War is barbaric. Yet there have always been individuals, tribes, and countries who will kill other men, enslave women and children, and take property without compunction, purely to glut their own appetites. Even a man so saintly as to refuse to defend his own life will be conflicted when his nation, his community, or his family is threatened by savages. There is a time for peace and a time for war, and distinct moralities for each. These moralities are based on the two philosophical views of idealism and materialism.

Idealism  develops from the Platonic concept of Beauty – that all things resolve to a unity of one, which is essentially spiritual in nature. Materialism concerns itself with that which we can detect with our physical senses and instruments, and thus recognizes individual objects co-existing in degrees of relationship which may be harmonious, conflicting, or both. As idealism is concerned with the eternal and necessary, so materialism examines the immediate and accidental. Materialism’s moniker is Power, which is simply the capacity to effect movement and change. Change does not exist in the ideal.

The poetic language of Beauty and Power is meant to convey qualities which aren’t so evident in the academic terms. The experience of Beauty can include a palpable sense of the presence of an artist expressing some meaning or purpose through his creation, via its order and unity. Plato is perhaps the West’s first monotheist, though he kept his philosophy remarkably free of dogma. Power is used in a non-prejudicial way to include the attribute that the material is unconscious as its objects decay and re-formulate themselves, blind as a rogue nation toying with weapons that could destroy all civilization, including its own people. When Power develops a religion, its gods are multiple, compete with each other, and can be arbitrary in interacting with us.

Neither materialism nor idealism can be held in a pure form – these are two sides of the same coin, in the same way that astrophysics and quantum mechanics describe the same world even though they have irreconcilable attributes. An idealist, for example, who claims that the right to life is absolute must qualify whether that right applies simply to members of his own species, perhaps to all mammals or all animals, or extends even to plant and microbial life. This might favor materialism, but materialism is implicitly compromised by its nature of change – if it were pure then the basis of morality could at best be self-interest, but even that encounters complications when considering relationships one has with others and with one’s world. Materialist morality resolves to some form of utilitarianism – whether one’s values are mutually consistent, whether one’s behavior is consistent with realizing them, and with thought given to any obligation to others and to the common good.

A modern, civilized culture tends toward the morality of Beauty when at peace. This is implicit respect for the worth of each person and support for his rights, in confidence that the ultimate outcome of self-determination by each of us tends ultimately to the good. But when confronted by those within whom the divine spark is so muddied that their actions and intent  are evil, the same culture – the same people – turn to the morality of Power, and ready themselves for war. Both are modes by which one interacts with the world, and both exist at least latently in everyone. This duality is evidenced in the Koran, which favors peace but also teaches an obligation to war in some circumstances (which are or can be made ambiguous.)

A country considers war justified when its own interests are at stake, meaning (under a representative government) the interests of its populace. It’s extremely difficult for a nation to enter war for the sake of another people, and not simply on practical grounds – a mark of legitimacy in a government is that it extends the right to self-determination to all nations as well as to its own citizens. Our country was able to gather an international coalition to supplant the Taliban government of Afghanistan primarily on the basis that it’s in the national interest of all countries to protect their people from terrorist murder, and only secondarily that the Taliban imposed its own determination of how people must live on an unwilling populace by force and was acting to extend that influence.

Clearly rights to life and property are compromised in war. But civilized cultures no longer abandon principles entirely when at war – otherwise we could hold no concept of war crimes. We are developing international codes as to which are legitimate and which illegal weapons, at what targets these may be deployed, and who bears the responsibility for violations (individual soldiers, those who give the orders, and/or whether the offending nation and its populace are culpable.) Nonetheless, in war morality includes expediency – ‘collateral damage’ is a sanitized term meaning that unintentional or unavoidable harm to otherwise protected people and property, though regrettable, can be morally and legally accepted.

Usama bin Laden is dead. And Anwar al-Awlaki, too, was specifically targeted for assassination. Under the morality of war we can celebrate their deaths. Any disquiet with that joy is the presence of Beauty within our souls. Killing is more troubling when the enemy has a name and a face, in part because someone worth targeting must be extraordinary in some way. But assassination is expedient – take off the head and the serpent will die harmlessly. Neither have we only now adopted this tool – we sent a squadron for Isoroku Yamamoto during World War II. And one of our most popular presidents, John Kennedy, is alleged to have authorized several attempts against Fidel Castro (if true, hopefully on the basis that Castro invited the threatening presence of the former Soviet Union just off our shores during the Cold War.)

That last example brings up the point that war can have an expansive definition. It’s not necessarily an overt conflict between governments – the Cold War was a conflict of the ideologies and distrust of two nations which never took up arms directly against each other, though we sometimes used hapless third countries as proxies (intolerable, if not claiming wartime morality.)

Governments can also claim war against non-political agencies – i.e., the war on drugs. Governor Rick Perry, a candidate for the presidency in the next election, recently said, “It may require our military in Mexico working in concert with them to kill these drug cartels and to keep them off of our border and to destroy their networks.”  This is not unlike our justification for intervention in Afghanistan; primarily, the drug cartels present a clear and immediate threat to our citizens of murder and other crimes, and only secondarily these cartels continue to commit mass murders in Mexico, the government of which is too weak and too corrupt to put an end to it.

The intertwining of idealism and materialism is expressed in the contradictions that Beauty, while worshiping the unity of all, respects the individual, and that Power, while championing the individual, requires him to surrender significant rights to the hierarchy of war. Not just soldiers – we would not tolerate the intrusive searches of private persons and property in airports if we did not agree that terrorists are at war with us.

That weave is expressed in the two fundamental documents of our government, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration presents our most basic ideals, naming as inalienable the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – then states that governments exist in order to secure these rights. The Constitution defines our government’s structure, responsibilities, and powers. The Declaration cites self-evident truths, twice appealing to God – hallmarks of the ideal. That a government must be established to defend these principles is a practical, rather than ideal necessity. The ideal holds primacy, but where we can’t agree on values – domestically or with potential enemies – we must establish utilitarian principles.  Our government is a material overlay on ideal concepts, an imperfect instrument attempting to institute the absolute.

First and foremost, government is charged to respect the divine spark within each of us – that is, it must support self-determination. Each citizen will have his or her unique perspective on the ideal, and in the very act of giving it substance the ideal is no longer pure.  Thus, a government must adopt legal statutes and avoid enforcing subjective principles (those truths revealed beyond articulation within individual souls) as much as possible. The separation can’t be maintained perfectly; an example unrelated to the subject of this article is that whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman is self-evident to a great many people. Self-evidence is the perspective of idealism – in religious terms it’s called revelation. Yet we require governments to recognize and guarantee specific rights on the basis of marriage contracts – our government is being forced to legislate a decision on whether same-sex couples can claim at least some of those same rights.

In principle certain rights extend to all people, and absolutely. Through the instrument of government, however, they are limited – enforcement means restriction. And distinction is drawn between the citizens whom a government represents and aliens, a consequence both of respecting the right of other peoples to self-determination and of the practical, material bias toward self-interest. Not even the first-named right – life – is held sacred; in order for government to secure our ideals it must be granted the power to make war, be given our permission to kill. Even internally, government assumes the authority to take life in action against criminal activity; the degree to which that is tolerated is morally contentious, and subject to our weaknesses as well as to our ideals.

There is a time for war, an obligation. And war is not so tightly defined; as an enemy’s strategies and methods develop a political character, they begin to defy police control and must be answered with war powers. This applies even to organized crime when its influence crosses borders and affect the liberties of other peoples, when criminals becomes effectively a warlike tribe oppressing its neighbors. Religious fundamentalists are of the same character when their methods include intimidation, brutality, and murder. Moslem extremists can claim that their actions are a response to Western interventions in their lands, but the Taliban has demonstrated that this is sometimes a ruse for an Islamic Crusade – the imposition of a religious way of life by force. This is Power masquerading as Beauty, betrayed by its contempt for the sanctity of other people’s lives.

Defense against terrorism must be explicitly defined as war by Congress because actions which are both legal and moral are far more extreme in war than in police action, meaning that they depart much further from our ideals. The rights which a government denies enemies and the lands which harbor them, and those which it must withdraw from its own citizens in order to conduct war efficiently are significant. Presidents who declare war in rhetoric yet do not appeal to Congress for the official designation can too easily find themselves in a legal quagmire, their staffs inclined to use war powers – in good faith, but without having been given the authority. The degree to which rights, and our ideals, can be compromised must be made explicit.

