Transfigurized

March 2, 2014
Transfigurized

Transfiguration Sunday. Remembering when Jesus took Peter and John and James up the mountain. On top he meets Moses and Elijah, who the preacher reminded us this morning, also had mountaintop experiences: Moses on Sinai where he saw God’s backside and again on Pisgah where he looked into the Promised Land; and Elijah on Carmel where he bested the prophets of Baal. Moses came down with God’s glory, Elijah with blood on his hands.

          So the preacher had more to say about Moses than Elijah − naturally. But the story of Elijah on his mountain was one of my favorites as a kid. My mother read it to me from Hurlbut’s − with commentary. She always read with commentary. She wasn’t only a wonderful, paitent reader, she was always looking for the odd bit of odd in any story, and she liked to share what she found.

This one starts when Elijah just shows up. He’s not there and then he’s there. Also, there’s rain and then there’s not rain. That’s when this part of the whole story happens, when there hasn’t been rain for three years.

          God tells Elijah: “Go to King Ahab, and I will make it rain again.”  Elijah goes. In the meantime, Ahab is looking for water anywhere, so he sends his servant Obadiah off one way and he goes off another, looking and looking.  Otherwise his horses are going to die.

          Obadiah runs into Elijah, who tells him to go tell Ahab. Obadiah isn’t sure he wants to do that. He’ll tell Ahab, but by the time they get back, Elijah will be gone – that’s the way he is: he’s there and then he’s not there. “No,” “I’ll be here,” Elijah says.  Obadiah probably thinks, Easy for you to say, you’re not betting your life.

          But when Ahab comes, Elijah is there, though the king isn’t really happy to see him. Elijah is nothing but trouble, as far as he’s concerned. The trouble isn’t with him though, Elijah says. “You brought this on yourself, forgetting God and taking up Jeze-baal and so Baal and so his prophets.

          “Get them all together and meet me at Mount Carmel.”

When everyone is there, Elijah starts preaching to the people, who have come, too, apparently by the thousands. “Listen. You can’t have it both ways. If Baal is god, you should stick to him, but if the Lord is God, then what.”  When the people sit there like dummies, he says, “Why don’t we test it out?”

          He wants two bulls, one for the 450 prophets of Baal and he’ll take one. They’ll cut the bulls up in pieces, put them on two piles of wood, but they won’t light a fire. Then the prophets of Baal will call on Baal, and Elija will call on the Lord. And the one that lights the fire: that one is God.

          Elijah gives the Baal prophets first choice and first go. They cut up their bull, put it on their wood, and start the farse.* They’re praying out loud like the preachers on the radio. No answer. They’re dancing around the non-fire like they’re on fire. Nothing.

          Elijah starts laughing. “Hey,” he says, “where’s he?” − meaning Baal. “Is he fast asleep?  Yell louder, ‘Wake up!’  Or maybe he’s on the john.” That’s what she said, for sure, I remember.  “Then, knock on the door. Tell him to hurry up and finish.”

          But nothing happens.

          Then it’s Elijah’s turn. And he gets twelve stones to build an altar, and he arranges them in a certain way; and he puts the wood on top of the altar in a certain way, and he cuts the bull apart in a certain way and puts it on the wood. Then he has some people fill up big jugs of water and pour the water over everything – three times, till it’s soaking.

          Then he prays. And the fire comes and burns it all up, the wood, the bull, the water – everything but the stones. And the people say, “Yes. Your God is God.”  And Elijah says, “Get them” – the prophets of Baal. And they do, they round up all 450; and Elijah kills them every one.

          And the rain came a-tumblin’ down.  She sang that.

It’s getting ready tumble down here, and it may bring snow with it. And we’ll be stuck again, if there’s more than a bit.

          The preacher said something about that, too, at the end of the service − after she’d gotten Jesus down off his mountain after he’d gotten Peter down, because he wanted to stay up there, and James and John. Then they were all going to Jerusalem, where, not long, Jesus was going to be killed. She said about the rain, “Be careful. Be safe.”

