“Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one…”
– Wallace Stevens
The American poet Wallace Stevens converted to Catholicism on his deathbed at 75.
The details are hazy because this was such a private event like everything in Stevens’ life, but it’s known for sure that he was periodically seeing a priest for a few months in the hospital before he passed on, and the priest said he converted at the very end. I don’t trust all priests (far from it) but I have a hard time doubting this one about this.
Because Stevens had been moving in this direction for a long time, too. For most of his life, he’d claimed he had no hard and fast faith in a personal God, and he didn’t attend church in a world where almost everyone did, but his attitude toward life had always been religious.
As religious as it gets, in many ways, in the modern world: the religion of poetry. The Religion of Poetry, the individual’s lyric cry that can be maintained against all odds in the world of modern mass society, the land of robotic humanity.
Stevens was the man who fought Hemingway on the nighttime docks of Key West, Florida, even though he was twenty years older, the man who turned down The New Yorker when they asked to publish some of his poems, the man who also turned down Life Magazine when they asked to publish some of his poems, and the man who refused to be a professor of poetry at Harvard when they offered him the job late in his life. Had he done even one of those things, he would have instantly become exponentially more “famous” than he ever was while he lived. And he knew it.
Because fame is a funny thing.
These days we say that the latest “star” of The Bachelorette tv series is famous. But such manufactured “fame” fades so fast we shouldn’t even call it fame, we should think of another word instead.
Or maybe we should just call real fame, the lasting kind that starts slowly and local and builds over decades and centuries, with peaks and valleys, dips and rises, GLORY.
And Wallace Stevens has his deserved share of glory now, in the American poetry pantheon, a true heir of both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
Stevens was a kind of Superman. During the day he was a businessman, an insurance lawyer who walked to and from work by himself and closed his door when he got there, a man who never drove a car and lived alone in his own house even though that house was also filled with a wife and daughter he almost never spoke to (until later when he became close with his daughter). At night he spent his late evenings drifting around his own large, fragrant, tree-filled Connecticut yard smoking cigars and drinking. The neighbors would see him there, the only one in the “respectable” neighborhood doing such. What they didn’t know was that he was also busy penning (in his mind) immortal poetry, this physical giant of a man.
It took me twenty-plus years of studying them (off and on) to truly understand Wallace Stevens’ trio of short poems “The Snow Man,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” and “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad.” These works were first published in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine in the early 1920s. They can be understood, sort of, on a first reading, but to truly plumb the depths of these short, vast works, a reader needs to return hundreds of times across a span of years. Harold Bloom convincingly called these three the heart and soul of Stevens’ work as poet and man. Liberation through words has never been so deep and so pungent since the Scriptures were written.
At the end Stevens finally decided (or became convinced) that life doesn’t end when life ends.
Bob Dylan, a Wallace Stevens-like figure in many ways, wrote (and he wasn’t joking), “Death is not the end.”
Walt Whitman wrote, “Death is different from what anyone supposes. / And luckier.”
(Images provided by The Drifter, and, I would like to think, Boo)
“I am an American, Chicago-born…” – Saul Bellow
Somewhere around the year 2017 A.D., when I was around fifty years of age, something happened to me that was so dramatic and traumatic it caused me to collapse that very day into a severe nervous breakdown right in the middle of the really bad nervous breakdown I was already having.
When I look back on those times now, sometimes I wonder how I even survived at all. And yet I did survive. And, lately, I even appear to be thriving.
The gas station involved in this story is what is known around here as a super-shady place.
Not as in shaded with lots of trees. There are no plants there at all, except the weeds sticking up through the cracks in the pavement.
Shady as in lots of shady people hanging around.
“Shady people” means folks who look like they just crawled out from the bottom of the barrel to look around at the world and get themselves some.
The people involved are of all colors, shapes, sizes, genders, sexual preferences, political persuasions and so forth.
The one thing they all seem to have in common is their shadiness.
“Disreputable” is a more fancy term for the same thing.
Turns out I looked a bit disreputable myself that day, at least to some folks, although I wasn’t quite aware of it in the way I maybe should have been.
This gas station is still there, on Roosevelt Road in the far West Side of Chicago, on the other side of Cicero (Al Capone’s hometown) and Oak Park (hometown of holy Hemingway and the great Frank Lloyd Wright) and right near Berwyn (humble home of yours truly).
The gas station sells gasoline and also other items. Like lots of hard liquor, cheap beer and hobo wine, sickening food loaded with horrible chemicals, countless amounts of smokable things, various sex toys and safe sex items like condoms randomly displayed in wide array all over the place, and, I was soon to learn, other things as well. It also has a “rest room” around the corner I’ve never had the courage to approach.