Guantanamo Bay is just such a legal no-man’s land. Those held there aren’t officially prisoners of war, but neither are they simply criminals; thus they’ve been given the peculiar designation of ‘enemy combatants.’ President Obama wanted very much to process the prisoners via the civil justice system, but as a practical matter has found that virtually impossible. A martial court is wanted here, not simply for its comparative efficiency, but also to deny these prisoners one of their favorite weapons – a platform for speeches to incite further bloodshed.

That expediency is a legitimate principle of government is easily seen in the example of a municipal emergency medical service confronted with a mass-casualty incident, whether it be a localized event such as a multiple shooting or traffic accident, or a disperse emergency such as a weather disaster. Because resources are finite, triage is invoked, meaning that victims are prioritized: those with critical injuries but for whom intervention has a hopeful prognosis, those with serious but not life-threatening injuries, those with minor injuries, and those dead or sure to die regardless of any intervention. The commanding officer must explicitly declare the emergency because the care and resources to which the injured are normally entitled are limited. Additionally, he is assuming authority for some of the decisions usually made by his personnel and their patients – for example, patients must be distributed among all the area hospitals rather than overwhelming any one. The environment changes to a more military hierarchy, and his subordinates must know the rules under which they are operating. Competently performed, triage produces the best outcome for the greatest number of people. As with all exercises of power, however, even this is subject to corruption, such as distinguishing the worth of different victims (favoring a public figure over the anonymous, or allowing the instinctive maxim of ‘women and children first’ to overly influence one’s assessments.)

In like manner, the mode under which terrorism is being fought must be explicit – a president’s staff must know whether they have the licenses of war or are limited to the arsenal of police agencies, and they must know whether certain decisions are theirs to make or must be submitted to the chain of command. The more militaristic an administration must be the more responsible a president becomes for the competence and discipline of his staff.

Terrorism raises the problem that the enemy is not a government, but rather people who subscribe to an ideology, and who use guerrilla tactics; they aren’t easily identified, nor do they necessarily have a hardened chain of command. This makes a formal declaration under current definitions of war difficult. What is needed is a legal distinction for this class of conflict, to make clear the war powers (the intrusions into rights) that are authorized. We certainly had the power to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty in going after bin Laden, and most of the world community looked away, recognizing the continuing threat he posed and suspicious of that government’s complicity in harboring him. But might does not make right. While we constitutionally disallow submitting ourselves to any law outside our own, we still want an international standard that legitimizes such an action, a class that defines the war powers which may be employed against terrorists. Such a definition could apply also to actions against piracy, drug cartels, and the sex-slave machinery – groups with an internal hierarchy or community which commit or indulge profound violations of human rights on an international level, when their victims include our own citizens.

In peace one cannot legitimize assassination – that first-named right, life, is simply too sacred. But in war the utilitarian case is easily established that the killing of key figures is likely to weaken the enemy and ultimately minimize the loss of life and property both among the enemy’s and one’s own military and populace. The decision to compromise our principles has been made – the matter becomes a mathematics of what action will most efficiently allow us to return to those ideals of peace.

But materialism is imperfect, subject to decay; remembering that government is the servant of our ideals, morality requires that assassination be employed only against those whose death is likely to save lives or shorten war – revenge, retribution, and political gain,  are invalid grounds. In the class of war which terrorism represents, an administration should be required to submit the name of an individual to be targeted to the courts to judge whether, by military (not civil) standards, assassination is permissible. The executive branch at any level of government is disposed to the expedient, and needs the oversight of the courts, which are more directly charged to be mindful of our ideals and the extent to which government must compromise individual rights in its responsibility to secure them for all. Death sentences, especially without due process, are a far more profound intrusion into rights than, for example, wire-tapping.

The assassination of al-Awlaki is more problematic than that of bin Laden because our government is charged to recognize greater rights in its own citizens. No doubt the legal aspect will be a thorn to the administration. Utilitarian morality, too, obligates a government to honor its contract with all its citizens, however heinous their conduct. In an undeclared war, al-Awlaki couldn’t be classified a traitor, but neither was he a mere criminal; he may be named another ‘enemy combatant,’ and the assassination did occur on foreign soil, but that classification lacks legal status, and our government’s obligation to uphold the rights of its citizens does not disappear offshore (otherwise, neither would there be moral support for the intrusions of rescue missions such as that in Grenada.) With no formal declaration authorizing the war power to kill without the due process to which a citizen is especially entitled, our government has committed a moral infraction for our benefit and in our name for the sake of expediency.

One wants not only to forgive, but to thank them, but then to follow up by insisting on the declarations and the legislation that will involve the courts, lest the current or future administrations continue to expand their concept of when assassination may be employed. Recall that the very dangerous Al Capone was sent to prison for income tax evasion, rather than the murders, rum-running, and extortion for which he was wanted; the outcome was laudable, but that precedent established the technique of searching for any crime one can find when a prosecutor wants to imprison an individual, regardless of whether motivated by justice, public pressure, or personal or political gain. Congressmen may themselves be tempted to wield the law in like manner, as a political weapon. In just this way our principles decay.

During domestic disasters the ranking police officer is normally the incident commander, with whom fire, EMS, and other public safety agencies must consult. This is as it should be, not the least reason for which is that police are implicitly more cognizant of what is legal and what is not; fire officials will be more expert on what is a safe perimeter in an unstable environment, and paramedic officers will want some persons removed from a scene when they interfere with or place burdens on rescue efforts, but it’s the police who are given the training and authority to control the movement and behavior of the public in an emergency. Due to the nature and urgency of their work, firefighters and paramedics are especially motivated to act on their personal concepts of expediency, but their training and judgement is narrowly focused on the mission immediately at hand. And once the fire hose is rolled up the people must be free to go about their lives.

War is a comparable emergency, during which a government is given extra powers over a broad range of civilian matters, including control of domestic transportation, communications, and even the rationing of privately produced goods such as gasoline. But we must not allow war practices and agencies to become so deeply embedded that we have difficulty recovering our souls when peace is restored; when democracy returns we must not allow any official to be touted a tzar, lest we become complacent to a pre-socialist autocrat. It’s we who are the source of authority, and without our oversight even the most sincere official is tempted to reverse government’s role by attempting to mold the citizenry to her view of what an American should be.

With these considerations, such an entity as the Department of Homeland Security should not exist except in a time of war, however heart-warming its name may be during fearful days. This concentrates police and emergency powers, including privileges of secrecy, in one agency – more effective, but any of its excesses and corruption will be amplified. Police are the immediate instrument of government within the public at large, exercising that government’s authority to restrict rights, and it requires extraordinary character to resist the abuses – little and big – which such power invites. Separation of powers is inefficient, but is a necessary restraint, and a principle of our constitution.

Given this caution, however, when disasters occur police and emergency services must be given a degree of autonomy to implement their expertise. Even a mayor or a governor should limit his participation to discovering and providing any additional resources that could be available to his commander and subordinate officers. Likewise, past experiences such as in Vietnam have taught us that the concept of limited war should refer more to defined objectives than to the strategies which our generals employ.

What’s in a name? When that name is war, it’s the balance of our rights under our ideals,  as well as those of the enemy and the lands in which they operate. When Mexican gangs begin kidnaping our daughters to consume their lives in forced prostitution, should we send our military in for them? This is the moral and the obligatory course. Some will be lost despite our efforts, and some because of them, and some soldiers will suffer irreparable damage in body and in  soul, but such horror must be stopped. But crossing the border is an act of war, and war, with its goal, must be declared. As this is an imminent possibility, the Pentagon would be remiss if not already having a contingency plan – Mr. President, unleash them the very day that your agents report our lost children being forced into a van in Tijuana. We only require that you approach Congress soon after for the proper declaration.

It’s laughable to be wearing sunglasses as I rise in the dim of this shaft, but the saints who came down to us as testament to the resurrection to come warned that the light will hurt unaccustomed eyes. Fading memories below and burning light above; just as Plato said, there are two kinds of blindness – that of the guide who descends from light to rescue those shackled in the cave, and that of the pilgrim who climbs to the sunlit world above. Where you wait.

