So the big day has arrived, the final episode of Breaking Bad will air tonight on AMC and I’m not going to be able to watch it live, but will have to wait until I arrive home and watch it on my DVR. This is particularly frustrating because I am vacationing in Taos, NM and Breaking Bad was set and filmed in the vicinity of Albuquerque, NM which is only three or four hours south of here. I assumed that Breaking Bad hysteria would be sweeping the state to the point that there would be “Breaking Bad” parties at local bars tonight but I’ve yet to learn of one. And, Breaking Bad hysteria is sweeping the state, and the country, and I am caught up in it though I do not watch a lot of TV and do not tend to get immersed in mass hysteria. But this is not an ordinary TV show. It is extremely well written and well acted and cuts right to the heart like a good literary work would do.

The main character, Walter White, was a high school chemistry teacher who learned he had terminal cancer and was going to leave his family without any means of livelihood. Even though strait-laced and schmucky as he could be, he discovered that he could cook methamphetamine and do so with such excellence that he could make a fortune and leave it all to his family. So, this innocuous high school teacher sets out on an enterprise in which he would “break bad” and these six years of episodes is the story of how this takes place.

This is not a story about drug addiction or even drug culture though each issue is an essential element in the plot. It is a story about how a good man has it in him to be led down a dark path by simple little decisions to a point where he has totally “broken bad.” It is a story about the capacity of the human heart to go places it never imagined it had the capacity to go.

It is a story about human ugliness and it is this ugliness that is the real violence that you will see. Yes, in the course of the six years, there is occasional “blood and guts” but the real violence is seen in the ugliness that emerges when Walter decides that the end justifies the means. This ugliness ravages Walter’s life and the lives of the family he purports to love so dearly and the lives of many other people.

My two dachshunds have taught me so much. There is a sense in which I think they are God’s emissaries, sent to prod me along the path of becoming more human. And I’m being mostly facetious with that point…but not completely!

My wife and I have them with us on our RV trip to Taos, NM and we would not have thought of failing to bring them as they are our darlings. But, they really complicate traveling life, needing a lot of attention and they do seem to have a mind of their own.

I’m going to share one anecdote about them which really has provided a revelation to me. One dimension of their care is that they need to be taken outside to “potty” as they do not have the luxury of doggie doors in this RV. So, that means we have to pay attention to such things as how long we leave them alone in the rv and always have to give them a bedtime “potty” opportunity. This is but one incursion into our plans.

During one of these “potty” events in Taos not long ago, it was very cool and wet with a steady mist coming down. I didn’t really want to take them out but my wife had knee problems and it was my duty. I debated just skipping the chore and taking my chances on cleaning up doggie “business” in the rv the next morning. But, I didn’t do this as Elsa and Ludwig are house-trained and have a sense of propriety about matters like this and will go to great pains to not “soil their cage.” And, I just could not be comfortable with knowing they would have to be so uncomfortable.. (Yes, I am “co-dependent” with them, but don’t tell anybody as I am still a licensed mental health counselor who spent years providing treatment for those with that ailment!)

So, on this occasion I asked myself, “Why are you doing this? Why don’t you pressure them to “do their business” quickly so that you can get back to the comfort of your mobile hearth and home?” Well, the answer was instantaneous, “I care for them. I care for these doggies deeply. Yes, I ‘love’ them like I would love children if I had had the courage to vote with my feet that this world was a good place to be. (Ok, actually, the “voting” would have required another part of my anatomy!)

I remember clearly when these would have been merely “damn dogs” to me; or, actually, back then, they would have been “dang” dogs! I’d have liked them or I wouldn’t have had them but I would not love them. That is because back then I was “separate and distinct” from the whole world and even, in some subtle esoteric sense, from myself. I was lost in the world of “literallew” in which I saw doggies, friends, families, the world, and even God as “out there” and not been able to feel a one-ness with them, not been able to “love” them.

And, these doggies are part of God’s providence in bringing about this transformation in my heart. They have taught me to love. Now, of course, I realize it is much more complicated than this, that the passing of time, emotional and physical maturity were involved, and certainly my marriage to my lovely wife who really led to the opening of my heart. And yes, in deference to one of my cyber friends, neurophysiology was hard at work in bringing about this change.

Now, “literallew” was not a cold-hearted beast! He cared for people and for the world and even for doggies. But he did so with great reservation as his heart was not yet “petal open” as Toni Morrison so vividly described in her novel BELOVED. My heart was not filled with “penetrable stuff” but was still “bronzed o’er with damn custom,” as Hamlet once accused his mother. I had not reached the point in my evolution where I was willing to relax my boundaries, put “literallew” out to pasture, and learn to swim in the spiritual depths of human experience.

I have not been posting very often the last few months but intend to “gird up my loins” real soon and resume my verbal sojourn in the cyber world where I have met so many friends.

I’m now vacationing in Taos, NM and when I return home and organize my photos I hope to post a few observations about this fabulous mountain village and include a few photographs. It is a special place and my wife, and two lovely dachshunds, trek out here at least once a year to enjoy the mountain air, the lovely art and architecture, food, and people. And, I am always captivated by the knowledge that one of my literary heroes, D. H. Lawrence, also found the place enchanting and lived her for several years in the early 20th century.

