Essay

I Saw the Light by Dale Barrigar

“…like a stranger in the night…” – Hank Williams

This week Saragun Springs celebrates the spirit of Dolly Parton through a celebration of the music of Hank Williams, because DP loved Hank Williams and because Hank Williams is the William Shakespeare of American country music.

Bill Maher said a lot of obnoxious, hypocritical things about Dolly when she died. His comments show that he, like everyone who laughed along with him that night, judges life through the material lens of the Golden Calf ($) only.

Dolly, I do believe, was different.

As a cultural figure in American life, she was the counterpart, in many ways, of Willie Nelson. Both artists cross boundaries almost like no one else.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are literary geniuses, but it cannot be said that either one of them reach “all” audiences in the way Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson do.

In their ability to be popular with (almost) everyone, Dolly and Willie are more akin to Elvis and Johnny Cash than to Dylan and Cohen.

There are many people who do not like Bob Dylan for a huge variety of reasons and, before he died, there were many, many more people who did not like Leonard Cohen either.

They thought Cohen was BORING and gloomy and confusing, IF they thought of him at all, which they rarely did.

(Cohen’s status changed radically with his comeback tour in 2008 – 2013 and then after his death.)

One of Dolly Parton’s favorite songs by Hank Williams is called “I Saw the Light.”

She performed it many, many times.

As with Robert Johnson, Hank’s music sounds old-fashioned at first; IF one is not listening carefully.

“I Saw the Light” is not just a Gospel song, and you do not need to “believe” in Jesus, or even God, to get a lot out of this song.

This song is about a privileged moment.

A privileged moment here does not mean what “privileged” means in the currently politically correct sense.

It means an epiphany, which is an intense, life-giving realization that doesn’t last forever but has strong echoes and reverberations.

Being “in the zone” is another way to put this in modern terms.

Wordsworth called all this and all these: “spots of time.”

They do not last.

But they leave a lingering resonance.

True and real artists cannot, and would not, ever, create anything at all, without privileged moments, epiphanies, being in the zone, having spots of time.

You can choose to take these spots of time to the next level and believe in life after death, like Dolly and Hank did and Bob Dylan does.

Where the white people live/d Jesus is depicted as a white guy and where the black people live/d Jesus is depicted as a black guy and in Japan he’s depicted as a Japanese guy and in India he’s depicted as an Indian guy and in Mexico a Mexican and for Native Americans he’s a Native American, and so forth. He’s the greatest shapeshifter who ever lived or ever will live. That’s just one reason why there are four canonical accounts (four perspectives) on his life none of which agree on all the details.

Michael Jackson, Elvis, The Beatles, Donald Trump, are NOT the most famous humans on the Planet and have never been the most famous persons on the Planet and never will be the most famous persons on the Planet, and not even close, although there are many (who are in the wrong on this) who have said they are the most famous persons on the Planet.

Jesus is the most famous person on the Planet. And he has been so for at least 1,500 years. His spirit was alive among humans long before he actually put feet on Planet Earth.

Sometimes I wonder why that is.

There’s something deeper going on here.

And just because we cannot see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Dale Barrigar

And how about some bonus Hank from some of country’s Big Names

Linda King Review by Adam Kluger

When my best friend, a book publisher, would host an annual guy’s weekend for high school and college friends at his house in Millbrook, in upstate New York. I would always take the couch in the library. On the book shelves were great authors like Hemingway and Salinger, and also various books by Charles Bukowski.

“Check out this Bukowski. I think you’ll like it.”

The book was Post Office. The opening line was something like, “It started as an accident.” Bukowski’s first novel was a humorous account of the down and out author’s life working in a post office and I was immediately hooked.

I would go on to read everything I could find by Bukowski. Women, Love is a Dog from Hell, Ham on Rye, Factotum and on and on —all of Bukowski’s poetry, prose, short stories and correspondence. Whenever a new title would show up at the Astor Place Bookstore,

I would snatch it up along with books from his literary hero John Fante, like Ask the Dust.

Over the years I have become an avid Bukowski aficionado/enthusiast enjoying Mickey Rourke’s portrayal of the Los Angles underground legend in the movie “Barfly” and Bukowski’s own performance in Barbet Schroeder’s wonderful 1985 documentary film, “The Bukowski Tapes.” When Bukowski passed on in 1994 it was a major blow. We had lost arguably one of the greatest writers of our time.

So, it was with great curiosity that I discovered on Facebook recently that one of Bukowski’s longtime girlfriends, sculptress and poet Linda King, was going to be appearing in a literary-arts event in 2026. We exchanged emails and Linda mailed me a copy of her old book, “Loving and Hating Charles Bukowski: A True Story,” along with a new photo-book of her wonderful sculptures.

The great thing about Bukowski was his ability to make readers feel something very real with his humor, flow and honesty. Always entertaining, thought-provoking and resonant. Linda King’s no holds-barred recollections of her volatile 5 year on-and-off love affair with the famous street poet, 20 years her senior, is honest, revelatory, heart-warming and heartbreaking at the same time with intimate love letters and poems between the two interspersed throughout the book as it reflects the nature of the underground writers scene in Los Angeles in the ‘70’s and the depth of a couple’s enduring love for each other through constant break-ups, infidelities, drunken fights, jealousies and the desire the be together again and again. This book is one of the most entertaining and insightful looks into the real Charles Bukowski, written by a courageous young woman who was both his muse and object of affection. I loved reading this harrowing account of a relationship that traverses from heaven to hell and back chapter after chapter. It is full of beautiful poetry and real insight into Charles Bukowski by the woman who may have known him best of all. If you are a Bukowski fan, or have ever had your heart broken but someone you love with every fiber of your being —you will love this book. I know I did

Post-script:

Linda King was kind enough to text me this note after I sent her this short review:

[Wow! That is a great review of my book. It is being translated right now into French language. They might like to use it on the back of the book or part of it. I just got off a long trip…tomorrow.

