“Mystery Play,” 11” x 15.5”, brush and ink wash on buff colored Arches Rives BFK; May-June 2025 Richard Van Ingram. [Yes, I know I wrote ‘2026’ by accident at the time, but we all know better. Sorry.]
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
William Butler Yeats
in THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS (1899)1
Dear G-d,2
Truly, I hope you are well. Here in your world, we are making a mess of it; not all of us, but enough to guarantee too many of our brothers and sisters are unnecessarily miserable or dead far too soon. Sometimes, we are doing this intentionally, by starving others or dumping explosives on them so we can take their land or because we are angry and full of wrath, fantasies, myths, and old memories. We will not truly forgive. There is too little mercy in some of us.
Those who try to be merciful and forgiving, or who ask for mercy and forgiveness from others… I’m afraid my fellow humans, like sharks, smell blood in the water, so to speak, when mercy is mentioned, so my fellow angry humans take it as weakness and woundedness and proceed to punish and exploit those who merely wanted peace.
Yet peace is the only strength I’ve ever experienced. Rare as integrity and dignity, briefer than life or a sunset. Peace is a difficult state to establish here requiring far more effort and cooperation than punishment and haughtiness.
It takes no real discipline or skill or meaningful labor to deprive others of, say, medication or a place to live or meaningful paid work. It is easy to leave children uneducated or miseducated, hopeless, futureless, hypnotized by mass marketed and pointless fame; to wreck the stability required to raise families or ease one’s way toward a dignified death. All it takes is those with power to refuse to help or to destroy the means by which people were once helped. Or the means by which communities and individuals once assisted themselves and one another.
Really, all that is required is the loss of the will to help, the desire to assist, the loss of the belief that one ought to care for others.
With the excess saved by cutting off help, the powerful can now gaudily gold-plate something: ceilings; poorly designed and tasteless décor; rickety furniture; unironic kitsch; urinals and toilets. Maybe billionaires can launch spacecraft to go mine asteroids for economically rewarding metals and claim other planets as their own private fiefdoms - or indulge whatever fantasy hobby they turn some attention towards. Truly, I don’t think the rest of us are invited to come along for the ride into their future world, though some may be forced to labor towards making these things possible.
Scattered in the wake of the powerful, wealthy, and well-connected are women who were once young girls molested, raped, abused, used, mentally degraded, and then ignored. “Forced labor,” indeed. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are intimately linked to our would-be one party rule authoritarian “president”; and though Epstein is dead, Maxwell is not and she knows too, too much. Our “president” had her interviewed by his justice department for no good legal reason… then pulled strings to change her status so she could be moved to a minimum security federal prison in Texas.
The nature of Maxwell’s convictions do not allow her to be housed in minimum security facilities: she is a menace, a rapist, and a woman who lied in court, was convicted of perjury, and has absolutely no remorse for her actions… as if abusing us “common people” beneath her social status and our children was her right.
Ghislaine Maxwell is a convicted child molester, a convicted sex trafficker, someone who participated in luring young girls into sexual abuse and bondage by Epstein, by herself, and by their wealthy friends, like party favors to be passed around. That is, treated as things, not humans, not ends in themselves with inherit sacred, inviolable value, with autonomy. Things are to be used, not cared for, not loved, not respected, not assisted for their own sakes. That most of us have been categorized as mere things, not human beings, is the root of most horrors in this world.
G-d, you saw these actions. You know the names. No, you did not stop it - because THAT is OUR job in this world! We’re not here to pass the responsibility back to you for what is in our power to oppose, to not permit; our task is to shape a culture that has no tolerance for abuse, for rape, for violence, for the strong lording it over the weak. You made us able to recognize value, to reason, to stand up for the weak, for children, for the stranger, the widow, the orphan - if not individually, then collectively through institutions and laws and enforcement.