I am posting this item by e-mail as I don’t have access to my WP account out here due to my technical lameness re WP. So, bear with me on any formatting awkwardness that you might note. And, on the general theme of this “awkwardness”, I would appreciate any feedback that you could offer regarding the technical aspects of this operation. I constantly run into problems which I cannot figure out and cannot find anyone local who can tutor me in person. Several of you have already given me a hand on this note and I appreciate it. And, of course, continue to give me feedback on the “literary” efforts of this enterprise. Just make sure you always agree with me. (wink, wink)

Forgive my ignorance b ut I’m trying to learn to post by email. I’m gonna see if this makes it to WP and if so, in what shape. Sorry for taking advantage of you.

Here is a very witty look at the American South and its women (sometimes spelt “wimmin”) Those of you who are reading from abroad might not fully appreciate this as the humor is very subtle. It is a treasure trove of clichés from my culture, some of which men also use routinely. Enjoy!

The Bible so succinctly and tastefully describes coitus as “the way of a man with a maid.” Shakespeare in Hamlet referred to it as “country matters” and in Othello so vividly and lustily as “making the beast with two backs.” This union of man and woman is one of the great mysteries of life and I often marvel with my own marriage, wondering, “How did this ever happen?” For, we are two people so very different in so many ways but have been drawn together for 24 years into a bond that is increasingly indissoluble.

I have three poems about this relationship and its intricacies. The first by W. H. Auden likens two couples coming together to physics and two disparate “particles” pelting each other.

ON A CHILDHOOD’S GUIDE TO METAPHYSICS

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and sos,
Futility, and grime
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do
Or the atoms in our brain.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely, it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
Around a universe

In which a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel,
Since year after year it repels
An aging suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet, Euclidean space—
Exploded myths, but who
Would feel at home a-straddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for—
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really becomes a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing nature
Be altogether wise.

The second poem, by Sharon Olds, describes a man and woman meeting at college, falling in love, and having sex from which a child comes. This coitus is described as, “I take them up like the male and female/ paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to/strike sparks from them.”

I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell)
By Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

One of my favorite poems is by Wendell Berry in which he beautifully describes the turmoil that is always part of a marriage when both parties are alive, each of them allowed to be present in the relationship, a “presence” which is disallowed in most marriages of the day.

MARRIAGE

How hard it is for me3, who live
In the excitement of women
And have the desire for them
In my mouth like salt. Yet
you have taken me and quieted me.
you have been such light to me
that other women have been
your shadows. You come near me
with the nearness of sleep.
and yet I am not quiet.
it is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.

I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough
of what it’s thirsty for!
Show me the way to the ocean!
Break these half-measures,
these small containers.
~Rumi

We are a composite of personalities, a composite of viewpoints that we had at earlier points in our life. When I was in high school I was a fundamentalist Christian, already a “hell fire and damnation” Baptist preacher who interpreted the Bible and everything very literally. So, when I came across literature in high school…poetry in particular…and was asked to understand and even interpret it, I was so frustrated and often angry as it made no sense to me. “There is nothing to interpret,” I would exclaim, “It means what it says” and often I could not understand it in the least. And Shakespeare, who I now love passionately and quote obsessively, was the worst of the offenders back then.

So, when I approach this beautiful poem by Rumi in the depths of my heart I can still feel that old high school Lew approach the poem with concrete thinking and remember my frustration and anger. But, that is only a faint memory for now there is another Lew, “literarylew”, and I grasp the metaphor and the imagery and am deeply moved by his wisdom. But I can always imagine how it must grab some people who might have the misfortune of stumbling across this blog. I’m sure they read this poem and, with furrowed brow and bewilderment, replay, “Huh?” And that is okay as our world needs all types of thinkers. This poem, and most poetry, is just not for them.

Now what happened between my high school days and this poetic awakening in my mid-thirties is another story for another time. Let me just briefly say, my life began to “come apart” (but in a good way) and the concrete thinking began to fracture and words began to come to life for me. To summarize, a spiritual awakening began which continues today three decades later.

Rumi’s poem reflects the passion of the Infinite that is always seeking expression in our life. To be more precise, we are Infinite in that we are an expression of our Source, the Divine, but we are trapped in this time-space continuum and often feel a longing to make our way back to the “Ocean.”

So, how do we get there? Well, we don’t want to go the Jim Morrison route of drugs and alcohol as it cost him his life at an early age. I think through spiritual practice, mature religious devotion, including prayer and meditation, we can occasionally get glimpses of that Ocean which we will swim in freely only when we “cross over” and return to our Source, the “Ocean” in this poem. And, I do think there are gifted souls such as Rumi who can “take a swim” occasionally or even quite often while still trapped in this time-space continuum.

But most of us must take the advice of T.S. Eliot who advised that spiritual practice is patient and humble, “prayer, discipline, thought, and action.” And, I like the observation of W. H. Auden who noted:

In the desert of my heart,
Let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of my days,
Teach this poor man how to praise.