Monday, February 27, 2017

Neil Gorsuch? Originalism and the Ten Commandments


Current Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch claims that judges should “apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be ....” On its face, this is at best an odd claim. Laws are generally forward looking in their desire to govern future behavior. And even if we could always focus back to determine legal meaning, why would we want to disconnect meaning from ongoing life in such a way? Why, for example, should the absence of email in George Washington’s day mean our modern use of email isn’t covered by our modern notions of “speech”? Excluding email from “speech” today would be silly and we have refined “speech” to include email in both law and in life. Of course, if we refine meaning for “speech” and “email,” why shouldn’t we do the same for other things in other contexts as they change with time? It’s hard to see how Originalism’s odd backwardness isn’t fatal from the outset.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Rethinking The Elect


                            The Elect

Take that long-suffering slave:  if she instead
Were master, could descent dissent and shed
Vile arrogance slaves shirk and in its stead
Renounce the life that life inherited?

Take that starved, broken pauper:  if instead
Of life so harsh he often would be dead
He had a fuller purse, was fuller fed
Would he have known to offer paupers bread?

Take that queer soul who's “different”:  if instead
He'd turned out “normal” would he think a dead
Queer's better than a live one, too, and spread
Intolerance majorities have bred?

Is this not Grace?  Spared from such tests as these,
Has God not favored his minorities?

In a time of Trump when I fear many devalue diversity and many more do not see the frequent grace in minority, struggle, and lack of material wealth, I highlight this poem from Charms and Knots.  I also highlight the poem for a time when many no longer appreciate the endless powers of formalist verse.  Apart from the inherent power of sonnet form, twelve same-rhymed lines followed by two fresh rhymes actually participate in the grace and rarity of difference (indexical expression of the point to use Peirce's terminology).


Sunday, February 5, 2017

Ekphrasis & Prose: Sonnet Translations of Poe & Hawthorne


I sometimes wonder whether a prose piece should have been verse from the outset.  Could the deep meaning have been more effectively captured and conveyed by poetic form than by prose?  I've wondered that, for example, in the case of Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death."  With no illusions that Poe's sonnet wouldn't have been much better, here's a concrete example of what I mean: 

Shadow After Poe 

We noticed there was pestilence about.
We played instead of passive victim an
Aggressive agent capable of plan
And execution.  In, we locked it out,

A simple action, really, which we sealed
With weighty velvet curtains drawn across
An iron door bolted tight.  “Our gain, Hell’s loss!”
We toasted with good bourbon and were steeled.

“God helps who helps himself,” we boasted till
We saw a shadow by a comrade still
And cold throughout the reverie.  It hid

As quick within the heavy draperies.  Did
Drink fool?  No.  Oh, no fancy has composed
Such vast lost voices in a single ghost.

I've also wondered the same about individual passages in longer works.  Here, for example, is a bit of Hawthorne's The House of The Seven Gables set to sonnet form:

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Originalism and the Fall of Icarus



Well, here we go again. With Neil Gorsuch as the current Supreme Court nominee, once more we hear praises of “originalism” as a judicial interpretive philosophy. As Gorsuch puts it, judges should “apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be . . . .” Since law generally looks forward to govern future and not past behavior, and since context drives meaning in much more complex ways than Gorsuch’s words suggest, I’m amazed that people take this backward-looking and overly-simplistic philosophy seriously. I’ve written at length about the problems with such an approach but now also wonder if an old painting might more quickly dispatch such error.

Saturday, January 7, 2017

Two Performance Review Mantras (“Mercy and Truth Are Met Together; Righteousness & Peace Have Kissed”)



I. Mantra For Myself

I smile if I have shown a light.
I smile if I if I have aimed at right.
I smile if I have done my best.
Imperfect, I’ve no other test.

II. Mantra For Others

I smile if they have shown a light.
I smile if they have aimed at right.
I smile if they have done their best.
Imperfect, they’ve no other test.