          We got home before it started.

I’ve written about writing about wine a couple of times [February 25 and February 27]. More about that in today’s “poem.”

 V

Notes:

*Probably not what she said, but I didn’t misspell it. She probably said “mass” or “meetin’,” depending on the night. She was Presbyterian and this was more than a little while ago. I didn’t take offense in either case. Then. I’m carefuller now.

To listen to Mayor LaGuardia from 1945, click here.

Dee Mack & the Syndics

Cover art from "The Very Best of Dee Mack"

February 28, 2011

From the journals – Dee Mack & the Syndics 

sing their hit single “Home, Running Away from Home”

Officially “home sick” but really “home hiding.”

Hiding can suggest fear − hiding from something; or it can suggest discretion − hiding out for a purpose. There’s also hide-and-seek, hiding willy-nilly as part of a game. Holing up is one way of hiding out, trying not to be found while while engaged in this or that − addressing a family crisis in the economic Trinity, or catching up on one’s reading.

          It’s said to be possible to hide in plain sight (like the purloined letter), as if someone might catch a glimpse of you but when he rushes to catch up, turning the corner he can barely make you out − you are so far away as to be barely visible.

          Unavailable. He catches up to you but can’t make himself seen or heard. He can try all he wants, it’s to no avail.

There are days you want to be better than hidden, more than unavailable. You want to have gotten away and have managed to take something valuable with you. Running away and getting away with − something valuable, a silver candlestick or the Holy Spirit (by good fortune solving that Family crisis). Then, you are in the wind.

I’d planned to play golf this morning, but it was too windy.

          So I hid my nose in the book Amazon got away with selling me, Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. But it’s just too much; it smells of expensive perfume too lavishly applied. I can’t get my breath; I fade into sleep. I wake up with a great name for a band “Dee Mack & the Syndics,” a Dutch Gladys Knight and her Pips.

Pip − someone whose escape is admired. “He’s a pip, ain’t he.”

n

Find out about Maxine Kumin at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maxine-w-kumin.

Dappled, brinded, dim; folded, spindled & mutilated

February 27, 2014
Dappled, brinded, dim; folded, spindled & mutilated

Gaspar Stephens called today to thank me for the "shout out" on the February 25th post.  He was thinking, he said about Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” which got him wondering about how notions of “purity,” which he called “a dangerous illusion,” inform − or even form − the way we think about one another.  He mentioned Hawthorne’s story, “The Birthmark.”

     I never really want to read Hopkins because I find him in almost equal parts fascinating, exciting, and enjoyable on the one hand and unnecessarily recondite, difficult and self-indulgent on the other.  But, “Pied Beauty” as a hymn to “all things counter . . . fickle, freckled,” flawed, impure − this is why I have a Norton Anthology of Poetry on the shelf above my desk:

Glory be to God for dappled things—       

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;       

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;     

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.  

 All things counter, original, spare, strange;  

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)     

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;    

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:        

                                                                    Praise him.

Then this afternoon I sat down and re-read “The Birthmark,” one of my favorite Hawthorne stories.*  The “man of science,” Aylmer, the “eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy,” marries the lovely Georgiana, perfect except for one flaw, the rosy hand upon her cheek. On any other face, he admits, it would be a charm, but she is so nearly perfect that “this slightest possible defect” troubles him, this “visible mark of earthly imperfection”  shocks him.  It follows that it – or its removal – possesses him, so that all he can think of is “the lengths he might find in his heart to go for the sake of giving himself peace” [italics mine]. 

     Our obsessions about purity, Gaspar, they aren’t, it turns out, for the sake of the other, are they, but for our own?

     And we’ll go great lengths to enforce them.  God forbid we be content with “the level of the actual.”  Aylmer’s great experiment, to remove the birthmark from his wife’s cheek succeeds; it departs like “the stain of the rainbow fading out of the sky.”  So also Georgiana fades out of life.