Luis said we must stay busy, lest our thoughts make us mad. But how active can one be in this capsule? Staying busy is what I’ve always done, and even before going down that fateful day to the lure of gold and copper, images of places I’d been and things I’d done were always fading, so that I sometimes questioned what had been real and what fantasy. Damn sunglasses – no sooner did they close the hatch tight against my arms than they razzed, “Make your nose itch, don’t they?”

Don’t over-think. But there’s nothing to look at except the slate walls of this chute. Suspended between heaven and hell, cut off even from my pale comrades, I can’t feel – am I moving up, or is the tube sliding down? I can’t even drop my head to see whether I actually have a chest, or hands, or legs. The catacomb wasn’t holding me from that promised world above – it’s me that’s been lost. No wonder that your face eludes me, when that chamber has separated me from the man who holds you in his heart. Maybe that’s why, when they learned that the heat had stripped us to our underwear, they sent us new garments, each with our name embossed – not so much because we’ll need them in changing environments from the Hades below, but more as covenant that we will soon be born again as the men we’ve always been.

Then is that pain below simply the gnawing hunger of the body which once housed me, or is it desperation to press against the bosom wherein I placed my heart, to again feel my pulse echoing in your breast? Am I nothing more than the eyes shaded against even these rock walls, and the ears which know only the rumbling and scraping of this capsule? The voice in my earpiece begins to sound like the reassurance of my own faith, now broken off and become an alien fragment of my own mind. In a movie, a man who was asked what women meant to him answered carefully, “Hope.” And before faith there is hope. We pinned our hope to the anonymous drill which found us, our faith seemed justified in the guitar sent back, and the chords Jorge plucked from it restored the ticking of our clock, sounding our mantra that the interminable night must yield to a dawn.

I did try; I grasped at the vision of you even while it was slipping into the shadows, becoming ever more wildly frustrated, like an old man who feels thoughts welling up in his mind yet has lost the gift of speech with which to command them. And the less corporeal you became the more glorious, more divine a thing did I sense that I’d lost, the more those scant words we were able to share became my prayer and your answering promise.

There – I felt that. They warned that the capsule might slow as it traversed bends in the shaft, and would pause right before reaching the surface. And just that suddenly I emerge into a burst of light amongst a crowd of people, so dazzling that it mutes their cheers. Even under the night sky I’m cautioned not to remove my sunglasses, lest I stumble foolishly about. So many hands to guide me, some touching me, even more applauding – as many people as can fit within the light, all wearing the brightly colored vests of rescuers and the helmets of artisans. Unknown faces, but people who’ve suspended their lives to bring me up, as though so long as I was away they were incomplete, shepherds who’ve left their flock to find the few who are missing. One or two do seem familiar now – under the team helmet, he looks just like the president himself, and she the first lady, who before had only been pictures on television and in the newspaper. Everything is more than real, and affirms that this is a world to which I belong.

And there you are – my better half, stepping out of the shadows of my hope. Like getting reaccustomed to the light, it could take time to re-associate you with that glorious spirit for whom I’ve yearned. Don’t over-think – despite Plato’s polemic, I doubt that anyone really can look directly at the sun, but I can look at the moon, and now I behold you. Though I sensed my inadequacy for the Madonna I held in your stead, well, if you aren’t really that angel – a man can’t kiss a spirit. Like the Fenix rising, I feel my flesh filling again. And as fire is to the sun, so my passion is to my love. Come to me. Mm, I’d forgotten how good you smell. Above all others, you make me rejoice to be a man.

Most of us require a couple of decades to mature enough to live more or less independently of our parents. During the formative time we develop our fundamental concepts of what the world is and who we are within it, both as individuals and as social creatures. Experience channels these concepts, and more often than not it’s through uncomfortable experience than they are modified. But we have psychic censors built into us; when something presents a challenge to our self- or world- views, our minds naturally resist so that we can absorb the information more slowly and have a better chance of fitting it in with whatever we had believed before.

Dreams censor by hiding whatever we are really thinking about behind a symbol. During the dream we sense all the emotions associated with whatever the actual matter is, but in a relatively safe way because we’re confronted with a substitute, not the actual circumstances that motivate those feelings. This is the same process by which we can be entertained by loathsome things in stories; as an audience to a movie or to a dream we can comfortably project ourselves into such circumstances because at some level we know it’s not real, that soon enough we will leave the theater, or awaken, having imagined what we would do and feel in a dreadful experience.

Dreams routinely censor, whether or not we really need to avoid facing whatever actually motivates our thoughts, and even when the true subject is comfortable and pleasant. But normally only the basic subject is disguised, and in developing its symbol a dream will ignore other internal censors. One needs to know this, because he will often witness or participate in taboo activities in dreams, and may wake wondering if something within him is profoundly corrupt. The most common example is awakening from some really nasty bathroom scene; this doesn’t mean that one is a pervert, but simply that the bladder is signaling that after a long night it needs to be emptied. This is an ‘external’ stimulus intruding on our thoughts, but no censorship restrains how we exaggerate its urgency. One has only to consider how often Native American myths of the coyote end with urinary excesses to recognize how common the image is. (It’s noteworthy that so many myths have the quality of dreams.)

I learned of a common example through a blog; a woman wrote that during her first pregnancy she often awoke with a guilty glow beside her husband, having dreamt of sexual encounters with former flames. A surprising number of women commented that they had done the same, involving old boyfriends, celebrities, or fictitious men – and generally the dreams were quite satisfying, sometimes ignoring glaring shortcomings of a partner with whom they were painfully familiar. This is evidently quite common with first pregnancies, but the theme subsides with subsequent babies.

Dreams routinely present their true subject symbolically. Thus, while sex occupies its share of our thought, when a dream features sex the subject is most likely something else. Sex dreams during a first pregnancy almost certainly reveal that a woman is realizing the commitment demanded by her upcoming role as a mother; the different partners she takes in her dreams are simply her speculating about the pleasures of other experiences she might have explored, but feels she has ruled out by becoming pregnant. (It’s not meant to imply that once one becomes a mother she can pursue no other role in this world, but it is hard to imagine anything more life-altering.) When such dreams don’t occur during later pregnancies, some of these women worry whether their libido is diminishing; but, already being mothers, there’s no longer the same need for the profound self-questioning. Anyway, dreaming of multiple partners says nothing about whether a woman is promiscuous in her soul – her mind is simply using the men as symbols of different experiences she feels have become denied to her. These dreams say nothing about her libido; there’s no cause for guilt – even if she dreams of enjoying activities she would never consider in real life, this is simply her mind twisting a symbol to fit its real meaning.

An interesting sidebar is that several of these women also dreamt of getting their teeth knocked out, or losing them in some other way. This could mean that a woman feels completely unprepared for motherhood, or that pregnancy and motherhood threaten a severe blow to other aspirations she has, or (if her appearance is emphasized) to who she believes she is. Dreams featuring eating often refer to our ability to absorb knowledge; thus the expression, “Let me chew this over,” means “Let me think about this.” Spitting out or choking on something suggests knowledge we are rejecting; in like manner, losing teeth suggests feeling unable to “bite into” an idea – the wordplay in dreams is often just this droll. But there’s another possibility – this may be the dream equivalent to a pregnant woman’s food cravings; as her subconscious recognizes that she needs certain nutrients by stirring lust for foods which contain them, the same stimulus may affect her dreams, telling her that her body is sacrificing tooth and bone for the baby because she’s not taking in enough calcium.

Another overtly sexual dream is to envision oneself indulging some favorite fantasy in which everything is perfect, except that during the dream he feels disappointment or shame for taking this particular partner. This represents nearing the attainment of some cherished goal – a job or promotion, perhaps – but the feeling is growing that it’s not going to be what or how he imagined it after all. He may not yet consciously recognize or may be resisting these feelings, but the dream reveals that he is at least subliminally questioning. Symbolizing the feeling as sex shows how deeply one has invested himself in the goal. Understanding the feeling that the dream portrays can help one get perspective – in some cases the dream is simply mental adjustment of one’s concept from the ideal to the actual, and in others it may be the dawning realization that he’s been pursuing the wrong thing all along.

