Stabilitas Loci: Packing Up the Desert (Part I)

Please excuse the most recent paucity of writing, I’m moving again. Again. More accurately, I am homeless. Placeless. Spatially confused. Etc.

This whole blog is dedicated to being misplaced in time, anachronistic (see blog title). This, I thought, would be perfect because when I embarked upon my doctoral program in History several years ago, I always sensed that being a misplaced citizen of the kingdom of time simply comes with the territory of being a historian.  What I didn’t expect, however, is how lost in kingdom of spatial reality I would become. Yet, somehow, that is exactly what has happened. Moving twelve times in the last eleven years will do that to a person, I suppose. So will moving twelve hours south of one’s hometown in order to start graduate school. So will moving six times in the five years since starting those graduate degrees. So will holding temporary teaching jobs in several states over one’s college and graduate degree. So will relocating to Germany for a year and a half for doctoral research. So will having a boyfriend who lives in Canada but is originally from Greece. So will conducting research not only in German but also Latin and sometimes koine Greek. So will attending churches whose liturgies are either solely in Slavonic Russian or Greek.  So will relocating to Europe and coming home for a whirlwind month of moving one’s possessions into storage, visiting friends in Canada, Wisconsin, Ohio, and …

Dizzy yet? I must be, too.

And my alarm clock is evidently as dizzy as I am. This morning, it awoke me at 7:38 for a 7:30 breakfast appointment with my doctoral advisor, Sigrun. Like most mornings, I lay in bed for several minutes solving the existential questions of the day: where am I? What language do we speak here? How long am I here for? After managing to brush my hair and teeth, I jumped into my car and drove 70 mph up the hill to the bagel shop.  Twenty minutes late, I ran inside huffing and puffing. When finally we had our breakfast ordered and the first sips of our coffees imbibed, the sleepy haze in my mind began to clear.

                “Are you awake?” Sigrun asked, spreading her usual raspberry jam onto her sesame seed bagel—no butter, no cream cheese. Just jam.

              “Physically, yes,” I murmured, through a sip of Brueggers’ Bagels hazelnut coffee. “But in most other ways feel like I am walking around in a daze.”

                Sigrun nodded as though she understood perfectly, probably because she actually did. She had just flown back from a nine-day conference in Australia, before which she had just returned to Cincinnati from a summer in Germany. For her, this was something of a way of life. She was about as lost in time and place as I was.

                “Yes,” she commented after a while. “There’s something to be said for a settled life.” I bit into my bagel.

                “Stabilitas loci,” I commented absently. We both nodded knowingly.

                Stabilitas loci is one of those Latin terms I just love. It means, literally, “stability of place.” Beyond a sort of poetic simplicity the phrase conjures up, for Sigrun and me it carries perhaps an added significance, given that we are sort of academic nomads in this world. In fact, I first learned the term from Sigrun herself—in the first History of Christianity class I took from her the second year of my Master’s degree. Perhaps it is because I never moved much before college. Perhaps it is because I have this girlish notion that in my heart of hearts, I am just this small town proverbial farm girl whose life purpose is to milk cows on the same land her grandparents have tilled for five centuries. Perhaps it’s because whenever life gets too crazy, my best friend and I jokingly vow to leave this world behind and become nuns so that we can get some existential peace and quiet around here ("here" being this whole living in the twenty first century thing, which we've never quite gotten the hang of). Or perhaps it’s just because I am so sick and tired of moving. Whatever the case, stabilitas loci has got me thinking more than ever before. Words, I think, are not just words. They are, in and of themselves, entire stories, histories. Words are Worlds.Even the dead words and terms, like stabilitas loci, are fossils that have preserve within them the living memory of concepts and realms we still need today...

               Stabilitas loci refers to a particular way of organizing social systems in the late Roman empire (i.e. between about 250 AD and the 470s, when the western empire finally fell). It is the notion that the head or patriarch of a family or artisan group should be devoted to that group and its place for a long duration of time. Constancy. Loyalty. It is the notion that political continuity and social order can only be preserved through geographic fidelity to a community or its place.

                The Roman Empire fell officially in 476, when Rome was sacked by the Germanic chieftain with the horrendous (but cool) name of "Odoacer" (rhymes with "whacker" as in "weed whacker" 'cause he seriously weed-whacked the crap out of that city). But even if in the end, Rome may have succumbed rather quickly, entire empires never crumble overnight.  Rome and its disparate subsidiaries had been threatened by tribes and other belligerent forces for centuries, even if externally the empire appeared to be growing and conquering. It had grown overstressed, overextended, even overly diverse.  And as the the late western Roman empire began to deteriorate within itself, the cohesiveness among its territories and political actors eroded not only at the highest levels of imperial authority, but also on the lower levels of ordinary social networks like families and estates.

