Kevin Basil

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This Sunday, Orthodox churches following the Byzantine rite begin using the service book called the Triodion (or in Slavic tradition, often the Penitential or Lenten Triodion). The Lenten Triodion provides the changing texts for the weeks of the Great Fast and Holy Week, as well as the four pre-lenten Sundays. This is why we begin using it this Sunday, four weeks before the beginning of this Great Forty Days, or Lent. This means that the following Sunday we will beginning singing the psalm that announces some of the great themes of our human condition — exile, bondage, alienation, grief, and even anger at the forces that have exiled, enslaved, and alienated us from our heart’s true home — communion with our creator.

That psalm is Psalm 136 (137 in the Hebrew numbering), the lament of a Judean over their exile in Babylon from Judea and its capital Jerusalem. “Despite the poignant beauty of the opening verses,” writes the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, “it contains some of the most vengeful language in all the Psalter.” That violent language often prompts horror when it is encountered in the modern world. In the reform of the Liturgy of the Hours in the post-Vatican II Roman rite, the final verses of this psalm have been suppressed, along with several other psalm verses with violent imagery. A choral group I sing with, the Archdiocesan Choir of the Archdiocese of Washington in the Orthodox Church in America, recently sang a setting of this psalm in concert, prompting my godson’s mother to ask about its meaning.

Christian tradition often sees multiple layers of meaning in scripture, sometimes called the “fourfold sense of scripture.” The first and most basic meaning is always the literal meaning of a passage. In Psalm 136(137), the literal meaning is the lament and desire for retribution. Here is the psalm in full as it appears in the Greek psalter:

Psalm 136 (137)

For David, a Psalm of Jeremiah.

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down;
we sat down and wept when we remembered Sion.
We hung our harps on the willows in the midst of it.

For there our captors asked of us the words of a song; ?and they that had carried us away required of us a hymn,
saying, Sing us one of the songs of Sion. ?How should we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.
May my tongue cleave to my throat, if I do not remember you; ?if I do not prefer Jerusalem as my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem;
who said, Raze it, raze it, even to its foundations.

Wretched daughter of Babylon!
Blessed shall he be who shall reward you as you have rewarded us.
Blessed shall he be who shall seize and dash your infants against the rock.

The psalm was written during the Judean exile in Babylon, so the emotions associated with all that the Judean community has seen in war are fresh and raw in the mind of the writer. The armies of Nebuchadnezzar II successfully laid siege to and conquered Jerusalem in 597 BCE, then deported many of the city’s inhabitants to Babylon and resettled them there — “By the waters [or rivers] of Babylon, there we sat down [or were settled] and wept when we remembered Sion [also Zion, one of the hills on which Jerusalem is built].”

The psalmist recalls being asked by their Babylonian captors to provide some entertainment with songs of their Judean homeland. It’s a taunt to an enslaved community, “Sing us a song of the home you watched us destroy while we abducted you.”

The psalmist mentions the Edomites, a neighboring nation which other scriptural writers identify as descendants of the Israelite patriarch Jacob’s brother Esau, and asks the Lord — in Hebrew, Adonai, spoken instead of the ineffable and sacred name of God, YHWH — to remember their cruelty when Jerusalem is someday again triumphant, “in the day of Jerusalem.” The writer may be thinking that the Babylonians are Edomites but could also be recalling the glee of their neighbors at the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians.

The last verses show us in graphic detail what the Judean people endured — a host of atrocities symbolized by the worst of them all, dashing their infants’ heads against stones and rocks. The psalmist seeks blessing on the one who will do exactly the same to the Babylonians. This is the literal meaning of the psalm; a hymn to God full of grief and rage in the midst of unimaginable pain. It is easy, in our own era in which new wars and new atrocities seem to emerge every day, to understand the perspective of this Judean psalmist and their community. On the level of the psalm’s literal meaning, it speaks to the grief and rage of anyone who has experience such horrors. And yet, the psalmist retains hope in the power of God to save their people.