Saturday, December 10, 2016

Wake Forest Law Review Publishes "Revisiting Langdell: Legal Education Reform & The Lawyer's Craft"



The Wake Forest Law Review has published its 2015 Legal Education Reform Symposium volume entitled Revisiting Langdell: Legal Education Reform & The Lawyer's Craft.  The volume can be purchased here and I hope it will make a positive difference in legal education reform. 

My introductory article in the volume highlights longstanding, substantial damage Christopher Columbus Langdell has inflicted on law schools and legal education. Much of this damage stems from three of Langdell’s wrong and counterintuitive notions: (1) law is a science of principles and doctrines known with certainty and primarily traced through case law; (2) studying redacted appellate cases is “much the shortest and best, if not the only way” of learning such law; and (3) despite Langdell’s own roughly fifteen years of practice experience, practice experience taints one’s ability to teach law. I briefly highlight problems with, and harms resulting from, each of these wrong notions. Among other things, I briefly explore: (A) contradictions, oversights, and wrong assumptions in Langdell’s views; (B) how the very meanings of “theory” and “practice” reject Langdell; (C) how the necessary role of experience in meaning itself rejects Langdell; (D) parallels between Langdell and unworkable Cartesian dualism; and (E) how the necessary role of framing in the law rejects Langdell. I also briefly survey some remedies suggested by reason, experience, common sense, and modern cognitive psychology. These include rejecting the redacted appellate case method as a primary mode of instruction, recognizing the necessary fusion of theory and practice, recognizing the need for practice experience in law professors, recognizing the embodied nature of meaning and the resulting role of practice and simulation in good legal education, embracing the humanities (including classical rhetoric) in legal education, abandoning meaningless distinctions such as distinctions between “doctrinal” and “non-doctrinal” courses, and abandoning “caste” systems demeaning those with law practice experience and elevating those who lack such necessary experience.  My introduction can be found here.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Pat McCrory Should Think Twice Before Trying To Pack The North Carolina Supreme Court


In this month’s North Carolina Supreme Court elections, Democrat Michael Morgan soundly defeated Republican Robert Edmunds thereby shifting control of the Court from Republicans to Democrats by a margin of one. With no Court vacancies “currently occurring” which Republican Governor Pat McCrory could fill to shift control back to Republicans, rumors are afoot that Pat McCrory will soon call a special session of the North Carolina General Assembly where the General Assembly will “create” two new Supreme Court “vacancies” for McCrory to “fill” with Republican justices. If this is true, it would not only be a stunning rebuke of democracy. It could well be unlawful under a best reading of the North Carolina Constitution.

                                                     Click here for remainder of post

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Blake Within Blake Within Blake Without End


As I have written before, the great William Blake magnificently employed signs beyond mere words in his poetry.  His powerful illustrations of verse add much additional meaning to his work.  As I have noted before, his symbols such as words are greatly supplemented by other types of signs such as the iconic signs of his drawings.  He applied these same principles in reverse in his great illustrations of the verse of other poets such as Thomas Gray and Edward Young.  Such illustrated verse injects blocks of symbols within Blake's icons, and it can be fascinating to replace these blocks of others' symbols with additional iconic expressions by Blake himself.  Blake's illustrations repeat common themes and can build on each other in such fascinating exercises.  I think Blake would enjoy seeing others doing this with with his icons, and I would enjoy seeing how others might attempt the endless possibilities of such substitutions.  For example, in the illustration above I have replaced Gray's verses about the "Stern Rugged Nurse" with one of Blake's illustrations of Urizen, the severe god of reason who traps the imagination with his compasses and strict categories.  The compass in fact is an awful symbol for Blake.  It's no accident that the "Stern Rugged Nurse" has one in her hand just like Urizen.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Beyond Words Alone: Poets as Artists of the Intentional


 

In his wonderful The New Book of Forms, Lewis Turco tells us that poets “focus on mode, on language itself.”  Focusing on language, a poet in Turco’s view is therefore an “artist of language; his or her concentration is upon the language itself.”  Taken this way, “[p]oetry can thus be defined as the art of language.”