                We speak of this time period as “late antiquity” or the “late Roman empire.” It was, one could say, the autumn of antiquity. The vibrance of cities, not to mention the roads connecting them, was slowly changing, falling into structural and political dilapitation from the life-giving trunk of Rome. Social networks and communities slowly followed suit. Soon, the cold death of winter would follow, to which some people refer as the “dark ages,”(1) that lasted from about 500 to 800 AD. What was dead during this wintering of western civilization, was an overarching political authority and social order. Cities—a staple of stable, centralized governance--disappeared and in their place, tribal and frankish clans looked after their own. Isolated groups across the European countryside built their own settlements, warring against one another for food and territory, leaving precious few artifacts of culture and civilization behind.

With the chill of Europe’s harsh civilizational winter setting in, stabilitas loci soon became a forgotten notion of the antique past, an ideal.

~*~

                One way we try to make sense of circumstances and changes in our lives is to speak of “seasons.” I’m going through a “season,” we say, of change, or a “season” of struggling, or a “season” of a heavy workload. One reason we talk like this, I think, is to convince ourselves that the status quo pattern of life dictates difficulties to be temporary. Once nature runs its course, once this current sorrow has had its proper effect, the season will fade away. Rarely, for example, do we speak of “seasons” of unbridled joy, or “seasons” of financial affluence, or “seasons” of having uncommonly tasty food in our houses for whatever reason. Probably because we want to believe that these good things are not mere seasons, they should be the norm. Anything that diverges from this status quo, that is anything negative, is a season.

                But what  if  a “season” of change does not, well, change?What if it lasts not for  weeks or months, but years? And years? I’m asking myself this, because I am experiencing it. I am and have been experiencing ongoing change in every facet of my life for much longer than a season, by any stretch of the imagination.  Graduate school in general. Family crises. Converting to eastern Orthodoxy. A serious relationship. Financial ups and downs. Relocating for a year and a half to a different continent, after which I don't know where--or what country--I will come to reside in. For months and months now, and for months and months to come, I have felt in the deepest corners of my heart that the only thing constant around me is constant change. At the heart of these changes is what feels like continuous geographic upheaval. There are days I wish to be nothing more than a snail—oh, the sanity of being able to carry one’s home upon one’s back; oh, the peace of moving slowly from place to place, too small to be noticed, hurried or in anyone’s way.

                This liminal modus operandi has given rise not only to a new sense of life, but also a new sense of dying. The new sense of life turns up when, for example, I slim down my list of possessions by a third or half. When I know I am not as beholden to physical things as I used to be. When I feel just as at home in my old apartment as I do in a plane flying halfway across the world, or a train chugging from one end of Germany to the next. When I look around me—no matter how unfamiliar the terrain is—and can feel in the very marrow of my bones that God is the same today as yesterday as tomorrow; that He truly is everywhere and fills all things, that He is the giver of life to all people in all places of His dominion. There is even a certain feeling of life when saying goodbye to people I love; to feel the love well up inside me, to feel the grief of turning away and walking down that corridor to my gate. There is new life even as I sit on the plane, I feel the distance between me and those I lovce wedging and spreading itself between us like a thick, mysterious blanket of snow. And I feel that blanket covering me with the icy chill of a geographic expanse; of the oceans, winds, languages, cultures in all the nooks and crannies of that blanket. There is life when I hold within me the warm hope, deep down, of future reunions.

                Those are the embers of life I find in change. But there are moments of death, moments of despondency. Moments, days, months when my mind seems to work more slowly; when every conversation I have is either a momentous hello or goodbye. And sometimes the moments of life and hope I described above to not feel at all like life andhope, but instead like latent disconnection between me and everyone else. It is a disconnection that Rilke describes perfectly in one of his laments, which cries in its opening lines "Oh how all things are far removed!" Because I am human, and humans need constancy. They need connection, unity between discordant things and people. We need to be gounded in place as in time. And some days, I feel that I have lost that, and I don’t know how to get it back.

