Third person.

 Third person. 

He walked down Bishop, down Crowder, down Division. The rain dripped down, the color of the leaves on the sidewalk. Corner Coffee: Axel and Nils were there ahead of him.
     And two women two tables over. The talking one kept pulling her hands toward her chest and pushing them out again as if to convince the other she was speaking from her heart. The sharp-faced other was dressed entirely in black. She was nodding.
     “What do you think they are talking about?” he asked Axel.
     “Luther,” he said. “The women come and go, talking of Luther.” he laughed at the back of his tongue, not quite into his throat.

“They’re talking about husbands,” Nils said, “how husbands continue to mislead wives.”
     “I don’t imagine the thin one is married,” he said, “the one in black.” She was making a gesture with her hand, as if she wanted to say something; then she stopped. The other kept talking.
     “They’re talking about a story they heard this morning on NPR,” Nils said, “not about their husbands but about husbands in general. About men: they continue to mislead women. It’s as inevitable as it is unfortunate. Some woman sociologist said so.”
     “What makes you think that?” Axel said.
     “What?”
     “That she’s not married?”
     “I don’t know,” he said — I said as Nils was saying something else. But I didn’t hear. I was listening to the espresso machine choke and cough and sputter. It gagged and stopped. His last word ended in “-er.”

                                                                      08.17.22
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Graphic: Corner Coffee in the rain, crabbed together on my box.

 Manchester United 1 - 2 Brighton & Hove Albion 
This was Tuesday.

Occasionally, I try to listen to one of the soccer podcasts; “Gab & Jules” it was this morning. But they are all too damn serious. And for all the podcasters know about the game, infinitely more than I do, they seem to me untethered to reality.
     This morning, Gab and Jules were talking about Man United’s loss to Brighton & Hove Albion. Completely unacceptable(!!), as if BHA were no opponents at all, as if there had been no players in blue and white on the pitch, as if Pascal Gross, in particular, had stayed home. So even if Man U was without a true number 9 . . .
     In which case — how could Manchester United be without? — they should just go out and get one. Better than, a damn sight better than, Marko Arnautović, never mind that he might be the best available — he is older than Jesus! Availability be damned — this is Manchester United: they should be able to get whoever/ whatever they want whenever/however they want it. Never mind how shitty they’ve been the last several seasons. (Proving they can't get whatever whenever, doesn’t it). But reality be damned.
     Renounce the laws of gravity, say you are above them, and they don’t apply to you.

Diogenes of Sinope was right, at least this far: you can only free yourself from the rules of the marketplace by absenting yourself from it. He meant by that that you cannot buy a center forward other than in the mall where you can buy a center forward. You can’t conjure one out of the air; you can’t conjure a God to conjure one out of clay, pace Gab and Jules. And, sadly, even if you are Manchester United, you can no longer go marauding and rape one as the Romans did the Sabine women.
    But, no! You can! There is a God, Sir Alex Ferguson, right? Reality be damned.

                                                                      08.11.22
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Graphic: Erik Ten Hag by m ball.

"mouse and cat," a farable of Jesop

 
  A farable of Jesop 

“mouse and cat”

 A lion and a mouse went on a journey. They had become friends and were friends until they argued along the way and decided to part company. The lion went home. The mouse went on but soon was lost and soon after baked into a pie.
     “I blame myself,” the cat said when she heard. Only she did not. 
                                   08.05.22  

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An online reproduction of the 1887 edition Jesop's Farables, translated from the Latin and edited by G. F. Murray - and with my brief afterward - is available here!

Interpolations

  Interpolations   

 from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012, p. 233) –

 

Jesus talks a lot in the canonical Gospel of John, but he says little. There are, however, sayings of Jesus interpolated into the gospel in several Latin fragments from the fourth century (now in the Blifil collection). The Latin is clearly a translation from an earlier, since lost, manuscript. Even the most knowledgeable scholars (Jones, Allworthy, et al.) aren’t certain of the original language, but they believe Old Tamil or another Dravidian dialect. This would place the original ms. in one of the Thomas communities of India, and indeed Thomas plays an important role in a number of these fragments, as in the following addition to chapter 17. In the canonical gospel, Jesus begins talking to his disciples, the so-called “last discourses,”  at 14:1, but he has long since left off (17:1) and is addressing “the Father.” This fragment begins at 17:25 to which it adds the verses I have numbered 27 and 28.

 

xvii.  ​25 “O righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you; and these know that you sent me,  26 for I have made your name known to them – I will continue to make it known,  so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” 

     27 Thomas said to him, “Lord, what do we know?” And Jesus told this parable, “A man was given a pearl that made him extremely wealthy, and by night he buried it in another man’s field. Who have ears let them hear.”  28 And he told another like it, “A man had a servant, whom he loved, but the servant ran away. When the master found him, . . .” Here the manuscript breaks off.

 

Commentary

Our concern is with Thomas, who, as depicted here, tries to bring Johannine Jesus back to earth, to rescue the incarnation from muddle-headed mysticism. He succeeds insofar as after he interrupts Jesus tells two parables, neither of which we know from other sources. [Note there are no parables in the canonical gospel of John.]
    In the first, Jesus considers a pearl of great price. What should one do with it — keep it or give it away secretly? In the second, as it stands, we don’t know the effect the love of the master that seeks out his beloved servant has.