Though these definitions of poets and poetry are correct as far as they go, they do not go far enough. Poets are artists of the intentional; they are artists using signs that point to things beyond the signs themselves.  Since words are not the only signs, why should poets limit themselves to words?  Using C.S. Peirce’s terminology, there are in fact three kinds of signs: symbols (arbitrary signifiers such as words), icons (signifiers such as paintings that resemble what they signify), and indexes (signifiers like photographs or weathervanes that participate in what they signify).  In the realm of symbols, why should poets limit themselves to words?  In the broader realm of signs, why should poets ignore icons and indexes?  They should not of course, and William Blake gives us excellent proof.   

Sunday, August 21, 2016

LBJ's Villanelle: Old Chamberlain & Chambers of the Heart (Addition to "The Apology Box")




The Johnson name shall live forevermore
At home and overseas.  Of virile heart,
I shall not risk the loss of any war.

I’ll slay Jim Crow and poverty before
Another president can steel the part--
The Johnson name shall live forevermore.

I shall not ape old Chamberlain though war
Endangers plans at home. I've rhetoric's art--
I shall not risk the loss of any war.

No hypocrite, I've nitroglycerin for
Myself as well and lob it at my heart--
The Johnson name shall live forevermore.

Though pills roll out my mouth, I've countless more
To keep me standing as I ply my art:
"I shall not risk the loss of any war.

No, we shall overcome Jim Crow, the gore,
The jungles, and old chambers of the heart.
The Johnson name shall live.  Forevermore,
I shall not risk the loss of any war."


© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.









Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Cognitive Emotion and the Law


Many wrongly believe that emotion plays little or no role in legal reasoning. Unfortunately, Langdell and his “scientific” case method encourage this error. A careful review of analysis in the real world, however, belies this common belief. Emotion can be cognitive and cognition can be emotional. Additionally, modern neuroscience underscores the “co-dependence” of reason and emotion. Thus, even if law were a certain science of appellate cases (which it is not), emotion could not be torn from such “science.”

As we reform legal education, we must recognize the role of cognitive emotion in law and legal analysis. If we fail to do this, we shortchange law schools, students, and the bar in grievous ways. We shortchange the very basics of true and best legal analysis. We shortchange at least half the universe of expression (the affective half). We shortchange the importance of watching and guarding the true interests of our clients, which interests are inextricably intertwined with affective experience. We shortchange the importance of motivation in law, life, and legal education. How can lawyers understand the motives of clients and other relevant parties without understanding the emotions that motivate them? How can lawyers hope to persuade judges, other advocates, or parties across the table in a transaction without grasping affective experience that motivates them? How can law professors fully engage students while ignoring affective experience that motivates students? Finally, we shortchange matters of life and death: emotions affect health and thus the very vigor of the bar.

Using insights from practice, modern neuroscience, and philosophy, I therefore explore emotion and other affective experience through a lawyer’s lens. In doing this, I reject claims that emotion and other affective experience are mere feeling (though I do not discount the importance of feeling). I also reject claims that emotion and other affective experience are necessarily irrational or beyond our control. Instead, such experience is often intentional and quite rational and controllable. After exploring law and affective experience at more “macro” levels, I consider three more specific examples of the interaction of law and emotion: (i) emotion, expression, and the first amendment, (ii) emotion in legal elements and exceptions, and (iii) emotion and lawyer mental health. To provide lawyers and legal scholars with a “one-source” overview of emotion and the law, I have also included an Appendix addressing a number of particular emotions.

