Lament for Spilt Porter

Larry John Mccloskey

Description

During the past thirty years, Larry McCloskey has become an accomplished writer, while his day job/vocation has been working with students with disabilities. He wrote Lament for Spilt Porter with a sense of urgency born of the need to reconcile a haunting sense of loss with our muted desire to find our way home. The desire for home—how we fit into this life and anticipate the next—is our most basic spiritual impulse, fueling our hopes and fears, passions and pathologies. But sadly, for many of us, the hunger for home has been supplanted by the primacy of self, with predictable results. At a time and in a place of greatest affluence and freedom, with technological means to connect all of us at all times, many of us are unhappy, isolated and on the question of meaning, lost.
In the modern world, the individual rules without rules, but the cohesiveness of family and the need for home remains. Finding our way home and living the spiritually examined life has become more difficult in this warp speed modern distracted world. So maybe the only way forward Is to look back, rediscover the wisdom from the cast of characters that populate our past and informs our present, to find the miracle in the minutia, to go home.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Maturation
• Relationship
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Castle Quay Books
• Date de parution: 11 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781988928067
• Langue: English

Extrait

LAMENT FOR SPILT PORTER
Copyright ©2018 Larry J. McCloskey
All rights reserved
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-988928-05-0 Soft Cover
ISBN 978-1-988928-06-7 E-book
Published by: Castle Quay Books
Burlington, Ontario
Tel: [phone]
E-mail: [e-mail] | www.castlequaybooks.com
Edited by Marina Hofman Willard and Lori Mackay
Cover design and book interior by Burst Impressions
Printed at Essence Publishing, Belleville, Ontario
All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission of the publishers.
Unless otherwise marked, Scripture is taken from New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McCloskey, Larry J., 1955-, author
Lament for spilt porter : longing for family and home / Larry J.
McCloskey ; foreword by the honourable David C. Onley.

ISBN 978-1-988928-05-0 (softcover)

1. McCloskey, Larry J., 1955-. 2. Authors, Canadian (English)--
21st century--Biography. 3. Autobiographies. I. Title.

PS8575.C635Z46 2018 C813’.6 C2018-905678-9



To my parents Enie & Len, their generation, and a way of life that is no more.


A Note on the Title, Lament for Spilt Porter
When we were young, my mother occasionally drank porter in the evening, a black, foamy, Guinness-looking drink. She didn’t much like it, but her doctor once told her that it would help with her digestion problems, and my mother always did what her doctor told her to do. She never drank a full bottle, a half at most, usually more like a third. To keep the fizz from failing, she would faithfully put a plastic cap over her bottle of porter and place it back in the fridge for the next evening’s medicinal.
This tale does not go anywhere. Meaningless detail 40 or 50 years old. Still, if you think about the minutiae that inhabits our mind and evokes memories of people who matter to us, these snapshots of nothingness are our fodder for meaning.
A few years ago, I managed to wedge a three-day stopover in Dublin into a scheduled business trip to Britain. I immediately went to a pub to hear some live music. The pub setting was appropriately kitchen-like, with people gathered around a big wooden table. The Celtic band was very good and featured a banjo player who gave it a cool hillbilly edge. The banjo player impressed me by playing flawlessly at breakneck speed, as he consumed three pints of Guinness in one set alone. It occurred to me that one set of his porter-like looking Guinness would have served Mom’s medicinal purposes for several weeks. I doubt his consumption was related to doctor’s orders.
I liked the band enough to buy their CD. On it was a piece where the violin cries out as only the violin can do, with longing, regret, and, to this sentimental fool, bittersweet nostalgia. I play it often, and it evokes memories of—for reasons I cannot explain—home, both the one I grew up in and the other elusive one, the one we all long to return to one day. In particular the searing violin of “Lament for Spilled Porter” reminded me of my mother, her silly, innocuous routine and my inexplicable desire to return to distant trivial events now so fraught with meaning. Unable to play violin, I picked up my pen and wrote A Lament for Spilt Porter .
Writing requires a context—the people you are about to meet—and a beginning—the first few notes of the violin, and I am indebted to the people I have known and the many strangers in the night who have helped shape my warped mind, with a special nod to those lamenting, crying and connecting through music above and beyond the expression of mere words. Music, like faith, can neither be explained nor explained away.



The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are the words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W. B. Yeats


From Ode: Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
William Wordsworth


We are in the position of a child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books but doesn’t know what it is.
Albert Einstein, on God


The modern speeded up mind is the mind of a madman; the mind that is slowed down is the mind of a saint; stop the mind and you have the mind of God.
Vacile Posteuk, Romanian poet, Buchenwald survivor


The Beginning Is the End:
A Lament for Home
I am and have always been a sucker for nostalgia. Oddly, this is especially true of my parents’ generation, the Depression, the Second World War, and the exquisite flowering of optimism that followed, times that I never experienced but whose shared values and ways of life we boomers threw off in the 1960s and 1970s, without replacing them with anything in particular, and certainly nothing shared. For the truly perverse, it is possible to feel nostalgia even without direct experience.
I am also nostalgic for the without anything in particular that followed, a time when at least some of us just assumed that the important parts of our parents’ world would be carried forward. But no, we threw off the shared values and fashioned the world as we would have it, as young, stupid idealists tend to do. Forgive us, for we knew not what we did.
And so we put the memory of our parents’ world into the discarded past and rapidly moved forward. Our kids move forward, and they are having kids who will move forward at ever-accelerating speeds, reaching for the next best thing, without any sense that anything, certainly not anything of value, has been lost.
For all our rapid movement, it remains true that wherever you go, there you’ll be. And for all the hoopla over the next best thing, it generally turns out to be nothing more than ever-shortening periods of catching our breath and moving on again. Always motion, never still; always searching, never found.
I confess to being the world’s worst offender, constantly searching for some sort of deliverance in an expected future guaranteed to disappoint. For 30 years, I’ve run hard miles, distance running a perfect metaphor for the constant itch to move without destination, the need to frantically keep from feeling at the core. If this seems harsh, consider Blaise Pascal, 17th century French philosopher: “All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” Ouch. I am tempted to invoke the modern excuse for everything, “It’s not my fault.” Still, in my defense, my inability to sit still is tempered by this nagging voice of nostalgia. I have to move, but it is with an eye to the past, always, and with deep suspicion about the brave new world that is to be our liberating future.
Nostalgia will not win you any new friends or make you a hit at the cocktail party. The backward gaze is not something I recommend, and I’ve kicked myself for spending too much time in a state of nostalgia, but it won’t go away. Still, lately I’ve had this terrible tiny thought. Maybe I should stop trying to kill nostalgia. Maybe I should sit still in a room and think about it.
Maybe I should try to answer questions like this: Why is it that we would give anything for one more solitary minute with a departed loved one, while we often ignore, take for granted, hold grudges against, or just plain don’t get around to connecting with living so-called loved ones who are here, lined up to be soon among those dead whom we would give anything for one more solitary minute with? Just what are we moving toward at breakneck speed, and why do we place so much faith in frantic efforts that we could not begin to articulate without sitting still in a room for at least a few years? Why do we believe what we believe, why do we not believe what our parents and their paren