Auld Lang Syne

December 31, 2014

Briefly

As the days dwindle down to a precious few, or one, or none . . . the crew of The Ambiguities wishes you a prosperous new year.

          - Ted for Roz, Tom, Gaspar, Axel, Bob and Neff, Uncle Albert, the entire crew

With regard to that “entire crew” and practically every damn thing any of them went on about the entire last year, there is an index. (Oh, boy!)

There are also more proposals for a better 2015 over on Go Around Back.

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The Not-So-Good-News

December 29, 2014

On which our hero drives through the rain and the night only to come to a dawn that is going backward 

We were late to church again yesterday. The preacher had already begun her sermon. (In our defense, that comes early in the short early service. We weren't as late as it may sound.)

          Her topic was light and darkness, or the reverse really: what a dark year this has been, do we continue to believe in, believe toward the light? How are we children of light, if we continue not only to live in but participate, live toward the darkness. She had particularly in mind the systemic racism that both blights and governs the way we live our lives together - or less together than huddled into angry clumps, the chips on our shoulders pointing outward like the quills of a porcupine.

          She is a good, faithful woman. As they say in Alabama, I’ve been knowin’ her a long time, so I know that.  She’s good, and she’s faithful, and she continues to hope. The light is coming; indeed, it is already here – if we could only pay attention and live as if we actually knew what forgiveness was.

The problem, as I see it – my seeing, not hers – is that we don’t; we don’t know forgiveness, we don't have a clue about it. Then, the light isn’t here for us in any real, palpable, helpful sense. And here comes (again) my ongoing problem with the faith; it turns out to be always about – it relies necessarily on – its hopes for the future. For it cannot realistically deny that 2000 years later, the present remains completely effed-up. So, hope! – better to live in tomorrowland (or apocolyptostan) than here, now.

I don’t despise hope, but I'm convinced that it gives us too much wiggle (out) room.
         Over on Go Around Back, my political side, I wiggle. Find some of my fonder (meaning more foolish) hopes for 2015 there.

n

End of the Year Fun and Games

December 28, 2014
End of the Year Fun & Games, Pt. 1 - TheTwelve Faces of Ted 

Here is Ted posing as Beethoven posing as a male model posing. For more of Ted posing as one of his betters, click here. You'll see originals and Teds as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol among the other false identities he's brazenly assumed this year. From the Strictly Home-made Studios crack art department.

Coming Soon: the 2014 index! 

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Boxing Day Eve

December 25, 2014
American Christmas

I don’t know anything about boxing, but I imagine taking so many blows to the body that the moment arrives, with the next jab, my stamina, strength, faith, hope run out, drain away. White with exhaustion, I stagger to the floor.

          Not out: I can see; I can hear. It's as if I've been kicked in the groin. The pain pushes outward from diaphragm through arms and legs to the tips of my fingers and toes; it oozes from the soles of my feet, my shoulders, and the crown of my head, then rushes back in. I am not out, but I cannot stand. I cannot move. I can’t even blink until the light crushes my eyes, and I close them to squeeze out the tears.

 W

 And, yeah! . . . I do know.

Hagridden

December 22, 2014

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, ou Céline

Dead of Winter, Dead of Night

How is it, if we invent the gods, we cannot tame them?

Here is Céline on Fortune, when, as it seems, fortune brings nothing but ill. Bardamu has been ill himself, and now with passport and medical certificate in his pocket, he is simply walking away from Rancy to another place he’s sure will be equally as unfortunate. “It’s no good expecting to drop one’s misfortune anywhere en route. It’s as if one’s misfortune were some ghastly-looking female, and somehow one had married her. Maybe it’s better to end up by loving her a little than to wear oneself out by beating her all one’s life. Since you’re not going to be able to suppress her anyway.” She’s always going to be there, full of energy for whatever she wants to expend her energy for.

          Céline is a misogynist – I know that; I’d add he is also a misandrist, a complete misanthrope. It’s difficult to put that aside, but try. What is interesting (to me) here is how he personalizes Fortune. And we see again how the gods are made: by the people we meet and the shit they make us wade through, then the stories we tell about them and it, and how we reflect on all of it, especially the parts we can’t figure out or help, so they're not going away; i.e., all of it.

          This is how we invent the gods, in short: we put them in a story; otherwise they are too far away. But even near, in our story, they do what they want – not what we want them – to do.

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