The article can be found here.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Fourth Circuit Strikes Down Discriminatory Provisions of Gov. Pat McCrory's North Carolina Voter Suppression Law



The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down provisions of Gov. Pat McCrory’s “omnibus” election law requiring photo identification in form blacks are less likely to have and requiring changes to early voting, same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration all in ways carefully calculated to adversely affect black voters.  The full text of the opinion merits careful reading and can be found here. The bill’s “almost surgical precision” (the Court’s words) in disenfranchising black voters should shock everyone’s conscience regardless of party affiliation.

Though highlights of the opinion are no substitute for reading the entire opinion, I realize not everyone will have time to read the entire opinion.  I therefore have redacted some of the critical language and insert it below in the order appearing in the opinion.  I have omitted or shortened internal citations and have bolded certain provisions that seemed particularly important to me.  Although this is no substitute for reading the opinion in full, here goes:

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Ballade of Charles Sanders Peirce: That Common Measure of the Number Three (An Addition to "The Apology Box")


      Ballade of Charles Sanders Peirce

A "candle" burns a finger, lights a room--
The only sense that "candle" has is how
It might unfold in our experience.
Experience is "firstness" unified.
It's "secondness" upon division.  And
It's "thirdness" in relating separate parts.
Three categories mix.  We'll often see
That common measure of the number three.

A "candle" is a sign one can dissect.
Such word's a signifier pointing to
An object and a meaning of the word.
Since arbitrary, words are symbols though
Resemblance also signifies (icons)
As does participation (indices).
In parts and types of signs, again we see
That common measure of the number three.

We'd waste our time to doubt a sign unless
We're given cause within experience.
If so, we question what is plausible.
We then inquire what might be probable.
That done, we then examine likelihood.
In threes, hypotheses, deductions, and
Inductions wrestle doubt.  Again we see
That common measure of the number three.

James erred in his conception of the truth.
Instead, life's trinities are tilting toward
Real truth that casts a shadow we can see:
That common measure of the number three.


© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.


Friday, July 15, 2016

Pope Urban II's Double Sonnet: Red Fields and Lucious Palaces (Addition to "The Apology Box")


        Pope Urban II’s Double Sonnet

                               I.

Although we were God's advocate below,
We were a child of Adam, too, brought low
By sin.  We therefore beg forgiveness though
We did our duty.  Bravely, we brought low

The infidels.  Our rhetoric called men to
Jerusalem with swords in hand as Christ
Himself commanded.  Fields ran red with sliced-
Up children, men, expectant mothers, too--

The serpent crushed within the egg can't grow
To blaspheme God or strike at others.  Though
Much bloody work, we had no choice.  Our trust

As shepherds left no option--shepherds must
Protect their lambs.  The Eastern fields ran red
With menaces that shepherds rightly bled.

                                    II.

We tended, too, our wandering sheep inside
The one true church. Thus, to our eastern side
We led the roaming churches back to Rome
While bringing, too, more unity at home

Among the many Occidentals who
Now shared a common venture.  Joined anew,
They focused on a foreign infidel
And Grace that comes from others sent to Hell--

Though we regret our actual person could
Not quit Rome's luscious palaces.  We would
Have joined the foreign danger, blood, and grind

Had our position not kept us behind.
A headless body could not wage a war.
We were the head and lodged in Rome therefore.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Monday, July 11, 2016

Wittgenstein's Sonnet: No Pictures See Themselves (Addition to "The Apology Box")




    Wittgenstein’s Sonnet


When I was young, words worked a different way.
We hung them round like pictures on a wall
To replicate real objects.  Words used ink
Instead of photographic plates and dyes.

In replication either method worked
So long as illustration captured truth
By rendering objects as they really are.
What more to say?  It all seemed obvious

Until I pictured pictures without us.
No pictures see themselves, their objects, or
A world that is unfiltered by a mind.
Words and their objects are no different.  Thus,

Duck-rabbits now play games within the mind
Where certainty's more difficult to find.




© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Double Sonnet of William James: Grace That Brings Good Order in the Head (Addition to "The Apology Box")


            Double Sonnet of William James

                                   I.
  