Some dreams, like some of our waking thoughts, are quite pleasant. But we tend to think about things which challenge us, and sometimes things trouble us deeply. While in my early twenties I experienced a summer of nightmares – the standard type in which one awakes trying to scream but can’t find the air to do so. It became so regular that I dreaded going to sleep. At the end of that summer, while desperately waking to escape the terror again, at another level I also voiced, “I’m not ready to know this yet.” Afterwards there was not another nightmare. I don’t recall any of those dreams, nor do I know whether I’m now ready or have learned whatever threatened me so when I was young.

The rescuing message of this voice revealed that the demon disturbing my sleep was simply knowledge – some thought or realization was growing and threatening to reach the conscious level. Usually when dreams actually present monsters doing harm to us, these are just unpleasant; however, in the extreme case of nightmares we sense the approach of a monstrous thought but escape to wakefulness before ever actually seeing it. The terror of these thoughts is not necessarily that something threatens real harm to us, but rather that it poses a profound challenge to our self- or world- concepts, or our hopes – something our minds are designed to resist. We don’t see the monster because we are refusing the thought.

As an example of why a thought may be repressed, a man dreamt that his mate had stolen something, and that she had arranged things so that if the theft were discovered he would look guilty rather than she. Infidelity is often represented by a theft ( it’s worthwhile to reflect on why.) The dream shows that he’s becoming suspicious of her, though this may not have yet reached the conscious level. That she had made him look guilty shows he feels that her (suspected) indiscretion is somehow his fault. The dream doesn’t reveal whether his suspicion is justified – only that it exists, along with the sense that she’s causing him to doubt or judge himself. These are thoughts he is naturally inclined to resist, but will affect his relationship even if suppressed.

The interpretation of dreams is a literary skill. Dreams are especially prone to wordplay, and one has only to research poetic devices to appreciate how varied this can be. The artistic devices of our sleeping thought are sometimes brilliant and sometimes waggish. Some dream symbols are universal, but many depend on the dreamer’s personal understanding of his own language. And it’s certainly useful to know a bit about someone to understand his dreams – his age, gender, and so own. As an artistic skill, interpretation is obviously subjective. The interpretations of the dreams mentioned in this post are generic, and could be very different for any particular person.

But one must approach the matter reverently when interpreting someone else’s dreams – his dreams are the concerns of his soul, and it’s often the case that what seems mundane to one is a profound matter to someone else. If you should happen to get it right, and the subject is something troubling to the dreamer, it’s a natural response for him to identify you with the threat and reject you with the same energy with which he is resisting the thought. And the dreams of someone who is not generally well in mind or soul are matters for a trained counselor.

That being said, often enough the key to a dream’s symbols lies innocuously in the background. In the dream described in my post, The Sinkhole, the real concern was exposed by there being a nude dance club housed in a ‘strip mall’ at the periphery of the sinkhole on which the dream focused. The image expressed my concern about media encouraging licentiousness, but during the dream what was near the sinkhole seemed only incidental.

That dream illustrates the perspective one should take in interpreting. The dream is not a revelation of any absolute truth about what behavior standards should be, but rather the truth of my beliefs and feelings on the matter – how I feel my culture corrupts the realization of my ideal in the pretty gender. Understanding that, it’s up to me to determine whether my quaint romanticism is something I should surrender or support – admitting that there’s also a rascal within me who appreciates a naughty girl.

Not all dreams are important – no more than are all our waking thoughts. Those which ramble on and on are just our minds wandering. However, those which are short or vivid, and especially those which continue to nag our thoughts after waking, are worth interpreting – these expose beliefs and feelings about matters which are important to us, and recognizing them is a significant part of thinking through past or anticipated experience.

I awoke chuckling one morning during that course. The dream had been a cartoon: Mickey Mouse was chasing Pluto and poking him in the butt with an umbrella, saying, “Take that, Pluto,” over and over. Hmm. Well, I dutifully wrote it in my journal, anticipating standing to share it with the class later – after all, it was my dream, and I have more than a comfortable estimate of the worth of my thoughts.

Until.. still thinking about it while driving to work I suddenly realized that I had had a Mickey Mouse dream, which (to an American of my generation) means fluff – entertainment without any substance. If imagining my mind as a fire station (where I worked), one firefighter (the story-teller) had played a joke on another in my company (my ego), waiting for me to record it ever so seriously, only to ‘get it’ later. Okay – I’ve been properly prodded. But if Pluto is not the most noble representation of my self-image, he is a well-meaning dog.

Evidently by coincidence, President Obama and former Vice President Cheney recently gave back-to-back speeches on the subject of EIT’s. Cheney argued that the CIA was authorized to use these methods to gather information in a timely manner when a particular prisoner likely had information that, if extracted, could be used to prevent harm to American citizens. He argued further that Obama would set a dangerous precedent by criminalizing practices authorized by a previous administration.

Cheney’s last point is strong. Assuming that Obama is a man of unquestionable moral fiber, this is the exception among politicians. After all, the democratic necessity of willingness to compromise one’s position is at best amoral. But there is an accelerating trend among politicians to exploit law as a political weapon – if it’s doubtful whether one can defeat an opponent’s platform, then impeach the man himself. However sincere his motives, for the president to himself aggressively pursue such matters is to invite purges based on partisan politics into our future. The separation of powers was made integral to our constitution to avoid just this sort of thing.

Whether or not the prior use of EIT’s was marginally legal, because Obama believes they should not have been, his focus should be to work as hard as his conviction is strong to change the law.

The question he faces is “Who’s law – U.S. or international?” International law is a matter of treaty, mostly among Western governments, but the United States Congress has not ratified these treaties. The arguments against doing so are that our own judicial system is competent to investigate and try cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that it would violate our constitution to allow a foreign party to conduct police activities on American soil, even if the agency is an international group with whom we’ve established treaties. Ireland faced a similar problem, and amended their constitution in order to participate in the international court at The Hague.

At present we do not submit to international law. We assert ourselves as a nation governed by law, but only by our own law. Right is what we say it is. But this is simply asserting that we are powerful enough to defy any challenge to our behavior – and we are the most powerful nation in history. Power, however, is a practical matter, while morality is ideal – what’s right is right absolutely, even for those who are completely unable to defend themselves.

And right is not one thing within our borders and another beyond our shores. Not moral right, but because of our position this is the case with legal right. The CIA expresses an intuition of the questionability of certain methods by naming them ‘enhanced techniques,’ combining the positive-sounding word ‘enhanced’ with the sophisticated word, ‘techniques’ (the implication that a science is used depersonalizes the practice.) These same EIT’s are what other nations call torture – and if we agreed with that label we’d almost certainly also agree that EIT’s are immoral.

But the CIA is concerned with expediency, and it’s hardly controversial that this agency has no concept of morality. The CIA is a police agency. Police bureaus operate on the basis of power, and this power is normally restrained by competing local, state, and federal agencies. That’s why at the federal level we have separate agencies such the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, The Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs and Immigration, and even the Secret Service (with their responsibility to the Treasury Dept) when their investigations surely overlap and could all be combined more efficiently within the FBI. The CIA is unique in that it operates beyond our borders and so is profoundly less subject to such restraint. The agency is subject to United States and not international law, yet its sphere of activity is outside the U.S. and not among the citizens on whose behalf it acts.

As an aside, this points to the danger of having a unified Department of Homeland Security. Police authorities must be indulged a certain level of secrecy in order to conduct investigations. This privilege can be abused, but it is also a restraint when one agency has authority to investigate another. Giving a single agency authority over all others certainly has the advantage of sharing information about enemies of our country, but it also carries the inherent danger of centralizing police authority. Repeating, police activity is implicitly power oriented – expediency is their nature, not morality. And the more urban experience an officer has, the more character it requires to avoid regarding all citizens as suspects, more to be defended against than defended.

The previous administration proclaimed 9/11 as an act of war, and as a practical matter civil liberties are compromised in times of war – civil liberties within our own nation as well as in our actions abroad. But terrorist groups are an unusual enemy in that they do not represent a country but rather an ideology. Because of this, it was recognized at the outset that this ‘war’ would last decades. Decades – time enough for an entire generation to grow to adulthood in the atmosphere of compromised liberties, and acceptance of the wartime expediency of a Department of Homeland Security, whose umbrella includes even FEMA (thus, by association, civilian FEMA agents acquire more police authority.)

