Butter pie

March 31, 2014

If anything should happen, 

          we'll be sure to give a ring.

I call Uncle Albert (See Just outside of Paradise and A friend in need.) once a week, another of my duties as my mother’s son, his adoptive nephew − though that’s not the true state of our relationship: I am not so much his adoptive nephew as he is my adoptive uncle. Just as I’m assigned to visit twice a year, I’m expected to call once a week those weeks none of his six “nieces” or “nephews” is with him. In both cases, visits and calls, my sister is the organizer. She sends out the schedule, so that we know the two (different) weeks we’re supposed to visit − for me this year one in March and one in August − and which days we are supposed to call the three weeks of each month no one is with him. This quarter I have Sundays, which is a blessing.

          I write that “Sundays” and “a blessing,” tongue in cheek; but there is some truth in the idea. It is a blessing to call on Sundays, because there is always something to talk about. There’s always something to talk about, because Uncle Albert goes to church whenever he can. Most often he drives himself. But, if the weather is bad (but not awful, as it can be), some one of his friends, most of whom are female and all of whom are younger, will come to get him. So, there is little for me to say. I ask him, “How was church?” and he tells me in some, odd detail; or, if he’s missed, he tells me why. Usually, it’s not weather but what he calls “beaucoup de gas,” elongating both the a and the s: beaucoup de gaaaassssss.  “I personally don’t mind farting in church, as you know.”  I do know, because he tells me every time. “I don’t mind, but others seem to. If God doesn’t fart, neither in God’s sanctuary should we, God’s people.”  Then, he’ll talk about the various symptoms of beaucoup de gas and some of the other times he’s been afflicted − or inflated − by it.

          But, yesterday he went. So: “How was church?”

          “Church was church,” he always begins and almost immediately veers not off the subject but into one of its murkier corners. The tangent almost begins, “What I don’t understand is . . . .”

Perhaps I should pause to say that I don’t think Uncle Albert goes to church because he “believes in the Lord”; on the other hand, he doesn’t go just to get out of the house. I puzzle about his motives, though I suspect the single most important is curiosity. Curiosity with Uncle Albert has never been a passing fancy, let me add. It is typical of his curiosity that he’s been following it to church for eighty years.

          So he knows a lot about churches, but what he knows isn’t entirely clear (to me), because he’s not paying attention to the things most church-goers are paying attention to. In this pause, let me add three of Uncle Albert’s observations about institutions. (These are all from one conversation three years ago; I wrote them down immediately afterward.)  They may bear on the church, if not directly.

1. Institutions are designed to make the institutionalized lose track. In fact, institutions create mazes into which the institutionalized go lost, so they can point that out, “You are lost.”  (By “institutionalized” Uncle Albert means anyone involved in the institution − not just the patients but the therapists, not just the students but the deans, not just the parishioners but the bishops.)
2. Old patterns are not like old people. The older they are the less sluggishly they move.
3. You can’t poke holes in fog.

          “How was church?”

          “What I don’t understand is why the preacher wants to come down and stand on the floor for the sermon. Sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t, and I don't understand why. It’s not like she’s just decided she’s going to talk to us this Sunday instead of  preachin’, because she’s always preaching; she’s never not telling us what we ought to be doing, even if you told her that’s what she was doing, she’d deny it.”

          “Uh-huh. Deny what?”

          “That she’s telling us what we ought to be doing.”

          “The preacher’s job, I guess.”

          “Then why try to disguise it?”

          “Is that what she’s doing? − I don’t know.”

          “Why else would she come down and play like she was talking?”

          “You know her better than I do.”

          “I don’t think she knows herself.”

          “She doesn’t know herself, what?  She doesn’t know herself why she’s coming down? Or, she doesn’t know herself period?”

          “Either one. She’s very nice, very nice; but I don’t know how smart she is.”

          “I’m not sure what smart has to do with this, Uncle A.”

          “Why doesn’t she take all her paraphernalia off before she comes down − her robe and what’s-it- called . . . stole and that damn rope she wears as a belt though it doesn't hold anything up? You can’t go under cover in uniform.”

          “Uh-huh.”

          “Well, unless you’re under cover in a police station. Or you’re a detective for some reason pretending you’re a beat cop.”

          “That’s an interesting idea.”

          “She’s wearing regular clothes − or regular Sunday clothes − plain clothes under all that stuff. She doesn’t take her skirt and blouse off to put the robe on, does she?”

          “I wouldn’t think so.”

          “Of course, underneath all of it she’s naked.”

          “Yes?”

          “She could talk to us naked. The naked truth.”

          “Uh.”

          “If there were such a thing.”

          “Yes, well.”

          “Notice the subjunctive.”

          “Yes. I did notice, Uncle Albert.”

          “Good.”