Descartes, pure mind and body can't be kept
Apart as claimed.  Drawn from experience,
They share a common nature, common sense
That both derive from shared experience.

I am therefore a monist.  I accept
That all is drawn from pure experience:
The body, mind, and all relations.  Hence,
Truth, too, must come from shared experience.

Truth is what works in shared experience.
With free will, physics is indifferent.  Hence,
Determinism turns on how we find

An absence of free will.  Because we find
Determinism horrid, we are led
To free will's higher order in the head.

                            II.

Descartes, why suffer needless doubt except
When something fails to work.  There's little sense
In doubting for the sake of doubt. I've kept
So many years of James I see no sense

In doubting James.  Efficiencies accept
That James exists until experience
Astounds such thinking--I of course accept
Doubt when thought stumbles with experience.

For me, religious doubt makes little sense.
Belief in God disturbs no physics.  Hence,
If God brings better order to my mind,

I'd err denying God.  Of tender mind,
I savor God and angels overhead,
And grace that brings good order in the head.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Ishmael's Sonnet: Built As "Normal" Boys (Addition to "The Apology Box")


            Ishmael’s Sonnet
                        
They called me Ishmael.  I was a first
Who wrestled with the "bastard" name though I
Was built as "normal" boys.  With Mother, I
Was cast into the desert.  Struggling first,
 
I'd often hide myself.  I'd lie about
My essence in some feint of normalcy
That let me pass.  As I was outwardly
A normal boy, I need not always out

Myself.  And yet the loss of me within
Such phantom lives did further damage. In
Such feints I slandered parents, slandered, too,
The Lord whose kingdom lay within me, too.

I therefore washed my mouth.  "I am" replaced
The "stain" of "bastard" washing had erased.



© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Simon Magus: Beyond Your Heaven and Beyond Your Hell (Addition to "The Apology Box")



        Simon Magus's Case*

Stand back, Jehovah!  I do not concede
Your jurisdiction over me. Instead,

I’ve secret knowledge shared among the wise
Of greater gods that reign above your head
And rest unstained by your Creation here.

Before this secret knowledge made me wise,
Men used to drag me to your temples where
They made me watch the helpless lambs within
Writhe as men slit their bleeding, bleating throats.
It was no better outside than within. 
There children starved and there poor animals
Would tear themselves apart in roles you made
Of prey and predator.  I saw the scrolls
Recounting other evils you had done.
You made the devil.  You made man without
A sense of right and wrong then punished him
For disobeying orders not to learn
That difference giving knowledge of your wrongs. 
You tainted Lilith and her progeny
Though she obeyed and never bit the fruit.
You baited Cain to murder by your whim
Of arbitrary anger at his gift.
You killed by indiscriminate deluge
Both beasts and infants that could not have sinned.
The common language of survivors you
Destroyed at Babel where (to add insult)
You forced your syllables on men though you
Had once told Adam he could name the world.
You tortured Abraham with felony,
Made him conspire with you to kill his son.
You baited Sodom with slick angels so
You might destroy again--this time with fire.
You burned up infants, animals, and turned
Flesh salt before a husband's frightened eyes.
You tortured your good servant Joseph in
A foreign land whose tongue he did not know
In a repeat of Babel’s cruelty.
Your mind on Egypt then, you unleashed plagues
So horrid I would rather not recount
The sufferings of men or beasts whose blood
You craved on doors or threw down from the sky
Or swallowed up attached to chariots
Beneath the crashing waves that closed on those
Not choked in waters turned to blood before.
For forty years you marched men in the sand
Where you dispensed bizarre rules governing
Such things as beards and testicles of priests.
You called these “laws” so you could claim the right
And pleasure of your awful penalties.
Bored with the desert, you then turned to war
Both in the taking and the keeping of
A “promised land,” an oxymoron of
Word rightly kept to steal another’s ground.

