Parrish Court

With apologies to Walt Whitman:

When jonquils first in the courtyard bloomed,
And the great star slowly drooped in the western sky late by day,
I yearned — and yet shall yearn with ever-returning spring.

---

Above: Parrish Court, Belknap Campus, University of Louisville. Cross-posted from The Cardinal Lawyer.

The Harrods Creek Bridge RIP 2008

The Harrods Creek Bridge
Regulated traffic according to the iron law of civility.

Bliss

Bliss
Search inside yourself for bliss
And if you find none there
Quit your search and rest assured
You won't find bliss anywhere.
dv

Me

A Look at Me and Where I'm Headed
I keep a picture of myself on my bookshelf where I can see it from my desk while working and from my chair when thinking. It is the last image I see before leaving for the day and the first image I see in the morning upon arriving at my desk. The self-portrait is shown above.

The picture shows my shadow cast across my gravesite at Cave Hill Cemetery pointing toward the symbol of earthly success, my Mercedes-Benz (formerly). The luxury car cannot deliver me from the place that awaits my sure and certain arrival.

I see myself in the picture as dust and shadow, like the flower of the field described by the psalmist: For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. Psalm 103:14-16.

There is life in the picture, the good life symbolized by the silver car. There’s death, dust and shadow in the scene as well and even fading flowers of the field set in a vase before a tombstone before the 'wind goeth over it.' And the grave-digger’s work is visible in the lower left foreground, marked by white flags.

And there is resurrection symbolized by the patch of green grass visible near the base of the shadow, the return of life in an eternal cycle.

The picture keeps me centered.

Masterworks

Masterworks

I look at what the masters did
I really learn a lot.
For when I see the work they did
I see what I did not.
--dv

Our club, "Your Water"

The Isaac Shelby chapter of the University of Louisville Alumni Association gathered on February 8, 2009, at Allen Dale, home of Reggie and Cheryl Van Stockum, to watch the Cardinals' basketball game with St. John's. Halftime entertainment included a screening of Reggie's performance of Your Water. The video, drawn from from Reggie's video library on Vimeo.com, exhibits one song from the Reginald Bareham Singer Songwriter Showcase at the Rudyard Kipling in Louisville on February 7. Your Water featured Reggie Van Stockum (performing under the name Reginald Bareham) on rhythm guitar and vocals, Kelly Hickerson on guitar, David Clement on trombone, and Brian Ginn on snare drum.

»  Cross-posted at The Cardinal Lawyer  «

Wendell Berry Makes Public Statement on the Death Penalty

Noted Kentucky author, philosopher and man-of-letters, Wendell Berry has authorized me to use the following statement of his position on the death penalty:

[Not to be altered in any way without the approval of Wendell Berry]

“As I am made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life before birth, I am also made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life after birth. Obviously, it can be well argued that the world would be better off if certain people had never been born or if they had been killed in early youth by a fall from a tree. And I certainly can imagine circumstances in which I might kill another person. But I don’t believe that mere humans have the mental or moral capacity to decide rightfully, let alone infallibly, that another human should be killed. As I don’t condone the illegal killing of a human by a human, I cannot condone the legal killing of a human by a human. One killing is not rectified or atoned for by the addition of a second. An illegal killing is in no way made better by a legal killing. A society is not made saner or more morally secure by the deputation in it of legalized killers. Whereas many illegal killings are done in hot blood, legal killings are always done in cold blood and with a procedural deliberation that is horrifying. Hot-blooded killing is of course horrifying also, but to me it is more understandable. Probably we have no choice against illegal killing, which continues to happen against the wishes of nearly everybody. But it is possible, morally and rationally, to choose to withhold one’s approval from legal killing, and I so choose.”
[Not to be altered in any way without the approval of Wendell Berry].
--Wendell Berry
Port Royal, KY
January 23, 2009

UofL's Speed School to Take Lead on Renewable Energy Research

On January 26, 2008, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear announced that Kentucky’s Center for Renewable Energy Research and Environmental Stewardship will be operated by the University of Louisville. Uof L engineering and business alumnus Henry Conn and his wife, Rebecca, have pledged more than $20 million to the Speed school to support this program.

The center’s mission promotes partnerships among the state’s colleges and universities, private industry and nonprofit organizations to actively pursue federal research and development resources that are dedicated to renewable energy.

Quilting Portraits

Fabric is a delightful way to represent the human face. My work is a bit abstract, but the images are (generally) recognizable.

Here is a version I have done of President-elect Obama. (I must remember that teeth are difficult to portray ...)

Earthrise on Christmas Eve

Earthrise December 24, 1968 Peace on earth, good will to all

Mellwood Artists At Library

Artists from the Mellwood Arts & Entertainment Center will have work on display from December 18 to February 8 in the Louisville Free Public Library's main branch. The works on display are varied and beautiful, ranging from ceramics, to print, to wood, to fiber. (OK. This is a bit of self-promotion, I have a fiber piece there.)