The previous administration did also acknowledge that the citizens of a free nation are more at risk than those of a totalitarian regime. If recognizing that EIT’s are immoral, the price of making their use illegal is to leave us more at risk. We must face the question of whether security is worth compromising our values. And our liberties.

Cheney contends that the ends justify the means – that’s implicit in his argument that the use of EIT’s did provide information that prevented planned attacks, and that there was no further loss of life within the United States. He cites the climate which existed after 9/11 as part of his justification. The question, however, is not whether EIT’s were effective, but whether they were legal and moral. His first argument asserts that they were right because they worked, and his second is the far more dangerous position that fear and outrage justifies extreme behavior.

Despite their declaration that 9/11 was an act of war, the previous administration classified captured terrorists as ‘enemy combatants,’ as though this label distinguished them from persons entitled to the protections afforded prisoners of war. Thus, EIT’s were legal. The label seems reasonable, since the prisoners were acting on political rather than criminal motives, but were agents of an ideology and not a country – thus, not exactly criminal or soldier. By the same reasoning, water-boarding could have been used in interrogating Terry Nichols to identify and track down Timothy McVeigh, as theirs was surely an act of political terrorism. And eager investigators may have used the same methods on Richard Jewell when he was the primary suspect in the Olympic Park bombing actually perpetrated by Eric Rudolph.

Unless domestic terrorism is not an act of war if conducted by American citizens. No doubt many individuals extend the belief that America should not be subject to international law to the position that our citizens have moral primacy over all others. Or that we are justified in using EIT’s with those who have used the same or worse methods on our soldiers and citizens. While it would be hoped that none of our political representatives make the same sort of claim publicly, there’s an uneasy sense that the previous administration incorporated such attitudes in their policies.

Significantly different world-views exist between the traditionally Christian West, the largely Moslem Mideast, and Asia, and include different measures of the worth of an individual versus social or national interests.  While most people sense  intuitively that moral right is absolute, in practice we differ on what these absolutes are – even when we interpret the teachings of the founders of our various religions. No one is justified in claiming his concept of moral right is supreme. But we can agree to minimum standards of what is unacceptable behavior in any circumstance in war (war crimes) and within nations (crimes against humanity.) This is the reason for international treaty – not to declare what is moral, but to establish what is legal.

Our present position leaves us with no moral authority, especially if we distinguish domestic from international terrorists – we are asserting that American citizens are of greater moral worth than everyone else. And there is no international law if it does not exist within the borders of the leader of the free world. Even should it happen that our own parallels international law in every way, we have no right to appear at any international court except perhaps as a defendant. Our presence at the Nuremberg trials is exposed to the argument – which some Nazi’s voiced – that our judgements were not justice, but only the revenge of the victors.

The declaration that we are a nation of laws, and that our courts are just and competent will be seen as self-righteousness by others. Any nation can make the same claim – not only vast and ancient China, but also those rogue nations which recent presidents have referred to as the ‘axis of evil.’ These nations – and the terrorist groups with political agendas – who know they lack the military capability of resisting us can also use Cheney’s argument that fear of a dangerous enemy justifies extreme behavior.

Iran can, for example, accuse American citizens within its borders of spying, arrest them, and submit them to the same techniques we use – or any other interrogation method they choose. And claim the same justifications as does Cheney – that these prisoners pose a great danger to the way of life of Iranian citizens, and that EIT’s are the most expedient way to prevent further harm to its people by the United States.

We cannot impose any international standard of behavior which we do not submit to ourselves and claim right. We can claim the power to do so, but not the right.  If the legality of EIT’s is based on morality, then the law has to be international. Thus, Obama and former presidents are correct in wanting to be signatory to an international court. But Cheney is right in protesting against a sitting president wanting to criminalize the former administration.

Before him the earth opened; the bedrock split, and opened into a great granite-walled gorge. The depth thereof dizzied him, and though Dusk pushed legs madly against the void, the yawning chasm drew him toward the precipice, as if the Earth Mother herself drew him in with her breath.

A river carved out the bottom of the gorge with high falls and narrow rapids. Many names could be given it: Alleyah, which announces a ‘guide of others,’ Galilahi, which is the word for ‘attractive’ to one people, or its like, Galilah, which to another nation means ‘God shall redeem.’ But its true name is Tallulah, which dissolves all in its meaning, ‘running water.’

Tallulah River has always been, though before it had run deep underground. And its currents have always swirled around the legs of maidens busy at their bath, their toes grasping granite pebbles in its bed.

There among them was Dawn. And as soon as Dusk saw her all her companions faded into the shadows, lingering only as the song of water splashing against stone and rising in a mist of chatter and laughter. The aroma of Dawn caught Dusk as a scent he had been born remembering; it entered his nostrils as a freshness, a perennial newness which intoxicated him before ever he tasted her lips.

All which Dusk had built, all which he had planned now seemed as naught – mere distractions which had occupied him until this moment of beholding her. He did not know her name, but if compelled he might have falteringly spoken the epithet, Hope.

And hope she flashed when she cast her eyes up, piercing questions into the heavens. Her glances had not yet discovered Dusk atop the granite cliff. After each blink Dawn quickly lowered her face to her bathing, demurely avoiding again voicing her prayer that this be the day she’d always felt approaching.

He no longer resisted the precipice, and slid, falling, floating over the edge. Dawn turned her face to the sky again, and beheld Dusk as a cloud settling into the gorge. But rather than blocking the sun which she had so recently discovered, it set a glow in her face, a blush in skin which before had been hidden from warmth, and pale. Indeed, the sun drew a silver edge to the cloud, presenting a shape for Dusk to Dawn.

Dawn crawled upon a stone to see what this cloud might be. Though the sun seemed so tiny and far away, it had already warmed her bed; its light burst into colors sparkling in the mist, and seemed to be not behind but within the cloud, and swelled as it descended to her.

Dusk touched her, gently at first, and as his cloud settled upon her and his mass grew the moisture alternately warmed and opened her skin, and cooled and quickened her. In pulses Dusk pressed her deep into the boulder, then raised her up within the walls. Dawn floated, she was crushed, and the waves were within her as well as without. He sustained his rhythm and she withdrew into the swirling rapids within her, and he changed his rhythm and she opened her eyes to Dusk as a living presence come, having chosen her, and frightening - no,  thrilling her.

In this way Dusk lifted her ever higher. And as he did, the sparkling granite walls opened around them as a night sky bristling with stars. There is only this short hour in which Dusk and Dawn come together; they are unlike and do not know the same world, for Dusk has walked the surface of our Earth Mother, and Dawn is a seed newly emerging from her womb. Yet there is this moment every morning and every evening when they are one and the same.

Every day our wives go about their tasks in the village, and our husbands leave for field and forest, but, like Dawn and Dusk, we begin and end each day with a kiss. Thus do our families and our village grow and prosper.

Echoing my email inbox, my tv is very concerned about my privates. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend must be complaining – she’s probably an ex precisely because she’s so verbose about whether she’s being properly gruntled.

Appropriately, the movie being shown was The Howling, in which people who’ve been infected by werewolves become man-eating beasts themselves. In the end, even the dainty blonde anchor-woman succumbed, turning into a pretty little monster while being broadcast on live tv.

Can this be stopped? Not easily. My governor has written that the feds have complete control over the airways, and local standards are irrelevant. My congressmen have also responded, implying that they have no power over the FCC. One wonders if they will realize their potency when they discover a Trojan massager hidden in their daughter’s music box. And of course AMC is a cable/satellite channel, not broadcast over public airways, and so it’s implicit that the viewer is requesting what he gets. But suppose Charlie Wilson wasn’t a womanizer – instead of finding secret means to fight communism, might he have discovered a way to clean-up our media? Or is the FCC a front for Las Vegas mafia?

Yes, it was after-hours. But who if not teens will be the majority audience at 2 AM on a June night? It doesn’t make any difference to them whether it’s broadcast or satellite – appearance on tv gives an aura of legitimacy, normalcy to the products being pushed and the lifestyle they imply. And the advertisers are experts obligated to persuade a mainstream audience. Son, don’t let the commercials misguide you; the advertisers aren’t playing pocket-pool with you to help you with the girls – they are reaching for your wallet, and any girl you get with their pills, lotions, and appliances has an emptiness that no amount of Extenze can fill.