Not only does such evil bring you down.
Your very mouth betrays you, too: "I am
A jealous god!”  Such jealousy requires
An object.  By your own admission you
Have competition and are not supreme. 
Consistent with us both, I thus reject
Your sovereignty Jehovah.  I would dwell
Beyond your heaven and beyond your hell.

*Simon Magus was a Gnostic who tried to solve the problem of evil by creating another and better realm beyond the one in which we live.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Witch of Endor's Double Sonnets: I Accept No Words for Me Except My Own (Addition to "The Apology Box")

    Witch Of Endor’s Double Sonnets

                            I.

I can't deny that I've known sorcery.
Men's words have cast their spells transforming me
Into a "witch" through verbal alchemy
Purporting to change essences of me.

I am a medium I will admit
But there's no shame or villainy in it.
How can it be an evil if I lend
A tongue to Heaven?  Hypocrites defend

The man who does the same when they declare
A "prophet" in their midst though they would tear
A woman into shreds who has the gift--

Unless of course a woman is more swift
In raising Samuel's ghost when trembling men
Must see it quick.  It's right to use her then.

                       II.

At men's request I raised up Samuel's ghost
That wore white veils across its sunken head
And mouth:  "Saul and his sons will soon be dead!"
Saul blanched and swooned. Now done with Samuel's ghost,

Men scorned my charity.  Not needed more,
I was a witch again good men abhor
And suffer not to live--though oddly men
Who have such powers are most godly men.

I  spat upon their terms, spat out my own,
And recognized no languages where few
Monopolize all prophets for themselves

In "piety" no doubt attempting to
Monopolize all profits for themselves.
I accept no words for me except my own.


© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Sonnet of John The Baptist (Addition to "The Apology Box")


             John The Baptist’s Sonnet
                    (A nomadic herald)

My one principal was God and as
His agent my one principle was God.
One principal and principle meant I
Ignored all call of urban artifice.

God tailored camels for a desert life.
Therefore, I clothed myself in camel skins--
How could mere John design a better wrap? 
With similar logic, I would not  rethink

The locust beans and honey God served there
That I preferred to any urban fare.
I was God's pristine voice that wilderness

Kept pure enough for Christ himself to hear--
Though urban folk were deaf and  Salome
Would have the mouth, not words upon a tray. 


© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Ballade of King John (Addition to "The Apology Box")

                   Ballade Of John Lackland*
            (English king & Richard I's brother)

Although I spilled much blood in France, I would
Have spared it had I means.  But they gave me
No choice.  Vast English lands within France could
Not spurn their sovereign with impunity.
When Anjou, Maine, Poitou and Brittany
Rebelled, I therefore fought.  What choice had one
Who held the crown, who must thus faithfully
Protect the English realm?  God's will be done.

Yet, when the fighting came home, too, I would
Not fight those barons who might murder me
And bring down England, too.  I understood
Consent under duress is legally
Not binding.  With such practicality
I saved the crown and nation.  Having done
So, I proved John would ever faithfully
Protect the English realm.  God's will be done.

Likewise, I fought that "Innocent" who would
Behind misnomers do his treachery
(Like wolves in sheep skin).  Therefore, I withstood
That scheming Roman priest across the sea
Who smelled our English lambs here grazing free.
He would have fleeced them had the Lord picked one
Less faithful, had the Lord not ordered me:
"Protect the English realm!" God's will be done.

O Lord, I only ask for serving thee
Long days for Albion.  When anyone
Presents a threat, King John will forcefully
Protect the English realm.  God's will be done!


*According to various sources, the poet’s 24th great-grandfather through Thomas Yale and 26th great-grandfather through Anne Lloyd Yale.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Ezekiel: The Universe Leaps Over Heart & Head (Addition to "The Apology Box")

Ezekiel’s Double Sonnet
                                                               (A prophet of the exile)
                         I.

