Not standin' in the need of prayer - or anything else

 Not standin’ in the need of anything 

He kneels on the earth in Blake's engraving. It's an empty place except for his friends hexing him with varying degrees of concern and satisfaction. We love to give good advice to those that need it.

     Later we say: “I really didn’t want to interfere, but he had wandered so far off the mark, someone had to say something.” “Yes, whether he listened or not. That was his decision, wasn’t it? Ultimately! You can only say what you know to be true.” “Say what you know to be true? – what everyone knows to be true. But he’s the one that has to do something about it.”

     It’s an intervention for Job’s own good. Oh, admittedly, as much for the good of the interveners (Eliphaz and Bildad* and Zophar), who do wish their friend would straighten up and fly right – and especially exercise a modicum of modesty – but who also want to get on the record. Then, they can go home and tell their wives with a shrug, “Well, we did what we could.”

Job’s own wife is behind him, not hexing but pleading: “Think of me,” gently. She may well be thinking herself, “The man is a jackass”; but he’s long been her jackass. And she doesn’t yet know that she’s going to die because of this particular piece of jackassery.

Finally, there is Job. Kneeling. Proudly. Hands open at his sides. Naked from the waist up, gazing into the distance though away from the hills from hence his help might come. Proud, sad, and, especially, knowing. Proud. Thinking, “פוק you guys.

     “פוק you all.” It’s the refrain of the self-righteous in every age. And Job is – don’t believe anything else you may have read or will read – Job is the epitome – he is the definition - of self-righteousness. His friends are wrong; his wife is misguided; God, if He is God of the Righteous, is on the wrong path entirely. But not Job; he is right. Job Job’s-self can confidently say, “פוק you guys. פוק everyone and Everyone of you. פוק you very much.”

And they are – all but God** – they are פוקך – wife, children, friends and foes alike, not to mention every sheep, goat, bird, and bush from one side of the Ponderosa to the other. All will פוקין die and rot into the ground. Every buzzard will die, every hyena – there will be nothing to poke at the bones.

     But not Job. He will live, and he’ll get everything back seventy-times-seven-fold. And he’ll die not of wind, fire, sword, or plague; he’ll die in his bed as self-righteous as the day Blake got out his Brownie and snapped his picture.

04.11.17

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 * Answer to that greatest of all Bible trivial questions, “Whose the shortest man in Scripture?” [Bildad the Shuhite]

** The doctrine of aseity. God cannot be פוקך.

dos marinos

Lorca, Barbarous Nights

 dos marinos 

     Dos Marinos en la Orilla

        Federico García Lorca

        1

Se trajo en el corazón

un pez del Mar de la China.

A veces se ve cruzar

diminuto por sus ojos.

Olvida siendo marino

los bares y los naranjas.

Mira al agua.

        2

Tenía la lengua de jabón.

Lavó sus palabras y se calló.

Mundo plano, mar rizado

cien estrellas y su barco.

Vió los balcones del Papa

y los pechos dorados de las cubanas.

Mira al agua.

I am sitting in the rocker on the upstairs sun porch, listening to Tito Puente. The old dog is curled up – so far as his old bones will let him – on the rug at my feet.

     I have read “Dos Marinos” twice through. I read it again. I am looking for a word or a phrase to float up from the page and into my mouth; I will swallow it, see how it sits on my stomach.

     Two phrases pick at me. I am wondering how the first sailor can have forgotten the bars and the oranges – maybe some of them, but surely not all – and what does his forgetting have to do with his sailoring. And, I am wondering about what the pope on his balcony has to do with the golden breasts of the Cuban women. It’s not that I believe they are not connected, both no doubt proudly on display. Vanity!

 “Vanity, vanity,” saith the Preacher. “All is vanity!”

Maybe so. And maybe not. Is the vanity of the Pope, dressed in his rich robes and high miter, the heavy cream-colored cloth stitched with gold thread, not only vain but also breathtakingly real for the faithful. He raises his right arm, extends his first and second fingers, and they receive his blessing. This day at least will go well.

     And the full, creamy-golden breasts of the Cuban women, nipples the color of dark rum pushing against the thin cloth of their dresses, they are not air, they are flesh: And why shouldn’t they be proud of them? The sailor that gazes on them, why shouldn’t he feel blessed? This afternoon and evening will go well.

     This day, this afternoon and evening, will they be forgotten, too, like the bars of other evenings ashore, the oranges for breakfast the next morning. (How do we forget?)

I read the poem through again - and again. So what do I see now? What do I hear, taste, smell, what rubs against my skin?

     My mind wants everything to come together in one place, a bar on the beach at Varadero, orange trees in the courtyard, a large, stuffed fish mounted high on one wall, a stylized photo of the Pope giving his blessing instead of a television over the bar. And at the bar, the women in their low cut dresses, leaning toward the sailors. The sailors inhaling their perfume mixed with the tangy smell of the oranges, and the sharp salt of the sea air. They raise their eyes from the golden breasts and look over the golden shoulders and out the open window to the water, rising into gentle hills and washing against the shore.

For all its attractions, we can’t seem to stay – we can never quite be - where we are. We are always thinking of where we must be going.

     That is why all is – all this, everything now (the Pope, the golden breasts, the rocker, the dog, Tito Puente, the sun on my shoulders) – all here and now is vanity, as the Preacher cries out, a mist [הבל]^ we keep squinting to see through. Across from where I sit, several books on Revelation. Catching my eye: Harrington’s Understanding the Apocalypse, the ultimate looking away from the present –"Forward, forward!" it cries. (Everlastingly forward!)