I wasn’t at this gas station because it was shady.
I was there because shady places generally don’t bother me too much (and even fascinate me when I’m in the right mood), and I was mostly there because I live in the area and I needed gasoline, and I didn’t have much money and this was the cheapest gasoline around.
At the time I was the proud owner of an ancient black mini-van, a vehicle that felt to me like a family member almost, I was that fond of her.
So I was standing there filling her with gas so I could continue drifting around town in that inimitable way I have.
(I haven’t been on an airplane in over twenty years and, for the record, flying on an airplane in any fashion is much worse for global warming than any kind of driving is: much, much worse. The driving I do is required for my artistic profession (and disposition), but I do limit it too, as much as possible, taking days off from driving and walking instead much of the time, etc. As well, I usually drive slowly, which also burns much less fossil fuel. This is to the future.)
I was there putting gas in my beloved black mini-van.
A shady-looking person suddenly walked right up to me – out of nowhere, as the saying goes.
Out of nowhere, suddenly, fast, and rapidly, too.
He was so shady-looking that I have to say he was a very scary-looking guy, who was also much bigger than me (even though I’m almost five feet eleven inches tall and weigh a hundred and ninety pounds).
I’ve been jumped before several different times in my life under various circumstances, and this guy made me nervous, bouncing up into my face like that.
But then I saw he was only asking for a small hand-out.
I had a few coins in my pocket, maybe a dollar’s worth, so I dug around, located these, and handed them to him because I now realized he looked hungry, very hungry.
My desert island book, other than The Bible, is The Imitation of Christ by the shady German monk Thomas a Kempis. And I remembered Jesus’ tale of The Good Samaritan. And that was why I handed him the money; even though I knew it wasn’t doing much, it was something.
At the time, you could buy an entire hamburger at McDonald’s for that amount of change, and this fellow was clearly hungry like he said he was.
If he were to spend the pittance on liquor or drugs instead, I figured he needed those as well. Looking as rough as he did, he probably needed more than one thing to help him make it through another day.
According to my private religion, turning my back on him would’ve been a sin.
He seemed happy to get the money even though it was such a small amount, almost overjoyed, actually.
But as he walked away I seemed to notice a strange glint in his one good eye and a weird twitch at the corner of his bleeding lip. He limped badly, was of indeterminate race, and was dressed in rags.
And I thought the matter had ended there.
The next thing I knew I was slammed up against the back of my van from behind so hard it would turn out that the bridge of my nose was broken, a scar that still shows on my face.
And I was slammed up against the back of my van so hard from behind that everything went black for a second and it took my breath away.
Until I came to again and realized with instantaneous horror, terror, and nightmare fear that my arms were pinned up against the back of the van by two gigantic, horrifically strong men, one on each arm on either side of me and neither of them in a good mood.
And I was literally pinned there, like the Christ, in the crucifixion position, standing with both of my arms pinned down straight out at my sides.
It turns out the two gigantic men were undercover police.
They had been watching me from their undercover vehicle the whole time, wondering what I was doing around here.
When they saw me hand the man the dollar in coins, they thought they saw him hand me something back.
When they rifled through my pockets, they found out that wasn’t the case.
But when they slammed me up against the back of the van like that, they thought I’d been purchasing crack cocaine, meth, opioids, whatever, from the man.
When they realized I hadn’t been doing so at all, and that I’d only been handing the fellow a dime, as the saying goes, they began to apologize so profusely that I almost instantly forgave them, even though I was still extremely angry at them and sometimes still get angry at them to this day, when I drive by that gas station.
They told me there were many, many gang bangers frequenting that area who carried assault rifles and machine guns in the trunks of their cars, pistols on their own persons, switchblade knives in their pockets, clubs beneath the seats of their low-riding vehicles, and so forth.
That was why they felt compelled to attack me from behind and slam me up against the van in the crucifixion position.
They were both well over six feet tall and huge as far as muscles go, each of them outdoing me by several sizes in that regard (gym rats, they call them). One of them was probably six feet four.
But they were sorry about what happened when they found out I was just out going about my regular, legal business.
And as they let me go on my merry way, they apologized again, slapped me on the back, and told me to have a nice day.
END NOTE: The Drifter continues to drift through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago: fearlessly.
He does it because he’s an American and this is America.