I would defend an adult’s right to purchase and use these products. I support the right for people to operate strip clubs, and even think it misguided that prostitution is illegal. These things are corrupt, but it’s not appropriate for one fellow to legislate another’s morality. Legalize, just don’t legitimize them, and regulate them with zoning laws. Can we not have zoning laws for tv, such that not only programming, but also advertisement is restricted to the audience with a taste for the vulgar?

One shouldn’t expect a channel offering ‘classic American movies’ to actually be a sex shop. But these commercials are pervasive. Not even the news channels will let twenty minutes go by without pushing a male potency pill. We have a choice whether to watch or not, but the choice is not whether to block a particular channel, but rather whether to watch tv at all. When AMC as a window into traditional Americana shows a couple in bed beckoning with their dildos, it’s only frustrating that the nude scenes are edited out of the movie.

Howling # 2 – a related subject

Drug companies are not our friends. They are large businesses obligated to make money for their share holders. They are not immoral, but they are driven by the profit motive, and profit is an amoral drive. It is to their advantage to promote products which treat disease, not those that cure; they advertise products which a person must take for the rest of their lives.

We have conflicting beliefs: everyone is entitled to the best possible medical care, and medical care is free enterprise. The drug companies exploit this, as they are obligated to their shareholders to do. The result is a mix of socialist and capitalist medicine – the pharmaceuticals offer their products for the greatest profit they can, and their price is obscured by government subsidy and insurance. There’s no outcry because the consumer is at best marginally aware of the full price he’s paying in taxes and insurance premiums. This is capitalist because the manufacturers set their prices as they think the market will tolerate and have patent protections, and it is socialist because we are all paying indirectly for each others’ medicines. Do you not groan on April 15 when a commercial begins, “Attention Medicare Beneficiaries”?

The drug companies try to convince us that they are our friends with the frequent promotions for their Partnership For Prescription Assistance. If that big orange bus actually exists, what real purpose might it serve outside of natural disasters? It isn’t rolling into rural America as the ally of the working man – this is pure propaganda designed to maintain the status quo of social capitalism. There’s a red star somewhere on that bus. And we are paying for its diesel fuel.

Why do drug companies advertise prescription medicine on tv if not to encourage us to put mass pressure on our doctors to give us access to their pills? “Doctor may I have some please?”

The cumulative effect of constant bombardment with drug advertisement is itself harmful to us, in more ways that I will mention. We are subject to the continuous message that the first solution to all life’s problems is a pill. Can’t sleep, can’t really awaken, memory problems, your food gives you heartburn, too little or low-quality sex – all these things can be corrected by a pill, so if life is painful or just boring it’s a small step to recreational drugs for perking things up. CNN, Fox – you’ve become drug-peddlers. Or does meteorology school actually teach forecasters to prepare the allergy reports brought to us by Allerest & Benadryl?

And of course there’s the raging competition between three or four pills for erectile dysfunction on every channel every hour of the day. Millions of men take them? Ask my doctor if I’m healthy enough for sexual activity? If I’m asking permission from my doctor, then I’m clearly not the cock of the block. I don’t know how much tax money has funded studies of how often men think about women during the day, but now my tv wants me to ponder my own genitals every ten minutes that I watch. Maybe the Immodium ads aren’t so bad.

Dear tv, it’s simple; if a product is something that can’t be discussed in the workplace without a supervisor being in jeopardy of harassment charges, then its advertisement should be blocked by the V-chip. Dear AMC – can you pretend to any sophistication in your programming when it’s only filler between sex-shop ads? Do you really want it to be mainstream for men to be womanizers and women to be voracious tramps.

So many pretty blond anchor-women. But I doubt that any of you watch your own programming because the proliferation of captions, tickers, and promos on the screen obscures your videos of airplanes coming in for belly-landings to just the tree-line on the horizon. Smoke is exciting, but one does wonder what is burning. Never were so many in such dire need of a silver bullet.

After retiring from a long career as a paramedic, I lived in the old German city of Nürnberg. Most of the town was destroyed in a fire storm during World War II, and when Nürnberg was subsequently rebuilt, Katharinenkirche was maintained as a burnt-out shell. Rather than a neglected war memorial, however, the townspeople still to this day use this Church of St. Catherine as an open-air theater for concerts of all musical genres.

The walls of Katherinenkirche still stand, though bare. When fire burnt away its roof and hollowed it out, the church’s sanctity was released to the heavens. Its remaining skeleton evokes a memory from the opposite end of my career, an hour in which, as part of my training to become a paramedic, I was called to witness the autopsy of a woman in her late twenties. Although she’d died of a cancerous liver, her body showed no external signs; her face was lovely and her figure the ideal of a woman. I think of her now as Catherine, in recognizing her likeness to the ruins of the medieval church.

St. Catherine of Alexandria, ‘the pure one,’ is the patron saint of scholars, philosophers, and apologists. St. Catherine was a beautiful, privileged and well-educated woman who tried to convince the Roman Emperor Maxentius to end persecution of Christians. Maxentius called pagan philosophers to debate her, but she converted them all. For that, and surely also because she refused the emperor’s seduction, she was martyred.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Catherine was a devout intellect who “declared to her parents that she would only enter into marriage with someone who surpassed her in reputation, wealth, beauty and wisdom.. Her intercession was implored by theologians, apologists, pulpit orators, and philosophers. Before studying, writing, or preaching, they besought her to illumine their minds, guide their pens, and impart eloquence to their words.”

Part of her legend (not embraced by the church) is that, upon her own conversion, Catherine was transported to heaven in a vision and betrothed to Christ by the Virgin Mary. This story comes from a time in which people believed that the body is a burden to the soul, and that truly holy people rejected all worldly things, and especially fleshly love.

Within the medieval walls of Katharinenkirche, where there are no windows to the world but the roof is open to the sky, one can imagine St. Catherine’s male counterpart as Sir Galahad, the purest knight of the Table Round, who pursued the Holy Grail in preference to everything earthly. The day after Sir Galahad was made to accept a kingship, Joseph of Aramathie appeared to him and offered him to drink from the holy cup. When he did, Sir Galahad ascended into Heaven in the company of angels, freed forever from his mortal burden.

Only the shell of Katharinenkirche still remains. And of the woman I know as Catherine, I have only the memory of her autopsy. I felt it a blasphemy to dissect her in the cold basement of the hospital, and yet this was an academic necessity in my acquiring the knowledge with which I could bring healing to my community.

St. Catherine and Sir Galahad left their mortal burdens as virgins; I can’t know whether my Catherine did, but I remember her as a promise unfulfilled. How dearly I would like to have known her as she went about her apartment singing love songs, or joining in with folk tunes on the radio while driving about our city. But the love she might have inspired in me was multiplied in every patient I touched throughout a long career, through the knowledge she imparted to me.

St. Catherine converted the pagan philosophers, not by refusing their arguments, but by engaging with them. She revealed something beyond the laws of logic, of nature, and of moral living – the love of a personal God. Remembering the concerts I heard in Katharinenkirche, it’s fitting that the shell of her church still reverberates with music even when the words of gospel are no longer preached therein; I’m reminded of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who’s study of mathematics was preliminary to and fulfilled in the Music of the Spheres.

The medieval mind understood Pythagoras’s musica universalis (music of the heavenly bodies) as one of three branches of their concept of musica; the other two are musica humana (music of the human body) and musica instrumentalis (music of instruments and voices.) Hindus (who were aware of Pythagoras) expressed this theme as Shabd (the Word made flesh) – a near identity with divine meaning and sound, tones which can be heard with ‘the inner ear.’ The idea is that of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Indulge me an exert from my novella, The Beautiful Fountain:

“The universe was approaching clarity – expanding with Aristotle’s vocabulary and contracting with Plato’s nameless Beauty. But, though these two sages were restored by the Orient, Pythagoras was returned in tatters. The monks were extracting the Music of the Spheres and discarding the harmony. Their thesis was a dictionary – a circular argument, words sustained only by each other, and without a theme.”