     Because, Gaspar − am I right? − to fix another is to kill them, in the same sense that the law kills, where the wind may give life.

We may not all be obsessed with purity – many of us love speckled, dappled, spotted, freckled, and stippled things we wouldn’t want to change for clear, smooth, and unmarked.  But all of us that write are obsessed with fixing.  Writing is about fixing a moment, pinning it to a page, so it will last; it is about laying out the facts of the matter; it is about explaining why this works the way it does (and, usually, how it could work better); it is about order. It is . . . dogmatic (as in Barth’s Church Dogmatics).  It cannot undergo; it must describe. (It cannot suffer without undertaking a theodicy.)  It cannot embrace; it must explain. And generally it does a pretty poor job of it. A homely example. I wrote last time about A. N. Eaton-Pierson’s writing about Argentinian wines − and she wrote most eloquently, I’ll allow. But even the most evocative words about wine don’t smell or taste like it.

I’m not saying don’t write about things. Just don’t believe what you write. As soon as you start putting words on a page . . . you are wrong, no could be about it.

m

(bicbw)

_______________ 
  *With many others:  "Young Goodman Brown"; "Rapaccini's Daughter"; "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"; "The Minister's Black Veil"; "The Maypole of Merrymount"; "The Canterbury Pilgrims." My enjoyment of Hawthorne is only occasionally marred by his ear for dialogue (or utter lack of it).  Witness (from “The Birthmark”): 

          “There needed no proof,” said Georgiana, quietly.  “Give me the goblet.  I joyfully stake all upon your word.”

          “Drink, then, thou lofty creature!” exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid admiration.  “There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit.  Thy sensivle frame, too, shall soon be all perfect.”

          She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to his hand.

          “it is grateful,” said she with a placid smile.  “Methinks it is like water from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of unobtrusive fragrance and deliciousness. . . .  Now, dearest, let me sleep.  My earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset.”

And that's the way it is . . .

February 25, 2014

"And that's the way it is . . ."

“But I could be wrong.” 

                         - Gaspar Stephens

My friend Gas thinks the five most underutilized words in the English language are those making up the phrase, “But I could be wrong.” I think he’s right, because − Lion, Roundhead, or Cavalier − we’re all looking at the world through a dark, dark glass. The Apostle says so. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

          Someone from Boston, New York, or Washington will try. Someone like A. N. Pierson-Eaton, daughter of an aide to several congressmen from blue states and a cellist, Ivy graduate, and staff writer/assistant editor for culture, politics, and religion at The New Slate Saloon online. Someone with the uncanny capacity to con an expert opinion on Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Henri, and the Ukraine one week, and Argentinian wines, five plays by Schiller, and the effect current Fed policy will have on the American middle class the next.

          Please forget that A. N. knows no one in the American middle class. She makes considerably more than you and I ; and this is not to mention her income from a family trust and the salary and bonuses of a spouse that works on Wall Street (albeit as a junior partner making only pennies per picosecond). Wait! She does. There’s the cashier at the bodega down the block, . . . what’s his name.

          Overlook that with reliable translations, trustworthy dictionaries, and a good reference grammar, I could quote Critique de la raison dialectique or Die Räuber as if I knew them by heart, who went to college west of the Mississippi River and was asked to leave a graduate program south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

          Also: never mind that as far as Argentina is concerned A. N. has never been outside the Buenos Aires airport, a taxi, the Alvear Palace Hotel (its bar and restaurant), and another taxi. It doesn’t really matter that the closest she’s been to Kiev is Warsaw on a boarding school May-term trip. She did write an Art 101 paper on John Sloan.

          None of this matters, because we are dealing not only with Washington, Boston, and New York City but with genuine intelligence, a lively imagination, also an astounding confidence that words really do stand for ideas, and ideas are better than experience. CNN, NPR, and those that matter in Aspen, Austin, and Los Altos are convinced.

          As for that crank in Keokuk that has his doubts (Gas, Jr. or one of his ilk), he’d vote for Ted Cruz if he lived in Kilgore.

