I took off at midday and drove east to Cahokia Mounds. I know little about them, even though there is plenty of information out there. I climbed up Monk's Mound, the largest man-made pre-Columbian... thing north of Mexico.

It was the best of civilization, for that time, that place, 1000 years ago. They knew nothing of the Imperial Palace or the Vatican, or Caesar, or Jesus, or Muhammad. What they did know was a great forest around them, filled with abundance, also filled with danger. For some reason, over successive generations, they built a mound that was like a small mountain, their way to the sky.

I ascended stairs to the top and saw the St. Louis skyline, highways, smoke from factories, smoke from burning brush, trailer parks, and the horizon, 360 degress around.

I tried to strip it away and see it as it was 1000 years ago. I could see flashes of color where now there is now fall brown grass, and smoke from burning brush.

Then I tried to see as it will be 1000 years from now. I saw savannah, made as it once was, before man, guarded by a nearly invisible intelligence, but no smoke.

I believe that stewardship of such things will ever increase, that we will never have our own Taliban.

It’s ink in water, black and pouring from aside
a silver whale, maliciously harpooned.
White butterflies now flutter from the wound
and now, unbearably, its brother whale

is speared, and now it faces much the same
annihilation. Ghosts are flying out
in coveys, death is riot, death and dust
repudiating immortality.

(He is a coward killer even though
a suicide. It is a coward’s way,
to kill the innocent believing it
delivers murderers to paradise.)

It seemed like water but it’s really sky
and halos ring and decorate the day.


Done the first anniversary, 9/11/02

In China, business people have no assurance that the contracts they sign will be enforced. Even the ones with all the requisite chops. So they try to do deals that rise and fall on their own merits, and will not need enforcement. They place little stock in the possibility of recovery if the contract is breached.

This sounds like a tough place to do business, and it is. It is one reason why the invocation of relationships - guanxi - is constant, and a cliché, but not entirely misplaced.

For years Westerners thought guanxi meant knowing the right government officials so the deal could be greased through. But this is only a part, and one which is increasingly less important. What really matters is the ability to trust. If you have dealt with someone for 20 years who has always been trustworthy, there is reason to believe he or she will be trustworthy again.

You cannot substitute a Rolex and a few rounds of banquets for those 20 years. I am not convinced you can substitute anything. So people who wish to make their business future in China have to be ready for the long, long haul.

If I wanted to succeed in China I would put in place a cadre for their own Long March. They can be non-Chinese (although fluent, sooner or later, in Mandarin) or Chinese. The main requirement is that they be incorruptible. They should be prepared to work on small deals for years while they develop the relationships that will one day pay off.

In Bali are craftsmen who gather up bits
of the world overseas for fashioning windchimes
with pipes, wood and string.
On my porch hangs a Santa with wings, over chimes,
below these a totem,
the sun and the moon, back to back.

He flies into thunderstorms, and probably wonders
why his life is consigned to do battle with
Midwestern weather. The smile is engraved.
So far from home, he is lashed to the porch,
to challenge the sadness of everyday life.

The breeze comes up, and there he goes.
On Santa, on Santa.
Chime on into the night.

An erudite college roommate emails a pretty good point, nicely contrapuntal to my comment yesterday about democracy.

Between musing on the Islamic situation, and re-reading European history, I'm thinking that the greatest concept ever created by Western Civilization is the separation of church and state. Maybe more than democracy.

Election Day. I voted for my usual odd collection of Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians. One cool surprise was a referendum calling for a new state Constitutional Convention. I voted for it, and I love the idea. We could all attend in powdered wigs.

The polling place was full, but not mobbed, a very civil group. The election workers looked to be either too young to vote, or way past 80. The voters were a wonderful collection of crotchety old ladies, moms with kids in the booth, mid-level women in those skin-tight cycling pants, guys in sweats.

I am always startled at first by the notion that each one of those people has a vote which carries exactly the same weight as mine. Then I multiply it out in my mind, seeing thousands and thousands and millions and millions of people, each of them with a brain and dreams and loved ones and pet peeves and secrets. Then, I always think, this is what makes democracy so effing great. It’s kind of a miracle. It always knocks me out.

One of the things that identifies my dying breed - liberal Republicans - is our belief in acting intelligently on the international stage. Generally the Bush administration does much better at this than the current press would admit. But there is a recent piece in the NYT that just makes me burn. Evidently the Administration is ready to attack a population-control treaty in an attempt to pander to the anti-abortion right in this county. This is wrong, and the Bush people should be careful. I could round up a whole room of people who would otherwise give money to his next campaign, but will re-think their support because of this issue.

The ancients are dancing around the room today, a rainy Sunday. First, a wonderful quote, Sullivan quoting Hitchens quoting Orwell quoting Milton: "the known rules of ancient liberty." Looking up the sonnet, there are other great lines:

That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty...

Second, a notion from the fringe that indicates there were sophisticated people long before Mesopotamia. Really ancient.

Sleepiness should be rejected. It leads to sleep.

There was a prayer I said with my mother:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I learned it so young, the memory is part phonetic. "Lay me" was "layme", a comfortable-sounding word. I came to understand the prayer’s meaning after I learned to say the words. I realized that at least half of it dealt with what would happen if I died. How unthinkable, to a child. I was immortal, and stayed so for many years.

What was my mother thinking? Teaching her son a prayer that addressed death in his sleep? I have remembered the prayer, but it has always seemed impossible with my own children. That may be because I am one more generation away from the time when children died all the time. They were fragile, they died. There must have been so much pain. Did working the possibility into a nightly prayer help to cope?

Sad to say that bedside prayers with Dad never really caught on in this family, with this prayer or any others. But Mom’s layme prayer has come back to me. It fits a death-confronting adult pretty well - maybe it was never a child’s prayer at all.

The calculus makes me dizzy. The planet
swims with warrior fish, they understand
their schooling. I who swim alone do not.
Do you ask whether I will do battle?

No, not whether you will go into battle.
I assume you are an honorable man.
My question: would you send your son into battle.

Every day a lawyer tells his client about the vagaries of litigation. Going to trial in America means uncertainty, cost, and often an unfair outcome. (Outside America, even more unfair.) When you’re a defendant you can’t escape it. But when you bring the case – when you’re a plaintiff – you have to take this into account. There is never a sure thing, never.

Litigation is thus a little like war. Uncertain, costly, often with an unfair result. When you are attacked you have to deal with it. When you attack you take your chances.

The dangerous point: the distinctions between defendant and plaintiff, attacked and attacker. Attackers say they were attacked, although in a way that may not have been war. Plaintiffs say they were damaged, but not in litigation. It spirals backward. Who committed the first offense? As we said on the playground, who started it?

And -- in trials we almost always just deal with money. In war we deal, always, with death. The calculus is similar. The stakes are not.

Beyond the discipline there is a kind
of peace. Beyond the order there is peace
as well, a curiosity of mind.
Beyond the bluff is just bare honesty.

This trick is won but yet this game is still
begun and losses are ahead. If honor lies
and lies are honored, games of chance we will
commence before imagination dies.

There. I’ve won. Your money comes to me
I scoop it forward, dragging it across
the table felt, for riches I can see
if only for an instant, not a loss.

This way we conquer bits of life in hands
of playing cards that no one understands.