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From the journal of Anthony Pau Cabrales, Associate Justice

21. On the Fifth Circuit, at home

A 7.0 magnitude earthquake, centered near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, leaves some 200,000 and more dead, dying. Night after the quake, in the streets of Port-au-Prince, packed in the safety of outside, a capella music begins, the hymnal phrase Blessed be the Lord weaving through the streets. January, 2010.

–Cardinal to Galileo Galilei

Bertolt Brecht

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When the dice are thrown on the table of the earth it trembles and is broken.

Gilles Deleuze

Nietzsche and philosophy

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We have no name for you, you no Katrina whose path becomes a personality, whose turn of desolation becomes someone else’s grace. No: you are everywhere, at once, existence falling from itself, theology shattered into dumbed ignorance. You dissolve what we were, shatter every tie, erase every petty monument to our climbed successes, dead bodies grounding our heights turned liquid in physics, drowning us as we drowned them.

This your grace: all done in no hand of ours. Grace beyond Apocalypse, Apocalypse which shall be made in our own engines, we thereby revealed as your destructive hand, then knowing there never was a we, only a you, awaiting End. But not this day. Today you invite us to struggle ourselves anew; to war, not against some of us, but all of us. We go to battle ourselves, to stand on the dead necessarily uncountable and make ourselves something new, no sea of shacks to topple in the next time, desperation fragile which was and is our living murder. In that desolation is humanity unowned, the lumber of our building, the only ground we have ever had. You clear the land in irresponsible lumber so we may war in charity toward a bloodless victory; yet we fearful of what shall outreach to us, that when the grief clears we will see nought but us again.

Streets flow with Blessed be the Lord, detritus of survival offering grace to the creator, needs be in lower case, that this time the he that is we can get it right.

Added later:

Lord, see our struggle. We level Europe in rehearsal of your End, raising thereafter a world incomprehensible to our past. But you turn eyes to the protective sky called United States, saying not yet, not yet. And shatter some others’ worlds for a try again.