Out of season

 Out of season 

It’s neither June nor January, both of which are invoked in Thomas Carew’s poem “The Spring.” (It’s not June in January.) It’s not long’d-for May, which is when Carew’s poem seems to begin.

     You can read the poem here. Or you may both read it and hear it read by clicking the YouTube icon below. As I say in my introduction to the reading, they don’t write poems like this anymore. “They” would mean, in this case, men. None of us woos his woman by telling her how beautiful she is now, but it’s not going to last. None of us has a woman he may call his for one thing. For another, who woos?

     The poem is long, long out of date, then. It remains, however, a delight for some right reasons – the frost that “candies” the grass, the arch joy of the language, the sound of the thing with all its headless lines. So, I like it this November day. I like Carew any day of the year. Shoot me!

11.07.19

Bible Tuesday

 Bible Tuesday*: checking back 

Sometimes I look back over what I’ve written, mostly to see what I’ve been doing. Otherwise, I forget. Or I’ve already forgotten, so I look back to remember.

     Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I read the prophet Amos again. Then, this morning, when Roz came down to breakfast, just as she was sitting down, I said in my best race-track announcer’s voice, “Prepare to meet thy God!”

     We were having our usual toast and coffee. We should eat more and better, but we don’t.

     “Where did that come from?” Roz said.

Lions and bears

     “I don’t know.”

     “Amos,” Roz said.

     “Oh. Right.”

     “Do you know how I know that?”

     “No.”

     “You told me.”

     “ . . . . ”

     “I saw that sign down near Marion.”

     “Oh?”

     “Remember. It was a month and a half ago, maybe a little more. You said you were going to write about it.”

     “Oh,” I said again.

And after breakfast and Roz was gone and I had policed the kitchen, I looked it up. And I had written about it; and I read what I had written, and I remembered.

     And I thought:

From the point of view of Jeroboam, king of Israel, and Amaziah, high priest at Bethel, there isn’t much to say for Amos, the self-proclaimed prophet (a tree-trimmer cum shepherd by trade), a nuisance, a meddler, who showed up suddenly from a place where there was plenty enough for him to piss on about, he didn’t have to come to your place - especially, he didn’t need to come uninvited to your place - to carp at you, make threats, scare people; he could have stayed home and played the outraged Puritan there.

     We don’t do this often enough, I don’t think: We don’t imagine the Bible from another point of view. The book is Amos, we decide; the words are Amos’s that God has shown him. And we take him at his word, or his words, as if there could be no other way to take him or them. We don’t think about how important Amaziah’s job is to him though we know he has a wife and children. We don’t think about how little the king of Israel wants to hear from a prophet from Judah. We don’t think. We forget there could be other points of view.

     But there have to be, right? We’re as dull-witted as Amos’ sheep if we don’t look around to see other points of view. Or we’re as blindly pious as his tree-saws but not as sharp: “Piety thrives on lack of imagination.” Who said that?

11.05.19

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 * This week Bible Friday comes on a Tuesday. It can come any day. A Thursday. A Monday. There were no reasons for these aberrations. Roz believes I don’t know what day of the week it is because when she asks me, I say, “I don’t know.” But I can always look it up.

     I do look it up before I go anywhere. Or, I try to. I don’t want to drop by Axel Sundstrøm’s office on a Sunday morning, for example, or go to the dentist on a Tuesday if my appointment is for Thursday. True, there’s no reason to know the day if you aren’t going out - or if you’re only going for a walk or a drive or to the 24-hour drug store for a Coke or some Gingko.

     (I wrote “Gingko” just for the sound of it. I don’t ingest. I don’t even know what it does - or is, for that matter. I doubt Amos knew either; he doesn’t mention it. But God could have given it to him in a vision he didn’t write down. “The priests of Bethel are like the gingko tree, its leaves torn off and chewed to heal the mind, yet they do no healing.”)

     Forgive the rambling. I’ve put it both below the line and small - below the line, for who reads below the line? - and small, so you could easily skip it.

Please Stand By

 

10.30.19

Saturday night

 Saturday night 

Roz said again at supper that she was worried about her narrow man. (See here.) We were talking about her friend Maggie, who was thinking she might have to have carpal tunnel surgery. Roz said something about wishing she could call the narrow man to ask if he was okay. I wouldn’t want a woman I didn’t know calling me, I said, asking how I was, whatever note of compassion she could put in her voice.