But about any or all of this I could be wrong.

Note. In previous posts, I have ended with omega (W), “the end,” almost as if I knew what I’d been talking about. I don’t. I never do really. So  . . . from now on, depending on how confident I am, I’ll end with the next to the last letter of the Greek alphabet (Y), or the one before that (F), or . . . .

L

(bicbw)*

*Because I could be wrong.

We're all gulls

February 24, 2011
We're all gulls

In the “Coda” to Karl Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything, the narrator (Henrik Vankel) is on a crab-fishing expedition with his brother and sad misfit father. It is then and there the father shows him the tiny angel hands under the wings of the gulls.

          The angels were marooned on earth when God died; for when God dies, heaven shrivels into nothing.  Then, the angels have no home; moreover, they are homeless in a place, the earth, they care nothing about. Their connection to the earth and its inhabitants was only in the tasks God gave them to perform here.  With no Task-giver, there is for them only drifting − nothing else, except survival. That is the why of their mutation from seraphim to cherubim to gulls − to survive. (It is unclear why survival is so important, except that there may be no choice: if they are eternal in or under the heavens, they must survive.)

          It is on this crab-fishing trip with brother and father, too, that Vankel admits that there is no one he loves sufficiently that he couldn’t contemplate his or her death with detachment. He has become an observer, a watcher. He considers, he categorizes, he draws hypotheses. He wonders about things, but the wonder never becomes wonderment; more accurately, he speculates. Dispassionately. Detached. He collects stories; but all the stories collects are as specimens; none has any meaning beyond itself. At home, he’ll empty his pockets and put the specimens into their proper places on certain shelves or in particular drawers in the correct cabinet. There are no stories, only these specimens; there is no story, only taxonomy. As the angels have become gulls, there is left only the reasons that reason knows.

Or something like that. I could be wrong.

Y

Hear Edwin Morgan read his poem at poetryarchive.org.

W

Dark until this morning

Going Around Back

February 24, 2014.  "The Ambiguities" was dark from February 20 until this morning, but there was some light in the darkness.  To see posts from February 21, 22, 23, go around back.

Heraclitus' GPS

February 18, 2014

Heraclitus’ GPS

Bombast Ÿ cotton or other material used to pad garments.

Pretentious pomposerosity.

          It’s what happens when anyone less than Shakespeare or Sophocles starts elaborating what he thinks is a tragic premise. We end up with The Sorrows of Young Werther, which von Eichendorff wisely turned into the picaresque Life of a Good-for-nothing (Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts).

Picaresque Ÿ pertaining to or characteristic of the episodic
adventures of a rapscallion on the road.

          When you’ve got too much time on your hands − and especially on your poor aching heart − it's best to get out of the house and wander into trouble. Better to run than to hide. Better to fall down under some gate-toothed wench from Bath than to pine for your lost Berner Mädchen. Better to sleep in a storm sewer like Diogenes wondering where your next meal is coming from than in your own bed, wrapped up in your own weeping heart.

          If you can’t get out of the house, read von Eichendorff or Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller or look through road maps as if they were icons.

          (Speaking of Diogenes:) Take lessons from your idiot dog, how he spurns tragedy and lives dogmerry even on his leash, eating anything he can snatch off the ground on his morning and evening walks − hamburger wrappers, chicken bones, twigs, dirt, cat and rabbit turds.

          Your nose, your tongue, your fingers are more reliable than your heart which is even less reliable than your memory.

There are two kinds of people (that old saw):

1.    Those that think we’ve left captivity and are heading toward the Promised Land; and

2.    Those that think we’ve left home and are on our way to Hell in a hand-basket.

But there is a third way:

3.    We’re wandering in the wilderness; we’re shifting from place to place, bobbing and weaving, but we’re getting nowhere wherever we think we’re headed.

Get lost, be lost. Especially, don’t worry about finding the way back, because − Heraclitus is right − there is no back.