But I had to wonder, though I didn’t say it, if the subjunctive isn’t a way of trying to poke holes in fog.

c

Naming names

March 28, 2012

Naming names

Yesterday’s report not due till today’s end, I brought my Bible into work. The gospel passage for Sunday, the internet tells me, is John 9. A change of pace from what I have been reading, Sheridan’s wonderful and wonderfully named The School for Scandal. He has a way with names, Sheridan does: Jack Absolute and Lydia Languish; Ladies Sneerwell and Teazle, Mrs. Candour − all among those that “teach” and “learn” at the school − Sir Benjamin Backbite, and his hot-blooded Irish friend O’Trigger; and all of them make use of a journalist/dogsbody named Snake. Among their intended victims are the Brothers Surface. In today’s world there’s a kind of artistic incorrectness about naming characters like that, so that if we’ve read the playbill, we can know who they are, even before the play has begun. And by the play’s end, because they meet our expectations, they are old friends.

          It’s incorrect in today’s world, I’m guessing, because you shouldn't judge people by their names − or their faces, or their clothes, by where they went to school, or even by their reputations. People aren’t always what they seem. Even if they are, we shouldn’t prejudge, though we are glad, aren't we, when people don’t surprise us − when we’ve pegged them right.

John isn’t completely unlike Sheridan, these characters he creates: the transparent Christ walking a centimeter above the ground; the solid, stolid disciples dragging their feet in the dust; the man born blind at sea in sight; his muddled neighbors and frightened parents; the easily irked and terribly efficient Pharisees.

          Enter Jesus, two disciples rumbling along behind. The man sightless, quiet as a rock. The disciples speak as if he can’t hear: “How does it happen, Rabbi, that he is blind?” They imagine two possibilities: Either his parents sinned, or he did, though how he sinned before he was born . . . ? But they aren’t the kind of men that think that far.

          Jesus says, “No.” It’s not either.

          “Let me show you,” he says. And he bows. He spits on the ground. He bows lower to pick up the dust and the spit and roll it into a cake. The cake he puts against the startled man’s eyes: “Go, wash. Use the waters of Siloam.”

          “What?” the blind man asks.

          “You’ll see.”

And he floats away − Jesus does. He’s won’t be there when the man returns. Enter instead the man’s consternated neighbors, wondering who this stranger can be. One thinks he’s not a stranger; he’s the man that was born blind, a fixture on that corner; but another is surer it can’t be. They argue among themselves − as if he can’t hear. They argue loudly enough none of them can hear him: “It is!  It’s me?”

          The authorities are called in, a trio of lawyers whom nothing can muddle, because they have categories that cannot be confounded: the law and its ensuing logic:

1.    No one has ever healed a man born blind; it follows that

2.    if this man sees, could not have been born blind.

Moreover,

1.    All healing comes from the God of the Sabbath; it follows that

2.    anyone that would break God's Sabbath law cannot heal.

Now law and logic have been parsed and the ground rules have been set, summon the witnesses.

          The man himself, though he is the only “eye-witness” cannot be correct. Yes, he can see, but that is proof he wasn’t born blind. Bring in his parents. Unfortunately, in their own timid way the parents support their son’s story. The two facts they know are the two facts he has insisted on: he was born blind; he can see. Dismiss the witnesses.

          Jesus is still somewhere else. In John, Jesus is always somewhere else.

Only when the stage has emptied does he return. And the blind man kneels. “Rabbi, you are the son of the living God, the king of Israel,” he says. “Oh, Nathanael,” Jesus answers, “you shall see greater things than these. Not only will the blind see but those that see will go blind.

          “Those that hear will go deaf, those that speak become dumb. The clean will become leprous, the living will die, and the rich will get bad news.”

b

(bicbw)

Hard bodies

Phineas T. Bluster

March 27, 2012
Hard bodies

Chekov, speaking for himself(see yesterday's post): “You know there are people − and Tolstoy is one of them – who accuse me of writing exclusively about trivialities and having no positive heroes, no revolutionaries, Alexanders of Macedonia, or even, like Leskov, honest chiefs of police. But where am I supposed to find them? There’s nothing I’d like better. We live provincial lives: our cities are without paved streets, our villages poor, our people worn. When we’re young, we all chirp fervently like sparrows on a dung heap, but we’re old by the time we reach forty, and we start thinking of death. What kind of heroes are we?”

I had a report to write this week, due tomorrow, concerning a matter that had changed not at all since last year’s report.  So a nip here, a tuck there, an injection of botox; I’m done a day early, and it looks new, though in an odd way. Imagine Dolly Parton as Howdy Doody, freckles painted over, blonde wig. 

     There is no need to grow old gracefully, when you can become a marionette.  Lift up your jowls, your boobs, the cheeks of your ass; bind them with papier-maché.  Add several coats of paint and varnish. 

     There’s no need to grow old at all, just hard.

Q

That damn Anton

March 26, 2012

That damn Anton:

He's looking right through you.