But thank you for you words.-Linda King ]

Adam Kluger

Indeed, There is Balm in Gilead by Michael Bloor

Though there was a rumour that his grandad had been Benito Mussolini’s food taster, Andrew was a proud Scot. In his retirement, he took up volunteering part-time, at Innerpeffray, Scotland’s first free-lending library (established in 1680). Andrew loved to brag gently to foreign visitors that Scotland was the first literate nation in Europe, thanks to the Presbyterian Church which believed that it was the duty of every Christian to study the bible. And, to do that, the peasantry had to learn to read. Not that there were lots of foreign visitors, because Innerpeffray Library was off the beaten track, at the end of a no-through road in rural Perthshire. Summer Thursday afternoons were the exception – that was when a coachload of Dutch tourists would appear every week.

When he’d first started volunteering at Innerpeffray, Andrew had found this regular Thursday influx of (largely elderly) Dutch folk a bit odd. He’d once asked Eunice Drummond about it; she’d been volunteering there for many years. Eunice shrugged and said they’d been coming to Innerpeffray all the time that she’d been at the library. She thought that each group would’ve been staying the night at the Crieff Hydro Hotel, some miles across country. Or maybe they were on their way to the hotel…? She wasn’t sure.

How the Dutch had got to Innerpeffray wasn’t really a matter of acute interest to Andrew. He rather enjoyed an audience, and this Dutch audience understood English very well, even when spoken with his Glasgow accent. He would ask them to picture the strangeness of the idea, in the seventeenth century, that one should allow casual callers of all classes to turn up at the library and then go away again with a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets under their arm, books back then being a luxury item. And, having pricked his audience’s interest, he’d show them one of the old Borrowers’ Registers, which recorded not just the book borrowed, and the name and address of the borrower, but also the borrower’s occupation. They could see farm servants, weavers, quarriers, road menders and the like, borrowing works of philosophy, history, literature and theology, to carry miles back to their wee cottages to read by the dim light of their cruisie lamps.

On this occasion, most of his audience had eventually drifted away from The Borrowers’ Register and gone over to where Andrew’s colleague, Ronnie, was displaying the library’s set of Mercator’s Atlases. Ronnie had an atlas open at a page mapping seventeenth-century Holland, and was inviting visitors to locate their homes. Andrew’s attention was drawn instead to a Dutch couple peering into the glass case containing the library’s copy of Hollingshed’s Chronicles, a history of Britain first published in the sixteenth century. The book was open at the page illustrating Macbeth’s meeting with The Three Witches, a scene which Shakespeare was later to borrow and make famous.

The couple were elderly but vivacious, even vivid. Andrew was on his way over to them, to offer them a bit of background on Hollingshed and his Chronicles, when the woman let out a chiming peal of laughter. It stopped Andrew dead in his tracks.

Although the woman had her back to him, he recognised her by the laugh instantly, from fifty-odd years ago. It was Mila’s laugh. His mind went back to a tousled tent on The Lido in Venice, and the ever-green mystic meeting there of lips and legs. For a moment or two, he watched the two of them by the display cabinet, leaning into each other and whispering, in the time-honoured tradition of library conversations. It was plain to see that they were a happy couple, enjoying each other and their holiday in Scotland. Whereas his time with Mila in Venice, all those years ago, had not ended well.

Deliberately, Andrew turned instead to a small Dutch group who were puzzling over the library’s copy of the 1602 ‘Treacle Bible,’ so called because Jeremiah 8.22 reads ‘Is there not treacle in Gilead?’

Later, after the coach party had departed, to the Crieff Hydro or elsewhere, and the library closed down, Andrew climbed into the car for the short drive home. He was smiling. He and Dorothy were planning a sunny evening meal in the back garden, just the two of them. He was looking forward to it.

Michael Bloor

*This story was developed from an essay on Innerpeffray Library, and the books therein (‘A Favourite Place: Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest free lending library, established 1680’), published in Literally Stories October 28th, 2023.

The Wicked Watches by Dale the Drifter

“This malignity is renewed every day against man, as it is written, Psalm 37, 32: ‘The wicked watches the righteous, and seeks to slay him.’”

– Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was one of the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians who ever lived (he invented the calculator). Suddenly, toward the end of his life (and he probably did this because of intuitions that the end was coming, although it did not come immediately), he largely dropped science and mathematics and turned to religion instead.

He wrote a mostly secret book that was not fully published during his lifetime, and also was not published until almost a decade after his death.

The title now is Pensees. It’s a French word which means “Thoughts” in English.

All of the thoughts are about religion, per se.

But the thoughts are not only for so-called “religious” people.

These days, in places like the USA, Canada, and the UK, in so-called educated circles (which are very large, made up of millions of people), being “religious” is considered a badge of shame.

I myself used to share this attitude, for years.

But I grew out of it.

I realized long ago that I “grew out of it” because of enormous personal struggles and pain that “drove me against the wall,” so to speak. In other words, the equation became, for me: believe or die. A lot of that had to do with getting over my own alcoholism, which gradually, then suddenly, turned into the most extreme variety of alcoholism ever known to humankind on Planet Earth. I never went to A.A. (except twice) but I read many books about it and devised my own form of the exact same thing.

I’ve already promised myself that if I live to the age of 80, I can (maybe) start drinking and smoking (perhaps in moderation) again. Only twenty-one more years to go!

…

I’ve been fascinated with the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky ever since I first discovered him and his works in 1983, A.D., when I was an uncertain, shy, questing, and rebellious sixteen-year-old living in Quincy, Illinois, USA, a town along the Mississippi River twenty miles away from Mark Twain’s Hannibal and known for producing uncertain, shy, questing, rebellious sixteen-year-olds.

There was a reading class at the high school and the teacher had a hideous skin disease that made her hands and face look, almost, like she had leprosy.

She was also enormously overweight.

She was one of the most human, most understanding women, or people, that I’ve ever met, and ever known.

She didn’t make me do any of the things the other students were doing, and had to do.

She didn’t even make me show up on time.

I was late every single day.

And she let me be late.

All I had to do was read.