A friend – my fellow blogger, Moriah Joy – danced around these ideas in speculating what heaven might be like, especially in her intuition that Heaven has much to do with the intellect, as she remembered God’s charges to Adam before the Fall. In the first creation story, God gave man rulership of all the fish, the birds, and the beasts of the earth, and in the second, more detailed creation story God paraded all these creatures before Adam to see what he would name them.

Naming the things of the earth is beginning to take rulership of them. Naming things is forming concepts of them, but rulership is more – it becomes co-creative by organizing them intellectually in a specific way. As there is more than one language, there is more than one way to understand the world. And, for that matter, each speaker within even a common language will have a unique understanding of his own tongue, formed of both natural and accidental associations of terms within his dictionary. The history and legends of St. Catherine are in the public encyclopedia, while Nürnberg’s Katharinenkirche, the autopsy, Sir Galahad, and my association with Pythagorus’s music are additional elements in my personal lexicon of Catherine.

Having names for things gives one the focus, the power to master them intellectually, with something comparable to using variable names in algebraic equations or logical expressions. The word, “dog,” for example, is an abstraction for rather a wide variety of beasts – knowing the features common to dogs gives one knowledge of how to interact with all, but the generic word obscures the unique characteristics of each. We achieve a certain clarity in the use of language, a recognition of the structure of our world, but we want always to remember that our dictionary is an approximation, a thesis comprised partly of what is given to us and partly an extension of our own minds.

But the structure is a skeleton – it lacks something which gives it life. What I wanted during Catherine’s autopsy was her life restored. Her body had fallen out of harmony, and life had left it. It’s necessary to exploit language, to say that what was missing in her flesh was her music, because there is no really suitable English word – and if one were invented it would soon be martyred by academics, if the emperors of the flesh didn’t first turn it to their use.

In communion service we eat bread and drink wine; bread is a universal symbol for knowledge, but, again, there is no satisfying word for what the wine represents. One thinks first of “life,” but this doesn’t capture the immediacy, the human passion that is wanting in the intuition. For this we want music. The bread is broken – separated into parts – and then the wine follows; the words are written, then revealed in music.”Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music” ( Edward Abbey.) Though the words are written first, the music is the alpha and the omega; if one changes the music it expresses a different passion – it’s a different song – but if the words are changed it’s only another stanza.

Much of Richard Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” was set within the city’s Katharinenkirche (before it was burned.) Wagner’s opera is the tale of a naturally gifted musician who struggles against the rigid rules of the music guilds, so that, by winning a competition, he would win the hand of the woman he loves. But the musician, Walther, has a competitor named Beckmesser. Walther has composed a song for the event, and the local master, Hans Sachs, arranges that Beckmesser obtain a copy and believe it to be Sachs’ work. But Sachs anticipates correctly that Beckmesser will utterly fail to understand the spirit of the song, and when Walther follows and sings it in a way to reveal its inner beauty, Walther wins the prize and thus also his paramour.

The words were the same, but where Beckmesser was a master of the craft, Walther bested him by expressing the passion within the words. As one who understood the rules, Beckmesser was an academic, an intellectual musician, while Walther was a poet in love.

Within the text of Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory often mentioned that he was translating the history from the French, but when he spoke of the Holy Grail he almost always retained the French word, Sangreal. Consciously or not, Mallory was communicating the meanings both of san greal (cup of Christ) and also sang real (royal blood.) Sangreal incorporates a mix of ideas (which our unconscious mind tends to do); depending upon the legend, it may be a platter, or the cup which Christ used in the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Aremathie later used to catch Christ’s blood in the tomb. Sangreal captures the sense of the full dinnerware of communion – most importantly, the vessel containing the wine, but also to a lessor extent the tray containing the bread.

When the Sangreal appears, it is carried by a maiden, and in some stories that maiden is thought to be Mary, mother of Jesus. But one may also recall the revived story that Mary Magdalene carried the daughter of Jesus; what is downplayed in The Da Vinci Code is that the legends assert not only Christ’s bloodline through French aristocracy but also through them to Scottish nobles, and so to Uthur Pendragon (King Arthur’s father.) Literalists would not be happy with this connection to the legendary King Arthur. But the power of myth is not in its historical accuracy, rather, in the spiritual intuition that is honed through the retelling from generation to generation, including ours.

The myth expresses the heart’s yearning for the divine feminine (“God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” – Genesis 1:27.) Too often, and especially in Arthurian times, the church becomes a political power in the world. What is done in public is masculine – it is the outer world, law, authority. But if the church is the bride of Christ, what it does is private, and intimately personal. The quest for the grail is our unconscious yearning for a personal union with God, unmediated by any clergy. It is our feminine instinct to find and submit to God, to take him into ourselves, to fill our senses with the Spirit as wine heats our blood, to make of our own hearts the cup of Christ.

St. Catherine was prepared for this with a good education and a fine intellect. But, like Pythagoras’s study of mathematics opening him to the music of the spheres, this was only preparatory to betrothal to Christ, to Sir Galahad drinking the wine. This is a metaphor for the union of the masculine and the feminine. We can fill our senses anonymously with the lights dimmed and our eyes closed, but taking the bread before drinking the wine symbolizes our learning the law and then discovering the love; it’s coming to know our partner so that we can kiss with our eyes open and looking into those of our beloved, learning the words before our hearts burst into song.

The Arthurian legends have it that on many occasions the Sangreal was present but could not be seen; nonetheless its presence healed both physical wounds and injuries to the soul (it cured Sir Lancelot of a two-year madness.) Many Arthurian tales depict a lady healing a knight of wounds or poisoning, and nurturing him back to health. The maiden bearing the Sangreal is the ultimate fulfillment of this feminine virtue.

God prepared Adam for rulership of the earth by awakening language within him. After the Fall, Adam was separated from God, and had to learn both natural and God’s laws to survive. Through Adam, mankind becomes masculine, but through Christ the feminine is restored.

Wagner’s Beckmesser is like Maxentius’s pagan philosophers – intellectuals, masters of both natural science and moral law. In communion, we partake not only of the body (the bread, the truth) but also the blood (the wine, the passion) in expressing our union with Christ. Walther is like St. Catherine, having not only an intellectual understanding of God, but also that inarticulable something of a heart in love.

On the opposite side of Nürnberg’s central river from Katharinenkirche stands a world-class music school, where students who are naturally gifted must go through the academics, the autopsies of music before they can become masters of their craft. In like manner, our intellectual grasp of God’s order in this world is a step in preparing us for our place in the divine symphony, our part in the Music of the Spheres. Bread and wine – words and music. Heaven is not plucking a harp somewhere in the clouds, following notes on sheet music, but rather the co-creative expression of our own hearts in love. In this way we are keepers of the garden. This garden.

Perhaps we shouldn’t bemoan the Fall overmuch. Now we are in the academy, mastering language, mastering our world, but seeking the music – the passion, intent, the meaning. The autopsy is a necessary step in learning what the music is about. And in recalling that Walther’s paramour was named Eva, I am reminded that Adam’s wife was not named until they were expelled from the garden. Neither did I have a name for my Catherine until the close of my career. By study, by intellect, we come to more clearly see whom we love. Beauty is, after all, an intellectual perception. Love is our heart’s response to it.

I should get up soon, go to the sewing kit and stitch my costume for the day. The basket lies open near the bed – some dusty spools are mine, but many more are yours. The ghost of the flame still lingers, fitting the shape of a needle’s eye. I stare through it, knowing it to be a portal through which time will resume as soon as a thread is chosen and is passed through. Just a moment for my pulse to slow to the rhythm of your breath, those deliberate waves that draw me deeper into the blankets.

Cruel, cold floor – the slightest touch of my foot against it would connect me with this house, the entire estate, and some role it demands I play. A map of our villa is in a drawer somewhere in the room – a tailor’s pattern, a blueprint, an unfinished dream. I recall sketching lines on the parchment, but now it seems much of the handwriting is yours. You’ve made everything new, novel, perennially under construction. And yet under the blankets, where you turn to nuzzle your back into me, all seems timeless and familiar. On paper, in sunlight, every line was straight and square, correct. Too correct. Now, under moonlit shadows, the geometry is organic, conforming to each of your curves.

