sing their hit single “Home, Running
Away from Home”
Officially
“home sick” but really “home hiding.”
Hiding can suggest fear − hiding
from something; or it can suggest discretion − hiding out for a purpose. There’s
also hide-and-seek, hiding willy-nilly
as part of a game. Holing up is one way of hiding
out, trying not to be found while while engaged in this or that − addressing
a family crisis in the economic Trinity, or catching up on one’s reading.
It’s said to be possible to hide in plain sight (like the purloined
letter), as if someone might catch a glimpse of you but when he rushes to
catch up, turning the corner he can barely make you out − you are so far away
as to be barely visible.
Unavailable. He catches up to you but can’t make himself seen or heard. He can try all he wants, it’s to no avail.
There
are days you want to be better than hidden, more than unavailable. You want to have gotten away and have managed to take something
valuable with you. Running away and
getting away with − something valuable,
a silver candlestick or the Holy Spirit (by good fortune solving that Family
crisis). Then, you are in the wind.
I’d
planned to play golf this morning, but it was too windy.
So I hid my nose in the book Amazon
got away with selling me, Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. But it’s
just too much; it smells of expensive perfume too lavishly applied. I can’t get my breath; I fade into sleep. I wake up with a great name for a band “Dee
Mack & the Syndics,” a Dutch Gladys Knight and her Pips.
Pip −someone whose escape is
admired. “He’s a pip, ain’t he.”
February 27, 2014 Dappled, brinded, dim; folded, spindled & mutilated Gaspar
Stephens called today to thank me for the "shout out" on the February 25th
post. He was thinking, he said about
Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” which got him wondering about how notions of “purity,” which
he called “a dangerous illusion,” inform − or even form − the way we think about
one another. He mentioned Hawthorne’s
story, “The Birthmark.”
I never really want to read Hopkins because I find him in almost equal parts
fascinating, exciting, and enjoyable on the one hand and unnecessarily
recondite, difficult and self-indulgent on the other. But, “Pied Beauty” as a hymn to “all things
counter . . . fickle, freckled,” flawed, impure − this is why I have a Norton Anthology of Poetry on the shelf
above my desk:
Glory be to God for dappled
things—
For
skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For
rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls;
finches’ wings;
Landscape
plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And
áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever
is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With
swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty
is past change:
Praise him.
Then
this afternoon I sat down and re-read “The Birthmark,” one of my favorite
Hawthorne stories.* The “man of
science,” Aylmer, the “eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy,” marries the lovely Georgiana, perfect except for one flaw, the rosy hand
upon her cheek. On any other face, he
admits, it would be a charm, but she is so nearly perfect that “this slightest
possible defect” troubles him, this “visible mark of earthly imperfection” shocks him. It follows that it – or its removal – possesses him, so that all he can think of is
“the lengths he might find in his heart to go for the sake of giving himself peace” [italics mine].
Our obsessions about purity, Gaspar,
they aren’t, it turns out, for the sake of the other, are they, but for our
own?
And we’ll go great lengths to enforce
them. God forbid we be content with “the
level of the actual.” Aylmer’s great
experiment, to remove the birthmark from his wife’s cheek succeeds; it departs
like “the stain of the rainbow fading out of the sky.” So also Georgiana fades out of life.
Because, Gaspar − am I right? − to fix another is to kill them, in the same
sense that the law kills, where the wind may give life.
We may
not all be obsessed with purity – many of us love speckled, dappled, spotted, freckled,
and stippled things we wouldn’t want to change for clear, smooth, and unmarked. But all of us that write are obsessed with
fixing. Writing is about fixing a moment,
pinning it to a page, so it will last; it is about laying out the facts of the
matter; it is about explaining why this works the way it does (and, usually,
how it could work better); it is about order. It is . . . dogmatic (as in Barth’s
Church Dogmatics). It cannot undergo; it must describe. (It cannot suffer without undertaking a
theodicy.) It cannot embrace; it must
explain. And generally it does a pretty
poor job of it. A homely example. I wrote last time about A. N. Eaton-Pierson’s
writing about Argentinian wines − and she wrote most eloquently, I’ll allow. But even the most evocative words about wine
don’t smell or taste like it.