“Galileo looked into the night / and learned the truth was an old lie /
And he sighed, knowing his fate: / If I write that again Someone will
tell the Vatican” – Irene Leila Allison
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein
(Wonderful images provided by The Drifter)
INTRO NOTE, or Here We Go Again:
From The Drifter: The idea for this essay came as a flash of inspiration like a lightbulb going on in a tired brain, while driving around (drifting) on the West Side of Chicago during a dreary, weary day after reading Leila Allison’s enlivening poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope,” available on Saragun Springs; first date of publication Tuesday, August 26, 2025.
I.e. it was a weary, dreary day until reading the poem then being inspired by the poem to write this essay about it.
The Drifter suddenly pulled over near a vacant lot on the West Side, nodded to the old fellows smoking their bud around a trash can watering hole under a tree, then committed most of this essay to paper via a short-hand note-taking method in a language invented by none other than himself, readable by only himself, with colored pens on repurposed paper like old bills and advertising circulars.
It was like Leonardo da Vinci furiously working at his desks (he had more than one) in the middle of the night, long hair crazy-wild and fingernails long, dirty, and broken like Bob Dylan’s from digging up corpses for dissection and anatomical drawings the night before.
All that remained to do was draw it all together and translate it, somehow, into fairly readable standard English prose.
The results can be perused below; now or later or much later.
One of the first questions to ask when reading a poem (or anything) is, “What did the writer need to know in order to write this?”
Harold Bloom said that the main purpose for reading fine (and great, which is a cut above fine) imaginative literature was and is in order to augment one’s own consciousness.
Another word for “consciousness” here is PERSONALITY.
Another word/s for “augment” here is make it better.
And the answer to the question, “What did the writer need to know in order to write this?” these days is, all too often, “Nothing;” or, “Not much.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, author of “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” and whom Bloom called the Mind of America because of Waldo’s influence, both positive and negative, on all other subsequent American thinkers, whether they know it or not, said that a poem was “a meter-making argument.”
What Emerson meant by this (or one thing anyway) is that the “argument,” or reason-for-being, of a poem is what elevates its language, what calls for the poem to be written as a poem instead of in prose.
The “argument” here is NOT polemical, political, a run-of-the-mill opinion, or a straight-up “idea” like how to conquer the moon or invent a better way of doing something practical.
Poetry’s impracticability is another one of its essential features. If it was only about doing things it wouldn’t be poetry, or not poetry (which is thinking) at its highest levels.
Philip Larkin called the modern short poem, which is the most common form of poem now, “a single emotional spear-point.”
An emotional spear-point has to have a deep reason for being, or it can’t be itself.
PART TWO
Here are just a few of the things Irene Leila Allison needed to know in order to write her poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope,” according to this writer (The Drifter, aka Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD).
One: What it was like to be none other than Galileo.
Two: What the power dynamics were like in society during Galileo’s time. (He was born the same year as Shakespeare and lived 26 years longer than The Bard, to the age of 77, which would be more akin to 97 today.)
Three: What it is like to challenge authority with the pen (or the keyboard) in any age. (For this to happen, you need to challenge it with your mind and your life first.)
Four: What the power dynamics are like in society in any age.
Five: The subversive nature of true creativity (or creativity at its deepest levels) in any age, including Galileo’s, and our own.
Six: The price to be paid for being subversive in any age, whether it be in writing or in any mode, like any form of resistance, which is available and morally required (in different forms, depending on the person) of everybody. (Jesus himself was nothing if not a rebellious spirit, at least when it came to the goings-on in this earthly realm.)
This list could go on but the Drifter will stop with a round half dozen in order to give the reader time to think about this.
…
…
The seventh thing (7 = heaven) Leila Allison needed to know in order to write this poem was how to fit all of the above into the space of just over one hundred words.
Return to the half dozen items listed above, and then ponder knowing all that, and then ponder the magic of powerfully, clearly, and beautifully expressing all of the above in a third of the words Lincoln used for his Gettysburg Address.
Not a single syllable is wasted in Ms. Allison’s poem, much less a single word.
Words are reinvented in this poem, used so they can be understood by the reader but also torn out of their “normal” context and made new again.
Here is just one example.
Describing Galileo making his amazing discoveries that changed the entire human world while under house arrest, Ms. Allison says, “the spheres (and spears) remained.”
In five words, she’s boiled down one of the most profound humans and human projects of all time into a space that is tiny in terms of its actual size, and as gigantic as the entire universe itself in terms of its implications.
This is what true poetry is, saying so much in five words or less that entire pages, or even books, of prose could be written upon it and still not capture its essence.
And doing it all while being beautiful.
At this point, I urge any and all readers of this to seek out Ms. Allison’s poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope.”
The title sounds like it could have been come up with by James Thurber, Lewis Carroll, or Dr. Seuss (he was one of the most important American poets of all time, which is neither a joke nor an exaggeration), a sign of the light hands of the poet.