If you are downtown, stop by the library's Bernheim Gallery to see what some of your fellow Louisvillians are doing.

Pug power for the holidays at the University of Louisville

Danzig U.S.A. has made much of the pug's status as the dog breed of the Cardinal Nation. The official 2008 holiday card of the University of Louisville drives home the point.

Woof!

Editor's note: Here is a bonus animal image, from the UofL Law School's holiday card:

Ashley Cecil calls on Champions 4 Her

Ashley Cecil has issued a call for artists to take part in next summer's Champions 4 Her fundraiser:

I’m looking for a few more visual artists who are interested in participating as a street painting facilitator. It entails meeting with the group you will be assigned to at their facilities for a series of sessions to collaboratively create a final design of what will go onto the pavement at Water Front Park the day of the event. Each group will consist of some combination of clients of the organization, volunteers, and/or staff (few of whom will have any artistic experience). This is not an opportunity for artists to showcase their own work. The objective is to guide your group through the art-making process and give them creative license.

Penny Sisto Exhibit at Uzoma

Fiber artist Penny Sisto's exhibit "Rude, Crude and Lewd" will be on display at uzoMa gallery from December 5 through January 23, 2009. The opening reception is Friday, December 5, from 6-8 pm, and she will hold an artist workshop January 11, from 2-4 pm.

For more information, contact Angela Ramsey Robinson at explore.uzoma@gmail.com.

Sisto's work is passionate, intricate and beautiful. I am certain this exhibit will be no exception. The image I have included here is from her Immigrant Series. (Click on image to go to her gallery page.)

(cross-posted on B's Dreams)

Ex libro lapidum historia mundi

Mazon Creek lagerstätte
All geology represents the present-tense freeze-frame of the earth's history, condensed conveniently in the chemistry of rocks and soils. Though the course of any single organism's life is infinitesimally minute by comparison with the history of the earth, only one species in the earth's parade of life — ours — has managed to crack the code. It is as though some geological variant of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle prevents observation over a more meaningful time span. Any organism attaining the power to unlock the earth's secrets also acquires, by that very stroke, the power to destroy the earth itself.

The true wonders in this world do not hide. Rather, they wait in plain sight, obscured not so much by ice or vegetation as by the shades we draw across our eyes. Most of geologic history belongs in this category of true wonders. Terrestrial history accretes at rates too slow for any mortal observer to notice. But it leaves records in the form of rocks and soils and layers.

On extremely rare occasions, the chroniclers of geologic time pause to pick one fragment of one organism — a leaf, a wing, a shell, a bone — and enshrine it in some durable medium. The imprints of Carboniferous ferns, horsetails, and club mosses, insects in amber, the barely perceptible bas-relief of a mollusk, cliffs colored by coccolithophorid shells, even the hydrocarbon relics of ancient plant life that humans so casually burn and polymerize — all these bear mute testimony to worlds long past.

As with sediment, so with sentiment: Our efforts at self-understanding have no chance of overcoming the mindless buzz of being and doing. We cannot understand feelings of the moment, with deep emotional footprints and even with lasting practical consequences, until we stop acting upon those feelings and seize the opportunity to look backward, in the serenity of solitude.

Editor's note: Cross-posted from Jurisdynamics.

Veterans Day

Glory Land

With new dress blues and shiny shoes
And the strut of a brave brass band
Daddy took-up his country’s flag
And marched to glory land.

Without his shoes and new dress blues
But behind the band and flag
Daddy came home from glory land
Wearing a burlap bag. DV
2006

The body of an American

Editor's note: This item was originally published in The Cardinal Lawyer on Veterans' Day 2007. It is a timeless message, though, and for that reason I am posting it here despite being a week late for Veterans' Day 2008.

There is perhaps no finer tribute to American veterans than John Dos Passos's "The Body of an American," the concluding chapter of 1919, part two of the U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36):

Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4thdayofmarch last-authorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthe body of an American whowasamemberoftheAmericanexpeditionaryforceineuropewholosthis lifeduringtheworldwarandwhoseidentityhasnot beenestablished for burial inthememorialamphitheatreofthe nationalcemeteryatarlingtonvirginia

In the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of

enie menie minie moe plenty of other pine boxes stacked up there containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe

and other person or persons unknown. Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe? . . .

how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?

. . . and the gagging chloride and the puky dirtstench of the yearold dead . . .

The day withal was too meaningful and tragic for applause. Silence, tears, songs and prayer, muffled drums and soft music were the instrumentalities today of national approbation.