Yet our billionaire-shameful-would-be dictator of a president uses the power to protect himself and his friends from a reckoning concerning these girls, these young women… and so many others abused in other situations everywhere. Sexually abused, economically abused, politically abused, kidnapped, disappeared, stashed lest they speak out against the rule of angry bully boys and their coattail riding cowards in appointed and elected positions.
This whole place has become corrupt from top to bottom and to and through the bones. Yes, individuals and communities of people have resisted going along, are good people for all their differences. They try. I have met such people, seen them with my own eyes, heard them with my own ears, benefitted from their mercy and hands extended in mercy and friendship.
But I have seen and heard the hateful, too. I have seen the too clever by half use their positions to slyly ignore injustice or impose injustices, no mercy to be found in their presence. I have witnessed and even suffered a degree of overreach by people more powerful than me so my trip into the dust might be sped up. And I am no one.
You know how many women I know who were abused, sexually, physically, psychologically, as children. I hold their secrets: whether and to whom they reveal their past is their business, it is their choice, not mine. But you know what I know and you grasp the knowledge has broken my heart in powerlessness. That the collective heart of this country is not ruptured and bleeding continuously on behalf of its girls and women alone is an abomination.
The foolish in this place are worried about the sexual orientation of people; persecute them because a man may love a man or a woman a woman; cannot accept some find their sexuality is fluid, will not extend basic patience for humans who find they were born into bodies that do not match the gender they experience themselves as. The foolish are wrapped up in controlling the lives and business of so many others, minorities of people who mean no one any harm: their “sin” is they simply do not fit into concepts that describe the experiences of the majority.
Which is no sin at all.
The same people, the majority, sexualize little girls and abuse them. They hide behind their positions as fathers, pillars of the community, as marketers, as coaches, as professors, as good workers, as veterans, as preachers and priests and imams and rabbis and prophets. In secret, their communities look the other way and allow the open secret of child rape to go on without care - rape of girls and of little boys and young men as well as young women.
My neighbors protest abortion? Where are these people to clean out their own institutions, their own families, their own culture which declare open war on the weak sexually, physically, mentally, economically?
The would-be dictator of America had his old friend Ghislaine Maxwell sent to an easier stay prison, minimum security, in Texas… lest she tell the secrets of our “president” and many, many wealthy and powerful people. Perhaps she will be pardoned: on their media broadcasts, the dictator’s idolaters already spread the belief that, perhaps, Ghislaine was poor Ghislaine - a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, like the girls and young women. Which is a lie darker than death, proven in court, but it will serve as a cover story should Trump turn her loose.
We do not matter to too many others, G-d. Not merely me in my minor way, but untold numbers of people and their lost dreams, their wrecked hopes. All are scattered like ruptured stars beneath the blind, screeching wheels of false Progress.
”How long, O LORD; will You ignore me forever?
How long will You hide Your face from me?” [Psalm 13]
*****
You've seen right through distorted eyes, you know you had to learn
The execution of your mind, you really had to turn
The race is run, the book is read, the end begins to show
The truth is out, the lies are old, but you don't want to know
Nobody will ever let you know
When you ask the reasons why
They just tell you that you're on your own
Fill your head all full of lies
The people who have crippled you, you wanna see them burn
The gates of life have closed on you, and there's just no return
You're wishing that the hands of doom could take your mind away
And you don't care if you don't see again the light of day
Nobody will ever let you know
When you ask the reasons why
They just tell you that you're on your own
Fill your head all full of lies, you bastards!
Where can you run to? What more can you do?
No more tomorrow, life is killing you
Dreams turn to nightmares, heaven turns to Hell
Burnt out confusion, nothing more to tell, yeah
Everything around you, what's it coming to?
God knows as your dog nose, bog,3 blast all of you
Sabbath bloody sabbath, nothing more to do
Living just for dying, dying just for you, yeah
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Black Sabbath (Geezer Butler)
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)
This, too, is a prayer, G-d.
Many of my fellow humans can’t hear it, but you are the Divine One, and you know and understand what is beyond all of us.