I’m
not saying don’t write about things.
Just don’t believe what you write. As soon as you start putting words on a page . . . you are wrong, no could be about it.
m
(bicbw)
_______________ *With
many others: "Young Goodman
Brown"; "Rapaccini's Daughter"; "My Kinsman, Major
Molineux"; "The Minister's Black Veil"; "The Maypole of
Merrymount"; "The Canterbury Pilgrims." My enjoyment of
Hawthorne is only occasionally marred by his ear for dialogue (or utter lack of
it). Witness (from “The Birthmark”):
“There needed no proof,” said
Georgiana, quietly. “Give me the
goblet. I joyfully stake all upon your
word.”
“Drink, then, thou lofty creature!”
exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid admiration.
“There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy sensivle frame, too, shall soon be all
perfect.”
She quaffed the liquid and returned
the goblet to his hand.
“it is grateful,” said she with a
placid smile. “Methinks it is like water
from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of unobtrusive
fragrance and deliciousness. . . . Now,
dearest, let me sleep. My earthly senses
are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at
sunset.”
My
friend Gas thinks the five most underutilized words in the English language are
those making up the phrase, “But I could be wrong.” I think he’s right, because
− Lion, Roundhead, or Cavalier − we’re all looking at the world through a dark, dark
glass. The Apostle says so. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Someone from Boston, New York, or
Washington will try. Someone like A. N. Pierson-Eaton, daughter of an
aide to several congressmen from blue states and a cellist, Ivy graduate, and staff
writer/assistant editor for culture, politics, and religion at The New Slate Saloon online. Someone with the uncanny capacity to con an expert opinion on Jean-Paul
Sartre, Robert Henri, and the Ukraine one week, and Argentinian wines, five
plays by Schiller, and the effect current Fed policy will have on the American middle class the next.
Please forget that A. N. knows no one
in the American middle class. She makes considerably more than you and I ; and this is not to mention her income from a family trust and
the salary and bonuses of a spouse that works on Wall Street (albeit as a
junior partner making only pennies per picosecond). Wait! She does. There’s the
cashier at the bodega down the block, . . . what’s his name.
Overlook that with reliable translations,
trustworthy dictionaries, and a good reference grammar, I could quote Critique de la raison
dialectique or Die
Räuber as if I knew them by heart, who went to college west of the
Mississippi River and was asked to leave a graduate program south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Also: never mind that as far as
Argentina is concerned A. N. has never been outside the Buenos Aires airport, a
taxi, the Alvear Palace Hotel (its bar and restaurant), and another taxi. It
doesn’t really matter that the closest she’s been to Kiev is Warsaw on a boarding
school May-term trip. She did write an Art 101 paper on John Sloan.
None of this matters, because we aredealing not only with Washington, Boston, and New York City but with genuine intelligence, a lively imagination,
also an astounding confidence that words really do stand for ideas, and ideas
are better than experience. CNN, NPR, and
those that matter in Aspen, Austin, and Los Altos are convinced.
As for that crank in Keokuk that has
his doubts (Gas, Jr. or one of his ilk), he’d vote for Ted Cruz if he lived in
Kilgore.
But about
any or all of this I could be wrong.
Note.
In previous posts, I have ended with omega (W), “the end,” almost as if I knew what I’d been talking about. I don’t. I never do really. So
. . . from now on, depending on how
confident I am, I’ll end with the next to the last letter of the Greek alphabet
(Y), or the one before that (F), or . . . .
February 24, 2011 We're all gulls In the “Coda”to Karl Knausgaard’s A Time
for Everything, the narrator (Henrik Vankel) is on a crab-fishing
expedition with his brother and sad misfit father. It is then and there the father
shows him the tiny angel hands under the wings of the gulls.
The
angels were marooned on earth when God died; for when God dies, heaven shrivels
into nothing. Then, the angels have no
home; moreover, they are homeless in a place, the earth, they care nothing
about. Their connection to the earth and
its inhabitants was only in the tasks God gave them to perform here. With no Task-giver, there is for them only drifting
− nothing else, except survival. That is
the why of their mutation from seraphim to cherubim to gulls − to survive. (It is unclear why survival is so important,
except that there may be no choice: if they are eternal in or under the heavens, they must survive.)
