Morning star

   Morning star  

Roz took Uncle Albert to church this morning because our rector, Susan, the former Miss Virginia, had called asking about him and me.
     Last night: “I told her you had the bug, but I would bring Albert.” Roz slumped her shoulders. “Why did I say that?” I shrugged mine. “Because I’m an idiot,” she said. “Though I do think Albert wants to go,” she said.

This morning: We talk across the room. We live now — we have lived for three weeks — across rooms behind masks when we aren’t in different parts of the house. It has worked, I guess you could say: I haven’t infected either Roz our Uncle Albert. I have kept my dis-ease to myself. Which may be why it has hung on so long. It has settled in where if not loved, it feels it has been accepted, made welcome.
     “I had forgotten how pretty she was. More than pretty really.” She was talking about Susan.
     “Yes. She was Miss Virginia.”
     “Did I know that? If I did, I’d forgotten. Which is not likely. When?”
     “2001, I think.”
     “Hmmm.”

St. Jude the Apostle
beach towel.

“What was the sermon about?” I ask.
     “That was an odd thing. It seemed to be on the  back of an envelope.”
     “It often is,” I say. “But what was it about?”
     “Something about the bright morning star and guns, about how far earth can get from heaven so only heaven can bring it nearer again.”
     Now I said, “Hmmm.”
     “That’s what I thought,” Roz says. “But you know me, unreliable witness. Never really sure. You should ask Albert.”
     “No,” I say, “that’s ... ” I start to say, “that’s good enough” or “close enough.” Instead I say, “I like that” though it doesn’t sound like Susan.
     “Oh,” Roz says. “Good.”

She is looking down, picking at the back of the blue arm chair. I am looking at the top of her head, how her hair can both stay in place and look as if it is about to spring off in every different direction. She looks up,
     “On the way home, I asked Albert why she became a priest, did he think?”
     “What did he say?”
     “He said, ‘Why does anyone do anything?’”    

 05.29.22 

Tuesday on the couch with George

  Tuesday on the couch with George  
Or, Apolgia pro ueblogia sua

My friend Rick Dietrich, whom, though he lives less than a block away, I never see unless I walk by his house and he’s looking out the window — he sent this to me. That is, he put it in my mailbox.
     It is an essay by the Hungarian philosopher/literary critic, George Lucács. Why he passed it along to me, marked up as you can see in the picture of one of the pages, I don’t know. But I read it through, not just the underlines and the marks in the margin. I read all of it. 
     It is one of those arguments that you can follow as you read it, but you might not be able to recapitulate it. But I think that the main argument goes something like this: Modern literature, particularly modern fiction, doesn’t work because it doesn’t engage the world. Instead of launching its characters into a changing world, it takes the world as already done (to a crisp). Its characters, for that matter, they are also already done. Everything is fixed, and nothing will change it. The story cannot move from beginning to insight to dénouement. It just sits on the page, though of course, for several pages. Static. The characters are static, and the story is static because the world isn’t evolving but given.
     This doesn’t mean that Musil or Kafka or James Joyce aren’t wonderful writers that can write wonderful descriptions, but it does mean that they do no more than that. The novels and stories are not narratives; they are pictures. Pretty, pretty pictures. They won’t last, Lucács thinks. Or, at least, that’s what I think Lucács thinks. The novels and stories won’t last in the sense that they cannot endure. Lovely as they may be, they don’t tell us anything we don’t already know. (They are about what we already know.)
     When I finish reading the essay, I suppose that my friend is trying to say something to me about The Ambiguities. His putting this in my mailbox suggests he might think that I am making the same mistake that Joyce did in Ulysses, that Musil did in The Man Without Qualities, or that Kafka did in The Castle or “The Metamorphosis.” Would that I was making a mistake as grand as those! But it’s only the same mistake, not nearly as grand. Joyce, Musil, and Kafka do accomplish what they set out to accomplish. I do not. But ...

Friend Rick: Here is my response, such as it is. I write — as weren’t we all instructed? — about what I know. I know my little life in which very little happens, though something does! And I know a little about the little lives around me. I know what we are up to in a world that is changing. I don’t know where we are going, but we are going somewhere, I think. In the meantime, we soldier on. Emphasis on “on.”