During that semester, I read all of the major works of both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. That means all of it, all of their long novels, and all of their well-known stories too. (Both of them also wrote thousands of pages of nonfiction and correspondence, and I did not read this material at that time. Wow, their hands, and eyes, must have gotten tired.) I hung out with friends a lot, but also, I did not hang out with friends a lot, at all. I stayed home, alone, reading, not because I had nothing better to do, but because I wanted to.

I didn’t write papers on the material, either.

All I did was read. And occasionally she would ask me to sit with her and tell her about what I was reading while she drank her coffee. That was all.

Dostoevsky’s life always fascinated me as much as his writing did.

After joining a radical reading group, he was found out by the secret police and sent to Siberia for nine years when he was in his twenties.

First, the Czar staged a mock execution where he made Dostoevsky and the other prisoners literally face a firing squad and think that the rifles pointing at their faces and chests were about to go off, blowing them to Kingdom Come, immediately.

One of the prisoners, immediately, turned into a gibbering idiot and never recovered.

A horseman had ridden up at the last minute and informed the prisoners that they were being sent to Siberia for nine years, not executed. The whole thing was staged. And they were granted their reprieve at the very last second before they thought they were about to die. No joke!

They knew Dostoevsky was a writer who loved to read. The illegal reading group he’d been a member of read secret pamphlets about issues like freeing the serfs, which would happen soon anyway but was also unthinkable (for the Czar and others of his ilk) at the time.

“THEY” did Dostoevsky one favor. (Russians are very strange.)

As he lived his life in the Siberian labor camp for four years (his other five years in Siberia were as a common soldier) among murderers, rapists, gang-bangers, and thieves, they allowed him to read one book in the evenings.

That book was the New Testament.

He read the whole thing cover to cover so many times that, after the four years was over, he never had to read it again, because he had it memorized, for life. The former educated agnostic was never an agnostic again. The murderers, rapists, gang-bangers, and thieves around him, and the New Testament, put together, had changed his tune, BIG TIME.

All of his subsequent writings, like Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, have to be read in this light, no matter what one’s religious beliefs are or are not. Both Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein, called The Brothers Karamazov the greatest novel ever written. With blurbs like that, from folks such as those, you can’t go wrong!

When Blaise Pascal dropped everything and turned to religion, he was doing so because he suddenly knew that he was going to die. Such things wake you up pretty fast, unless you are really (mentally, spiritually) just sleeping.

Blaise had always been a sickly, although also life-loving, person (many sickly people are very life-loving, often more life-loving than so-called healthy people, I’ve found). He had always known he was going to die. But suddenly he knew it in his heart, soul, bones, liver, limbs, fingertips, toes, and blood. It is called his “night of fire.”

There are some of us who can quietly accept the dissolution of their bodies and spirits and quietly accept that fact believing that nothing will happen after death. They believe that death is the end of everything, for everyone, always, everywhere. Maybe they are just tired, and want to go to sleep, period. And that is okay.

Even when I was a so-called educated agnostic like all the rest of the educated agnostics out there who throng the world (I’ve never been an atheist, or rather, not for very long), I had a very sneaking suspicion that death isn’t, as in IS NOT, the end. I was, and still am, enormously comforted knowing that Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Hank Williams (aka Luke the Drifter), a half dozen of the smartest, most creative people I’ve ever heard of, all believe(d) the same thing/s, deeply and lastingly. They’ve encouraged me (almost) as much as the Bible has (although they were all encouraged by the Bible in the first place), and, as such, I think of them as comic, open-souled prophets as much as singers and songwriters.

Then again, my very first waking moments (that I can remember) told me that I had already been alive, somewhere else. It was a real dawning of consciousness and it had more to do with the “somewhere else” than it did with the “here and now.” It cannot really be put into words other than saying “it cannot be put into words” (so I won’t even try).

In the old days (as in during the nineteenth century and for the rest of human history before that), almost EVERYBODY believed these things. Even Charles Darwin, even Mark Twain. Although sometimes they also said they did not believe these things – like any rational, thinking person might tend to do now, sometimes.

Jack White sometimes says on stage before beginning a song, “I always feel like I’m in the right place at the wrong time.”

He also says, in the song “Seven Nation Army,” by the White Stripes: “Don’t want to hear about it. Every single one’s got a story to tell. Everyone knows about it. From the Queen of England to the Hounds of Hell. And if I catch you coming back my way, I’m gonna serve it to you. And that ain’t what you want to hear. But that’s what I’ll do.”

Jesus shouted out more than once at the people around him, including the disciples, “HOW MUCH LONGER DO I HAVE TO STAY HERE WITH YOU INCREDIBLE FOOLS!?” He never physically attacked anyone; but he verbally crushed people all the time, and tried to get away from them as much as he tried talking sense to them, sometimes. See the Gospels.

Pascal also quotes a Midrash from the Jews: “Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king who cannot see the future.” This quote is both literal AND symbolic. It applies to literal kings and literal wise children; but also, it’s about SYMBOLIC wise children, and SYMBOLIC “evil kings,” like that ex-boss you hate/d so much, or the wife or husband or parent who’s always trying to lord it over you.

Stephen King is right. There are many evil clowns among us who are always watching, waiting, peering, peeking from the bushes with their pants down around their ankles – watching where they are not wanted, waiting where they are not needed nor required, with their greedy, fascinated, perverted, envious, covetous, delirious, red-rimmed eyes.

We do not need to look at the top of the pile to find evil.

Enemies surround us. All of us!

Some of us even within our own homes, until and unless we, somehow, escape.

No one knows why there is evil. I think not even Jesus, the human, and the smartest person who ever lived (see the Gospels before you say no), knew why. His intelligence was, among other things, the culmination of the Jewish prophets Joseph, Moses, David, Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and the others. He could never have existed without them, as he knew and said. He knew the Bible (as it was written at that time) better than anyone else. See the Gospels.

Most of us (or maybe even all of us) don’t even know what evil really is!