Because children, too, should be told about people like Galileo; and the intelligent child in all of us is what keeps us alive.
And after truly studying, and absorbing, this poem, you will know more about Galileo, the world, and the universe than, literally, entire book-length works about him or his times can tell you.
I only show myself when the holy spirit of creation is upon me.
Or in its aftermath.
Or in the lead-up to it.
Or in some other form of extremity that embodies some sort of emotion that can be used for good in this world, if one looks hard enough, one way or another.
I have pictures of myself where I look one hundred and ten years old.
And not a healthy one hundred and ten, like Moses was when he died.
They say he was as strong and mentally acute at that age as he had been at forty. And that his sight and hearing were as strong as they’d ever been, too. But it didn’t stop him from dying.
Yes, I have pictures where I look bad old.
Beaten and broken, weary and bloated, or shriveled, wasted and worn, worn out.
I only keep these pictures for myself (for now), in the same way that Hamlet held up poor Yorick’s skull to his own (for now) living face and spoke to it.
A memory of the future, which is the definition of memento mori.
I started experimenting with drawn and photographic self-portraits in the 1980s, when I was in my teens.
I was partially glad when the Selfie came around, because it partially justified me, at least in the legend of my own mind.
Before that, even people who were otherwise on my side would sometimes make fun of me for taking “selfies” – before “selfie” was even a term, or a word.
But ever since there were cameras, there have been poets who have done this.
Walt Whitman, Philip Larkin, and Robert Johnson are only three examples.
I was raised in the Lutheran Church in Michigan; their religious art influenced me in enduring and subconscious ways that I can’t even diagnose in myself because they go so deep.
Other influences on my self-portraits include classic album covers, certain movie posters, author photos, and of course the classic self-portraits by the great classical artists.
I had a stroke at the age of 57 in the Year of Our Lord 2024.
After that point I started making self-portraits just to prove to myself that I was still alive – as alive as ever, or even more so.
I had one grandmother who remained youthful up until the very end, at 88. I had another grand who remained youthful until the age of 92 (and then her slow decline until “the end” at the age of 94).
I only make the self-portraits on my regular phone. No tricks. I’m no technologist. As in all art, spontaneity and selectivity are the keys. These, and dogged determination.
I got this phone three years ago. I’m 58 now. So I call all of these self-photos the 55 and Up Series. Almost everything else disappeared with the other phone.
I also make the pictures to taunt all my enemies, and all the people who left me in the dust when I didn’t want them to.
There were others who left me in the dust and I was okay with it: or even goaded them into doing so.
Signing off for now until next Sunday: “The Drifter.”
“Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.”
– Oscar Wilde
LITERATURE, in its pure form, says The Drifter, is no longer taught in American universities.
What we have instead is economic grievance (usually from people who are already wealthy) and identity politics (also from wealthy people) masquerading as literary theory.
The pure spirit of Literature has been crucified, in the American academy. It was dead and bleeding on the cross. Now Joseph of Arimathea has disappeared with the body.
Charles Baudelaire, the first poet of the modern city, anywhere (his city was Paris) used to pray to the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, just like a Catholic prays to a saint. (Baudelaire was also Catholic, perhaps the most unique Catholic who ever lived, or one of them.)
If you told someone in American academia these days that you pray to a Literary Saint, the cynical crowd would suddenly rear its ugly head and laugh you right off campus immediately, from coast to coast and everywhere in between.
For me, the two greatest literary critics, ever (in the English language), are Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Dr. Harold Bloom. Johnson died in 1784, at the age of 75. Bloom died in 2019, aged 89.
Both of these titanic and gargantuan figures (and they were both gargantuan and titanic physically, as well as spiritually and mentally) have been wildly and consistently misrepresented in the popular press. Ideas they never had are attributed to them; stances they never took are assumed to have been their own; and their personalities, the most important thing about each of them, have been distorted beyond all recognition.
But the works and the good writings about each of these figures still remain, as well as the visual representations (from which you can learn entire worlds) and large collections of quotations about them by people who knew them well or just came into contact with them for brief periods.
One of my favorite works by Samuel Johnson is his first full-length book, the short biography The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, sometimes known as Life of Savage, and whose full title is An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (whether or whether not Savage was really the son of the Earl was one of the things about him that was always in dispute and a large contributor to his renown, or infamy, because he claimed he was, and the Earl claimed he wasn’t – loudly).
Savage was a famous minor poet, sometime actor, fulltime alcoholic conman, and all-around good guy who Johnson was friends with for a time. They roamed the London streets together at all hours, sometimes sleeping rough when they had to, starving and drinking and trying to make a living as Grub Street hacks (sometimes partially succeeding at the latter).