It
is on this crab-fishing trip with brother and father, too, that Vankel admits
that there is no one he loves sufficiently that he couldn’t contemplate his or
her death with detachment. He has become
an observer, a watcher. He considers, he categorizes, he draws hypotheses. He wonders about things, but the wonder never
becomes wonderment; more accurately, he speculates. Dispassionately. Detached. He collects stories; but all the stories collects are as specimens; none
has any meaning beyond itself. At home,
he’ll empty his pockets and put the specimens into their proper places on
certain shelves or in particular drawers in the correct cabinet. There are no stories, only these specimens;
there is no story, only taxonomy. As the
angels have become gulls, there is left only the reasons that reason knows.
February 24, 2014. "The Ambiguities" was dark from February 20 until this morning, but there was some light in the darkness. To see posts from February 21, 22, 23, go around back.
BombastŸcotton or other material used to pad
garments.
Pretentious pomposerosity.
It’s what happens when anyone less
than Shakespeare or Sophocles starts elaborating what he thinks is a tragic
premise. We end up with The Sorrows of
Young Werther, which von Eichendorff wisely turned into the picaresque Life of a Good-for-nothing (Aus dem Leben
eines Taugenichts).
PicaresqueŸpertaining to or characteristic of the
episodic
adventures of a rapscallion on the road.
When you’ve
got too much time on your hands − and especially on your poor aching heart − it's best to get out of the house and wander into trouble. Better to run than to
hide. Better to fall down under some gate-toothed wench from Bath than to pine
for your lost Berner Mädchen. Better
to sleep in a storm sewer like Diogenes wondering where your next meal is coming from than in your own bed, wrapped up in your own weeping
heart.
If
you can’t get out of the house, read von Eichendorff or Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller or look
through road maps as if they were icons.
(Speaking
of Diogenes:) Take lessons from your idiot dog, how he spurns tragedy and lives
dogmerry even on his leash, eating anything he can snatch off the ground on his
morning and evening walks − hamburger wrappers, chicken bones, twigs, dirt, cat
and rabbit turds.
Your nose, your tongue, your fingers are more reliable than your heart which is even less reliable than
your memory.
There are two kinds of people (that
old saw):
1.Those that think we’ve
left captivity and are heading toward the Promised Land; and
2.Those
that think we’ve left home and are on our way to Hell in a hand-basket.
But there is a
third way:
3.We’re wandering in
the wilderness; we’re shifting from place to place, bobbing and weaving, but we’re getting nowhere
wherever we think we’re headed.
Get lost, be lost. Especially, don’t worry
about finding the way back, because − Heraclitus is right − there is no back.
Put
off the mask of tragedy. Be merry. Live in your senses not in your soul. Especially, forget becoming a tragic hero. Did
you want to be Macbeth or Polycarp, that in love with power or piety? Polycarp’s last thought before the spear piercing his side allowed the
fire to lick empty his brain − the martyr’s last thought was how good this was
going to look on his résumé.
F
Live in your senses. Note on Auden's "Musée des
Beaux Arts" and Brueghel's paintings below.*
Y
Notes:
*More
than one commentator has wanted to associate Auden’s description of “the
dreadful martyrdom” running its untidy course while dogs play and horses
scratch with Brueghel’s The Massacre of
the Innocents. But it’s an
association, which, besides the painting’s playing dogs and numerous horses
(none scratching his behind), has little to recommend it. Commentators have been drawn to The Massacre for two reasons, it seems
to me. First, the painting is in a
series with The Numbering of the People
at Bethlehem. (One hesitates to
suggest that scholars were “turned on” to The
Massacre, because there was only one page to turn over from The Numbering in their art books; but
there it is. Second, the painting—filled
as it is with occupying Spanish soldiers killing the children of Dutch
peasants—allows for the possibility of all kinds of political commentary
(particularly on World War II), even political allegory. Fair enough, but the deaths of the innocents,
however horrible, are not martyrs’ deaths.
The word (“martyr”) has an
interesting history, which as good a classical scholar as Auden would have
known. It comes from the Greek martys (martuV)
meaning, literally (and simply), “witness.”