 05.24.22 

Getting well again

 Getting well again 

Dear Ted,
     I am sorry to hear (from Moira) that you have contracted the virus. Get well soon! (All may never be well, but some things do get better. It is true that some things also get worse, for the sake of balance, but let’s hope it will be worse for someone else. Yes, forget charity. Let’s hope that.)
     Leslie* came by last night to take me for a walk. We went through the oval of the park alongside which I sometimes sit [link to Marksman?], down to the pond-called-a-lake and back. We left at twilight and came back in the dark. A warm night, just enough damp in the air to stick pleasantly to your skin and make your lips taste like salt.
     He likes to keep track of “earthly matters,” Les does, the rise and fall of the pandemic and the dollar, the weapons of the wars between liberals and libertarians, between conservatives and crazies, between Slavs — cold wars and hot wars, wars with lives at stake and only reputations, prejudiced masked as ideas. He mutters about this battle and that, then suggests that humans would be better off if there were regular days of worldwide fasting, if all went out into the streets or the fields and lashed themselves and wept, “however crocodile the tears,” he said. Better to feign repentance than not to repent at all.
     I don’t as what has brought this particular jeremiad on. It's better to enjoy the distinctly British rhythm of the muttering, matching my steps to its.
     When he stops (muttering) — when we arrive at the lake and pause to look over the water — I mention, because he’s mentioned the pandemic, that you have been sick with it. “Oh?” he says. “Not seriously, I hope.” “I don't think so.” “Well, I wish him well.” “Yes.” “Tell him so,” he said. So I have.
     Few of us, in my (admittedly little) experience, are as fragile as we think we are; all of us are prone to melodrama. Then, few of us are as resilient as we think we are; we fail to see how this scratch and that dent and this bit of gravel in that quart of fluid have weakened the structure. Finally, like an old car, we will fall apart. Overnight! We’ll be driven home from a till-the-wee-hours-party; and the next morning, we won’t start to go to work. And I am not sure, whatever the manuals say, that how well we have been maintained makes a great difference.
     But what do I know, compared with Les, or you, a girl who read poems and plays and ignored philosophy and religion?
     Again I say, Get well soon!
                                              Trudy

 Dear Trudy,
     Thanks for your letter and your get-well wishes. I’m looking at a cardinal on the window sill: he is only himself, red and lovely. As a bird of the air, he is guarded by God, and so he lets the minute’s own troubles be sufficient for the minute. He drops to the ground. And out of sight.
     One of the values of good social satire is that it lets us see self-righteousness for the pious fraud that it is. Even the enormously intelligent characters Aldous Huxley invents — I am reading Time Must Have a Stop — are only batting empty words around; that the words are bigger — and the rallies longer — doesn’t mean that more than hot air is being moved from place to place, just more of it. No-place is being moved from place to place, portentously.
     Long ago, I learned at meetings that whatever I said was “wise” only as far as it furthered another’s cause. All this is to say that when, as in sickness, one begins to take oneself seriously . . . well, don’t.
     I would be comforted if I still believed that the Apocalyticist was right and this is a comedy. But I am afraid that he is as big a blowhard as your friend Dame Julian. Thumb your nose at them if you see them. Blow them from me a long, juicy raspberry.
                                                                   Please, Ted
_______________
 * Leslie Becket, one T as in Thomas, not two as in Sam. See here, here, and here. Also here.

 05.19.22 

Omicron

  Closed for COVID 

It happens: things just don’t go on. Blog does have a stop. At least, a hiatus:

 05.06.22 

Third Thursday after Easter

 Third Thursday after Easter 

It happens: things just don’t go on. Time does have a stop. The second hand that ticks forward then hesitates before it ticks forward again does hesitate. It is as if you have nodded off, then you wake again, but, however long you were “out,” nothing has changed. The cat in the window hasn’t twitched. The murmur of the conversation on the sidewalk you can hear through the window hums in the same register; it is on the same line, it is in the same measure. The same plane is droning overhead. It is stuck in the sky like a fly in ointment, struggling but not moving.
     Then, it lurches forward, the hand, and time, which heals some things but hardly all, resumes.

 05.05.22 

Subplot

  Subplot 

I had an email from Gaspar Stephens: “What do you believe in (believe into, pisteuei=n ei)v) these days? I find it hard to tell.”
     “You mean besides Jesus?” I wrote back.
     “Yes, let’s say besides Jesus.” And he went on:

If you can, tell me what is real (as it can be), and what is delusional. Assuming you can make that distinction though, I assume that most of our religious belief is self-delusion. But is that a bad thing? Delusion can be beneficial; there are times when it is not, clearly: we meet a bear in the woods, and we think we can take him on mano a mano (mano a pata?). But let us say we are sane and not courting death. We delude ourselves. We don't think of death as inevitable. We put off thinking about it. We even construct a belief that will allow us to put off ever thinking about it, life after death. And so we go from day to day and from the next day to the next. and so forth.
     Do you know Tyler Cowen? Economist. Occasionally, I listen to his podcast. And I listened to him recently on Honestly, Bari Weiss’s thing. You listen to that now and then, right? Did you catch that interview? If you didn’t, listen in. Or go back and listen again to the last fifteen minutes or so. Toward the end of the interview, Bari asks Cowen why he thinks the culture and its institutions seem to be imploding. And a primary reason, he says, is our decreasing detachment from religion. She then asks him about his own faith, and he identifies himself as a non-believer, but one who believes that Western culture has benefited enormously from religion and is foolish to throw it all away. (I was reminded of what you wrote about Graham Greene as a Catholic agnostic.)
     Cowen is right. I think. What religion brings at its best, a constant sense of mystery, tends to keep the mind humble.  Yes, there are a lot of pompous asses in the church, more than any institution deserves but no more, I am pretty sure, than any other institution on average. But for all that (or all of them), I think you see Christianity, for example, generating more humility than arrogance. Most, because they are still on this side or they are in the middle of or they have just pulled themselves up on the other side of the Slough of Despond, most, believing they are standing before God, don’t have to be told to be humble; they don’t have to be told to wonder. They do without being told.
     Maybe I am off the point I began with. Still, tell me what you think.