After Savage died, impoverished, alone, well-known, and alcoholic, Johnson wrote his life, thereby penning one of the first deeply psychological biographies ever committed to paper. One reason I love this book so much is because Savage reminds me so totally of a person I once knew, a very close friend, with whom I got into so much trouble at that time it has to be saved for another column.
Johnson also wrote a kind of nonfiction novella called Rasselas. This book was one of the very first Western explorations of Buddhism ever written, a fictionalized, Westernized account of the Buddha’s story almost as if filtered through the story of Muhammad.
Johnson himself, as a man, was such a strong and powerful abolitionist, before abolitionists even existed, that slaves in the New World ended up naming their children Rasselas after his great character. Johnson later adopted a black child as a single father after the death of his wife, raised the boy into manhood, and left him his money and name when he passed on. Such things were so unheard of in the 18th century that hardly anyone understood Johnson’s point of view at all. They didn’t know that he had moved beyond racism in an era when no one even knew what “racism” was.
Johnson was a multiculturalist (in the sense that he believed, like Jesus, that everyone should be included) not decades, but centuries, before such a thing existed with a name, and he didn’t just preach it, he lived it. And yet, the English Departments of the American academy now mostly accuse him of being an ultra-conservative “dead white male” who deserves to be ignored, forgotten, and even “canceled.”
Such thinking and behavior only give fuel to the rising and rabid fascist tide among us, a situation that is like a flood and a fire at once within human culture itself and thereby demands the mixed metaphors.
Harold Bloom has also, seemingly endlessly whenever he is discussed, been accused of being a so-called political conservative, even though he never was anything of the kind at all, and even was the exact opposite, more of an imaginative and creative, one-of-a-kind anarchist in his politics than anything else. (“Anarchist” in the sense of placing the highest possible value on human freedom, and human expression, itself; it has nothing to do with the practice of political violence, or rather believes the practice of violence should always be avoided because when you practice violence you’re not free.)
Born in 1930 in NYC, Bloom did his best work after the age of 50 (once Ronnie Rayguns took over), and perhaps his very best work after the age of 70, even though everything he did before 50 was the basis for all that came after, and led to it.
Five of my favorite books by Bloom are: How to Read and Why (2000); Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003); Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003); The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011); and Falstaff: Give Me Life (2017).
This last book, a true and deep classic in Shakespeare studies, a brief book that takes the reader on a lasting tour of all things Jack Falstaff, was written and published just a few years before Bloom passed on at the age of 89. In its late 80s, one of the most powerful human minds of our times appeared to be getting stronger than it ever had been, not less so.
Harold Bloom was like Oscar Wilde in the way he took nonfiction writing about literature and raised it to the levels of the very highest and best imaginative literature itself. Bloom said that William Shakespeare was his ultimate model, as opposed to any critical writers he’d ever known or studied (except for Samuel Johnson). As a writer, Harold Bloom was much closer to someone like Bob Dylan or Ernest Hemingway than he was to what we usually think of when we think of a “literary critic.” And he was a real and true harbinger for many directions imaginative writing will take in the future and is now taking even as we speak, inevitably (says The Drifter).
Crucial END NOTE from The Drifter, MFA, PhD: The Drifter’s name, “The Drifter,” is not influenced by, but is rather stolen directly from (in a sense), two names that Dr. Samuel Johnson called himself, when he himself wrote columns: The Rambler; and later: The Idler.
A Few More Crucial Note/s: Samuel Johnson’s prose style can strike the modern reader as outdated at first, but a good reader can catch up with him within the hour, and the struggle to do so can only be beneficial, since this is Johnson, and since nothing too easy is any good. Johnson is far more modern than almost any other writer of English prose of his era, his pal Boswell rivaling him in this. And often enough, his prose sounds exactly as if it were written yesterday, or tomorrow (these are his best bits, and they’re scattered everywhere throughout his vast, massive work).
Harold Bloom wrote a lot (a vast understatement), and he has entire, five-hundred-page books (among his early work) that are composed almost entirely in a stilted, bloated, airy, windy, jargon-filled prose that is still, despite itself, brilliant and unique almost all the time.
After the age of 50, at his own admission, he started to write for a more general audience outside of academia, including the reader he called the “incredibly intelligent child of any age.”
He did this for two reasons. One: he wanted to reach more people while he was still alive. Two: his skills had improved.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PART: Reading good works or otherwise genuinely engaging with good art of any kind keeps your mind, heart, and soul in a good place, so that, the more you do it, the better your own inherent goodness becomes. The opposite of this, just as powerful, is rotting your brain (and heart and soul) with meaningless trash.