                But sometimes places, too, are seasonal. Or perhaps, life itself is just a season of upheaval within eternity? After all, that autumnal season for Roman civilization lasted years, if not a century or more. In the midst of the deadness encroaching upon the empire, some interesting things were happening besides the doom and gloom of a failing empire, particularly in the spiritual realm. Before the life of cities were fading, we see spiritual men and women fleeing the urban centers of the Church and state, opting instead for desert or wilderness landscapes wherein they could devote their lives to solitary pursuits of God and His son Jesus Christ. It’s like they knew something was happening to the fabric of social and religious life around them in these cities, and they needed to get away from the coming tumult to commune with God. Today, they are known as the Desert Fathers of ancient Christianity, but there were also important “desert mothers” such as St. Mary of Egypt (ca. 344-421), who lived a life of prostitution and worse before having a conversion experience in Jerusalem and living out the rest of her years in the desert, experiencing a powerful and sustaining relationship with God that is said to have nourished her not only spiritually but physically and nutritionally.  For these desert fathers, who lived only in loose—if any—connection to one another, the sole aim was the pursuit of the life of God. 

As the cracks in the structure of the Roman empire continued to grow, Augustine penned his prolific City of God. This theological work offers a wide-lens glimpse of the world around him, a panorama of a world in decay. The city of man, Augustine argued, is one that is fading, falling apart at the seams. It may not be there tomorrow. The city of God, however, is one that is unseen and eternal, and dwells in the midst of men who seek it out of the woodwork of temporal reality.  Augustine is grappling with a reality that was becoming more apparent by the day, that the city of man—Rome—was not the eternal city everyone thought it would be. Perhaps it was partly this mentality that compelled so many of the desert hermits (whence the term “eremitical” derives). Isn’t it ironic that even while Augustine was putting his thoughts into words, so many men and women were abadnoning the cities of man, living in the most remote wilderness territories of the eastern and western empires, to pursue the city of God? In this way, the tendencies of monks predates and foretells the future abandonment of cities that would take place on a wider scale with the fall of the roman empire.

                But what were the desert fathers giving up in order to gain this fuller life of spiritual devotion? They were, I think, giving up a sense of place. A sense of connection to a certain physical space, because part of what grounds us to any sense of space is our community ties. Spatial landmarks. The give and take of daily life in contact with others. They were exchanging a sense of home for life in a cave or wilderness, often without basic amenities or nutritional necessities. They may have renewed some sort of connection with their little dwelling place, but I think the whole point of living in the desert in solitude was to deny oneself the sense of home. To fast from having a home in order to find one’s grounding in God. Whereas stabilitas loci had once been wrought through tying oneself to collective community networks of the family and estate, these ascetics found their stabilitas loci in God, in the middle of the most uninhabitable terrains.

                For a few days, this comforted me. In the midst of my travels and moving, I tried on the whole desert father thing for metaphorical size. Packing, moving, dissertation—these things, as I saw them, became my desert. Shedding my possessions to the thrift stores, sorting everything into like-sized boxes, living out of a suitcase for weeks, months, a year or more on end. This is freeing. But for three days in a row, 8:30PM was the first time I could sit down to eat a real meal all day. I was averaging 4-5 hours of sleep a night. On top of it all, I was toiling the day long in good, old fashioned Cincinnati heat and humidity. All of this was done not out of spiritual discipline or reenacting the life of a desert father, but rather out of reality. Or letting reality take over my sanity.

                Finally, on the third day of this, I sat down at 9pm to a bowl of brown rice and ham cubes (one has to clean out one’s fridge) all the while mumbling incoherent comments about my stressful day through crocodile tears and a mouthful of pork to my boyfriend over skype. Evidently I would have really sucked as a desert father.

                I was learning, as a novice learns. And the lessons I was learning about myself and human-ness was rather inconvenient. No matter how one tries to rise above the here-and-now, to be disattached from one’s place, to be ready at all times to travel, one will always remain a here-and-now creature with here-and-now needs. God has built us with these needs to eat, sleep, drink, and rest as though placing threads within us that root us to our surroundings—wherever our surroundings happen to be. And yet, as it says in Ecclesiastes, he has also placed eternity within our hearts.  Being a human is much like being suspended in a hot air balloon, tethered above our personal place in space and time: we can’t fully cut those tethers, else how will we obtain sustenance brought forth from the earth? We hover our whole lives, never fully rising above the distant horizon, yet never far removed from the heavens either. 

And that is me, too, in a way: hovering between this place and all the other places I’ve been and shall be in. Hovering between this world and the next. Wondering when will I finally get to touch the ground or, perhaps, the clouds.

