Purity: With an Asterisk Rubens and his writhing ganglion of drunken revelers. “The crowd is untruth,” wrote Kierkegaard. As for you: Remember that small, unfenced field and the cold stars above; everyone gathered around the keg, the stubby, silver barrel of veneration? Plastic cups of watery beer. High-school, hyena laughter. What were you doing there? Zola tells us of a farmer plowing in a dell in September 1870 while the Battle of Sedan raged close by. A consequential battle: the fall of Napoleon III, Prussian defeat of France, the Paris Commune. And the toxic seeds planted for future use. But the farmer plowed on, a Zen master who’d never heard of Zen. The man I still would be. So, I put my finger to the wind, and go the other way. Though, sometimes, I confess, I glance back over my shoulder. I, too, am not immune to the fear of missing out. Mike Dillon Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His most recent book is a chapbook, The Return, from Finishing Line Press (Spring 2021), and is editor of the recently released (Oct. 2021) Notes from the Garden: The Making of a Pacific Northwest Sanctuary, from Chatwin Books. He is a previous contributor to The Ekphrastic Review.
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May 2025
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