Addendum: Roger Ebert is the Harold Bloom of the movies; Lester Bangs is a Bloom of rock and roll.
Stay tuned this week as The Drifter attempts to practice literary criticism upon modern popular music, but in a late-Bloom kind of style, not an early-Bloom style, i.e. jargon free and written for the incredibly intelligent child within all of us no matter what age.
An elderly Mexican man, about five feet tall, with a gigantic, huge, massive, perfectly white, and amazingly long, drooping mustache, and also wearing a gargantuan-sized sombrero and sometimes a poncho or sometimes just a bright red shirt with collar, depending on the weather, brown pants, and sandals in summer, cowboy boots in winter time…who roams and stalks through and across the streets, the sidewalks, the alleyways, the yards, the side lots, the vacant lots, the parks and parking lots of Berwyn, Illinois, USA, in all weathers…in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, seemingly 24/7, 365, in rain, in too-hot heat, in blizzards, in nice weather, he walks, steadily and slowly, and never stops walking, not like he’s looking for anything, but more like he’s registering everything…
And sometimes when you pass him on the sidewalk he says, in clear and strong English, “Hello! Nice dog…” but more often he just keeps going, because there is something going on, in his mind, in his eyes, and in his soul…something he doesn’t need to share with anyone, but is also sharing, in the way he walks through his, and our, windy world…
And a woman, a beautiful, gorgeous, ravishing, rough-edged black woman, who always used to approach my car while I sat in the Burger King drive-through waiting for my food (I was teaching fifth grade at Saint Leonard Parish School at the time even though I’m not Catholic which is a long story unto itself and it seemed like I was always starving and had about twenty-three minutes to procure and consume my lunch which was often the reason for the convenient Burger King)…she was always alone, always working that parking lot, and would pop out of the bushes and say “Hey baby! How you doin’!?” as she walked up to the car…and we never shared anything but eye contact, fist bumps and dreams so that she knew by now (and knew it anyway) that I wasn’t about to become a customer but she always wanted to just say “HI!” anyway…and sometimes I wonder where she is now, and hope she’s okay.
And a white guy named Charlie. I was walking my Siberian Husky, Boo, along a near-Chicago suburban river trail when I looked up and saw a massive white bird skimming right by me over the river, and wondering what kind it was…Charlie, a medium-old (or an old middle-aged) man with a gigantic gray beard like Walt Whitman’s (or Herman Melville’s) zipped by me on some sort of automatic bike contraption and called out joyously, and exactly as if he’d read my mind, “WHITE HERON!” as he rode on past myself and Boo…Later we met up farther down the trail, and he struck up a conversation. “I’m supposed to be a biologist but that’s of micro-organisms…maybe I’ll just throw in the towel and look for white herons around here instead.”
Later as I was heading back to the car on foot with Boo, a gigantic, huge, massive, gargantuan-sized monarch butterfly flew straight toward me on the trail; it kept on coming, didn’t stop, flew straight at my eyes it seemed, then flew straight into my forehead before I could do anything, and bumped me directly in the middle of the forehead, paused there as if landing for a second, bounced off, glanced off, brushed my hair delicately, and, flapping his wings, flew off and away, over and above me, over and above my head, and away down the trail (where he veered off and disappeared into the summertime greenery)…
All these people and creatures are my neighbors…
Walt Whitman wrote, “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, / But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, / And filter and fiber your blood.” (And no one else wrote like that in the 1850s.)
Such things as all these neighbors don’t change; have never changed; and will never change (or not for a very, very, very, very, very long time).
It’s we, us modern people, who have changed.
And why are we always in such a hurry to get nowhere important again?
And what are we missing when we never really stop to notice where we truly are (no matter where it is)?
Concluding Post-note by “The Drifter”: The Drifter, sometimes known as Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar, could say a lot more, and describe many more characters he’s met on his daily travels on foot and by car through his own neighborhoods, with or without (mostly with) his canine companion/s.
But he’s determined to let it rest for now. He can’t think of anything better to end on on this second Sunday of August, 2025, than the two questions he wishes to leave hanging in the air like the butterfly who bumped him in the forehead on purpose (he’s certain it was on purpose, and has something mysterious to do with natural energy, no matter what else anyone else thinks or doesn’t think about it) before it flew off on its merry way again.
Astonishing Natural Fact: The monarch butterfly lives a life that is, on average, four weeks long.
When we consider this astonishing natural fact in depth, it can serve as a symbol for the precious, precarious nature of EVERYTHING in this always-passing, ever-changing, never-to-return (that we know of so far) world.