Critical and Crucial Literary End Note: One of the best depictions of the life of the spirit, as it really is, that I’ve ever read, is in Leila Allison’s wildly imaginative short story “My Fair Wiccan,” as well as in her Feeble Fables of the Fantasmagorical and many others of her works. That is why (among other heartfelt reasons) I feel so honored to be her Co-Editor at SARAGUN SPRINGS!

Dale the Drifter

The Great Debate Between Good and Evil by Frederick K Foote

(Today Mr. Foote returns with one of the things he does best–a dialogue –The Eds.)

Cicero: Dear audience, please prepare yourself for a spectacle unlike anything the world has ever seen or heard.

I’m Cicero Webster. I’m your host tonight.

Tonight, live on our stage. We have a debate for the ages without commercial interruption. This presentation is being carried by most major streaming, television, and radio outlets. For the next two hours, prepare yourself to see Evil and Good in their inaugural debate.

Viewers and listeners to the right of me. We have Mr. Good, a blonde, blue-eyed, six-foot-one-inch-tall White male in a custom white tuxedo that literally glows. He’s crowned with a silver halo.

To my left is Ms. Evil, a five-foot-nine-inch dark-skinned Black woman in a form-fitting red sequined dress and red heels. The tips of twin red horns stick out from her natural hairstyle.

We will start with each party providing a brief definition of the concept they represent. Mr. Good has won the coin toss and has elected to start.

Good: Thank you to the billions that are looking and listening for joining us tonight. Thank you, Cicero, for hosting, and thank you, Evil, for making this event possible.

And now, to my definition.

Good is an activity that promotes the well-being of humans and nature. Good thoughts and good intentions are weightless in the world of actions.

It is our good deeds and efforts that define us.

I yield the floor to the elegant Ms. Evil.

Evil: Ahh, Good, you are resplendent and gorgeous in your glowing garments. And your halo is absolutely divine.

To Cicero and all our audience, I welcome your kind attention and thoughtful consideration of our words.

Evil is hateful or harmful acts committed by humans for the actor’s satisfaction, or gain, or with utter indifference to the impacts of the actions on humans or other life forms.

Equally important is the duty to oppose evil in your sphere of influence. The failure to oppose evil is evil.

You are all familiar with evil. It is part of your everyday life.

Cicero: If these definitions are satisfactory starting points, would each of you give your best example of good and evil in the last century? Evil, it is your turn to take the lead.

Evil: It was a six-year season of blood, brains, brawn, and guts mired in the trenches, smothering the beaches, and the macabre fruit of every remaining tree or shrub.

It was the invasion of Poland on tracks, wheels, and soaring wings of steel, with shells, bombs, and bayonets, that watered and sowed the blood-sodden soil with the sweet meats and tender flesh, and glistening bones of 250,000 corpses, a grand death dance to open wide the gates of hell on Earth in WWII.

Invasions, battles, sieges, retreats, firebombing, atomic bombing, death marches, the rape of millions of women by Axis and Allies troops, “Comfort Women,” Unit 731, and the mass murder of 13 million human beings because of their race, culture, physical and mental ability, or ethnicity.

And this banquet of butchery establishes record numbers of 20 million military deaths and 40 million civilian deaths.

This war was a symphony of acrimony, hatred, hubris, and greed in a monument to the endless capacity of humans to do violence to one another.

It is evil incarnate.

[Evil has changed from her red gown to green camouflage fatigues, boots, and a steel helmet. She is holding a shovel and a sign, “The gravedigger is the final victor.”]

Cicero: Well spoken, Evil. Good, the floor is yours.

Good: Evil, your words move me, touch my soul, and terrify me. Yet, I find goodness in the world. Lift every voice and rejoice. In 1900, world life expectancy was 32 years. In 2026, worldwide life expectancy is 73.66 years. Forty-one years of life is a glorious bounty worth taking a minute to savor.

We are living testimony to our good work, our incredible ingenuity, and our commitment to our communities.

[Good has morphed into a garbage worker’s white overalls, gloves, and work boots.]

Cicero: Do you have any comments or questions at this stage?

Evil: The hunting-gathering societies that preceded and still coexist with us had life spans of 70 or more years if they survived birth and infancy. Perhaps civilization had negative impacts on life expectancy that we have just corrected over the last century.

Good: Whatever the context, we have documented the good we have accomplished.

Evil: Dear audience, if you are of the opinion that good and evil are distinct and separate and opposite entities, please let me tell you that is not the case. We are devious and deceptive in our presentations, and you will have to watch us carefully. But you will soon understand that our differences are overwhelmed by our similarities.

Good: I adamantly disagree with that proposition. Without good and the distinction between good and evil, civilization falters, and the world runs to ruin. We can separate good from evil as clearly as we can see the difference between day and night. Hitler, from your WWII example, is a case in point.

Evil: Hitler was one person who had the support of millions in his racist, nationalist, imperialistic campaign of conquest and genocide.

And even those who did not support Hitler but failed to oppose him fall into my category of evil.

I think 90% of the German people fell into these two categories of evil.

Yet it would be difficult to say that these millions had not a grain of goodness in them. Don’t you agree?

Good: We are talking about Hitler as a uniquely evil person beyond a doubt. Most people would agree on that.

Evil: Most people are evil. We have demonstrated that with our Germany example. The value judgments of a cabal of evil are questionable at best.

Good: Dear, dear, Evil, grant me this one concession that people of the world recognize Hitler is one of the truly great evils of our time.

Evil: Does he lack even one grain of goodness?

Good: Even if he does, it utterly fails to compensate for his crimes against humanity.

Evil: Hush now. Tread carefully, for you are on the precipice when you declare even an odious human such as Hitler an inhuman thing undeserving of human concern. At this moment you start to glow evil.

Good: Evil, why are you supporting the alleged humanity of Hitler? Answer me that.

Evil: To prove my point. To win our debate. Evil is everywhere and in all of us, given the opportunity to express it. You are all subjects in my kingdom. Bow down.