A rift ran down the middle of my soul
With halves that tugged perpetually at war
And kept me torn as both a priest and man.
I found that rules and that exceptions can

Be true at once.  Though contradictory,
We must have justice, must have mercy, too,
And must have death although we hear the din
Of dusty bones redressing into skin.

A nation must be punished for its sin,
A nation made of aggregates where one
Thus bears the guilt of all although no one
Is guilty for the deeds another's done:

The father's never guilty for the son
Nor is the child for what the father's done.

                        II.

God's scroll was written to be read. Yet, God
Fed me the message, too.  Sad to the ear
Words somehow tasted honeyed to the tongue.

In honeyed thought, I thought of being young
In Israel again although I knew
That logic stays me.  God, though, had free hand

To seize my hair and whisk me off to stand
Outside the temple walls. I found a hole
Within one wall and peered in where I saw

Beyond facades, beyond exterior awe
To inner awe that dwarfed all things that we
(However wise) have ever felt or said.

The universe leaps over heart and head
Whose terms of course can't curb a universe
Whose essence always brings it back to God.

 © Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here

Sunday, June 26, 2016

The Brexit Vote Was "No" Not "Yes"


In any reasonable sense of a "federal" referendum, the United Kingdom did not vote to quit the European Union.  (I put "federal" in quotes because I know that the United Kingdom is not a federation in the American sense.  However, I use the term because I believe that the United Kingdom must figure out a workable federalism if it is to survive.)

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Caesar, Antony, & Brutus (Additions to "The Apology Box")


     Julius Caesar Joins His Cousins

Hail cousins in Olympus!*  Like you, I
Have intervened throughout the world.  I warred
Not just in Rome but in far regions, too,
As god in man no doubt is prone to do.

Why not go far in war since I must war
Regardless?  God and man are opposites
And thus could not keep truces long in me.
They often warred and shook me violently.

I wondered how the two in me were mixed:
Were they both loose?  Were they together chained?
Was one a cage that kept the other pent?
Did they conjoin in some third element?

However joined, despite all paradox,
I came. I saw. I conquered.  I now thank
Rome's daggers that the incarnation's past,
That I'm a pure and quakeless god at last.

*He was an epileptic whose family claimed descent from Venus.





            Brutus’s Defense

Did we do murder?  Not on Caesar’s watch.
Crime is defined within some rule of law.
His tyranny suspended rule of law.

Did we do evil?  Not in killing him
When reason would instead condemn the hands
Refusing reason and its pure demands.

We rescued reason when our blades brought down
The despot flaunting it.  And if we should
Now balance pain, we find the common good

We did outweighs the suffering Caesar felt.
We should be stoic, too, and recognize 
That fate spins narratives and thus denies

The choice required for blame.  And yet so what?
The finest reason never dulls the pain
As past replays itself time and again:

The awful cries, the sounds of blades against
The spine, the red spurts, then the vacant stare
As rigor mortis seizes Caesar there.

I am no hypocrite.  I've suffered, too,
In righting Rome vile Caesar had abused.
I need no flogging.  I'm already bruised.




            Marc Antony’s Defense

Will future generations laud my name?
No. History is pillage victors own.
The vanquished are deprived of it--and yet
I stand before the gods with no regret
Or fear.  The judgment of the gods, I know,
Is never swayed by pillaging below.

Before I fell, in Athens they hailed me
As a new Dionysus.  They were right.
I saw beyond convention.  Nature was
My measure--not some antique prejudice
That drew a line between the West and East.
Uncritical acceptance in me ceased:

I freed my mind and heart to analyze
All things in truth, not prejudice.  I spurned
The ancient, awful bigotry of Rome
Permitting one the lowest Roman wife
Yet banning Cleopatra as a bride.
Pure truth advised me, too, when Caesar died.

I would not profit from his murder.  I
Embraced the bloody vessel that once held
Great Caesar and I promised my revenge.
Whatever evil men might say of me,
I was a loyal friend who also dared
To free both mind and heart Rome once impaired.


© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

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