But it came in the life of the early church to mean one who refused to
renounce his or her faith whatever the torture, even when it led, inevitably,
to death. In fact, one of the earliest
church documents preserved, other than Scripture, is the so-called “Martyrdom
of Polycarp,” which describes in simultaneously laconic and lurid detail the death
of a bishop of Smyrna who refused to bow down to Caesar and renounce
Christ. As a result, he was thrown to
lions who declined to harm him, burned though the fire would only encircle him,
and finally pierced with a spear—at which point there came forth not only blood
sufficient to quench the fire but a dove.
This death of Polycarp, however bizarre, is in “The Martyrdom” likened
to Christ’s, for he (Christ) is the first martyr. (See Hebrews 12.)
Indeed, if “the miraculous birth” refers to Christ’s birth, then “the dreadful martyrdom” almost certainly
refers to his death. So, if Auden has a
specific Brueghel painting in mind, as he writes these lines, it is most likely
The Procession to Calvary in which
the “dreadful martyrdom” will “run
its course/ Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot.” Again, the central figures—Jesus falling
beneath the weight of his cross, Simon of Cyrene seeking to help over his
wife’s physical objections—are almost
lost in the crowd that fills the painting’s middle ground. The site of the crucifixion itself is
relegated to so far a “corner” (literally) of the painting the viewer wonders
how Christ will ever get to it. But
people—and their horses and their dogs—are already gathering there for the
spectacle to come.
Not that either horses or dogs
care. The dogs do “go on with their
doggy life.” It’s a strikingly
colloquial turn of phrase, almost childlike—in the sense that nursery rhymes
are childlike. Look closely at what
Auden is about here, at the level of words.
On the one hand, there is “the dreadful martyrdom.” If not a starchy phrase, it is a formal
one. Like “the miraculous birth,” “the
dreadful martyrdom” has a kind of high-church, book-of-not-so-common-prayer
sound. But “the dreadful martyrdom” will
“run its course”—the language becomes increasingly less formal—“anyhow in a corner”—colloquial, even
common: “where dogs go on with their
doggy life.”
And where “the torturer’s
horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
The language falls, from formal to common, then begins to rise again—a
bit anyway. They were pretty much any
old dogs getting on with their “doggy life,” but it is not any old horse
scratching his “behind on a tree.”
(Incidentally, this particular “event” does not appear in any of
Brueghel’s paintings to my knowledge.)
It is “the torturer’s horse.”
It’s an interesting choice of words, not only for the sound the phrase
makes—all those r’s rolling around
together creating all that internal rhyme: tor-
with horse, -tur- with -er’s, -er’s with -orse—but for the sense, and tone it gives this second picture.
We
heard an interesting sermon this morning.
(I liked the preacher. She
preached well, sang beautifully, and was relaxed about the whole thing. God
may be perfect, but she doesn't have to be, so we don't either.)
The preaching passage was 1
Corinthians, verses from chapters 1 and 3.
Paul is scolding those dunderheaded Greeks on the basis of a rumor. “It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people
that you’re arguing.” If they are − if Chloe’s
people aren’t just trying to stir the pot or rile the Apostle − the argument is
about who one or another “belongs” to.
One is saying he belongs to Paul.
Another is saying she belongs to Apollos. One belongs to Cephas and one even to Christ.
Well, if belonging has to do with
baptism, Paul will take himself out of the argument. He didn’t baptize anyone, oh except Crispus
and Gaius . . . and Stephanas and his family − at least, that’s all he
remembers. He’s not in the baptism business
anyway. He’s in the telling business.
And let him tell you this . . . .
The
preacher herself wasn’t much into what Paul was telling. She was more interested in why these Corinthians
were hanging on to their connections to Apollos or Cephas or Paul, not just Christ. She thought the folks at Corinth attached
themselves to one or another as kind of guarantors of their faith, that it was
right as well as righteous. Because it
was from Apollos or Cephas or Paul that they learned the story. They didn’t have Scripture.