Too many of us are crushed by the thoughtlessness of the masters of our world, from world leaders to local business managers. We are not even an afterthought for them once our economic value has been extracted, once we have served whatever use the powerful could find in us, whatever cruel sport the sadistic and hateful can find in our removal from a job, a town, a region, a country, or from this life. Our humanity is not merely abused, but dismissed by these people who have chosen to become a living curse on our Earth.
”Living just for dying, dying just for you.”
That could be truthfully said by too many of us caught in the chaos of this rising tide of nihilism and selfishness - and the “you” we are dying for is these self-proclaimed idolatrous gods and their servants, all merely humans who have forgotten they, too, are merely mortals. The dust will swallow their names as it has millennia of nightmares before them. But that knowledge eases no one’s suffering, God.
We do not live in the future; we live now. What are we to do, those of us not elevated to stages, on spotlights, wandering atop the roof of the White House, pushing buttons in the Kremlin, hoarding food in some African nation; shelling, shooting, raping, and murdering in a rampage from Ukraine to places of which we are ignorant, all for more land, more power, to extort more wealth?
Ghislaine Maxwell is resting in the most comfortable minimum security campus we have, according to the Bureau of Prisons, a place where no sex offender of any sort is allowed because it is a white collar crime campus; today, according to ABC news, someone leaked Maxwell said she never saw Trump do anything at all with girls when she was with Epstein — nothing that “caused her concern.” Really? What would cause Maxwell “concern,” given her history?
One need not strain to imagine who leaked that. And Maxwell, the convicted liar, charged with perjury, who has shown no remorse at all for her crimes, will lie for Trump to get better treatment (or even a pardon) to hide this massive case of abuse of the weak by the powerful.
Epstein sexually abused over 1000 girls. We do not have an accurate number, but know it was in excess of 1000 people, all with Maxwell by his side to assist.
You see it better than I do, all of it, all that I do not see, cannot know, will not understand; but I see and I grasp enough. No, I do not expect you to fix it, O Lord. I only ask for you to inspire mercy and a love for justice in me and my fellow humans, courage in those placed to resist, to speak, to stand in the way of this idiocy. I ask that you open our eyes that we see one another as brothers and sisters, that we all must stand with one another, that there are no strangers here, and, in the end, it is all of us or none of us. We stand together or we will be ground down one by one.
The world has seen this before, again and again, with increasing efficiency in the means of death.
Is that all there will be?
”Dreams turn to nightmares, heaven turns to Hell
Burnt out confusion, nothing more to tell.”
***
Hito-no inochi-wa hito moyase.
(Burn a human life like a fire)
Mushi-no inochi-wa hi-ni suteyo.
(Throw an insect’s life into a fire)
Omoi-omoe-ba Yaminoyoya.
(Think it over. How dark this world is!)
Ukiyo-wa yume-yo. Tada-kurue.
(The floating World is no less than a dream. Just go crazy.)
Lyrics from the film Hidden Fortress (1958, Akira Kurosawa)
He hears the silence howling
Catches angels as they fall
And the all-time winner
Has got him by the balls
Oh, he picks up Gideon’s Bible
Open at page one
I think God, He stole the handle
And the train it won't stop going
No way to slow down
from Locomotive Breath
Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson)
Aqualung (1971)
Looking around, it seems to me that my nation is on fire, that it has come to its end, an end that will be an extended suicide.
The ground beneath my feet increasingly seems like quicksand and for as far as I can see, it is all quicksand without much that is solid, worthy of trust. Institutions will be sucked down or crumble as their foundations shatter.
Powerless — this is what I feel. My feelings are not always accurate. They are often exaggerated or simply wrong, so I rarely trust them. Feel them, though, I’ve no choice about. Right now, I am frozen, unsure what to do, unsure what I can do, unsure where to turn, what’s realistic.