I wrote back:

I tend to agree. Even if religion is only a subplot, offering light relief, the relief comments so trenchantly on the plot, the play cannot be understood without the light it sheds. Greene, yes, I learned a few weeks ago at my book group, called himself “a Catholic agnostic,” which, as one of us ventured, is quite different from calling oneself an agnostic Catholic. Yes, too, your friend, Tyler, seems to be onto the same thing: we should hold religion to be of crucial importance even if we cannot believe its story is true in any literal sense. Any kind of belief, even sincere attempt at belief — maybe even insincere attempt at belief — can keep us humble, whatever temptations come our way. Today, for example, as in my faux “confession” I enumerate the so-called deadly sins, seven of the many-many characters in the busy-busy subplot, I am aware of how many of them lead away from humility. Pride, of course, but also anger, greed, gluttony, lust, and sloth (if only because it doesn’t care one way or the other). I’m not sure envy leads anywhere. And I continue to think it is the saddest of the sins for that reason. Wherever they begin, the other sins (even sloth when we nod off) can take us out of ourselves, but envy begins in us and will not come out to take us anywhere at all.
     Maybe I’m wrong. I know that for me just this kind of exercise (shuffling through the sins as through index cards) — this exercise, however abbreviated, even facile, convinces me that Tyler Cowen has a point. Ways to think about ourselves, what we do and who we are, ways that have a long history of leading us to humility — we shouldn’t throw them away; we shouldn’t carelessly, ignorantly let them go. Despite all the pompous asses in the church, who tempt us to.

 

 04.29.22 

The Monday after Low Sunday

 The Monday after Low Sunday 
being the first Sunday of Easter, only low because attendance
is low because the regular pastor is taking the Sunday off.

Evening. I am sitting with Axel on the porch of the cabin he has rented in Doubthat State Park. Supper over, the dishes done. I am his guest for cigars, drinks, quiet conversation, then to spend the night. But I don’t like cigars, not even the sweet-smelling wooden-tipped ones rolled for children, so I have brought a pack of cigarettes, Gauloises. The drink is akvavit, which I don’t much like either, though this that Axel has with fennel and/or anise scratching at its sides, is the more palatable the more we drink.
     Axel is talking about church the day before — because I asked him. Yes, though he was off, he went. And the sermon was . . . , and he stops. The light is blurry, day become night but with a little day left in it. Something is whirring and something else burping: insects and frogs, I imagine, who have no idea. Axel coughs as if a bit of cigar or spirit had gone down the wrong way. He coughs again.
     “There are people that you just don’t like, right? And people that don’t like you. There’s nothing either of you can do about it. They can’t help it. You can’t help it with them.”
     “Yes. Right.”

“The sermon yesterday,” Axel says. “It was good. The passage was John 20: Jesus appears to the ten, or so they say but Thomas doesn’t quite believe them. Then, he appears to the ten and Thomas, whom he challenges to put his finger into his hand and side and see”
     “Yes,” I said.
     “The scenes are the same in both appearances. He doesn’t chastise the disciples for running away. He doesn’t chastise Thomas. He is tender with all of them ‘Peace!’ he says. And all is peace. In the second, he breathes on them and gives them the Holy Spirit. In John’s hands, Pentecost isn’t Pentecostal at all. It’s very Lutheran.”
     “Yes.”
     “As was the sermon,” Axel went on. Then, he stopped again. Pulled at his cigar, sipped at his drink. “It was very much the sermon I would have preached myself, very much the sermon I have preached on that passage, only better. Good! A good solid . . . ,” he trailed off. I waited.
     “Only there are people . . . ” he trailed off again. And I picked it up,
     “Only there are people you don’t like, and there is nothing either of you can do about it.”
     He waved his cigar in a circle above his head, meaning yes.

“I don’t like thinking about that,” Axel said. “It doesn’t matter so much for some, for you for instance — at least not practically, not professionally since you no longer have a profession. But it matters for me because I am usually the one in the pulpit. And . . .” He slowed down, and
     I interrupted: “You hadn’t thought of this before?”
     “No. I should have. How difficult it is for people to separate the message from the messenger.”

The insects and the frogs were getting blurrier. “But there’s not just that,” Axel said out of the night. “Jesus,” he said, halfway between the name and a curse. “I am thinking, ‘It’s not just the cross that is a stumbling block; it could be Jesus himself.’
     “If he is truly human, as we say, there are going to be people that don’t like him. Not his fault but not their fault either. There is something about the way he walks or ducks his head before speaking, or the way he smells, the soap he uses, something about the shape of his mouth or his nose and his mouth together, about the way he uses his hands, or you just don’t know why. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Did God think of that?”

“Do we know what God is thinking?” I asked.
     “I wouldn’t have expected such pious bullshit from you,” Axel said.
     “The smoke,” I said, “and the ‘wine,’” I hesitated, “and the company.”

 04.21.22