Those Juggling Fire and Those in the Path of Hurricanes
Those Juggling Fire and Those in the Path of Hurricanes
I can remember the drive across the border from San Ysidro into Mexico as though I last did it yesterday, though it has been about two decades now, and doubtless everything about the particulars has changed since then.
Slowing to allow the patrol to briefly scan your still-moving car, just to conduct the instantaneous visual test to determine whether you are sufficiently suspicious to require stopping. When no one looks longer than a second or two and you continue on through the checkpoint that is mostly not a checkpoint, you accelerate back up to cruising speed and then follow the ramp around on to a main boulevard.
As you make this roundabout, a panorama of the city of Tijuana presents itself to your vision.
Another country that might as well be another world.
You coast along exhilarated, barely aware of the car’s tires on the road, as though breathing a different kind of air, somehow more fragrant and intoxicating, and affected by a greatly reduced gravitational force. Through the permeable barrier between the known and the unknown.
Then, at the first light off the freeway, they come out to greet you. They want to wash your windows sometimes.
And sometimes they are juggling fire.
They appear in a blur of motion, in seconds putting the flame to their batons, climbing precariously up on flimsy ladders or balancing on stilts, meticulously performing their well-practiced act, then extinguishing the batons and rushing about to collect coins from the cars before the light changes to green and all the potentially paying customers hurry off to their business.
And there are children with them, and sometimes they are children themselves. They often come from Oaxaca and Veracruz and Villahermosa, far to the south and the east, from a part of the country that might as well be on Pluto when one compares it with the borderland.
From dusty, narrow roads traversed by but a few cars a day, and the slow, quiet parade of country people who could have stepped from the pages of a work of history, to noise-polluted streets bordered by seas of plastic bottles and drunkards sleeping it off and an occasional pool of blood, and a whirlwind of traffic and seedy commerce and seedier transgressions and outright crimes and the full-on depravity of our species in its stomach-turning splendor.
One cannot look on those innocent babies, made too rapidly into something else, something unnatural, rushing to perform for coins at a traffic light in a city far from their home, without feeling as though this world might be a homeless world, an impossible and merciless world, a world wholly devoid of and unfit for love. I do not say it’s true, but it becomes easier to suspect it might be when one witnesses the performance of such disheartening dramas.
As inevitably as the dismal condition of the fire jugglers impresses itself on me when I am in Mexico, sitting in a car yards away from them, it just as effortlessly fades from my consciousness when I am elsewhere. Or rather when I am in other places where no fire jugglers in other guises are present.
They sprang into existence again in my mind today as I was watching video from Gulf Coast Florida, desperate images of the devastation produced by the hurricane, of people of every station in life left soaked and destitute, their cars and houses and every material belonging swept away in hellish wind and water, by a force of the natural world against which our vaunted intelligence and technology is nothing.
I thought anew of the impossible, merciless, loveless, and, for these desperate men and women now quite literally homeless world that produces the fire jugglers and the victims of hurricanes alike.
I prayed that they be comforted, that they find shelter and warmth and help and love. I prayed it with a sentiment at once hopeful and despairing, or rather alternatingly so, now with sadness and a terrible and oppressive agony, and now with confidence in the promise that the arc of the universe does indeed bend toward the healing of such wounds.
Those hostile to religious faith are contemptuous of the calls of the faithful for prayers for the suffering in such times. “Too easy, and too inconsequential,” they say. “DO SOMETHING REAL!”
It is true, material help is needed. But not instead of prayer. Indeed, can we ever know with certainty material aid is not itself a manifestation of the success of prayer, or at least, are we not forced to acknowledge that in at least some cases the prayer contributes to the motivation to act in other, more tangible ways?
Perhaps the prayer is not only for comfort and aid to those suffering, but also a cry by the anguished speaker of the prayer to change his own spirit. A request to be made by powers beyond him—for he has proven only too incapable of achieving the outcome on his own—into someone capable of more and deeper charity and brotherly love, someone who does not utterly, effortlessly forget the fire jugglers and the hurricane-pursued as soon as they are no longer before his eyes.
Someone who, when suffering comes to him, as it must, says aloud “What a gift, these tribulations! How blessed I am, and how much more compassion should I have for those not nearly so lucky, to be presented with challenges that are so easily superable, instead of those closer to the gravity faced by those juggling fire on the street for coins and fleeing hurricanes that have left them naked against the elements. And even when such unbearable burdens come to me, may I somehow find a way to sing a song of gratitude to this world that so cruelly forsakes me.”
Hi all,
I’ve been at this project now for a little more than six months. Hardly seems possible, but I just checked the calendar and I believe that is the right math.
So, this is a note to you: Thank you.
I’m tremendously flattered by your interest in what I have to say about life, art, politics, death and I’m grateful that you read my ramblings. Every writer desires to be read (Lovecraft’s letter accompanying his submission to an editor notwithstanding) and thus owes a debt that cannot really be repaid to readers, however much the writer sometimes pretends not to recognize this (it’s part of the persona, you see…).
So that’s something I want to be sure to say and say again: THANK YOU.
Now, the other reason for this little note.
I finally got around to doing the technical stuff necessary to provide a paid subscription option, and so that’s the “phase II” in the subtitle above.
What does a paid option mean?
It means it’s an option. At present, everything on this account remains open to all subscribers, paid or free. Even if I move at some currently unforeseen point to separating material here into paid and unpaid categories, I still plan to always make the great bulk of it available when it’s produced without cost to everyone interested in seeing it. I’m tremendously appreciative that you read this site and want to do everything I can to ensure you continue to be interested in doing so.
I am hopeful though, and I make so bold as to ask, that if you have a few extra dollars rattling around, you’ll consider kicking some of them my way to help make it more feasible for me to spend more time on this project.
Inevitably, and despite my deepest feelings about writing, I think at least a bit about possible material returns when I am allocating time to writing projects. I have two kids who eat and are in constant need of new clothes and a house in which things are constantly breaking down. Add to that the fact that, to my great regret, I do not have infinite time to dedicate to writing, and it emerges necessarily that sometimes the possibility of writing things for pay trumps writing things here. This is so even though I much prefer writing here precisely because it allows me more freedom to engage with the topics I find most interesting.
If I can generate some paid subscriptions, then, I can spend more time doing this writing, the writing I most care about, and the writing that I hope you find valuable. If I generate enough, I may even finally find enough time and energy to get around to dipping my toes into Podcast World, which is professionally speaking probably the last thing I should do, given my tendency to say things that get me into trouble, but YOLO, as I’ve heard they say.
I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription and, whatever your decision on that, I look forward to writing more for you as Phase II gets underway. Should you decide to “go paid,” you need only click the button below and it should lead you in the right direction.
Cheers, and thanks again! And very special thanks to those who have already switched to a paid subscription!
ATR