Good: No! No! Goodness is the hope and the foundation of the world. Without our goodness, without our families, without our caring for each other, without our raising our children to adulthood, there would be no humankind, and this is the essence of goodness—our caring for each other.

Evil: [Applauds] Bravo. Good. Dear Good, you do understand that most domestic abuse, most child abuse, most false indoctrinations, such as religion, racism, and nationalism, occur within the family.

Family miseducation provides the foundation for every Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

And I know you have seen the DNA results that show that the rate of incest is higher than we had assumed.

Family values in action by the good families of the world.

Oh, and don’t forget Cain and Abel and Joseph, and his brothers, Hamlet, Macbeth, and too many more dysfunctional evil families to mention.

Good: Evil, I’m not claiming that the family or any other human institution is perfect; we all know that is not so. What I’m claiming is that, for the existence of humanity, the family has been the good, the good platform we stood on and still stand on.

Evil: Let me whisper a secret to you, Good: What you are missing from your account is the fact that this is the good and evil platform of family.

And at this point, I suggest you concede the debate to me, for you have admitted that all human endeavors are imperfect and therefore subject to and contain the seeds of evil.

[Evil is now dressed in a red bikini, flip-flops, and a bathing cap with a towel over her shoulder.]

Good: NO! Never. God is good in perfection.

Evil: God! No, you didn’t. If you are referring to the Christian God, if you are referring to the one who destroyed the world once and has threatened to do it again, has destroyed six or more cities and slaughtered thousands. If that is your exemplar of good, you are deranged. Your God is the evilest creature I have ever encountered.

I will speak no more on that.

Good: That is the most despicable and disparaging comment I have encountered from a creature of reason that professes respect for the beliefs of others.

Evil: Oh, please, Good. Don’t play dumb and innocent. If your God exists and its bibles are its true words, they are its proud public confessions. If it is a myth, shame on the myth makers for promoting mass murder and genocide.

Good: God moves in mysterious ways beyond the comprehension of man.

Evil: Rubbish! You supposedly understand your God’s goodness and eternal love that is erected on this platform of evil and destruction. You have an enormous, apparently immeasurable capacity for understanding.

Come, Good, forget the debate. Come with me to the beach. And we can discuss good and evil in a more relaxed setting.

Cicero, I’m going to blow this joint. Thank you all for listening, and we await your comments.

Good: I reject your arguments against God. They demonstrate the true nature of evil. You would deny humankind hope and salvation.

Evil: Save it for the next debate. I’m beach bound.

Good: I will not leave millions in the lurch. We shall have this out here and now.

Evil: Your true believers will be unswayed by logic and truth, and doubters will still have their doubts.

Cicero: Perhaps you could return for another debate. That would allow us to evaluate the overwhelming responses we are receiving.

Evil: Of course, Cicero. Possibly at the beach next time, but not too soon.

Good: So be it. I will settle for a second match. Evil: A dip in the ocean might just cool my temper.

Evil: Good, Good. Why don’t you be black for the afternoon? It would be gratifying for us to be on the same page for a change.

Good: I can do you one better than a change in my skin tone.

[Good turns into a dark chocolate brown woman wearing a white bikini.

Evil: I like your style, Good. Let’s take in the ocean air.

[The pair disappears from the studio.]

Sun Beams and Alchemy (and Photo Gallery) by Christopher J Ananias

When the world is a dark pit, and you find yourself locked up with lunatics. Sometimes, a person needs a slice of sunshine. So that’s what this series of photos will try to capture, but alas, it’s hard to catch a sunbeam.

Then again, I don’t need my baseball glove or butterfly net. Not when I have this magical weight around my neck. It’s left the dark room behind, this is true, but I have my own just in case.

I try to explain this alchemy, as if to a five-year-old or my giant German shepherd dog, to these folks on the ward, but they just cock their heads. I talk about apertures, f-stops, and blinking eyeballs.

No respondo, Ernesto just gazes away from me and talks to people who aren’t there. All of their heads turn, and I finally have an audience.

I’m free again, on Antabuse, so I’m back with the camera therapy of nature and sunshine. The technology that I couldn’t explain to them—resting in my hands. Like a thousand picture books.

The shutter is eager to slide over its mechanical eye, snapping pictures of the sun and everything under it, but you have to be careful taking so many pictures of God.

One Writer’s Life (Lately) by Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

“The earth’s proper scripture could be carried on a three-by-five card if we weren’t drunk on our own blood.” – Jim Harrison, from After Ikkyu

INTRO NOTE: This little article about five photographs appears to jump around a lot; but that is only because it is an EXPERIMENT in attempting to capture the process/es of one writer’s mind during a mini-siege of controlled thinking.

I repeat: THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT. In the same way that scientists do experiments is this. (We know as little about the mind as we do about the entire universe which is just one reason why I believe Mind Experiments are productive.)

Henry David Thoreau once said: If I knew anyone better than I know myself, I would write about them (instead of writing about myself.)

Second Intro: These five pictures are called “One Writer’s Life” for six simple reasons.

ONE: I write in my car (a small, fuel-efficient vehicle), a lot, by hand, while roaming around, or ferrying my kids around, from work to school and back again, sometimes while actually driving.

I can drive like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen. There are a trillion things in this world I’m no good at, at all (even unto the point of being mentally deficient at some level, at least by this society’s standards), but driving is not one of them. (Writing an essay about all the things I’m not good at is on the agenda.)

TWO: I spend a lot of time in the northeastern Illinois fields roaming around with and sometimes without my three dogs, and writing, by hand, on paper, with multicolored pens, in all four seasons, which I love equally well. (Every time I try to pick my favorite month, I remember that all the other months are equally good for different reasons.)

I use many-colored pens because I like many colors (it makes the page/s look alive and vibrant, and reminds me of my heroes, Van Gogh and Walt Whitman), and because it helps me tell what the hell is going on in the packed page/s later (if and when the pages don’t fall out of my pockets for someone else to find, or not find, later).

THREE: I watch a lot of documentaries about writers in my down time, when I’m too tired to read or think on my own.