____

FOOTNOTES:

(1) I personally don't like the term "Dark Ages." I find it a little racist or time-ist or something. As some historians, more popular in the 19th and mid 20th centuries, would have it, the dark ages and middle ages were little more than a period of stupidity and barbarism in Europe.  Europe would only fully recover from the dark ages with the En-LIGHT-enment. (Get it? Dark? Light?) This is a flawed approach to understand history, because there was a lot happening in Europe during the dark ages, middle ages and reformation periods. Just because it does not look recognizably modern does not mean the people were simply dark or ignorant. Likewise, there was a lot happening in the Enlightenment that would have disastrous consequences for modernity. Secular thought, for example, did not necessarily mean less violence or brutishness. In fact, the wars of modernity would prove to be more violent and destructive than of the dark ages. 

Take Back the Night: Say NO! To the Global pRecession

                               
Friends, Family, Comrades, Citizens, and Gentleman of State:

A specter is haunting every economy and country in the world. In these troubled times of unemployment, earthquakes, climate change, and dubious fashion trends, it is only natural to search for the reason behind this mounting plague of uncertainty. Who is to be believed? Some of Them tell us the economy is to blame, others of Them attribute our demise to industrial pollution, politicians, and gluten. But alas, dear reader, don't believe them. They have simply been using these lies to cover up the even bigger lie that dates back at least to the ancient Babylonians.

For fourscore and seven years, give or take two millennia and/ or more, we have been fed a rather incandescent deception that the so-called "heavens" allegedly remain fixed above us, i.e. that a person deemed a “taurus” is born under the constellation of taurus; that the star call Polaris (as its supposed name indicates) is positioned above the north pole.

However. Due to some recent dabbling in astronomy, which has been necessary to undertake in order to better understand the astrological content of the early modern calendars I am looking at, I have discovered a very inconvenient truth. This truth, I would wager, is responsible for most modern ills.

Indeed, my friends, a specter is haunting the world. It is the specter of celestial mutability. Join me, please, in my campaign to Stop Global Precession.

                                 

What on earth is precession, you ask? Well, since precession is not a strictly earthly phenomenon, it would be technically impossible to answer your question.  OK, you stammer, well what in the universe is precession? Thank you. I can now answer your question at length.

Before I do so, however, let’s return to elementary-school science class. Are you with me so far?

Back then, we were taught about the rotation of the earth around its axis, which takes approximately 24 hrs. This, They taught us, we are supposed to call a “day.”  We were also taught about the revolution of the earth around the sun, which takes a little more than 365 so-called “days.” This revolution we call a “year.” These two basic movements, their imprecisions of leap years and minutes notwithstanding, helped us understand why we have seasons and years; why different stars are in different parts of the heavens during different times of the year or night. The stars rotate in a circular pattern, the center of which is the northern polar star known as polaris, aka the north star.

This is what They taught us, what They want us to believe. But friends, this is not the whole story. There is, in fact, a third motion of the earth. Experts call it axial precession, or the “third motion,” the “slow revolution,” depending on whom you want to believe. I, on the other hand, call it the Untold Story or the Great Conspiracy.

~*~

In addition to the 24-hr rotation and 365+-day revolution the earth makes, it is also traveling a very long rotation around the ecliptic pole, and not from east to west, but from west to east.

This is a picture of the earth on an average day, just minding its own business and rotating along on its axis like it was supposed to. 

What is the ecliptic pole? It does not surprise me you are asking me this, because They have wanted so much for us to live in ignorance of this inconvenient truth that They never taught us what it was. Let that sink in for a moment.

The ecliptic is the annual path of the sun’s motion projected on to earth. Picture the earth tilted on its axis: the earthly equator is then an imaginary line that is not horizontal from this vantage point but tilted at an angle. The prime meridian, if drawn from north pole to south pole, would form an imaginary ninety degree angle with the equator, right? So if you keep those lines in place, but take away your picture of the earth, the lines would form a sort of “x” rather than a “+,” since the earth was tilted on its axis. Now imagine the earth, once again tilted on its axis, but instead of superimposing the imaginary “X” on it of the equator and prime meridian, superimpose a “+” on it, as though there were an imaginary pole at the very top and bottom and a separate equator that was perfectly horizontal from our vantage point, even though the earth is still on its axis. The horizontal line of the “+” is something like the ecliptic, a or of second equator, but whereas the equator indicates the earth's rotation around its axis, the ecliptic indicates the imaginary line drawn by the suns rays on earth's surface, since the angle of the suns rays hit horizontally across its axis. The vertical line of the cross is the imaginary line connecting the two “ecliptic poles.”  