Well,
we do! But are we then better off? Or does it − or bits and pieces of It −
become what we belong to now instead of Christ. Whoever
baptized us, a lot of us still belong to Paul, though some of us belong to the
Synoptics, some of us to John’s gospel, some of us to Revelation and Daniel,
and some of us to 2 Cephas 2 [selected verses]. " " " " (
Which means we all end up belonging to
ourselves. Look again at 2 Timothy:
“All scripture is inspired
by God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness.” (OV)
OR: “Every
scripture inspired by God is useful for doctrine, for reproof, for correction,
and for training in righteousness.” (AV)
The verse is often cited as the last word on Scripture.
Well, maybe, sort of, because what it says isn’t entirely clear. Both translations are possible. Yes, your Bible may give the first, but we
both know that it really, practically means the second. And it’s
up to us to judge what is truly inspired by God, and we will decide the way it was decided that 1 Timothy made it into Scripture at all, based on our
particular purposes at the time. I belong to Paul today, but I may need to be Cephas' tomorrow. You can't tell what is going to happen; how can you tell who you're going to want to be? Bob and weave.
Someone
said once about my mother that the tragedy of her life was that she had to grow
up; but it wasn’t a tragedy, only a sorrow. She seems to have thought she
wouldn’t have to. Growing up was for her much older brother; since he managed
it, let it be on her behalf as well as his.
So when she
married, she was a child bride, though she was older than my dad. Why they
married “someone” may know; I don’t. They
were in high school together. She was lovely as rain; when he came back from
the war, all grown up, he dared ask her and she said yes.
Then, she was pregnant; and before they’d been married a year I was born. And on her
hands. Dad was too busy doing what men did then; children were under
what-women-do.
They didn’t, or at least I didn’t,
require she be a woman to do it, an all-grown-up girl. That she bore me made her my
mother, but she could treat me more as a little brother than a son. Note:
“little brother,” not doll.
Girls of her generation may have read
to their dolls, but they didn’t get carried away with it. She spent − more than
hours, more than days − months reading to me. I would sit on her lap or nestled
into her side; or she would sit arm against me on the edge of my bed, and read
and read and read. It wasn’t a chore; she was the older child that could read, I was
the smaller child that listened.
Is it true that if you want to know how
anyone thinks about things, you should know what his mother read to him? Over
and over my mother read to me from two books, a big blue book of Bible stories −
probably Hurlbut’s − and a big maroon book of stories of King Arthur and his
court. We spent a lot of time in Galilee and Albion.
It is a sorrow, growing up, or pretending
you have. It’s not a great sorrow, though. It’s like tiptoeing around after you’ve
broken something you shouldn’t have been near much less picked up, hoping
against hope that if you’re really quiet you won’t get caught. Mom was better at
that than I have been. But no one gets away with a whole hell of a lot. Not
where we live.
That’s because our Bible, unlike
Hurlbut’s, is fuller of Paul than of Jesus. The Messiah suggests we become like
children if we want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like. The Apostle says,
“Screw that: put away childish things. Stop thinking like a boy. Stop acting
like a boy. Grow up!” Be a man, doing what men do.
Having dispatched D.
R. Dudley’s book on Cynicism, I’m rambling my way through Goncharov’s Oblomov.
(Say that three times rapidly: rambling through Goncharov’s Oblomov.) It’s on a list I found on the Manchester Guardian website. (Now to be found here.)
I was skating the net, looking for “comic novels,” because I’m sick and tired
of woe. I’m always sick and tired of woe; I never think tragedy describes
the way the world works. (Nor does “winning through,” which is why I refuse
to read memoirs. If you think you’ve won through: first, if you have to
write about it, you’re wrong, you haven’t; second, if you have to write about
it, for God’s sake, keep the manuscript to yourself.)
You have to look for comic
novels, because they’re hard to find. Who has the guts and the skill to
write them, to write about life without going all brave or maudlin? But here, on the Guardian's list of 1000 novels you ought to have read, was at least a small sublist of (maybe 150) comic novels. Many, like Saki’s very, very clever The Unsufferable
Bassington, I’d never heard of. I had heard of Oblomov, whose protagonist isthe prototype
of “the superfluous man,” but I’d never really looked for it.
I have it now on Kindle. It’s
not – it can’t be – the best translation available. But it’s good enough I
can see the comedy. The Guardian warns that comic novels aren’t
always that funny. And they aren’t; but they do always take woe, even
tragedy, lightly, with salt. I don’t know how else you
survive. You’ve got to be brave and win through, I guess.