Yes, I unexpectedly lost my job a couple of months ago. For cause, though evidence does not support the cause — I’ve spoken about this too often. My lawyer will do what can be done with a grievance or appeal; no, I won’t get the job back, which I accept, but the material that keeps me from applying for jobs in my field needs to be erased. It’s ridiculous, debilitating, cruel - at the very least, an overreaction; at most, based on lies.
I’ve yet to find even a stop-gap job while I get a certification to do something else, something unrelated. Each day without the regularity of meaningful work seems another inch sunk deeper in the quicksand.
Regulation and law, though, which I am relying on in my unimportant matter, has become untrustworthy - people in positions of power here, even at low levels, have the belief they can sidestep legal requirements, resist legal requests, ignore regulations because they know the money that backs up their employers speaks far louder to regulators and politicians than my vote or taxes. Or basic rights.
To quote Bob Dylan, “Money doesn’t talk, it screams.”
Corporations have become people; people have been transformed into things. Magic.
The rights of money, the howl of it will always drown out someone like me in a situation such as America has created. I am less than no one.
Yet my situation, so far, is so much better than people snatched off the streets, off job sites, out of their cars, out of their homes and deported to who knows where. Trump hasn’t gotten around to dealing with his “homegrown problems,” as he threatened a while back. Citizens of the United States, in other words - he intends to revoke the citizenship of people he does not like and deport them as well or disappear them into a concentration camp - not a place reserved for the entitled, though, like Ghislaine Maxwell. Who knows how one would arrive in this category of non-people humans? I’m sure most of us will be people who do not have the resources to resist and who have political beliefs Trump’s supporters despise.
The mystery breeds fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety cause people to make themselves small and silent. Compliant. If they don’t outright collaborate, most people will choose to look away and pretend nothing is happening for as long as possible. They already are. How did this atrocity with Epstein and Maxwell involving over 1000 girls happen without innocent people noticing?
It did not. You know it did not. Americans are full of cowardice, fearful of what they might lose should they stand up and speak the truth, get in the way of evil.
In the face of this wave of sheer insanity, how important is my job situation, or me for that matter? No, I’ll not cooperate with this hateful, idolatrous terror. My spit is reserved for Trump and all he stands for and all who benefit from authoritarianism. But how effective my resistance may be depends on how long I and my wife can hold out in the chaos.
But that’s many of us.
Don’t ignore the cries of my brothers and sisters, G-d, their stolen children, their missing families. The sages taught that the Gate of Tears remain open, and you know an ocean of tears have been and are being wept. Heed their pleas!
Afterwards, recall my own tears, my family, my broken heart, my confusion, my bewildered mind. Bring us out of this narrow place, O G-d, through the dark waters and into the wider world of real possibilities, a place of hope, a place of justice, a land of mercy. Show us the way through.
Without your Light we will not find it.
5, 6, 7 August 2025
Tu B’Av
Gershom
Richard Van Ingram
Since pop culture is mostly all we have in common as a people, if you’ve seen the dystopian movie Eqilibrium, you, indeed, know at least the last lines of this poem. Yeats is my favorite poet, as a pointless aside. You might enjoy some of his work if you don’t already. Invoking him here and now is, for me, akin to having an old friend stand by and bear witness to my foolishness: all I have to offer more often than not is what my contemporaries count as foolishness.
Yes, I write HaShem, Our Creator and far More Than Our Creator, here from time to time in all seriousness. Why not? G-d listens through our ears and surely reads through our eyes, if nothing else. I walk around privately and talk to the Divine, as well. Perhaps the Creator wants, even needs to hear from us now and again.
“Bog” is Russian and Slavic for “god.” I assume that was the intention of the writer. And “God knows as your dog nose” is not merely word-play and it isn’t sacrilege. A dog senses dangers long before they become apparent to a human just as G-d knows what will happen long before a human does. Since this song is, in part, an angry lament about being had and abused by the recording industry, one can see the sense of this shocking simile.