Confucius returns to New Orleans.

 Confucius returns to New Orleans.* 

1964, four years before his previous visit in ’68. Above the streets named for
the muses, across St. Charles from Audubon Park, in the large second-floor
classroom of Gibson Hall, Tulane University’s front door.

He is lecturing about Joseph Smith and Baháʼu'lláh, how religion will fall from revelation to inspiration, from genius to ingenuity, from imagination to wit, a series of brief propositions.
     In answer to a question about Zen in the discussion that follows: “I cannot answer that, but it is not unanswerable because the practice is ineffable but because it is a tangle of pig- and bull- . . . One hand clapping?” He blew a raspberry,** and there the discussion ended.

                                                                                        01.22.23
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 *His previous visit, see here. For all previous Confucius posts, here. **For why he blows a raspberry instead of using the sh-word, that is here.

Axel's dream

 Axel’s dream 

“To me this is like the days of Noah,
    when I swore that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth.
So now I have sworn not to be angry with you,
    never to rebuke you again.
Though the mountains be shaken
    and the hills be removed,
yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken
    nor my covenant of peace be removed,”
    says the Lord, who has compassion on you.         — Isaiah 54:9-10

Axel is telling me about two friends from his seminary class who remained friends “ever after” they met first year and even became brothers-in-law when the one’s daughter married the other’s son. The one was a big man, slow and calm, the other an waspish Rumpelstiltskin. D and R he calls them. Then he is telling me about their wives as well because they had to become friends, too, whether they wanted to or not: D’s tall and plain and beautiful nonetheless and R’s small and round with a flat, blonde, unblinking doll’s face, eyes painted a fierce blue. Axel said, “I know I am only telling you what they looked like, but they were what they looked like.” All of this he is telling me by way of introduction to a dream he thought I might be interested in.
     My first thought is contrary: How interested is any of us in anyone else’s dream? But then I thought: Maybe I am interested, a little, if only because I have never thought of Axel as one that has dreams.

Read Rumpelstiltskin’s true story here.

Axel says: I am flying from one place I never wanted to be to a destination I’m not certain of, and I am lost in this massive, labyrinthine airport until I stumble my way into one of those bus-station-like corners where the bus-sized planes fly from the city to smaller towns around. I’ve taken off my glasses so I won’t recognize anyone if there might be anyone in that drab grade-school-lunch-smelling room that I might recognize. But I can’t not recognize D, who even if I can’t see him is wearing that overconfident Christian armor he has over the years (sadly, unfortunately) taken piece by piece from R until almost all of D’s natural, big-man’s modesty has been squeezed out and R’s small-man’s over-compensatory self-confidence substituted until it is brimming over, smelling of engine oil. I say self-confidence (bustling, bristling), for it is not God that is R’s refuge and strength as he would have you believe. No, it is the other way around: R is God’s refuge and strength.
     When I put on my glasses and embarrassedly introduce myself, D doesn’t seem to recognize me. But it is only for the moment — D is too kind naturally — he cannot be completely taken over by his brother-in-law’s mean spirit. I mean “mean” more in the sense of little and shrunken than nasty or spiteful, though there are times one must be nasty if God, who is much too kind, too open, too forgiving in Jesus Christ — one must be nasty if such a God is to be protected. But D is not thinking how he must defend the faith against me but wondering WWJD, and he blinks and says, “Oh, hi.” And he asks where I am going.
     But I don’t know. I’ll need to check my ticket if I can find it. I begin patting my pockets from coat to shirt to pants, and I wake up.

“I didn't know you wore glasses,” I say.
     “I don’t.”
     “Oh,” I say and after a pause, “What happened with the daughter and the son?”
     “I don’t know,” Axel says. “It was a dream — I said that, didn’t I?”
     I nod. “But the daughter and the son were real, right?” I want to add. But I don’t.

                                                                       01.18.23

A bit of everything

 A bit of everything 

December 23, at home, continued from here.
     Her new husband, Brainerd, comes, bringing mostly silence and an eight-pack of Guinness Stout Draft.
     Everyone brings something to drink or for dessert. For the rest, Roz orders Chinese.

