Emilio DeGrazia's blog
1999 and other new maths
by Emilio DeGrazia
Of pigs, wolves and one dead whale
by Emilio de Grazia • 11/11/08 • It was the middle of another sleepless night, one of those damp drizzly Novembers of the soul, my mind turning as witlessly as the world. A hundred miles away my nineteen year-old daughter Emily was turning her college life into Big City dreams. Beside me, Leah, my three year-old, lay curled up close to Monica, my wife suddenly pregnant again and round as a small earth.
Quietly I slip downstairs to my favorite chair and most honored book, that wail-song Moby-Dick.
My radiant little heresy
by Emilio DeGrazia, 10/9/08 • Antinomianism: Belief that salvation comes by faith and Grace alone, not good works or obedience to moral law.
Snakemate - Part II
The serpent’s power to charm is hardly a thing of the past. Teenage boys and their ilk perhaps suffer from serpent charm more than any other type. Imagine some good boy, young or old, staring through a keyhole of the mind at some bare-bosomed Geraldine doing a dirty dance with a constrictor chum in Joe’s Last Chance Inn. Oh how he’d love to be that snake. Then imagine me in my writing chair, the rattlesnake wriggling its way out of its old clothes and showing itself off naked to me.
Snakemate
I didn’t know what to make of it. Crotalus horridus. Here I am, gazing at the blank page as if waking from a trance, and there at my feet a rattlesnake is writhing itself out of its skin. Yes, fear suddenly freezes in my spine, and I’m too paralyzed to think it through. Pen in hand and writing tablet on my lap, I sit numb as a stone and watch the creature twist and turn itself inside-out until its labor is done. Then, as if I suddenly exist, it fixes me with those eyes for the stillest moment of my life.