However, Christian tradition has also perceived a spiritual meaning in this startling text, which is why the Byzantine Christian tradition continues to sing it in its entirety for its Sunday morning service of prayer in preparation for Lent: We live in exile. We have been spiritually alienated from the paradise for which we were created: communion with God, our creator. We have been enslaved to the forces of fear and hatred, but we retain a memory of our heart’s homeland.

The answer to this bondage is to smash the little thoughts of fear, hatred, greed, lust — all the little temptations to be my worst self, to give in to the forces of darkness in the world — before they grow up to be strong, powerful Babylonians who will enslave me. These little thoughts must be smashed against the rock — which Christian tradition identifies as the rock of Christ. Only such spiritual warfare allows us to return to our heart’s homeland: the embrace of the Father.

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“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Three tragedies of our current political situation exploded into the headlines this week, each screaming for our attention.

1. First, explosive devices were found addressed to outspoken critics of the US president: first in the mailbox of George Soros, a Hungarian-American, Jewish philanthropist known for supporting progressive causes and frequently a bogeyman for anti-semitic conspiracy theories, then in the mail of former President Barrack and Michelle Obama and former Secretary Hilary Clinton. Eventually former Vice President Joe Biden, several Democratic senators, and news outlets were targeted. The bombs were all found before anyone could be hurt. A Florida man has been arrested on suspicion of sending the bombs. Although he was of Filipino and Italian descent, he longed for a different identity. For many years, he self-identified as a member of the indigenous Seminole nation, plastering the van he lived in with Native American stickers. Upon the election of President Trump, he registered as a Republican and traded the Native American stickers for stickers supporting President Trump and repeating far right messaging fueled by the president in campaign rallies and posts on Twitter. He expressed hatred towards his own family, even his mother.
2. A white gunman shot and killed two black shoppers in a Kroger in Kentucky; witnesses heard him making a racist remark. Prior to entering the grocery store, he was seen attempting to enter an historic black church where people were gathered.
3. The week concluded with the mass shooting of Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on the Sabbath (Saturday). The gunman shot and killed 11 worshippers and injured 2 worshippers and 4 police officers responding. Before opening fire, the white gunman yelled, “All Jews must die.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, it is “one of the deadliest [attacks] against the Jewish community in the U.S.”

In the face of violence, it can be hard to know how to react, but silence only emboldens abusers.

I speak as a Christian: Jesus’ teachings demand that his followers love and accept all people as their brothers and sisters, without regard for their ethnicity, faith tradition, country of origin, sex, gender, orientation, or any other distinguishing characteristics. “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. In this is summed up all the [Jewish] Law and the prophets.” Jesus said this was true, and when asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he told a story about a man beaten and left for dead on a stretch of highway. A clergyman and a temple worker passed by on the other side of the road so that the man’s blood would not prevent them from doing their job as worship leaders. It was the foreigner and heretic who bandaged his wounds and set him up in the equivalent of a hospital and who Jesus identified as the person to emulate — and as the neighbor to love in return. No one, in other words, should be rejected. Every human being should be loved in the same way that we love ourselves.

I speak as an Orthodox Christian: Yesterday was the commemoration of “‘Ohi!’ Day” — that is, “‘No!’ Day,” when Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas and the Greek nation responded to Mussolini with a united “No.” We, too, must respond with a united “NO!” to a resurgent fascism, a resurgent hatred of Jews, as well as hatred of people of color and immigrants, — in short, a resurgent hatred, born of fear, of anyone who is different from us. Of course, none of this is new at all; it just never died. St Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris and her companions stood against Nazism in France and protected Jews in every way they could. When asked if he would stop protecting Jews, Fr. St Dmitri Klepnin said he could not. It was impossible. He looked the German commander in the eye, pointed to the crucifix on his chest, and asked, “Do you know this Jew?” He was struck backward and to the ground. He and St Maria were taken to concentration camps and died as martyrs for authentic Orthodox Christianity.