Just like the earth rotates around its axis poles (the north and south poles) about once every 24 hours, it also rotates along its ecliptic poles about once every 26,000 years. This top-secret confidential video illustrates what I am talking about, however, I would not suggest watching it for a prolonged period of time or right after eating, as the truth of this movement may be too disturbing for sensitive viewers or those inclined toward sea-sickness.

This is the mutant sabotaged earth, rotating on its axis and the ecliptic. LIFE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS COMPLICATED, MR. AXIS. KEEP IT SIMPLE. 

There are very real implications that stem from the Great Conspiracy. Essentially, the third movement of the earth means that, over the course of 260,000 years, all of the stars and constellations in our solar system undergo a process of constantly shifting and changing places in the sky. Stars we call “fixed stars,”  as opposed to stars that change like comets are not actually fixed. You heard me correctly. In actuality, our so-called fixed stars move at a rate of thirty degrees every two thousand years. “Degrees” in the cosmic sense is just a fancy schmancy word for “a long distance.” So, you can imagine that a long distance multiplied times thirty is like… a very long distance.

Have you ever heard of Hipparchus? I didn’t think so. The reason why you have never heard of him is that his voice has been silenced like countless other precession martyrs. Hipparchus is the first person we have on record of who spoke out against the movement of the stars. He compared his recorded observations of heavenly motions with some earlier Babylonian records he had, noting that all of the constellations were in slightly different locations. This greatly troubled him, since it was thought that the heavens did not change, that they were changeless, or immutable. 

Ptolemy, though, said that Hipparchus was full of it. Of course, the stars didn’t move, probably the old records were just wrong, after all were written by those idiot Babylonians.   After reprimanding Hipparchus’  finding, Ptolemy went on to make his grandest contribution to modern science, which was the evidential support of an earth-centered universe. So, clearly he knew his stuff. 

I think we all owe Hipparchus a big apology. It turns out, he was right all along.

But back to the Babylonians for a second. Somewhere around the sixth century BC, they had recognized that equidistant from the north pole, there is a belt of stars that, when split into equal increments, contained twelve constellations (like Cancer, Taurus, etc.) This made the Babylonians very happy, since they had a hard time telling time at night. I think this was because—being scattered across Mesopotamia—there weren’t any good cell phone towers nearby to set the clocks on their phones. Thanks to the zodiac, though, they devised a system of telling time. Since it is constantly in motion according to the earth’s rotation, about every two hours, a new zodiac sign is rising on one side of the horizon, while another is setting on the opposite side. Thus they split the night into six parts, and the day as well. This is where we get the twelve zodiac signs from, and the twelve hours of the day, and even the original proxies of the twelve months.

Over time, people began to perceive what they thought were patterns in people’s personalities and life events based on what sign was overhead during the time day or year they were born. Meanwhile, the Greeks were becoming more powerful and starting to catch on to this whole time-telling business, since they had the same cell phone problem. 

The Greeks came up with a word to describe all of this, which we still use today: horoscope. “Hora,” means hour and “skopus” means an object to which the eye is fixed. The original meaning of this word was simply the “hour mark,” or the sign one used to tell time at night, often used to record the exact time an important person or heir was born.  But like I said, the whole notion of these signs were expanding to accommodate making predictions about people’s lives, so over time, the word horoscope has also expanded in meaning to convey those ideas.

Now, I don’t put a lot of stock in horoscopes as we currently understand them. This is mostly because I am supposedly a cancer, which is a constellation of a crab. To be honest, though, I’ve just never felt much like a crab. I think if horoscopes were true, I would have at least developed some kind of exoskeleton by now, or cancer (Lord have mercy). If anything, though, I think I’m more of a Leo the Lion, because of my last name, or possible even Gemini, because I’ve always wanted a twin. But horoscope signs are like names and brothers and hair color: you can’t just pick and choose.  

But even though I don’t like horoscopes, I dislike being lied to even more, and that’s exactly what They have done. Remember when I said that the zodiac belt is split into 12 increments roughly equal in length? Well, that length is about thirty degrees; each zodiac constellation is about thirty degrees long. Think, when have we seen that number, thirty degrees? Oh yeah, it was when I said that the stars shift an average of thirty degrees every two thousand years.  This means that a “Taurus” is no longer born under the constellation of taurus—like he or she would have been back in the day of ancient Greece--but rather Aries. Contrary to the truth, however, that person is still called a Taurus in today’s society, even though the term is purely arbitrary. It’s simply wrong. Ask an astrologer to account for this and they will feed you a bunch of lies that involve differentiating between the sign and the constellation blah blah blah. 