Bel brings a nice Pinot Grigio and Nils a Sauvignon Blanc. Axel brings two bottles of Malbec, one quite nice unopened, the other in which he has been stewing fruit and fruit juice to make Sangria because “What goes better with Chinese?”

Ramos Gin Fizz.
Click here for a recipe.

Giggly Polly brought all the ingredients to make loopy Ramos Gin Fizzes for before dinner. Uncle Albert had ordered a case of Perrier. There were no deserts except I had laid in three cartons of ice cream, one vanilla, one chocolate, and one butter pecan, just in case. And not everyone wants dessert anyway, or more than dessert than their fortune cookies (smelling of sesame and vanilla. Axel’s fortune is, "You haven’t come this far to come only this far.” “But where would I be going?” he asks. Bel’s is, “Sometimes silver exceeds gold.” And Brainerd’s is, “There is travel in your future, but you will go nowhere.”
     I can’t drink with my meds, so usually I don’t and never at these parties. Instead, I drive everyone home that isn’t walking. They make their own way back usually to get their cars the next day. Or the day after. I say “usually” because once I had to pick up Maggie after she had called Roz to say her car had been stolen.

“Why do you do this?” I asked Roz. This was the morning after. She uses the good china and the good glassware and the real silverware, all of which we have to wash by hand.
     “For you, of course,” she said. “I know how Christmas gets to you.”
     “No,” I said, “I’m okay. Really.”
     “Yes, I know you are. You are okay. But not really.” She takes the plate I’ve pulled out of the suds, runs it under the hot water and puts it in the drainer. When the drainer is full, we dry and put away; and we start again. “Actually, it was Dwight’s idea.” Dwight is my sister Hannah’s I-always-thought-humorless, consumerist husband. Double major in Economics and Philosophy, or so she claims, but then on to dental school and getting rich by taking over his father’s highly successful practice. Really, he had to have majored in Business, I think. He can’t have majored in Philosophy, or Economics — much less both. He had to have majored in Business.
     I winced. “No!” I thought — not Dwight.
     “Yes. It makes sense what he said, even if I can’t explain it very well,” Roz said. “Something about your benefiting from embracing the absurd, then you would come out on the other side. A philosopher named Grand, Joseph.” She gave both names a French pronunciation. So she was kidding, I was almost sure.
     “Wait,” I said, handing her the last plate and draining the suds from the sink. “He’s not real. He’s a character in The Plague.” “Is he?” “You know he is, the one that can’t finish even the first sentence of his novel.” “No,” she laughed.
    “Yes,” I said. “Does he survive, do you remember?”
     “He does,” Roz said, reaching across and handing me the sink drainer basket to carry to the garbage because the disposal is making a funny noise again.

                                                                       01.09.23

The Friday before

  The Friday before 

December 23, at home.
     Uncle Albert says he wishes English had more letters though he doubts we could master them as we haven’t mastered the 26 we have.
     “I don't know, ” Axel says, “Are the letters ours to master any more than the words are Humpty Dumpty’s?” The conversation is taking place at Roz’s Friday-before-Christmas dinner, which she holds those years that neither Christmas Eve nor Day falls on a Friday. Axel has been coming since 2014, and his brother Nils since 2018; this is Bel Monk’s second year, I think. Longer than any of them, Roz’s best friend Maggie (See also here.) and her well-meaning but irritating friend Polly have been coming, as was Polly’s former husband Chris, who said in three years only two words, “Fuck” and, immediately after,  “Sorry.” Now her new husband, Brainerd, comes, bringing an only slightly less measured silence and an eight-pack of Guinness Stout Draft.
     Everyone brings something to drink or for dessert. For the rest, Roz orders Chinese.