     Forward not to the orange I may eat at lunch, not to wondering this evening at Roz’s nakedness as she changes for bed, not even to imagining some future trip to Havana or Rome, but dragged by the longest of ropes into the fictitious time way, way, and way away from here when a sword-wielding Christ will come swooping down with his band of angry angels, one of whom will surely lop off my head.

04.10.17

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 ^ The Hebrew translated “vanity” means literally “fog” or “mist.”

espesura de besos

 a thicket of kisses 

 

    Variación

       Federico García Lorca

     El remanso del aire

     bajo la rama del eco.

     El remanso del agua

     bajo fronda de luceros.

     El remanso de tu boca

     bajo espesura de besos.

My Spanish isn’t very good – that’s an understatement – but I feel as if I almost understand this little poem which avers there are still waters, a haven, a safe harbor underneath, or behind or within, quite dangerous things: a multiplication of echoes, a dazzle of stars, a thicket of kisses.

I wish the poem were more first-person, if that makes sense, the last verse

     El remanso de mi boca

     bajo espesura de tus besos.

Garcia Lorca, El Beso

I am remembering a time a girl I had been dating – we met for a movie, because we had stopped and were seeing other people. Then, afterward, down the street from the theater, in the dark around a corner, she turned and rocked to her toes and kissed me so hard our teeth knocked together. How many quiet times beneath – or since – that kiss I have thought of it?
      And how many times when I have thought about it, have I wondered when desire for that kind of desire, passion that knocks people’s teeth together so they hurt or creates a thicket of rough kisses between their lips – when did desire for that kind of desire go out of my life? I usually think immediately (even now when I am almost sixty), “No. That’s not right.” Because the desire for desire remains. It’s the foolish spirit to sneak away and to look for it around a dark corner; that’s what we decided one clear, earnestly sober day to misplace with a sad but relieved sigh.

     Because we had become unconvinced that there is un remanso beneath desire’s danger to catch us when we fall.

04.06.17

Pontius Pilate

Sorry, no audio today. Pepsi.

 Pontius Pilate 

Can we begin anything truly new until the old is forced out (or in the unlikely event it leaves of its own accord)?

Pontius Pilate
Berlin, 1938

I found The Master and Margarita on the floor under a chair this morning, because when I’d finished reading it, I couldn’t put it back on the shelf. It wouldn't let me let it go. I leafed through it. Chapter 2 - “Pontius Pilate.” He’s never going away, is he? – at least not until the last person that (not only says but) affirms the creed - “suffered under Pontius Pilate” - dies, and his grandchildren stop telling stories about him.

Bulgakov (fils) was neither theologian nor philosopher; he was only trying to figure out how the world works, and how it doesn’t work more of the time than not. There are too many loose ends. As soon as you come up with even a partial explanation, a cat wanders in that doesn’t fit where you're going or something you were certain was essential disappears with not even a silent fart.

     And whatever God’s place in it – the cranky world or your explanation of it – it must be off-stage. In the meanwhile, Weiland and his henchman are – Mischief is – as ludicrously in charge as anyone. Mischief or fate, fortune, or luck: All are unpredictable; how they function cannot be explained. It can be described. You can write a story about it, but the story must begin before its beginning – thus the Pilate chapter in The Master and Margarita; and it won’t end at the bottom of the last page: the merry bandmust be off, on its way to another confusement. Maybe the current political crisis is their doing. American capitalist democracy is these days no less foolish than Soviet-style communism was in those; indeed, if some predictions of how the climate will change are correct, it may be more deadly.

I had written this and printed it out, and I was going over it. Roz had come home to check on me, and she was reading over my shoulder.

     “As usual,” she said, “what’s the point?” I took my crayon and circled “on its way to another confusement.”

     “That’s the point,” I said. “That’s almost always the point.

     “If there has to be one,” I said.

04.04.17

Unruly wills

to listen, click here

 Unruly ears 

 Collect of the Day

O ALMIGHTY GOD, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.

The first strictly theological term I learned, I think, was Docetism, which has to do with a failure to believe that Jesus was a man, human, as human as we are – or with a need to believe that he wasn’t: he must be different from us – for example, not subject to unruly will or affection. (Unruly is an interesting word, isn’t it? – “not disposed to keeping the rules,” meaning, in the prayer of the day, the ones God commands, not wanting to do what God desires.)

     Consider today’s story from John 11, the raising of Lazarus and all that goes before it.

So, Lazarus, this friend of Jesus, is ill; he’s dying; but when Jesus hears about it, he doesn’t set off immediately to visit, to see his friend before he . . . well, croaks. He waits around for two days. Then, he says to his disciples, “We should go.” And they say, “Why? They were getting ready to stone you there, you remember. Why?” And Jesus thinks, “You don’t think I don’t know that. You don’t think that’s all that’s been on my mind for the last two days. Let’s hope it’s not too late.” In fact he says as much, if in code. “There is daylight, and there is dark. We can start off in the light and hope we get there before dark.”

     At least, that’s what I heard.

I also heard Thomas say, “Yes, let’s go now. To hell with danger.” (Jesus is then wishing he were so unthinkingly, unaffectedly brave.)

     I remembered how much I dislike Mary, because she’s always passive aggressive toward her sister. She’s the one, when Martha goes out to meet Jesus – she’s the one that says, “I’m coming”; only she’s not.

     And I remembered how the Orthodox Church has regarded the raising of Lazarus as two miracles. The first “explains” how he manages to come out of the tomb though his hands and feet are tied.

     “Let him loose,” Jesus says. He’s thinking: “And me. Let me loose, too, you damn Docetists.”

I know. I’m dead wrong. (Get the pun?)

    (I do, you damn Ebionite.)