural identities and heritage.
Catholicism is a family religion because it is usually inherited through generations. Mothers teach their daughters to say the rosary prayer and the First Communion is a family celebration. But without the secure bond of family in a stable environment, Catholicism is complex to thrive and faces discontinuation of legacy with no parents to teach it to their children. Consequently, the disintegration of black families is the sine qua non of the decline of black Catholics in the U.S. to this date. Even if the American Jesuits, including the present Georgetown administration, have expressed their regret and condolence to the 272 black people they sold for profits, the American Catholic Church should continuously endeavor to reconcile with the racialism within the Church by making all races of people welcome when they come to the Church by reaching out to the concerns of each that are universal to all of us.
Have you ever felt that no matter how hard you tried not to make the same mistakes, you would turn a full circle as if trapped in a labyrinth? If you have, then you are not alone, and you are not uniquely flawed. Put it bluntly, you are not a loser and will never be.
We live in a society – or in an era inclusively – where uniformed measurement of success in status represents who you are regardless of how long a way you have come despite everything, Unlike Ancient Greeks who valued what individuals had endured and achieved as much as they possibly could under the most depraved circumstances, we look at what our eyes see in the face of the mind because of the misguided belief that only the fittest will survive in the Darwinian theory of evolution. Here in the States, people believe those subsisting on welfare are lazy losers because they are uneducated or less educated. But that’s not the case. People with college degrees also find themselves mired in the rut of life, eager to get even a mime-waged job just to get by lest they should be thrown out to the streets. Sometimes educated people live in poverty, not because they are substance abusers or mentally deranged, but because they have different personal reasons that are not to be generalized under specific circumstances. We are all different, and different people have different needs. Didn’t Depeche Mode sing in “People are people?”
Failure discriminates against none, embraces everyone, and we are one in it. The Beckettian philosophy of failure as a championing, not championed juggernaut of doom echoes the Nietzschean credo of what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Try again, fail again, succeed again. Or fail worse. Better worse. Fail worst. Till you get sick of it for good. Throw up for good, ad nauseam. If you are doing it, you are not alone; I am not alone. We are not alone. Don’t forget about it.
If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?
I am one of those sentimental folks who tend to make a parallel with themselves to the characters of a story in a book or film due to an uncanny spiritual ability to channel into the psyche of another. Methinks this could be something of an ancient Greek or Roman Sybil, who foretold the prophecies at holy places in ecstatic mania. Accordingly, my choice of avatars is of independent, strong-willed, but mistaken women whom people could not fail to notice out of the melee: Cassandra and Ariadne.
Cassandra, the daughter of the last king of Troy Priam and his wife Hecuba, was a priestess of the god Apollo, who bestowed the gift of prophecy on her. However, when she refused the god’s amorous advance, the cruel god fated her not to be believed in her predictions. So when Cassandra warned her people of the fall of Troy, they didn’t deign to acknowledge her but to scorn her for such hokum. Alas, poor Cassandra! I knew him, Ariadne, for your beautiful deed and heart was betrayed by Theseus, whom you helped kill Minotaur and save the Athenian youths from the labyrinth! Theseus abandoned his beautiful savior on the island of the Naxos and sailed on to Athens. Why did he forsake her? It’s because the goddess Athena told him that Ariadne would be nothing but a nuisance in his way of constructing her namesake city-state! Before being the sacred and immortal goddess, Athena was also a woman, but how could she force Theseus to bloodlessly forsake the poor Ariadne, whose benevolence saved the youths of Athens?
Both Cassandra and Ariadne’s benevolence and strong will were not appreciated by those whom they helped or tried to help. What a tragedy it was! Likewise, my heartfelt intention and humanity meet with cold shoulders or the least respect from the people I help and have helped. Sometimes I wonder if nature bestowed beauty on me, would they be unkind or appreciate who I am? Then I think of Cassandra and Ariadne and cannot help but feel for what they had been through.
Elsie Robinson (1883-1956) was an unforgettable writer whose nationally syndicated column “Listen, World!” spanned over 30 years and garnered more than 20 million readers. Yet, her legacy has not met with the justice of recognition, forgotten in the careless oblivion under the shadows of her contemporary starry women writers. Nelie Bly was sensational as an undercover in a mental asylum and an ambitious challenger to Phileas Fogg of Around the World in 80 days. But Elsie Robinson was a champion of writers whose heartfelt writings touched the finer tissues of the millions of hearts who found solace and support in her words. She was honest, and her words were real, alive, and alike, and there was none other like her.
Robinson was my kind of model writer who wrote from her experience and heart. Edgar Allan Poe would praise a type of writer with a passion for intoxicating the heart and the truth to satisfy reason. The fates had let her go through trials of life, but her mind exceeded the compass of her wheels. She didn’t mind working as a miner as a single mother before a tide of fortune finally took her to her literary career in the Oakland Tribune. While her peers and contemporary writers took the naval-gazing, angst-ridden narratives a la mode, Robinson used her writing to communicate with readers seeking elbow room in her column. They recognized themselves in the plight of a stranger and found commonalities in it, making them feel that they were not uniquely flawed. I guess that’s why Robinson didn’t get recognition as much as her contemporary peers, who enjoyed the stardom of literary legacy. She wanted to tell her woebegone readers their problems were not theirs but yours, mine, and ours.
Like Kurt Vonnegut, Robinson wanted to let readers know that to express ourselves in the form of art is to allow our souls to grow, however poor or good, by encouraging us to write our own columns. In that regard, blogging is a great platform to express one’s artistic self without fear of rejection or ridicule, freed from the devil’s advocates of literary purists intent upon finding grammar faults in anyone’s writings. To that end, Robinson is a scintillating writer with an eye for truth and a heart for passion – like the sun in the twilight, remitting the splendor while retaining magnitude, dazzling the eyes of the beholders with the hearts’ contents. As a result, Robinson has become one of my darling writers.
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