(I have (almost) no regular furniture in my small, fuel-efficient apartment, and if I did have it, I wouldn’t use it (which is why I don’t have it).)

FOUR: I write outside, as stated previously, a lot, including at night. I rarely use an umbrella even in the rain because my uncle, who was a Marine sniper in the Vietnam War with two tours of duty (and later regretted his actions but felt he was serving his country at the time), told me that Marines never use umbrellas unless it’s holding one over someone else, and I admire that kind of humble, dutiful, rock-solid toughness; but I still find umbrellas beautiful for some reason, I think because of my fondness for Asian culture and some of the beautiful paintings I’ve seen.

The lonely plant here, reaching toward the stars (not touching the stars: reaching toward them) is a symbol of the real (and HUMAN, all-too-human!) writer.

The stars are not of this world; and at the same time, they are the only thing that’s truly important in this world at all.

FIVE: In the mode of William S. Burroughs, that great Kansas aristo-cat who always wore an Army jacket and baseball cap in his later years, I sometimes toss together half-assed collages of writers when I’m not writing.

At the present moment (I counted) I have 103 pictures of various writers (and a few other artists, especially Van Gogh (who was also one of the greatest writers of all time, just pick up his letters and dive in anywhere), Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Marilyn Monroe, and Joan Crawford, one of whom reminds me of my mother and another of whom reminds me of a few someone/s I won’t talk about right now) up all over in my apartment.

Many of the pictures are small, like postcard-sized and so forth.

I see them much more than I see any other humans these days except strangers on the street and my kids, and sometimes their friends, etc.

SIX: Real writers are more introspective and self-conscious, and less publicly performative and pushy, than all other kinds of artists (in general, or mostly) and many of them definitely fit into the category of “neurodivergent,” and many of them in many more ways than one, too. And many of them are always dodging and disappearing around corners, like Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, were both equally wont to do, on a regular basis.

Hurray for the Human Writer, the Outsider Observer who cares (and struggles and strives) and can get it all down in words!

They call/ed Jesus “The Word” because they knew he is the greatest writer who ever lived, bar none.

Paul first spread The Word’s teachings through the word. (Open his letters anywhere and dive right in; Kurt Vonnegut repeatedly called himself a “Christ-loving atheist”; Charles Bukowski said, “Jesus had style.”)

Literature is the deepest, most profound, most complex, and longest-lasting Art form (without any doubt whatsoever at all).

Almost all of the greatest military generals in the history of Planet Earth (from Alexander the Great to Napolean to Ulysses S. Grant) have known and acknowledged this fact.

Michelangelo, and Picasso, and Rodin, all also acknowledged this fact.

They were all obsessive readers of Literature, and either were, or wanted to be, Writers.

Dale Barrigar (Words and Photos)

The Ritz by The Drifter

She really wanted to come over and see him and he really didn’t know quite why that was, but he said okay and hung up the phone.

The year was 2003 and the time of year was midsummer and he didn’t have a cell phone yet (on purpose) and wouldn’t (on purpose) for a long time.

The landline wasn’t his either.

He was house-sitting for a friend while the friend and his wife were in France for the summer.

The house was in the northside Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago, just off Lawrence Avenue. This was before Lincoln Square became horrifically, and ridiculously, gentrified but at a time when it was already on its way, fast, on the downward slope.

The house he was house-sitting in for the summer was ridiculously large by his standards, a person who was used to living in many different, small, cheap apartments all across the city over the last however-many years.

Only two people usually lived in the house but it had five upstairs bedrooms, four bathrooms, a gigantic kitchen, a massive dining room, a huge living room with a massive fireplace, a really big family room with an incredibly large TV, a gargantuan basement with at least six separate rooms and lots more TVs, several rooms on the ground floor that were used for things like libraries and studies that were never used, etc. etc. etc. (“Sleeping” alone in this large of a house gave him waking nightmares which usually led to him crashing on one of the first-floor couches near a window by a tree.)

His friend, the husband, wasn’t that loaded, but his friend’s wife came from a family in Oklahoma that was so rich with oil money it wasn’t really funny except it also was kind of funny – in a perhaps sick way.

When the main character of this story’s friend arrived she looked beautiful because she was beautiful. She was, somehow, much more beautiful than the last time he’d seen her, about three or four months ago at the university where they were both lecturers in the English Department.

Her long, fresh-smelling brown hair came down to the middle of her back and had blonde streaks in it that looked natural and golden when she moved her head. Her perfect face was cat-shaped and insomniac-pale, looking for something, and her large, gray, long-lashed eyes sparkled with satirical humor and a wild, one-of-a-kind, literary intelligence. She wore a dark red lipstick and had sexy crooked teeth.

She immediately bummed a cigarette off him and asked for a beer because she knew he would have some of both.

They went out into the backyard, on the beautiful green grass (that kind of grass can often be beautiful even though it literally is an environmental catastrophe for Planet Earth) which was very long and thick because, while he was supposed to keep it mowed to the neighbors’ standards while he was house-sitting, he did not do so. (The neighbors often gave him dirty looks. When the summer was over it would take him a long time to get that grass mowed before his friend and his wife returned from France.) The temperature was at a perfect eighty-three degrees F, the sun was out, the Chicago sky was blue and clear, she was in a really great mood, he was in a very great mood too, he was lighting her cigarettes for her (she kept on bumming more from him but he had a carton in the house), the beer tasted wonderful, and the two of them, both writers who made their livings as lecturers and not lecturers who made their livings as writers, were “writing in air.” In other words, they were doing it purely for the love of it (not only aiming for the $ by following trends and corporate style books).

“Writing in air” is a phrase that was used by the great American writer James Agee, author of the classic text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which accompanied the famous Walker Evans photographs of the poor folks down in Alabama.

Like many writers then and now, too, Agee became an alcoholic and spent a great deal of time as a younger writer “writing in air,” which is to say, spending more time talking about writing with other aspiring writers than actually writing.