     Roz asked me how I knew that if it had never happened to me.

We were eating spaghetti I had made with store-bought marinara sauce but doctored with basil and fennel and thyme, thickened with diced and sautéed onions, apples, peppers, and celery, and with ground Italian sausage. The noodles I boil just beyond al dente. Sometimes I make a salad as well. This time, though, I just threw two cups of frozen spinach in with the noodles.

     Afterward, Roz bussed the table and washed the dishes. I put on a second sweater, wrapped my legs in a blanket, and sat down in the den to watch the sad fourth game of the Series.

10.27.19

Deep Desire sung this song

 Deep Desire sung this song 

And now for something completely different:

  10.26.19

Demons vs. rashes

 Demons vs. rashes 

Sunday morning was rain, hard and cold. Uncle Albert didn’t want to get out in it. He wasn’t going to church; he wasn’t even coming over to watch Premier League football (though he would come Monday afternoon to see Arsenal lose its sad, sad game to Sheffield United).

     It was just as well. Roz wanted me to go to church with her: The narrow man* was preaching at the little Presbyterian Church near Red Spring, where our State Senator is a member. The Senator wasn’t there. There weren’t many there at all. I counted 17 including the two of us and the preacher.

     The rain was loud on the roof, sounding both angry and resigned.

with apologies to Martin Schongauer

The narrow man has grown a beard; it is sparse but neatly shaped. It gives him the resigned look of a prophet that knows no one is listening, however attentive any may appear. The true prophets have wild, thick, scratchy beards and are sure all must be listening as it is God’s word they are speaking. The Word cannot return empty, even when it - almost invariably - does. Did Amos topple even one idol?

     He apologizes, the narrow man, for departing from the assigned reading for the Sunday. He has no excuse, only one story has been picking at his sleeve, pulling at his ears, pestering him, so he can’t get it out of his mind, “The Gerasene Demoniac,” as he called it.

     “Picking? Pulling? Pestering?” he asked. It had been plaguing him, infesting him like the demons infested the poor man living naked in the cemetery on the other side of the lake. He tried to smile. He shrugged. The little beard was white. It made him look, I thought, paler than I remembered, more worn. I didn’t believe the story had been plaguing him, however. I took the smile and the shrug as an admission of hyperbole.

     But Roz said afterwards that she was worried about him.

He said something like this:

     The church came to believe - and his text for this morning was its proof - that demons could only be moved on, from a madman into a herd of defenseless pigs, for example. They could not be killed, and they could not be rehabilitated; they could not be taught a trade and settle into a quiet, productive life.

     Leprosy, on the other hand, could be cleansed. Whatever happened to them after, when the scales were lifted from one man’s skin, they didn’t go on to descend on another’s. A broken body could be mended. A troubled spirit could not be calmed.

     It’s one explanation, he believed, tentatively, for why we try to shift blame: why the problems of women are the fault of men, and the problems of men are the fault of their mothers; it's why conservatives must blame liberals, and liberals must blame conservatives; it's why the problems of the UK are the fault of the EU, and the problems of the EU are the fault of Greece; it's why “the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Muslims and everybody hates the Jews.”** He didn’t want to gore anyone’s ox, it wasn't any one's failing; indeed, the examples could be multiplied infinitely. If we can no longer, in the twenty-first century, find someone to cast out our demons, we ourselves can - we think we must - lay them on others’ doorsteps. Then, let the other be angry. No, the other is angry already at being blamed: It’s not her expletive deleted fault, God knows!

     So, is this what we have become, he wondered, a society of sects, shifting the blame, throwing it off on another herd because how else do we get rid of the demons that infest us?

And he stopped as if winded. “I’ll leave you with that,” he said. And he tried again to smile; he shrugged his shoulders.

     The rain continued until late afternoon.

10.23.19

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 * We hear the narrow man only occasionally. You may find the occasions here.
** Because it's National Brotherhood Week!

Another farable of Jesop

 A farable of Jesop. 

“the lamb lies down with the wolf”

A wolf and a lamb set out on a journey, taking turns riding on each other’s back because it was cold and that way they could keep each other warm. As day dusked, the lamb grazed while the wolf built a fire. Night fallen, they huddled together next to it. The lamb fell almost immediately asleep, but the wolf lay quite awake, tending the fire.

 10.22.19

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The Farables (online reproduction of the 1887 edition with an afterword by me, Ted Riich) is available here.