I know I’m going on about this. But why does anyone want to be brave? Better a live dog than a dead lion, as
the saying goes; better Milton Berle than Pat Tilley. And win through to
what? Does your life change because you’ve come to the decision that you
don’t have to forgive your parents? One of comedy’s gifts: it reminds us
that life doesn’t change. It just goes on and on, one damn – and crazy!
unpredictable, never to be resolved – thing after another. You grow up, you don’t
forgive your parents, then you die.
Of course, I could be
wrong. Surely I am. It’s the brave and the serious, the ones that win
through, that are held up as examples to be followed. But that, I suspect, is because it’s the kind of people that read memoirs that want to tell us how to live our lives.
Ash
Wednesday. When we repent of our sins and think for
forty days we can do without, at least one or two of them.
***
In the last chapter of the first part of Oblomov, however Ilya Ilyich idealizes
aspects of his childhood, he is less sorrowful that he is no longer a child than he is indifferent to having become a man.
Among those things we are indifferent to in our childhood are the days and the
weeks and the months, for we live in the seasonsand to and from the great feasts and festivals − family birthdays,
Christmas, Easter, when the pool opens and closes. We are largely indifferent
to the world outside our world; we don’t imagine that anyone − except in books − lives any
differently from the way we do. And since there is no reason
to envy anyone in a book, there is nothing to be envious of. We are indifferent
to the nature of the world we live in, for we have conceded the mystery of it:
how birds fly and trees get and lose their leaves, how snow falls and rises
again − “the air and water and forest and field [are all] alike under the sway
of the supernatural,” as Oblomov says. So are our friends, the heroes of fairy
tales, legends, the Bible. So are we.
Then!
Goncharov
suggests that sadness will come, when we realize that the world is “ordered
according to a simple plan” − the moon is not cheese and the sun is not butter;
Thor does not hammer out thunder, Zeus does not scatter the lightning; the
dead will not rise; giants will be imprisoned in side-shows and imps confined
to circus tents. The year will be divided into months and the months into weeks
and the weeks into days. Each day will have twenty-four hours. Each hour − and each
minute − will have a number.
The child’s world is not so easily measured, it wanders; but the daze in which it
roams − or floats − does not confuse but delights.
Then!
We
put away childish things. We foreswear confusion. And we lose our knack for
delight. That, at least, is what my mother thought without thinking; it is what
she taught me without my learning it.
Last
night, the same awkward dreams of getting lost; and this morning, waking up little
rested to begin the day reading the same old snark at the same old news
feeds. To whom we are superior today,
who never go lost: Woody Allen, Vladimir Putin, indeed all of Russia. We could
have choreographed a better opening ceremony. We could have danced a better dance, sung a better song; we could have
run rings around the rings.
For, thanks be to God, we are superior
to all things, and there is no manner of thing we could not have done
better. There is nothing awry in our lives, except your inability to go
back and do as we say you should have. (Please
know: “Thanks be to God” is a verbal tic. For God, if he exist, is an incompetent fool compared to our hindsight, our
knowledge-of-the-way-things-shouldhavebeen. Haec diximus.)
Anywhere
else than our writing desk is the hinterland, the way it is depicted in “Barney
Google and Snuffy Smith”: women in shapeless sacks, kerchiefs wound about their
heads; men in overalls and crumpled stove-pipe hats; toothless children;
simpletons all. G-d-, if we couldn’t
run New Jersey, West Virginia, and the Olympic games – all at once – better than
the thousands of buffoons now in charge.So give three cheers and one cheer more for the mighty pundits of the
op-press corps.
***
Why
are we all so full of hate, or at
least its self-righteous cousin, contempt? Why are we all so small of soul we can’t imagine anyone’s motives ever approaching
pure? – our own excepted, of course.
(I’m tempted this Sunday morning to
blame it on the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Paul, who could not love all
humankind alike but had to have his favorites to whom he gave the Law or the Gospel with which not only to judge
themselves but all others besides.)