Such behavior looks like a waste of time to a lot of the world but it is not a waste of time. It only becomes a waste of time later. When the writer is fairly young, as these two were then (early thirties or so), “writing in air” can be extremely beneficial for the writer as she or he tries out ideas, becomes fluent in the use of verbal flow and tricks, talks about stories, poems, essays, and books, and listens (the deep, active listening is key) to the opinions and ideas of others as well.

These two were having a great time writing in air in the backyard, such a great time that day became evening became nighttime became them in the bar that was just across from the house on Lawrence Avenue.

The bar was called The Ritz and it was run by a guy who called himself Alfred.

That wasn’t his name. It was what he called himself.

The Ritz was one of the most dangerous dive bars the main character of this story had ever been in, and he had been in a million of them all across the USA, from coast to coast and from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, and in at least forty-five or forty-six other different states too, as well as several in Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica, where he’d almost been killed in one of them (but that is a different story).

The Ritz is there no more. The place where The Ritz was is now a phone store.

Back then, as soon as you walked in the door, you could smell the menace and danger oozing from every single corner of the room.

The place was a garish nightmare from the mind of Poe or Dostoevsky. It had blood-red walls, a deep, sickening green ceiling, very low, yellowish lighting, very dark, hidden corners with very shady people lurking in them, and a gigantic man (as in six and a half feet tall and built like a freight truck) with a vicious scar all the way across his face and nose standing at the door glaring at everyone who walked in the place. Don’t say hello to him because he won’t answer.

The clock was upside down, the only bathroom was dirtier than the one pictured on the Rolling Stones album cover for Let It Bleed, the clientele contained gang bangers, mafiosos, hookers, prostitutes, street walkers (none of these three are always the same thing), drug dealers, thieves, hit men. Yes, “Alfred” had once told the main character of this story that several regulars in this bar sometimes made their livings taking out people for money. But don’t worry, said Alfred. They only kill who they are paid to kill and they don’t enjoy it. They don’t mind it, but they don’t enjoy it, either.

Alfred looked like an emaciated, cadaverous, half-Asian, needle-hiding version of Alfred Hitchcock who’d been resurrected from the grave and presented with a set of gold teeth which he was always flashing then hiding behind dry, cracked, pursed lips. When he gave you a drink he acted like you’d won the lottery.

It may sound half mad that the main character of this story, who wasn’t really (much of) a criminal himself after all, would’ve spent so much time in a place like this, back in the old days. No one knows why, but the facts are the facts.

And the amazing thing was that she understood the danger and the shadiness of the place very well, and wasn’t afraid of it at all.

The two of them entered the Ritz just before midnight and began drinking even though they’d already been drinking (and chain smoking) since way earlier in the day.

They started doing shots of tequila.

Lots of shots of tequila.

In The Ritz you were allowed to do whatever the hell (and whatever the F) you wanted to do, even if it brought you to hell. You might end up dead, injured, crippled, wounded, tied up, kidnapped, maimed, scarred, sick, ill, brain-dead, missing, or otherwise unaccounted for, but no one was going to stop you here. When you stepped in the door, all bets were off, and you had now entered underground Chicago, Land of the Gangsters, at its lowest, or its highest (depending on your perspective) levels.

The two of them retreated to a corner, commandeered a nasty little booth and started making out in the almost-dark, while still drinking and smoking.

After closing time (because even The Ritz had to close at some time) they made it back across the street (somehow) wrapped in one another’s arms.

She had accidentally, somehow, burned his hand with one of their cigarettes. Later tomorrow he would realize how badly and deeply the top of his hand was burned, but right now, he didn’t even notice, or feel, it.

Both of them were married (to other people). Neither of them lived with their spouses, nor had they for a long time.

She reminded him of his wife. But she was not his wife.

That fact, or those facts, made her dangerously attractive to him. She tasted like honeydew. Her flesh was manna.

They both fell down trying to make it upstairs to the bedroom. That is, while holding each other and trying to drag each other up the stairs to the bedroom, they both took a tumble, all tangled together, and somehow ended up at the bottom of the stairs, wrapped in each other’s arms, on the floor, instead of at the top of the stairs, in the bedroom.

They continued making out, there on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, before they both passed out, in each other’s arms, on the floor, at the bottom of the stairs, with the front door wide open, the summer air blowing in.

In the morning the hangover was so bad it was worse than hell. Much, much worse. Whatever hell is and however bad hell can be, this was worse! (It was so bad that this kind of thing would cause him to completely quit drinking forever in two years or so, which was almost impossible at first and also felt like freedom beyond belief – but that is another story.)

The hangover had a million different things about it that made it especially horrible, horrific, harrowing. After staggering around for a while with the splitting, near-blinding headache, he saw and reached for an almost-empty vodka bottle that was located on one of the tables in the house and took a swig to kill the pain. But it didn’t kill the pain (not yet). He retched. The cigarette which he then located and lit after finding a lighter under one of the couches made his heart pound like an old-fashioned steam engine about to permanently explode. He noticed that the top of his left hand had a deep red cigarette burn upon it (that would turn into a permanent scar weirdly almost in the shape of a heart, like a token of this story, and if it wasn’t a cigarette burn it was some other kind of burn, but he’d had cigarette burns before (a few self-administered in front of other people to impress them) and this looked like one) and that his fingers were all yellow from smoking. Three of his fingernails were bruised, and bleeding, a little; he had no idea why. His knee was killing him, probably from toppling down the stairs which he, vaguely, remembered. He located one of the three remaining Vicodin pills he’d gotten off a friend last week and gulped it down without water, then chugged a ton of water, straight out of the sink, while bending over it.

No one on Planet Earth knew how many cig’s he’d had yesterday but a good estimate was five packs of twenty (just like John Wayne). He was guessing that the number of drinks sat at around thirty – minimum. Actual solid food all day, and all night, long – zero. Cups of strong black coffee with cigarettes before she’d arrived – seven or eight. He saw a Chicago hit man loading a pistol with a blank look on his face then reaching out the other hand to take the wad of cash from Alfred. And he knew this was the truth.

One of the worst things about the hangover was that, when he woke up, she was already gone.