Do it now while you’ve still got the time (whatever “it” is that’s eating at you), as long as you’re good, and as long as it’s difficult – and real.
“There’s a slow, slow train coming – up around the bend.” – Bob Dylan
“This whole world’s gotta buy you a drink, man / Gotta take you to the edge and watch you throw it up / Every morning, I could give a damn what you did last night / Just tell me how far to kick this can…”
– Conor Oberst, “No One Changes”
“Christ’s religion is essentially poetry – poetry glorified.”
– Elizabth Barret Browning
The Drifter (myself) took his last drink of alcohol almost exactly twenty years ago from today: on August 5, 2005. (I write this on August 1, 2025.)
The story of my drinking, its history, its reasons and motivations, its progression, its hilarity, its adventures (many, many, and many more, including good company, bad company, and dangerous company), and the eventual fall into total addiction in my mid-30s (drinking hard liquor sometimes combined with red or white wine all day every day and never drawing a sober breath, plus other related problems like catastrophic depressions, weight loss, liver problems, heart problems, heart palpitations, malnutrition, emergency-room accidents, vicious, pain-filled, suicidal hang-overs, crushingly embarrassing behavior and psychological humiliations, near-death occurrences and much more, none of which were improved by also smoking two to four packs of Marlboro Lights per day along with the liquor) will be gone into in more detail in the near future in another column.
Because alcohol is a subject I still love to talk about, even though I haven’t had a single sip in almost twenty years.
For today, in honor of my drinking and in honor of all drinkers, addicted and not, and in honor of the one thing that has kept me sober perhaps more than any other, I will briefly explain what I think the Lord’s Prayer means.
This column is not for so-called “Christians Only.” Nor is it only for alcoholics who are looking to quit drinking. Nor is it only for ex-alcoholics who have already done so.
It is for writers and writer-friendly peoples everywhere, especially since writers are known to be, as a group, prone to drinking alcohol more so than the general population (which is a lot, especially in America, land of the binge drinker); and also for anyone interested in surviving this life (as long as possible) and living a good one while you’re here.
Because the Lord’s Prayer can even be said and studied by atheists vastly to their own enhancement at almost every single human level we can possibly imagine.
I do not presume (very far from it) to have the final answer/s about these words, unlike many of the pastors, priests, and ministers (so-called) afoot in America these days (not all, but many).
These are simply my (brief) reflections, today, on a prayer (a poem) that has saved my life.
I never could’ve gotten myself sober without this.
This column is also meant to defamiliarize the Lord’s Prayer in a personal way, so it can be renewed in at least a few of us.
(Disclaimer: This piece may sound a tiny little bit like a sermon in certain places (in the manner of John Donne) but it’s Sunday, after all…)
*
Our Father who art in Heaven: hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation.
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory: forever and ever.
Amen.
*
In the first part of this poem, which is the first sentence, Yeshua (hereafter called Jesus in this work) was asking humans to do something.
He was asking them to acknowledge the eternal existence of something greater than themselves.
In so doing, not only the Creator of the Universe is worshiped. Humanity itself, including the speaker of the prayer, is worshiped.
He is our Father, after all. And He is in Heaven. By hallowing (making holy) his name, we make holy everything there is, including all the pain, all the death, all the suffering, all the murder, all the disease, all the killing, all the death, death, death, death.
We let it go (like saying “So it goes”), and give it back to Him. Jesus believed he was waiting to receive it. Walt Whitman later said, “All goes onward and outward; nothing collapses; and to die is different from what anyone supposes; and luckier.”
In the second sentence of this poem, which is only three words long, Jesus asks for The Kingdom to come.
It’s key to remember, or point out, that elsewhere he said, many times, “The Kingdom is inside you,” when talking to a few of his small bands of disciples and followers on the lakeshore or in the hills. (The Book of Acts says there were “about a hundred and twenty” believers after his death; the first person to see him after he died was Mary Magdalene.)
When he says “Thy Kingdom come,” he means after death, yes. But he also means, and maybe more importantly, right now, and right here, while we are alive on the earth. And it isn’t outside you, it’s never outside you, it’s right in your guts, in your brain, and in your heart, like it was in Mary Magdalene’s. Or it should be.
In the third sentence of this poem, Jesus acknowledges that we are not in charge of ourselves and we do not necessarily create our own circumstances.
This sentence is about what we call in the modern world “acceptance.” Buddha and Muhammad had similar messages. We may be born blind or we may be born with a disease that will kill us before we reach the age of twenty. Such people are more beautiful, not less beautiful, than the rest of us.
