…When I returned to the cemetery, some years later, I was alone. As I walked the grounds, an old man in shorts and suspenders, in his short sleeves, rode back and forth along an adjacent road on his bicycle. In the distance, in the west, rain fell in a silent column from a swollen grey-blue cloud. The cemetery was not like any I am used to – those well-manicured lawns and uniform rows of the dead one encounters elsewhere. Instead, an old world cemetery, a Louisiana cemetery, a jumble of above-ground tombs of every shape and size, and because this is Acadiana, carved into the stone names that sound like birdsong: Donathilde, Euchariste, Phelonaise, Elodie. On one marker, a simple phrase declaring the hope of us all: ON VA SE VOIR UN JOUR – We’ll meet again one day…

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…We drove east toward the Black Hills across the blonde, burnt plains, through the Crow Agency and the rez of the Northern Cheyenne, volte-face of the route by which Custer’s Seventh Cavalry hurried toward their doom. After the quiet of the plains the Black Hills were agitating, unsettling – the crowds and the traffic; the RVs and trailers with brand names like Shasta, Cougar, Lariat, and Silverado; the souvenir shops peddling dreamcatchers, jewels, fossils, and gems; the billboards hawking caves, campgrounds, ‘50s diners, helicopter tours, ziplines, and personal injury attorneys specializing in motorcycle accidents; and behind it all an intricate web of historic preservation dedicated to the greed for gold, to whores and gunslingers – a land completely conquered and overrun – the heart of everything that is…

…featuring the work of Arthur Powers and the music of the Cimarron Kings.

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…In both Scripture and legend, the first musicians are remembered as the grandchildren of Cain, cast out from Adam’s more righteous descendants onto a dry and disused plain beyond the foothills of Paradise. Exiled among the devils of an earthen waste, given over to every manner of fornication, they fashioned harps and pipes, rattles and drums, and so with song and tumult lured their cousins – the children of Seth – from high places of worship down into depravity…

…featuring the work of Stanley Booth and the music of the Cimarron Kings.

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…Before we left New England, I went out into the yard and dug up the bones of our family cat, a black cat, hit by a car and killed some three or four years earlier, afterward wrapped in an old bath towel and laid to rest beneath the day lilies crowded outside our dining room window. When it came time to move we didn’t feel right leaving him behind, not knowing who might move in next and disturb him, disinter him, digging in the wet black earth – it might as well be us. So when we drove to Alabama there he was, his remains wrapped in plastic and tucked beneath the trunk mat, beside the spare tire, like Joseph carried up from Egypt by the sons of Israel into the promised land – our kitty not laid to rest in Schechem, of course, but rather in the shade of the pines outside our new home on the island…

…with work by Joshua Hren, K.P. Dyer, and Lesley Clinton, and featuring the music of the Cimarron Kings.

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…Christianity is a true crime religion. At its heart are scandal, treachery, and murder. Strange to think that we the people would ever turn away from Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, given the proclivities, the bloody entertainments, so beloved in this bloody land…. On the one hand, the Good God of the Universe - the Three-In-One, the One-In-Three – Maker and Destroyer of Worlds, condescended to shame among His creatures, with a brow to welcome thorns, with hands that did embrace the violence of the nail… In opposition, the peril implied by man as a rational creature, by the gift of love, that if it be real it must be free, and so must hold within itself the possibilities of rejection - the heart of man become not a temple but a void, the sensible become senseless, become welter and waste… And so, we live suspended - as though hung upon a cross - between two mysteries, between the Almighty and our equally unfathomable selves… Whichever way we turn we are confronted by the insoluble…

…with work by Joshua Hren, K.P. Dyer, and Lesley Clinton, and featuring the music of the Cimarron Kings.

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…So began in downtown Dallas the daily sacrifice, the faithful drawn together by the Eucharist – drawn by its hiddenness, its quotidian tastes of bread and wine, its incarnation a sign, a promise, of the divinization of all things born to die, an apprehension through belief redounding upon this mortal world and so reordering, recreating what was fallen. To stand before the Cross as blood and water spill from His side, to walk into the empty tomb and see the very vanquishment of Death, to witness in the breaking of the bread His fellowship and presence…

…with work by Anna Key, Rachel Kennedy, Mary R. Finnegan, and Stephen Kramp, and featuring the music of the Cimarron Kings.

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...For the genuine legacy of America’s first Catholic president was in neither the Apollo program nor the missile crisis, but in an outpouring of significance far beyond the ken of technological excellence or expertise. Norman Mailer, in hearing the first astonishing eyewitness reports from the moon, maintained it was “as if a man were descending step by step, heartbeat by diminishing heartbeat into the reign of the kingdom of death itself and he was reporting, inch by inch, what his senses disclosed.” Hyperbole, however poetic – for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had indeed gone to the moon, but no further. Instead, it was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, poor old glamorous Jack himself, like Orpheus, who’d gone alone into the underworld...

…with work by Anna Key, Rachel Kennedy, Mary R. Finnegan, and Stephen Kramp, and featuring the music of the Cimarron Kings.

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…But for you others with ears to hear – do you understand what I mean? I think I mean the end of that awful sense of waiting hanging over us, that’s hung over us now for years… a nation of distraction and idleness… of sexual bulimia, endless war… celebrating monsters… and all of us haunted bodies wandering in a haunted land, wondering if there really is any more ‘we’, or if it's only you and me alone, us and them, a sense that things have spun out of control and are headed toward some inevitable confrontation, some necessary reckoning… as though America in our time has to offer not wealth or progress or sweet dreams of a better life but rather apocalypse, the veil grown thin, the gaze transfigured, the truth itself beheld with awful clarity, awful intensity, ‘like shining from shook foil’…

…with work by Rachel Kennedy, Elisabeth Kramp, and Maria Illich, and featuring the music of the Cimarron Kings

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