The Drifter (Images by The Drifter)

Ophelia Invisible by The Drifter

“Who is now reading this?” – Walt Whitman

It was just one block away from my apartment, on the corner; but I suddenly felt like I’d traveled thousands of miles, or gone to a different level of something that was on a whole other level.

The utter humbleness of it all was what struck me most. Whoever did this took the time, with, obviously, very limited resources.

It was the early AM of a midsummer morning just outside Chicago at the time when the birds are going insane in the good way, having a party before settling down into the branches above us and hiding out for the rest of the day.

Then, suddenly, they were there, these simple signs that were honoring the dead.

And I saw that at the top of one of the lists of names, the name was Ophelia.

First it made me think of the Taylor Swift video (not just the song), “The Fate of Ophelia.”

Next it made me think of Good Will’s, and Hamlet’s, Ophelia (the lover of both for sure).

Then I noticed that, within the same list, there was (is) someone with the same first name as one of my daughters.

And THAT made me think of invisible connection/s that spread throughout the world (and what is called the universe).

And then I thought of how Ophelia is invisible to me.

The Drifter (All Images by The Drifter)

A Coalfield Legacy: An Essay by Michael Bloor

I’ve lived most of my life on the periphery of coalfields. As a child, I could see the twin spoil-heaps of Swadlincote, in the South Derbyshire Coalfield, from my parents bedroom window. When my daughter was a child, she went to nursery school just down the road in Coalburn (there’s a clue in the name) in the Scottish South Lanarkshire Coalfield. When we left Coalburn we moved to just outside Abergavenny, on the edge of the South Wales Coalfield. For the last twenty-odd years, I’ve lived just a few miles from the site of the Polmaise Colliery in Stirlingshire.

The Polmaise miners were famously militant: they struck for ten months in 1938; after Mrs Thatcher broke the 1984-85 national strike, they were the last miners to return to work, a week after every other pit. There’s little sign of the mine today; it closed a year after the strike ended. Stirling Council now has a refuse disposal and recycling centre at Lower Polmaise. Coal had been mined around Coalburn since the 1840s, the last pit closed in 1968. In 1988, a huge opencast mine was opened, alleged to be the largest hole in Europe. It closed in 1997. Europe’s largest battery storage facility is currently being built there, to store excess power from Scotland’s wind farms. At its peak in the early 1920s, The South Wales Coalfield had employed 250,000 men; numbers shrank through the twentieth century and the last deep mine to operate was The Tower Colliery in the Cynon Valley. In 1994, 239 Tower miners pooled their redundancy money to buy the pit and run it as a workers’ co-operative, which they did successfully until their coal reserves were exhausted in 2008. The old Swadlincote spoil-heap in South Derbyshire is now a dry ski slope.

From my comfortable seat on the periphery, I’ve watched a whole industry vanish. But many of the mining villages are still there. Not all of them, some were just timber cabins, but by the mid-1950s miners and their families were living in decent houses, funded out of the public purse, and replacing the shoddy houses previously built by the mine-owners for their workforces. Those mining villages remain special places. Take Coalburn for example: the village’s Miners Welfare Institute remains the centre of village social life and is the only pub in the village; there’s an annual village gala; there are two marching bands – a pipe band, and a silver [brass] band; there’s a thriving horticultural society, with an annual show; an historical society; pigeon-racing is a popular sport. There is a strong sense of community that is almost certainly an inheritance from the workforce solidarity of the village’s industrial past.

I was reminded of the role and importance of workforce solidarity in the mining industry when I saw the news of the deaths of 82 Chinese miners at the Liushenyu coal mine on May 23rd this year. The deaths had been caused by a build-up of carbon monoxide, which can kill by asphyxiation or explosion. The mine had a previously been criticised for its poor safety record.

Of course, that Chinese tragedy is part of a wider story, an auld song. Scotland’s worst coalmining disaster was back in 1877, ‘The Blantyre Calamity’, when 207 miners lost their lives in an explosion and fire caused by a build-up of firedamp (methane). A subsequent inquiry uncovered a list of poor safety management practices: inadequate ventilation, inadequate safety lamps (not the standard locked Davy safety lamps), and shot-firing by untrained workers. The attitude of the mine-owners can be intuited by the eviction of 34 widows from their ‘tied’ cottages just six months after the explosion. Disasters such as these drew a response from the workforce: they were a stimulus to worker solidarity. One of the Blantyre miners who gave evidence to inquiry was Andrew McAnulty who went on to be President of the Lanarkshire Miners Union. In the course of his career as a miner he suffered a scorched right arm with shrivelled sinews, he lost the sight in one eye and had injuries to his feet.

In the UK, the miners’ federated union successfully urged Parliament to pass a law in 1911 to allow miners to choose their own safety inspectors with the right to go anywhere in the mine to ensure that safety regulations were enforced. A similar measure had already had an impact in the French mines, and the introduction of the Workmen Inspectors, as they became known, definitely had a big impact on UK mine safety, especially in guarding against gas build-ups and deaths from roof falls.

Likewise, political pressure by the mining unions and Members of Parliament for mining constituencies led the Government to ask the UK Medical Research Council to conduct chest X-ray screening of miners, research which led in turn to pneumoconiosis, caused by coal dust, to be recognised as an occupational disease, allowing the sufferers to seek compensation. The mine-owners had previously opposed pithead medical examinations.

Workforce inspectors are also found in the shipping industry, another industry with a spotty safety record. The International Transportworkers Federation, an international union, has ITF inspectors who conduct unannounced inspections on berthed ships to detect violations in international shipping regulations on health and safety.

The UK coalfields, that have been a sort of backcloth to my whole life, no longer yield up coal to burn in the living-room grate. There are no more UK coal-mining disasters, though other industrial safety failures continue to cost lives – witness the 167 deaths in the Piper Alpha North Sea oilrig explosion in 1988. But the Coalburn Silver Marching Band is still there as a small reminder that human solidarity is a great resource for the common good.

Michael Bloor