          Put off the mask of tragedy. Be merry. Live in your senses not in your soul.  Especially, forget becoming a tragic hero. Did you want to be Macbeth or Polycarp, that in love with power or piety? Polycarp’s last thought before the spear piercing his side allowed the fire to lick empty his brain − the martyr’s last thought was how good this was going to look on his résumé.

F

Live in your senses.  Note on Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and Brueghel's paintings below.*

 Y

Notes:

*More than one commentator has wanted to associate Auden’s description of “the dreadful martyrdom” running its untidy course while dogs play and horses scratch with Brueghel’s The Massacre of the Innocents.  But it’s an association, which, besides the painting’s playing dogs and numerous horses (none scratching his behind), has little to recommend it.  Commentators have been drawn to The Massacre for two reasons, it seems to me.  First, the painting is in a series with The Numbering of the People at Bethlehem.  (One hesitates to suggest that scholars were “turned on” to The Massacre, because there was only one page to turn over from The Numbering in their art books; but there it is.  Second, the painting—filled as it is with occupying Spanish soldiers killing the children of Dutch peasants—allows for the possibility of all kinds of political commentary (particularly on World War II), even political allegory.  Fair enough, but the deaths of the innocents, however horrible, are not martyrs’ deaths.

                The word (“martyr”) has an interesting history, which as good a classical scholar as Auden would have known.  It comes from the Greek martys (martuV) meaning, literally (and simply), “witness.”  But it came in the life of the early church to mean one who refused to renounce his or her faith whatever the torture, even when it led, inevitably, to death.  In fact, one of the earliest church documents preserved, other than Scripture, is the so-called “Martyrdom of Polycarp,” which describes in simultaneously laconic and lurid detail the death of a bishop of Smyrna who refused to bow down to Caesar and renounce Christ.  As a result, he was thrown to lions who declined to harm him, burned though the fire would only encircle him, and finally pierced with a spear—at which point there came forth not only blood sufficient to quench the fire but a dove.  This death of Polycarp, however bizarre, is in “The Martyrdom” likened to Christ’s, for he (Christ) is the first martyr.  (See Hebrews 12.)

                Indeed, if “the miraculous birth” refers to Christ’s birth, then “the dreadful martyrdom” almost certainly refers to his death.  So, if Auden has a specific Brueghel painting in mind, as he writes these lines, it is most likely The Procession to Calvary in which the “dreadful martyrdom” will “run its course/ Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot.”  Again, the central figures—Jesus falling beneath the weight of his cross, Simon of Cyrene seeking to help over his wife’s physical objections—are almost lost in the crowd that fills the painting’s middle ground.  The site of the crucifixion itself is relegated to so far a “corner” (literally) of the painting the viewer wonders how Christ will ever get to it.  But people—and their horses and their dogs—are already gathering there for the spectacle to come.

                Not that either horses or dogs care.  The dogs do “go on with their doggy life.”  It’s a strikingly colloquial turn of phrase, almost childlike—in the sense that nursery rhymes are childlike.  Look closely at what Auden is about here, at the level of words.  On the one hand, there is “the dreadful martyrdom.”  If not a starchy phrase, it is a formal one.  Like “the miraculous birth,” “the dreadful martyrdom” has a kind of high-church, book-of-not-so-common-prayer sound.  But “the dreadful martyrdom” will “run its course”—the language becomes increasingly less formal—“anyhow in a corner”—colloquial, even common: “where dogs go on with their doggy life.”

                And where “the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”  The language falls, from formal to common, then begins to rise again—a bit anyway.  They were pretty much any old dogs getting on with their “doggy life,” but it is not any old horse scratching his “behind on a tree.”  (Incidentally, this particular “event” does not appear in any of Brueghel’s paintings to my knowledge.)  It is “the torturer’s horse.”  It’s an interesting choice of words, not only for the sound the phrase makes—all those r’s rolling around together creating all that internal rhyme: tor- with horse, -tur- with -er’s, -er’s with -orse—but for the sense, and tone it gives this second picture.  

W