                            

What I want to conclude with is what you can do in the face of this startling truth. First I want to encourage you that the problem, as bad as it seems, is reversible. When you really think about it, all that needs to be done is to stop the path of cosmic precession and make sure the earth stays still on its ecliptical orbit. That is plan A.

Plan B is organizing a global summit and inviting all members of the galactic community, including rogue constellations and stars such as Polaris and Cancer. The goal of this summit would be getting the constellations on board with planet earth so that every time precession causes the constellations to shift a degree, the stars move backward exactly one degree. This would ensure that, at least from our perspective, the stars stay put and obey the law.

In order to work, both plans A and B would take an enormous amount of awareness raising.  We want Precession to be the thing people are talking about on the street, at the breakfast table, on earth, and in the heavens. Science textbooks should be written that properly explain precession, and history textbooks should include the silenced martyrs of our astronomical tradition such as Hipparchus. Write to your local senator or congressional representative and inform them that you care about this issue. If they don’t make the global precession their top priority, elect officials that will work towards a better cosmic reality—like me.  Another strategy would be to construct tents so that we can camp out in important places like Wall Street. By camping, we can observe the heavens and show the press what is really happening to our world. The more people on board with this issue, the more support we will gain. The sun, for example, has already signed my petition and has promised to talk to his voting district about the issue. I believe if we can convince all of the inner planets and moons, we’d easily be able to persuade the rest of the solar system.  This goal may seem far away, but I assure you it is within reach.

So, friends, I hope you will join me. Say no to celestial mutability, say no to the changing positions of stars along the earth’s terrestrial ecliptic pole, say no to lies. Say no to the global precession. Say yes to truth, say yes to stars behaving themselves, say yes to Polaris. 

If not just for my sake, then for Hipparchus'. 

A Flower Behind Bars

A Dirty Floor

Anywhere else,

And it would be just another

                                Ordinary

                                Dirty

Floor.

But here,

In this    Long,

                Empty,

                Cavernous

Room,

With whitewashed walls

And mlky windows that dim the sunlight

There is something unnerving about it all:

The way one’s voice echoes

Off the dirty ridges

Of the yellowed floor tiles.

And slowly, it becomes clear,

Why it unsettles a person so.

We are, after all, in a prison.

“For obvious reasons,”

Emphasized the tour guide

“A lot of other execution chambers

Were converted for use by butchers

After the war,

For obvious reasons.”

For obvious reasons,

An imperceptible gesture to the floor.

Anywhere else,

And it would be just another

                                Ordinary

                                Dirty

Floor.

And anywhere else, the blood has long

Seeped into the earth.

Here, though, it lingers.

A Prison

Hovers above the park

Where I feed ducks

Tall turrets of centuries-old brick

Gothic windows with iron bars

Stone fortress walls

Lined with barbed wires.

And sometimes

A duck flies over the wall,

Perhaps he prefers prison food?

And I hear laughter

From beyond

But it was, as they say,

An inside joke.

A flower behind bars

We toured it, the prison.

For its architectural anomalies

And historical attrocities.

Gruffly

They removed from us

Our passports, purse, phones,

And herded us into a crowded corridor

With walls  made of bars

and windows covered

by milky glass.

It was then the tour guide

Realized he had forgotten something

 And turned back to his office,

Closing the bars.

Locked into the cell

Of walls made by bars

And windows of milk

We stood,

Not prisoners,

And yet…

The window, I saw, was opened

Just a crack of a crack

Held in place by a padlock

And beneath,
from a tiny courtyard

Stretching up to us

With the smallest pale face
And petals strewn on the ground
like teardrops from a recent storm:

A blooming, ivory

Rose.

ABOUT THIS POST: These  poems were written after touring a historic prison around the corner from my apartment. This prison is noteworthy not only for its age (the oldest part of its architecture was constructed in 1506), but especially for the fact that there is an execution chamber used by the Nazi's during the Third Reich.  This chamber was used to put to death various shades of people ranging from hardened criminals to political resisters to the ambiguously defined Volksschaedlingen, or social harm.  As you can imagine, one of the aspects of German society that became skewed during the Third Reich was the justice system, and this memorial site bears witness to the injustice wruught by a legal and fully-functioning court system. Many of the people executed were killed for petty or ambiguously defined crimes in pursuit of creating a purer society and race. We were able to tour the prison and see the inside of the execution chamber, which are obviously not open to the public, as well as the accompanying museum, because a colleague here was able to organize it for us.