Davor Šuker with Arsenal

Uncle Albert claims to have met “Lju” Gaj, as he calls him, though that would make him (Albert) 196 instead of 96, I say. But no, don’t be ridiculous! He met him at the 1998 World Cup in France,* when Croatia finished third as they did this year, in ’98 beating the Dutch 2-1 in the third-place match. That was at the Parc des Princes in Paris.
     “He was wearing the same military coat as in your fake picture of him with Confucius. I didn’t meet him at the match but in the afternoon before it. Kundera introduced us.”
     “The Czech writer?” Nils asks. He is shaking his head and is about to say that this is all bullshit, it has to be, when Axel jumps in to ask who scored the winning goal.
     “Yes,  Šuker,” Uncle Albert says. “He won the Golden Boot with it. That’s a letter we could use, one for the sh sound. Then we would know whether it should be shedule or skedule.”
     Polly turns to Roz and giggles, “Is this the way it is every night here?” as Uncle Albert continues: “He played a season with Arsenal, though not much of one.”
     “No,” Roz says to Polly. “Most nights Ted cooks.”

                                                                       01.02.23                                                 continued here
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 * So when Gaj was 189.

Special offer.

 World Cup special offer. 

Kip’s, Berkeley, CA. One week ago.
     “As I understand it,” Confucius was saying to no one in particular, “M is the 13th letter of your Western alphabet. So, who am I going to root for going forward? Morocco is clearly out, Argentina is led Messi, France by Mbappé, and Croatia by Modrić.”
     “My good sir,” a man in a military jacket, having just stepped off the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, spoke over Confucius’ shoulder, “Pardon me for interrupting.”
     “No,” Confucius turned toward him, motioning to the empty stool beside him. “Sit.”
     “Allow me to introduce myself; I believe I can help you with your dilemma. Ljudevit Gaj,* modest,” swallowing the word with a modest cough but then repeating it for clarity, “modest creator of Ljudevit Gaj’s Latin alphabet. My card.”
     Confucius took it, odd proportions. There was only the name on the front and the dates 1809 - 1872. “Ah, turn it over,” Ljudevit Gaj said.

“I believe you'll find that in the alphabet my talented countryman Luka uses, M is the 18th letter.”

                                                                       12.19.22

______________
 * Don’t ignore the “1 minute read.” You know how much you use the site.

Special offer. This FIFA World Cup commemorative: Kǒng & Lju on a field of checks. (Actual size. Exclusive from The Ambiguities.)

Paronomasia

 continued from here

 Paronomasia 

Dramatis Personae: Axel and Nils Sundstrøm, Bel Monk, and Uncle Albert, wrapped up in a wool scarf and his full-length overcoat though its 40°F warmer inside Corner Coffee than outside on Division Street. And me.

Setting: Corner Coffee at the intersection of Division and Market. The smell of coffee, milk, and wet wool. Muted gabble. E.g.,

Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot
1845-1903

Nils: Blah, blah, blah. Politics. Blah. Kyrsten Sinema. Kari Lake. Now Arizona politics.
     Until he stops to take a swallow of his, and I push in as he raises mug to mouth. Wait until it touches his lips, and I’ll be too late: “What do Lutherans find funny?” I say. “What do they laugh at?”
     “Not much,” Bel says. “Mostly they twitter. Or they bark.”
     Nils is putting his mug down, but Axel says, “Wait!” the older brother.
     And Bel goes on: “They’re nervous, or they’re angry.” Nils has put his coffee down and has both hands around his mug. But Axel says again, “Wait!” “Because they’re caught off guard and they don’t know what to say,” Bel twitters nervously, demonstrating. “Or they can’t believe what they’re hearing,” — an angry bark. (Big dog!)
     Nils: “I . . . ,” but Uncle Albert doesn’t hear, or he doesn’t care: “You are still thinking about your de Maupassant story,” he says to me. “It’s ruin, as I said before. And requital.”
     Taking his wool-gloved hands from his lap and putting them on the table: “No one likes being laughed at, so they retaliate. Stand-up comics. They imagine that the audience is laughing with them, but as soon as they sense someone is not, someone becomes a heckler; and the comic will set out immediately to turn the laughter so it is directed at him.
     “Varajou’s brother-in-law and sister laugh at nothing, they are too serious — not only self-serious, too serious altogether. Or, they laugh aloud at nothing. Still, they are sniffing, snorting at Varajou’s improvidence and yobbery. Why shouldn’t he snort and sniff back? Except his snort and sniff will break out — not when he sees that he’s mistaken the mayor’s wife for a bawd and her daughters for chippies, but when he gets what that means for his self-righteous brother-in-law, who depends on the mayor, what it means for his smug sister, who depends on her husband — then he will  break out in raucous har-de-har-har-har that he upsets their pinched, prudish, grasping apple-cart?