I speak as an Orthodox Christian in America: We must be clear that racism (or ethnophyletism) has no place in our church. Orthodox Christians love our families and take pride in our old world origins; when warped minds confuse this with their own hatred and fear toward people who are different from them, we must clearly say, “NO. That is not who we are.” We follow a man who was crucified and yet still loved his executors to the end, asking that they be forgiven in his last breath. We are united to his death and resurrection, and therefore we must never, as our fathers wickedly did, use his passion as an excuse for hatred of his people, who remain our brothers and sisters and our neighbors.

I speak as an Orthodox Christian in America who was raised White, Anglo-Saxon, and evangelical Protestant: We must recognize that our ancestors caused grave harm to people of color and created a world where we benefit and they do not. We must clearly speak about this and say, It is not right. We must act to bend the arc of our shared history toward the justice and mercy our scriptures teach: “He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8 NKJV). About this and other teachings of our shared prophetic tradition, the Jewish Talmud says, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it” (Pirkei Avot 2:21).

Yesterday, the Greek Church commemorated the Holy Protection of the Mother of God, transferred to October 28 from October 1, when most Orthodox Christians commemorate it, because there were so many stories of her miraculous protection in Greece as the Greek people stood against German Nazism and Italian Fascism. We, too, should implore her protection and the intervention of her divine Son against the demonic winds of hate and evil which are now possessing our land, and we must be prepared to speak and to act. Not to do so is itself to act and speak in favor of the evil.

God will not hold us guiltless.

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Good evening.^[1] I have been asked to speak to you today about the Eucharist as sacrifice—something of a daunting prospect for an Orthodox speaker in front of a hall of mostly Roman Catholic and Lutheran Christians. So instead, I am going to talk about the Doctor.

“Earls Court Police Box” by User:Canley – Photographer: User:Canley. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

My patristics professor, Fr John Behr, told students in our first year at seminary that we have to learn to think about time in ways that seem more like science fiction than what we are used to.^[2] So allow me to begin with this quote from Doctor Who: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint—it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… timey wimey… stuff.”^[3]

We tend to think of time as a linear progression. There’s no rewind or fast-forward. I have no access to the Battle of Okinawa, because 70 years intervene between it and my present existence. When I lived on the island as a teenager, I could visit various monuments to those momentous events, but I had no access to the battle itself. Moreover, even though I lived on Okinawa as a youth, I longer have any access to Okinawa except as a memory. From our limited perspective within the system of time and space, subject to its constraints, as participants in it, we can only call to mind past events and imagine future possibilities.

Understandably, we bring this limited perspective to salvation history. The perspective of an observer outside this system (of which we know only one) would see things quite a bit differently. Classical theism and classical Judaeo-Christian faith both hold that God exists outside of the time-space system. With no frame of reference except that of our existence within time, so we tend to think of God’s eternity as merely extension in time—time, only longer. In fact, this is the quality of everlastingness, not eternity. Eternity is to be outside of time, unbound by it, time-less.

This insight has several implications for our theology. The most important for us this evening is that God’s acts or operations within creation will appear to us as discrete moments in time and will seem like separate acts or events, but in fact they are a single divine action. The cross stands at the center of the Big Bang.

This brings me to one more quote, which will require a bit of explaining: “The TARDIS is …burning. It’s exploding at every moment in history”^[4] The TARDIS is the Doctor’s almost sentient time machine/spaceship, famously “larger on the inside than the outside,” an almost infinite amount of space and time crammed into the space of a 1960s London police box via the dimensional magic of television science fiction. As a space-time machine, its destruction in one episode occurs “at every moment in history.” A complete synopsis of the story is too complex to undertake tonight, but I think you can imagine what I’m driving at.

The execution of God on a cross does not simply occur on a hillside outside the walls of Jerusalem in first century Palestine. It is the eternal Word of God voluntarily sacrificing himself on the cross; the crucifixion exists eternally in the life of God. The cross stands at the center of all time and space. The Lamb of God is slain for the life of the world and its salvation “at every moment in history.”

Notice that this is not about repeating the Lamb’s sacrifice. The Apostle makes this clear in his letter to the Hebrews: “Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb 9.24–26 ESV). The sacrifice is not repeated; it is the single divine self-sacrifice that stands at the center of creation. The cross creates the world.

Now, finally, we can look at the Lord’s Supper in a new light. When we speak of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, it is not a new sacrifice or a repeated sacrifice. Martin Luther correctly opposed the idea that Christ was crucified again in the Mass, as did the Council of Trent. His sensitivity to scripture as a unique source of authority made such an interpretation of the “perpetual sacrifice” abhorrent, and he said so in very colorful language. To understand how the Lord’s Supper can be a perpetual sacrifice without “they are crucifying once again the Son of God to [our] own harm and holding him up to contempt,” we must understand the biblical concept of memorial.

The Israelites were instructed to keep the memorial of the Passover yearly. In this ritual (which continues to be remembered among Jews in the seder meal), the exodus from Egypt is not merely recalled. Let me read you a passage from Kevin Irwin’s Models of the Eucharist:

For the Jews the Passover is considered as much more than a past event that occurred once and for all. The Passover is also an event that is a present, effective reality. And in being commemorated (literally remembered together) in the present, it also necessarily leads to its fulfillment in the future. In biblical phraseology, saving events like the Passover and the death and resurrection of Christ [that is, the Christian Passover] are events that occurred “once for all (time)” (from the Greek term ephapax in Hebrews 7:27). The Passover of Israel and the paschal mystery of Christ are both events that occurred once and for all and yet they are also events that by their very nature occur still, here and now, in the unique moment of liturgical commemoration.^[5]

So, the Doctor Who version of time and space actually takes on biblical proportions.

Thus, in the Lord’s Supper, it is the Lamb of God who offers and is offered on the altar, and the offering is the same offering he makes on the cross. The priest acts under the authority of Christ, making Christ present by his action—or rather, revealing the sacramental presence of Christ by his submission to Christ’s command, summed up in the Latin phrase in persona Christi. The Lord offers himself, a human being, through the action of offering the gifts of bread and wine and the gifts of the people which are his body and are made to be his body by the eucharistic action. Indeed, the priest acts on behalf of the people who corporately act in persona Christi to offer themselves as living sacrifices (Rom 12.1).^[6]

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You have heard, no doubt, of New England-style clam chowder. You may have heard of Manhattan-style clam chowder. I had not heard, until yesterday, of Hatteras-style clam chowder.

Hatteras-style chowder uses a clear broth, salt and pepper to taste for seasoning, and typically flour to thicken it. I made some today using some canned ingredients. You could just as easily use fresh ingredients, and it would work fine.

Ingredients:
2 cans minced clams (not drained)
1 8 oz bottle clam juice
1 can diced potatoes
1 can kernel corn
1 can mixed vegetables (or diced carrots)
2 tbsp coconut oil (or some other vegetable oil)
1–2 cups potato flakes (ie, dry mashed potato mix)
salt and pepper to taste
dried minced onion, to taste

Most recipes I’ve seen online include chopped bacon. I did not include this for obvious reasons.^[1] If you want to include it, cook it beforehand and add it with the other ingredients at the end, before simmering.

Directions:
Combine clam juice, coconut oil and juice from one or both cans of clams in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat. Add potato flakes to desired thickness (it should be thicker at this point than desired finished product). Combine remaining contents. Return to a boil, stirring occasionally. Cover and simmer over low heat for 30 minutes or so.

The corn is my own take: I really like for my chowder to have corn. If you have dietary issues with corn, just omit it. Also, you’ll notice I used pototo flakes instead of flour to thicken it.

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Photo credit: Kevin Basil Fritts

Love is a wonderful thing. On Valentine’s Day, many people typically publish statements of affection on the social media of their choice, usually trying to outstrip the expressions of their friends. Here a few timely facts to consider:

1. 43% of all Americans are not married. (Source: CNN)
2. 60% of marriages experience domestic violence. (Source: US DOJ)
3. Every 2 minutes, someone is sexually assaulted. (Source: RAINN)

All around you (and reading your status updates), people experience Valentine’s Day as a cruel form of torture. How might you be more considerate of them?

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Our father among the saints, Patrick, archbishop of Armagh and all Ireland, wonderworker.

Troparion, Tone I
Today, Armagh rejoices with Antrim and Mayo, * and all Ireland praises the illustrious apostle, Patrick. * On all he met he made a deep and lasting impression, * for the grace of God overflowed his noble and sensitive nature. * With the Lord Christ as his breastplate and the undying lamp of the Spirit in his hand, * he went forth to make the Irish people children of the font,
*** baptizing them into Christ, the only lover of mankind.

Kondakion, Tone IV
The evil one is ever on the watch to carry off entire nations as booty, * viciously plundering their spirit and leading the minds of the people into error. * For this, you wisely spurned the world as a passing dream prone to destruction, O holy Patrick, * preferring to be a merchant of that which lasts forever. * Thus, you led the Irish nation to worship Christ, our God, * becoming the blessed father of a multitude of sons and daughters in the Lord.
*** Beg him now to save our souls.

From The Monks of New Skete, Troparia and Kondakia.

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The following interchange took place as I purchased beer at a convenience store on my way home from my extended family’s Christmas party tonight. The cashier was a cute brunette who sold me beer, so she was at least eighteen years old.

Cashier: May I see your ID?
Me (getting ID): You just made my day.
Cashier (looking at ID): Oh, you were born the same year as my mom!
Me (laughing) You just ruined my day.
Cashier: You’re still young.

Yeah. Right.

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“Seminary is where blogs go to die.”

Someone posted that on the true blog-killer, Facebook, and I laughed. I almost wrote, right here in the space where you’re reading these words instead of what I wanted to write, “And something clicked inside me.” But that something clicks a lot and not a damn thing ever happens.

Take, for example, my Greek studies; I’m probably going to fail that class. Am I having trouble understanding what the aorist is, you ask? Or perhaps getting moods mixed up: Confusing the subperative and the injunctive? Nope. The problem is that I’m not memorizing a damn thing. That’s my problem. I know this. Something inside me keeps on clicking, and nothing changes. Click. See? Nothing. Click-click-clicklicklicklicklicklick. Not. A. Damn. Thing.

Something else needs to start clicking deep down inside me.

I might rename this old beast. I named it Decimation and Reconstruction around seven years ago. The blog was itself only a few months old, a little over a year. The webserver hosting my blog (and those of several other men in my parish) was cracked and everyone’s blog was down for about a week. At the time I thought Decimation and Reconstruction nicely summarized what happened and coincidentally served as a nice metaphor for our lives. I have left the title in place for seven years now.

I think perhaps I should rename the blog. Something like “The Abomination of Desolation,” or “Desolation and Recrimination,” or some other play on a Latinate “-tion” ending. Something that reflects that reconstruction never really happens: What is happening is always destruction. Even when we think we’re rebuilding after a massive decimation, we are either deluding ourselves or we are just building another Babel for the next act of God to destroy.

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Who wins the clown of the day award? The two a——clowns that unnecessarily honked at me while I waited for a tow on a residential street. I had my hazard lights on, so no one else found such meanness necessary. Here’s to you, jerkoffs; you’re real cool. I hope someone honks in your ear next.

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“A glooming peace this morning with it brings.”

Well, actually old Sol is shining rather brightly in fair Yonkers this day; he must not be too full of sorrow. Nature, unlike the implied stage directions in the Bard, usually continues blithely on, reminding us that our lives, too, go on, whatever our joys and sorrows may be.

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“Bulgakov’s rejection of Marxism had a great deal to do with …the inadequacy of homo economicus [humanity defined by the economy]…. An account of human needs in terms of [economic determinism] leads — paradoxically — to an alienation… since it seeks a way out of personal struggle and growth, out of the risks of creativity. It sets up a mechanical opposition of economic interests, to be settled either by the logic of history (Marxism) or by the laws of the market (capitalism); but both resolutions sidestep the specifically human task of transfiguring the material world in and through the creation of community.” Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on Fr Sergius Bulgakov

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People sleep soundly in their beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do them harm.

I finally got tired of seeing this quoted (without irony). I decided to track it down. Here’s the skinny: It’s often attributed to George Orwell, a political observer and novelist, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, two novels about totalitarian regimes. That’s why I was suspicious. Orwell said that? I was thinking one of those two novels might be the source, meaning its context would be deeply ironic. As it turns out, Orwell didn’t say it. The other candidate, Winston Churchill, likely didn’t say it either.

• “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
  • Alternative: “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”
  • In his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism”, Orwell claimed that the statement, “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf” was a “grossly obvious” fact. “Notes on Nationalism”
  • Notes: allegedly said by George Orwell although there is no evidence that Orwell ever wrote or uttered either of these versions of this idea. They do bear some similarity to comments made in an essay that Orwell wrote on Rudyard Kipling, when quoting from one of his poems. Orwell did write, in his essay on Kipling, that the latter’s “grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” (1942)
    • “Yes, making mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep” – Rudyard Kipling (Tommy)
    • “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.” – Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men)
  • Alternative: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” – Winston Churchill (miscellaneous quotation, no date)

Source: Wikiquote

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These will go a long way to explain why Wesleyans (including Methodists, Nazarenes, Wesleyans, and others) consider it a religious duty to sing (and almost a sin not to).

1. Learn these tunes before you learn any others; afterwards learn as many as you please.
2. Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all; and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can.
3. Sing all. See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.
4. Sing lustily and with a good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sung the songs of Satan.
5. Sing modestly. Do not bawl, so as to be heard above or distinct from the rest of the congregation, that you may not destroy the harmony; but strive to unite your voices together, so as to make one clear melodious sound.
6. Sing in time. Whatever time is sung be sure to keep with it. Do not run before nor stay behind it; but attend close to the leading voices, and move therewith as exactly as you can; and take care not to sing too slow. This drawling way naturally steals on all who are lazy; and it is high time to drive it out from us, and sing all our tunes just as quick as we did at first.
7. Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven.

From John Wesley’s Select Hymns, 1761

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Last night, I dreamed a bizarre and frightening end. I don’t usually remember my dreams (though psychologists tell us we are always dreaming, even when we don’t remember). Of course, what I do remember is fragmentary.

I remember someone saying something about a nuclear blast. So I look up at the sky, and see what look like clouds in the shape of a mushroom cloud, much like all those films of above ground nuclear testing in the South Pacific. I said, “They’re just clouds!” Then there was a flash of light, and my heart started palpitating.

Next I recall huddling up close to the foundation of a house, while the firestorm of the explosion rushed by. Everything gets blurry at this point. Did any of my friends survive? No one who was with me at the moment of the explosion survived, but eventually there were other people, I think.

Was the explosion a single bomb over New York City, or had other cities been affected or attacked? Was only New York destroyed, was the entire world in ruins? These questions were never answered in my dream, but it seemed like everyone wanted to know, and no one did.

There were questions about what to eat, whether things were poisoned with radiation. Eventually, everyone decided that everything had been tainted, so there was no point in trying to meticulously ferret out safe foodstuffs. I guess it was a matter of eat the poison or starve to death, though no one ever said this out loud, that I recall.

Finally, I was alone, swimming naked in cold, clear water; the light refracted along the bottom was the color of the sky. I knew it was contaminated with radiation, but I dove in anyway and swam among ice formations that looked like human skulls.

That’s when I woke up and wondered why I keep dreaming of nuclear holocausts.

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A jester with a very large bauble
once tried to settle a squabble.
He laughed at the king,
and danced with the queen,
and now owns a penthouse in Kabul.

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