My thoughts have disturbed a ball of yarn in the basket. It tumbles out, and the kitten gives chase. I don’t recall your having a cat, but there she is, the mighty hunter toying with her prey. Her forehead is branded with the candle flame in my mind, like an Egyptian hieroglyph of the All-Seeing Eye. The kitty is even more Eastern than that – Siamese, I should think, judging from the turquoise and emerald of her eyes, matching the satins and sequins that wrap my love.

The fuzzy ball escapes through the balcony door. The cat pursues, after glancing back to confirm my attention hasn’t drifted. But I’m not anxious to fling open the blankets and release nocturnal warmth. I can follow her, anyway, in the theater of my mind.

Pussy is in my studio, where I spent so many years sculpting my hopes of you, my fingers penetrating deep in moist clay, my nostrils filled with the scent of earth. My hands delighted in anticipating your shape. Busts fill the shelves, statues line the walls – the stove eyes still glow atop the oven where I baked my models. Every one came short of you, though, draining of life as it dried. It must be the eyes. I sculpted a hollow in each to catch a shadow – it works, but only if I stand a little distance away. What’s that about cakes – why can’t I hold my love and look at her, too? My ceramic faces look through me to you, and crack, disenchanted now with their artist.

Feline fur whispers through the door. She’s become larger, a lynx. Though she doesn’t turn to demand I follow, it’s no accident that her tail is flipped so high. She’s in the gardens. The estate is studded with them – the baroque, the labyrinth, the orchard – and I’ve strolled through every one, though they seem to shift about and are impossible to embroider on my map. The bouncing ball has disappeared, lost. Or has it multiplied, become the fruit dangling in the branches like your delicious ideas? The lynx poses beneath the trees, waiting for me to choose one and give it a toss. The puzzle is to pick which citrus is yours and which mine, but I know the trick, and sniff for that with the sweetest, juiciest breath.

I’ve won the game but disturbed birds roosting in the trees where the fruit had been – they flutter out in a blaze of Amazon colors, the lynx watching with more than interest. I could swear she said, “Aye, sir, I’ll try you in the labyrinth next,” and she pulls my arm round her shoulder to carry me there.

The flickering wings settle as torches to light lush halls of tall hedges that are decidedly yours. A flame meets my eye wherever I turn, and lures my hand irresistibly to pierce inside. Its soul feels as wet on my skin as it does warm.

The lynx prowls on, but I stop before each corridor to listen. The wind rustles twigs into the clacking of a million little spider legs knitting their webs, and if the way is blocked somewhere around a bend the breeze is trapped, and resonates with whistles and hums of things you shouldn’t have to tell me, that I should just know. I’ve learned to avoid such paths, and choose instead the quiet ways, those you’ve forgotten were open or don’t know so well, even if all these halls are yours. The passages house thieving bunnies which take caution against the lynx, and sometimes darker, grumbling shadows and stains. Well, a few little beasties haunt my own caverns, too, and it’s best not to pester such creatures, to trust another day’s sunlight to burn them away.

So I escape your labyrinth, though leaving groomed green paths for dark jungle seems more going deeper than emerging. The torches spark and disperse as prisms woven into a veil of mist, shimmering in vines that smell of my angel’s hair. Having grown to respect my triumphs in her tests, the cat has matured more potent, a jungle feline, though before I can tell what kind she disappears with two graceful bounds into the bush, a fading shadow daring me to find her. I do still sense her behind the chaos of birdcalls, screaming insects, and alien cries that fill the forest; she’s there as surely as the sun is somewhere beyond the fog.

I choose the one constant – the song of a river threading through mangrove roots. Its chorus gradually increases to a crescendo at the base of a waterfall. A thousand eyes push me up its channeling rocks, the cascade washing my back so clear that my heart is revealed, throbbing like a red sun. Easily I claw to the summit – our balcony overlooking the rainforest – and notice your kitten-paw slippers beside the bed. Somewhere under the mound of blankets is the spring, the source of all that moisture.

The sewing kit still lies open. I squint through the needle’s eye, deciding which uniform, what version of me best says to you, “It is I.” But animal magic begins to reveal the moon whole under the shadow of its crescent, and my lids open full. I find your eye peeking over the pillow, flickering the scantily coded message, “Need you get dressed just yet? The candle is still lit.”

I’ve lifted my own dove in this very same glow, produced by blue gels over stage lights, when dancing a pas de deux with Lacy, my ballerina of many seasons. But that was in the past – I’m on duty now, in the back parking lot of a church in urban Atlanta.

The police are tidying up their report just a few blocks away. Next of kin known, but disinterested – the little crack-whore is destined for the paupers’ cemetery which runs downhill from the prison, just above the landfill. Her drama will soon be covered over by the light of the moon. I think of it as a hunters’ moon – I avoid claiming that it actually contributes to lunacy with the pragmatic observation that the bad guys can simply see their targets better. It’s just risen above a branch of that oak against the fence, as if the tree were raising a lantern to reveal the world for which I am responsible.

I seek to recover strength behind Israel Baptist Church, sitting in the cruiser assigned to me as EMS lieutenant for the southern half of the county. The child around the corner is dead, beyond recovery. As I approached, the cop had lifted pencil from clipboard just enough to indicate the door to a toolshed – a sure sign that his most pressing concern was to avoid contaminating a crime scene. The moonlight that could penetrate the one greasy window took a moment before revealing a little black girl collapsed over her knees like a Muslim at prayer, her forehead to the concrete. I had no real hope that the dark pool running from beneath her to the floor drain might be oil. Her skin was the temperature of the night, and my fingers discovered only the wound in her neck – the heartbeat had gone out with her blood, it had been a while since her last sigh.

I wanted to do more for her – at least give her the dignity of pulling her pants up from around her knees. But once death is confirmed it is indeed a crime scene. The medical emergency is over – just cancel the ambulance and fire crews who are en route, and disturb nothing for fear of cheating CSI technicians of their booty. I’ve no more duty to her – only to the file cabinet, providing a medical report to supplement the police documentation. The cop knew her name, having picked her up a few times as a child out too late and loitering at the wrong corner.

The church parking lot is empty, save for me. A few hours earlier it had been filled. They call it choir practice, but at an urban gospel church on a Saturday night surely throats were filled with the same passion and joy as will be shared with the congregation in the morning. Worship that waxes and wanes as does the moon – their song will rise again with the sun. It’s a hot night, but the cool blue of the moonlight makes everything in this world gleam as if from a light within, a landscape under a summer snow.

The peace belies the neighborhood. Somewhere in the shadows nearby is the monster who thought her life worth less than the coins she’d asked for her service. I don’t know that devil, though it’s easy to recognize others – I can diagnose a patient’s drug of choice by the personality of the demon who’s taken him over. There’s a corner suckling at liquor, a whole block loiters with marijuana and hashish, but the nearest intersection is the haunt of crack cocaine, her pushers and her whores.

The girl was fourteen. Her skin had become ashen upon releasing her dove, no moisture left in her body to give it a sheen. Her voice is silenced forever, her dove flung into darkness, with only my prayers to lift her to the light. Maybe that’s why I think of Lacy – she was about this age when I first danced with her.

My virginal Lacy – she danced the Snow Pas de Deux clad all in white and glowing in the stage lights. I appeared in white, too, when I danced with her, my partnering an act of worship of Beauty become corporeal. During this dance our legs grew cold from the dry ice machine rolling a heavy fog over the stage – I can imagine how that felt to the snowflake dancers when they finally found order, forming two columns and bowing deep into the mist. Approaching the final crescendo, I carried Lacy overhead in promenade between them, and paused at center stage. I could feel her leg stretch just a bit higher above me in arabesque, even feel her wrists pulse the last waves of music before the curtain. Nothing so lovely could be real, but there she was, living, perched on my hand as if I’d plucked her from the heavens to present her almost within reach of the first row. As the music receded I could hear the audience draw in the vision with their breath.

Movement in the shadows under the tree catches my eye, but it’s only a breeze stirring dead leaves. Where in the debris has that dove fallen? I would brush away the ashes of the world into which this little spirit was born and, like that oak lifting the moon above the shadows, present her to the heavens, asking God to receive back this child. I can’t save them all – I know that. The choir must rest its voice in the stillness before sunrise, but I search for the prayer that could find the lost dove. No words come – what rises from my heart is a vision of Lacy circling cautiously till she takes my hand, and trusts me to lift her into the lights. I have touched Beauty. I am ready for the next call.