     “Think about it.”

 

Nils gets up, “Head,” he coughs.

     Axel says, “It’s not just Lutherans, it’s the Presbyterians, too, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Norwegians, the Finns, and the Latts. Bel is right. Most laughter is nervous chirp, angry bark, or confused coughed — or menacing, the witch’s cackle, the villain’s bwahaha. It is almost anything but delighted. It may be the only pure laughter not of children is at puns. We groan but without bitterness or cynically; we’re not nervous or angry, or lost. We laugh at puns, but it is never laughter truly at but we’re laughing with thepunster. Poor guy. He can’t help it.”

 

“‘Bawd’?” I say to Uncle Albert. “‘Chippies’?”
     Axel because he can’t help it, turning also to Uncle Albert: “What do you think it was, the bawd rate?”
                                                                       12.12.22 

An officer but not a gentleman.

Guy de Maupassant
1850 - 1893

 An officer but not a gentleman. 

There’s a story by de Maupassant, typical of him in that it is not a story but an anecdote, with too obvious a point: “The Noncommissioned Officer.”     The feckless officer has decided to spend his leave in a small, backwater town with his sister and her husband though they are his opposites, proper, pious, and provincial. The officer is, if not a man of the world, worldly — hard-charging, hard-drinking, and randy, one of those men “for whom life has no greater pleasures than those of the café and public women.” These do not come free: he has decided to visit his sister because there is no one else of his family and acquaintance he has not borrowed from. So perhaps she and her husband, a local official, will . . . .
     But he discovers what he should have known all along had he any insight: all he will receive for his “troubles” are a week’s worth of prim lectures and bad meals. The meals he must eat, but the lectures he will ignore because he is a lout. He is, de Maupassant informs the reader, in the phrase the whole story is worth reading for: “Boasting, blustering, full of disdain for everybody, he despised the whole universe from the height of his ignorance.”
     The story ends predictably when the officer, having drunken his fill at a local café, and, looking for other satisfactions (his other satisfaction), misunderstands the barman’s directions and stumbles into the house of his brother-in-law’s patron, there mistaking the patron’s wife for a madame and his daughters for whores. His poor brother-in-law is mortified! Har-de-har-har-har. The officer falls on the floor laughing. But what is so funny?

I think, “I’ll ask Uncle Albert.”
     He's asleep in front of the France-Poland match; or, he’s asleep at the half. He has turned off the sound because he finds the Fox commentary team’s analysis simultaneously vapid and irritating. (Before he goes to bed, he’ll catch up with James Richard’s “The Totally Football Show.”
     I nudge him. “What? Go away. What?”

     “de Maupassant. I have a question.”
     Again, “What?”
     “About a story: ‘The Noncommisioned Officer’ in English.”
     “I don’t know it.”
     “The main character’s name is Varajou.”
     “Varajou,” he corrects my pronunciation.
     “Maybe. I don’t know, however, if I can find it.” He pulls his right talon from underneath his throw, painted with penguins, and points at his brain.
     “Come on,” I say.
     “Likely it is in there,” Uncle Albert says, “but the index . . . .” He stops.
     “Can you read what I’ve written?” I’ve printed it out.
     He waves his hand. I put the copy in it.

 

“Vaguely,” he says, waving the paper but referring, I take it, to his memory of the story.
     “So?”
     “So, what?”
     “My question,” I say: “What’s so funny?”
     “Ruin,” Uncle Albert says and waves the page toward me until I take it back from him.
     “Ruin?”
     “Yes. Ruin and recompense.”
     “That’s it? Meaning?”
     “Think about it.”
                                                                       12.04.22
                                                                                                                                                      to be continued*

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* TA returns on a once-a-week schedule. Mondays. Sometimes Tuesdays. Maybe.