After E.D. a poem

After E.D.

My voice is still in loneliness

I dare not utter “I”

I wake from sleep

In valley haze, wet, anesthetized

My child totters down the hall

He traces cracks of rain

His tattered garment of a soul

Drenched in valley rain

Disgrace it soddens all my pores

Shame grimly trickles down

I moor my solace to the world

My agony drowns unbound.

Kalam Cosmology

William Lane Craig’s book The Kalam Cosmological Argument sets out to both explain and defend the theory cited in the title.  This theory is one of the ways that God’s existence is rationally proved.  But Craig mentions God very few times in this book.  The thrust of the book is on the cosmological argument, and not its conclusion.

The lynchpin of this theory rests on the assumption that an actual infinite cannot exist.  If it does not, then the universe must be finite.  It must have a beginning.  If it has a finite beginning, there must be a creator of the universe who existed prior to its creation.  If real infinity exists, and if the universe is eternal, all manner of absurdities would ensue.  Time as we know it would not function.  And the sequential nature of events as we observe them would not exist.

Craig handles this argument in various ways, from showing in very mathematical terms that a true infinite does not exist, to more philosophical arguments.  He then goes on to examine both the theoretical and empirical results of the Big Bang Theory, which  bolsters the argument for a finite, created universe.

Craig will deftly bring you through these abstruse matters; he will not leave you behind, although this is not a book for the rank beginner.   But to see how a mind thinks about matters divine, rationally, and according to the dictates of the senses and experience, Craig is no greater guide.

The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing spent her formative years in the former Rhodesia.  Her first novel Grass is Singing, is part of the fruit of that experience.  This is hard story to read; Lessing paints a picture of characters that are so far removed from fulfilling their dreams that the very terms of their lives are distorted and twisted.  There is no love, friendship, or joy.

Added to this is the inevitable problem of race, and the novel takes an even darker turn.  The ending, not revealed here, is a bit of a disappointment; that Moses, the house servant, would commit such an act is a form of reverse racism; the setting of the trap where whites both explore and reject their racism.

But this was Lessing’s first novel, and she needed, it seems, a conventional ending.  From here, she would go on to explore the marvelously plastic form of the novel. 

Dust - a poem

Light on a lake
Of this dust
And shimmering sun
Here, there, 
At the tips of fingers
The Essence of All
Encapsulated in this
Fragile shell of
Dust becoming, 
On its way
To Being