John Doe was born (thudding din of blood of love into the shuddering soar of a man and a woman alone indeed together lurching into and ninemonths sick drowse waking into scared agony and the pain and blood and mess of birth). John Doe was born

and raised in Brooklyn, in Memphis, near the lakefront in Cleveland, Ohio, in the stench of the stockyards in Chi, on Beacon Hill, in an old brick house in Alexandria Virginia, on Telegraph Hill, in a halftimbered Tudor cottage in Portland the city of roses,

in the Lying-In Hospital old Morgan endowed on Stuyvesant Square,

across the railroad tracks, out near the country club, in a shack cabin tenement apartmenthouse exclusive residential suburb;

scion of one of the best families in the social register, won first prize in the baby parade at Coronado Beach, was marbles champion of the Little Rock grammarschools, crack basketballplayer at the Booneville High, quarterback at the State Reformatory, having saved the sheriff’s kid from drowning in the Little Missouri River was invited to Washington to be photographed shaking hands with the President on the White House steps; —

Read the rest of this post . . . .* * * * *

though this was a time of mourning, such an assemblage necessarily has about it a touch of color. In the boxes are seen the court uniforms of foreign diplomats, the gold braid of our own and foreign fleets and armies, the black of the conventional morning dress of American statesmen, the varicolored furs and outdoor wrapping garments of mothers and sisters come to mourn, the drab and blue of soldiers and sailors, the glitter of musical instruments and the white and black of a vested choir

— busboy harveststiff hogcaller boyscout champeen cornshucker of Western Kansas bellhop at the United States Hotel at Saratoga Springs office boy callboy fruiter telephone lineman longshoreman lumberjack plumber’s helper,

worked for an exterminating company in Union City, filled pipes in an opium joint in Trenton, N.J.

Y.M.C.A. secretary, express agent, truckdriver, fordmechanic, sold books in Denver Colorado: Madam would you be willing to help a young man work his way through college?

President Harding, with a reverence seemingly more significant because of his high temporal station, concluded his speech:

We are met today to pay the impersonal tribute;

the name of him whose body lies before us took flight with his imperishable soul . . .

as a typical soldier of this representative democracy he fought and died believing in the indisputable justice of his country’s cause . . .

by raising his right hand and asking the thousands with the sound of his voice to join in the prayer:

Our Father which art in heaven hallowed by thy name . . .

* * * * *

John Doe’s

heart pumped blood:

alive thudding silence of blood in your ears

down in the clearing in the Oregon forest where the punkins were punkincolor pouring into the blood through the eyes and the fallcolored trees and the bronze hoopers were hopping through the dry grass, where tiny striped snails hung on the underside of the blades and the flies hummed, wasps droned, bumble-bees buzzed, and the woods smelt of wine and mushrooms and apples, homey smell of fall pouring into the blood,

and I dropped the tin hat and the sweaty pack and lay flat with the dogday sun licking my throat and adamsapple and the tight skin over the breastbone.

The shell had his number on it.

* * * * *

The blood ran into the ground.

The service record dropped out of the filing cabinet when the quartermaster sergeant got blotto that time they had to pack up and leave the billets in a hurry.

The identification tag was in the bottom of the Marne.

The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of blue-bottle flies.

and the incorruptible skeleton,

and the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki

they took to Chalons-sur-Marne

and laid it out neat in a pine coffin

and took it home to God’s Country on a battleship

and buried in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheatre in the Arlington National Cemetery

and draped the Old Glory over it

and the bugler played taps

and Mr. Harding prayed to God and the diplomats and the generals and the admirals and the brasshats and the politicians and the handsomely dressed ladies out of the society column of the Washington Post stood up solemn

and thought how beautiful sad Old Glory God’s Country it was go have the bugler play taps and the three volleys made their ears ring.

Where his chest ought to have been they pinned

the Congressional Medal, the D.S.C., the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, the Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania, the Czechoslovak war cross, the Virtuti Militari of the Poles, a wreath sent by Hamilton Fish, Jr., of New York, . . . . All the Washingtonians brought flowers.

Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.


Editor's note: The photos of the burial of the Unknown Soldier appear on ArlingtonCemetery.Net.

Visiting Harland

Harland Sanders is buried at Cave Hill Cemetery. One can follow a yellow line from the main entrance to the colonel's grave. It's really worth the visit. Cave Hill is beautiful, filled with wonderful flowers, trees, and monuments. The Sanders memorial is a delightful walk and a bit of Kentucky history. As the trees turn, before it gets too cold, take a moment to visit the colonel.

Upshot: The Cathedral of the Assumption

World Religions
Philanthropists who paid for the resotration of Louisville's historic Cathedral of the Assumption will be honored and thanked for their contributions in November. The foundation overseeing the renovation has changed its name and mission and is now focusing on interfaith relations among the world's religions. It is based at the cathderal offices.

Pug power in the Cardinal Nation

Danzig U.S.A. has long acknowledged that the pug is the unofficial dog breed of the University of Louisville. And now it's official: