Weatherlessness

The view is from poet Alice Templeton's apartment in The Castro.  

The word 'weatherlessness' is from one of John Barth's postmodern novels (The End of the Road perhaps) read in the 1970's and remembered.

Alice's poems are far from weatherless, more resembling leaves swept up into small piles and set fire to, smoldering away somewhere in Tennessee.

Weatherlessness rather denoted the psychological phenomena of detachment from one's personal and political circumstances, neither surrender nor disinterested-ness but something far less engaged, an ignoble passivity.

One can see the raindrops but not feel the rain.

The US Supreme Court voted 8-1 yesterday that 'the police do not need a warrant to enter a home if they smell burning marijuana, knock loudly, announce themselves and hear what they think is the sound of evidence being destroyed'. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the lone dissent.

A new bill sponsored by House Republicans, part of the National Defense Authorization Act, would go much further than The Authorization for Use of Military Force approved by Congress the week after Sept. 11, 2001 "in allowing military attacks against any and all forces engaged in hostilities against the United States", and "allowing the president to detain belligerents until the temination of hostilities."

These two items, culled from The New York Times, May 17, 2011, might cause one to put a fist through a window.

John Barth, now 80, has written a 'new' (2008) book, The Development, which is a rigorously non-postmodern collection of stories set in a gated retirement community in Chesapeake Bay.

And poetry is praise, a spiritual exercise performed by those who believe, or disbelieve, and can't help but sing out about their condition.