                                                                       08.03.21

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For links to other biblical commentary from Rantrage, click here.

Just one question, or four

 Just one question, or four 

Matthew, chapter 11, beginning at verse 2:

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” (ESV)

In some manuscripts, this follows:

 “I am not offended,” John returns, “but please, tell me: What do the blind see and where do the lame go? What do the deaf hear, and when the dumb speak, what do they say? The raised up, are they truly alive? And the poor, do they believe it?”

Yes, what does anyone hear? And when the dumb speak, what will they say?

                                                                      07.18.22

 Farrago  

What to say about Menippus but that without leaving a word he left a genre?
What to say about Meleager but that he wrote of love?
What to say about poor Whigham, who admired Ezra Pound and wrote for Diana Mosley and died too
     soon in a car crash in California, but . . . What does the ambassador Chapuys say to Cromwell of
     King Henry: “a man of great endowments, lacking only consistency, reason and sense”?

                                                                      07.26.22

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Menippus of Gadara. His Complete Epigrams may be found here.
Meleager, also of Gadara, who wrote Menippean satire, and edited The Greek Anthology, from which the poems in the YouTube link come.
Peter Whigham. It is his translations, or, more accurately renditions, of Meleager I read.

Axel's Kittel

 Axel’s Kittel 

Late in our session, I found myself telling Dr. Feight: “The story of the Gadarene swine, you know it?” Of course he did — hadn’t he also played Bible baseball in Sunday School? But I told it again anyway:

The kingdom of God is like this: There were two Cynics from Gadara, Menippus and Meleager, the first a slave that became rich by begging 300 years before Jesus, the second a poet that went from Tyre to Cos 100 years before. There was also a madman, who lived while Jesus was alive.
     After the Storm, which Jesus has stilled, he and the disciples come to the other side of the sea, to the land of the Gadarenes — or Gerasenes, as Mark has it. There is the man, with an unclean spirit, or hundreds of unclean spirits. The boat has, it seems, cast up on the edge of a graveyard because that’s where he lives, in the graveyard, where he has been chained to one of the tombs, but he has broken free, screaming and shouting and tearing at himself. But when he sees Jesus, he runs to him, though he is shouting still, “What have you to do with me, Jesus of Nazareth?” Or the demons inside of him shout it because Jesus has been speaking to them. It is they that answer, when Jesus asks the man his name. Their name is Legion, meaning 5200 soldiers and 300 horses. Yet they are afraid. They say to Jesus, don’t just throw us out into the air. Throw us somewhere, into those pigs over there, they say. Jesus does. He throws them into the passel and the passel throws itself, or the pigs in the passel throw themselves, over the cliff and into the sea. It makes quite a splash and people come out from town. They find the man sitting up, clothed, and in his right mind. This is dangerous, they decide, and they ask Jesus to leave. He does. The man wishes to go with him, but Jesus says, “No. Stay here.”

     “What do you think?” I said.
     Dr. Feight didn’t say anything. His pen was scratching notes into his pad; then it too was silent.
     “I looked up ‘in his right mind,’” I said. “I wrote it down, the Greek.” I wrestled it out of my pocket and handed it over my head to him. “Axel helped me find it in his Kittel.

“What do you think?” The chorus repeats: the scratching, then it stops.

     “It is the present participle of sophrouneo.” The word sounds like a flag wobbling in the wind. And I rattle on with what I’ve found, that it goes back to classic Greek — to myth, to the tragedians, to Plato. It is hard to define. It is the opposite of mania, of hubris, of foolish immaturity, of crying like a baby. It isn’t exactly but it has to do with circumspection, modesty, proper respect, also with purpose, with knowing what we are to do, with knowing ourselves.
     “Not to disbelieve,” I say, “but it’s a lot to accomplish in one miracle, a lot to accomplish just by rustling some demons out of a man and pitching them into a passel of pigs, even if after you find him a place to sit and a suit of clothes.
     “It's more, I think, than I can do.” Meaning for myself. More scratching.

“I got a letter from my sister.” I stop as if I don’t remember exactly when I received the letter though I do. “From Moira.* The day before yesterday. She said something about how I am always wondering if I am going to get through to the other side. Then I wonder if there is an other side. She can’t be sure, but every time she thought she had gotten there, or even somewhere near, she found she hadn’t.
     “She goes on though, hoping this new medicine I am on will have some effect and suggesting that I keep moving even if I’m going nowhere, I keep puttering about ‘like old men do, vacuuming, working in the yard, washing their cars, sweeping their front porches and their sidewalks, and the like. These are good for you, I have been told, and it was when I quit them all, stopped cleaning my apartment, washing my hair, brushing my teeth, etc. that I was ‘done for.’”

The scratching stops as, with a period. “And, that’s our time,” I said, “isn’t it?”
     “Yes, I am afraid so.”
                                                          07.22.22

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 *  Moira is my dead sister. Hannah is the living one. The graphic is sophrounta on Axel’s Kittel.