In sentence four, it’s crucial to meditate on (think about) what he means when he says “this day” and “our daily bread.”
We are not supposed to hoard possessions or money like Scrooge, and we are not meant to live on the earth forever. If we have enough today it is enough; tomorrow, as he says elsewhere, has enough worries of its own. Worrying about the future is a sin, because it diminishes the present.
“Our daily bread” does not just mean food, although it also does mean food.
It also means whatever we need for today, like strength, endurance, imagination, courage, stick-to-itiveness, a purpose, a reason for being.
It’s also meaningful to isolate the phrase “give us this day.”
For sentence five, we need to define “trespass.” Trespass means SIN.
Too many modern people these days get salty when you tell them they are sinners. And too many people of the cloth (pastors, ministers, priests, etc.) have NO IDEA what sin really means, these days.
It is not the old-fashioned thing. This world is rampant with sin. The people in the White House in the USA are great examples of this.
Greed and not caring are sins. Getting drunk or “cheating” on your spouse are personal choices (maybe bad choices, but not necessarily “sins”). (And maybe the spouse being cheated on is too greedy of your own personal time; and maybe you getting drunk is sacrificing yourself for your own artistic inspiration; everything depends upon the context.)
Jesus also emphasizes what a profound, life-changing, freeing personal event it is when you forgive someone. Forgiveness is for the other person, but it is for you first. Also, we can’t expect mercy and compassion when we don’t give unto others.
Send out mercy and compassion and you’ll soon find it will come right back at you (“instant karma”).
An example would be giving an authentic smile (not a sales person’s smile) to someone on the street, instead of ignoring them. And they smile back, in a surprised and genuine way.
For sentence six one needs to define “temptation” and “lead us.”
In this sentence of the poem, is Jesus intimating that it is God Himself who leads us into temptation? If so, doesn’t that make God a bad person? And why would he want to tempt us into something that isn’t good? Did Eve eat the apple first because she was smarter and more adventurous than Adam, or because she was more underhanded? Does temptation mean a temptation to despair, which is nihilism and a lack of faith in life, which lead to greed and not caring because you have nothing better to do or focus on?
At this point in the prayer-poem, it’s time to really realize that part of one’s job in all this is thinking, and thinking deeply, and long and hard, over years, about what it all means.
And it is NOT something one shares with others, at least not in any overt kind of way (until, maybe, much later) but the thinking itself changes who you are, and it changes you for the better.
No exceptions.
Number Seven is the penultimate sentence of this poem-prayer, and it is not Number Seven for no reason, either. (Seven = Heaven.)
The last sentence was tacked on by Martin Luther (a personal hero of mine, and a person well worth reading about, whom Harold Bloom once called the most “important” person in the West since Jesus himself, although Martin also wasn’t perfect, like all of us) much later, and it deserves to stay where it is.
It’s very, very, very similar to what the Buddhists mean when they talk about attachment – being too attached to the things that are only of this world, which equals suffering for yourself, which equals suffering for others, which equals suffering in the world.
We should attach ourselves, instead, to the things that can’t be stolen by the thieves, or corroded by the rust. Instead of being outraged by what the thieves stole from you (whether it be the “white collar” thieves or the “regular” ones), attach your mind, heart, and soul to what they can’t get at. (Any other reaction is, again: sin.)
It’s up to us to decide what those things are for us – like Jacob wrestling with the angel.
“AMEN” means Let it be.
DRIFTING END NOTE: An example of a drinking adventure I had was the time I traveled to the White Horse Tavern in New York City which is the last bar Dylan Thomas ever drank in and where he consumed the oceanic quantities of liquor that helped kill him.
I went to the White Horse Tavern specifically to get spectacularly drunk in the manner of Dylan Thomas, in order to celebrate the roistering poet spirit of Thomas in a way that was living the life, not just writing about it. (And back then I was much better at living the life than I was at writing about it, although I was working and practicing at both, every single day of my life.)
And I managed to accomplish my goal. I did in fact get spectacularly drunk in honor of Dylan Thomas. My guess is that I drank at least six pints of dark beer backed up with at least one or two shots of whiskey per beer – plus nonstop Marlboro smoking – all on an empty stomach. (I never ate when I drank since drink was my food; not even a single mouthful.)
I had to be led out of the bar and back to my friend’s apartment by my drinking companions who were also spectacularly drunk (but a little less so than I, at least on that particular occasion).
I was a bit cautious that night because I didn’t wish to jinx myself and end up dead like Dylan Thomas.
(I will eventually of course, just like we all will: but not yet for any of us).
Saragun Springs 