***
Wit is
one thing; humor is quite another.Witty
self-deprecation is nothing like true modesty.(It is actually closer to overweening pride.“Look: I can make fun of myself.No, look. Here!”Don’t look away, don’t dare look away.Look here.Look!Aren’t I being funny about myself?)
Modesty recognizes the ambiguous
nature of our life among others. Witty
self-deprecation pays no attention to others at all. Look. Here.
Modesty
doesn’t judge lest it be judged. Witty
s-d holds the self up as the rule. I
can be self-deprecating because my ideal (true) self is – let’s put false modesty aside – the measure of all
things.“Everyone has his prejudices
but, thanks be to God, mine are the right ones.”(True, I chuckle when I say that, but it
doesn’t make it any less true. I can
laugh at myself, we have established that – and you may join in and laugh with me.But do not laugh at me; don’t
let your laughing with me go on a millisecond after my own laughter stops.)
***
I am
tempted to blame Yahweh, and I begin wondering again about the wisdom of
polytheism (as Ovid, e.g., describes it),
acknowledging – even invoking (as well as evoking) – ambiguity. The gods
may be as jealous as Yahweh, I begin to write; but they can’t be. The jealousy of one is mocked and tempered by
the jealousy of another – tempered, yes, even thwarted. So every little corner of the world becomes mysterious and every people in every corner chosen by one deity or another.
“Everyone may have his prejudices, but
thanks to the god of this place, mine are the right ones . . . at least here. When we come to your place . . . .”
***
From
the doesn’t-happen-often-enough department. The story of Calchas, whose wisdom helped guide the Greeks through the
Trojan War. But! Chalchas “was undone by
his [resulting] high opinion of himself. Challenged to a guessing contest by Mopsus, he failed to estimate the
number of figs in a tree. When his
opponent guessed correctly, Calchas
strangled on his own vanity.” (Evslin's Gods, Demigods & Demons, 30)
Think of vanity as both overweening
pride and complete emptiness, so that the vain soothsayer, prognosticator, politico,
pundit having puffed forth so much carbon dioxide finds he cannot breathe; he
chokes and the one that claims to see goes blind from lack of oxygen to his
mighty brain.
Y
Thanks to Bob Hodgell for the wonderful "Words, Words, Words."
The day begins well, sunny and mild. I think I may play a few holes of golf in the
late afternoon in memoriam John
Updike. He hasn’t added one word to the world’s
store this week, but the world – though you might imagine it would be – is no
lighter for it. The day begins sunny and
mild, but by three it’s cold and cloudy and by five it’s snowing. By the time I take the dog for his walk,
there’s an inch and a half on the ground. Its beauty is skin deep. Beneath the white the grass is gray, the ground is soft and wet. By the time we’re home my shoes are leaking, my socks are wet, my feet are pods of sweating ice. I shovel and sweep the walks only so they’ll be
slipperier by morning.
This is the way life slips by these days. Walking from here to there, talking on the
phone, meeting people. Nice people for
the most part but not particularly good.
None of us is either wise enough or wide enough to be truly good. Those that try to be – to get above niceness –
go about it the wrong way, because good isn’t above niceness, it’s in another direction.
I’ve
been reading Susan Neiman’s Moral
Clarity. Her world is much wider
than mine, she is much wiser than I; but she still doesn’t understand
good. Her examples of goodness are of nice - and talented, of course. They’re very bright and they’re thinking hard;
but they can’t break through by thinking. Good is not nice or bright or talented or reasonable.
Dulness
best solves
The
tease and doubt of shelling,
And
Chance’s strange arithmetic [Wilfred
Owen, “Insensibility”]*
We
dress – we dress up – and go. Every week
we forget why. But it’s a comfort –a quiet
joy – to arrive among people we know and don’t know, that know and don’t know
us. Everyone from grayest to pinkest is
freshly scrubbed and neatly pressed; they smell clean. They smile with their teeth.
We find a place at the back. And we sit with them; and we stand with them, to say
the Creed, to sing the songs that tell us their bits of the old, old
story. And we hear again how God chooses
the lowly and lonely to save the world though it doesn’t care to be saved.
We leave – now we’re smiling as we
shake the preacher’s hand – then go to fill up and drive through the car
wash. So we come back clean.