What Chekhov knows about people − and doesn’t shrink from saying − is how petty we are, and indolent, and not only self-centered but blind; oh, and how easily we give up! We say we haven’t, we’re pressing on; but that we're going forward doesn't mean we haven't given up. We pretend we are hanging onto our ideals, but we have long since let them go; our hold on them was tenuous in any case. If we maintain them, it is only as ideals: this is what we should have done, what we should be doing, who we should be, who we would be if . . . But it’s not possible.

   I mean you have to come to terms with the possible.

Fooling God

Mask of Solemnity

March 25, 2012

Fooling God

La gravité est une mystère du corps inventé pour cacher les défauts de l’esprit.            «Solemnity is an outward mystification devised to hide 

            inner faults.» [La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, V.257]

We become solemn before mysteries we don’t comprehend, but − La Rochefoucauld is right − we also pretend solemnity when we don’t want to be understood: we use it as a way of disguising how callow we are − or how ignorant or misguided. We use a solemn face to disguise confusion, but also frustration and resentment. It’s another mask we wear − comedy and tragedy: and the mask of solemnity.

***

Often we’re solemn about grief, because we’re supposed to be; but is that the way we feel?

          A wise man once told me: “Never invite grief; don’t be greedy for bitterness or woe. But, when grief comes, stop; wait. Let the memories and the sadness meet you and walk through you at their pace – march or stroll, meander, waltz, lope – until they go. Then you go, too. Go your separate ways until you meet again.”

***

Grotesque solemnity. A phrase that his biographer Henri Troyat uses to describe Chekhov’s view of many public occasions. People act solemn, but they are grotesques.  Here is Chekhov himself (in his diary; he’s describing “a sumptuous banquet at the Hotel Continental to celebrate the anniversary of the emancipation of serfs,” Moscow, Feb. 19, 1897): “Boring and ridiculous. Eating, drinking champagne, making noise, and giving speeches on the people’s self-awareness, freedom, and so forth, while slaves in frock coats, serfs even now, bustle about the table and coachmen stand waiting outside in the cold – it’s like lying to the Holy Spirit.”

Can you do that? − and get away with it? You’d think not. But Chekhov is also reported to have said that, “One fine feature of art is that it doesn’t let you lie. You can lie in love, politics, and medicine; you can fool people and even God – such cases do exist – but you can’t lie in art.” 

          Even God. Maybe in this sense: we can so profoundly deceive ourselves that even as we envisage ourselves standing naked before God as he searches out our hiddenmost faults, we don’t imagine he can see what we cannot.

***

One more Chekovism, on religion (from his notebooks): “Between ‘God exists’ and ‘There is no God’ stretches an immense space, which [even] the honest sage has great difficulty crossing.”

          In my part of the world, the distance is between “There is no God” and “Here is God, and I have him.”  There are not only no sages in between, there is no modesty at either extreme.  There is only the noisy self-confidence of the thought-less.

          Because in addition to being solemn it’s always good to be loud.

p

(bicbw)ecause it'ot only no sages in between, t profoundly dicine; you can fool people and even God - such en'and is present with him,

Anger mismangement

 March 24, 2012

Gone mad

On ne fait point de distinction dans les espèces de colères, bien qu’il y en ait une légère et quasi innocente, qui vient de l’ardeur de la complexion; et une autre très criminelle, qui est à proprement parler la fureur de l’orgueil.  [La Rochefoucauld, Maximes. i.159]

«We make no distinctions between kinds of anger, though one may be slight and innocent, that which arises from a passionate temperament, and another criminal, pride gone mad. »

The first is an inner fire, the second an explosion that blasts the landscape.

***

Then there is the anger that set alight by anxiety does not burn at all but bristles with electricity. The anger that springs from anxiety, swells into a stream that rushes, slows to a trickle, seeps underground, and burbles up again; the anger that will become another way of sadness.

***

La Rochefoucauld has little to say about sadness, but he knows about self-inflicted wounds as a way to withdraw. 

Les q’on se fait pour sempêcher d’aimer, sont souvent plus cruelles que les rigeurs de ce qu’on aime. [v:369]

«The injuries we inflict on ourselves to keep from falling in love are often more cruel than the cruelties of love itself. »

We injure ourselves in practice for fear of failing in the game. We get ourselves to a nunnery before we can be exposed to “the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune.” Not for us to “take up arms against a sea of troubles.” 

          And we find we are more injured by our fear than we would have been by the world.  We know better than the world does how to hurt ourselves; and our hurts last longer: the wounds become infected and are slow to heal, if they heal at all. 

          It wasn’t an explosion we needed to worry about at all; it was implosion.

 ***

On the whole, it’s better to remember to take our meds.

f

Seems to have been mislaid

March 23, 2014
James, James Morrison's Mother

There are days we can lose ourselves − that’s too dramatic . . .There are days we misplace ourselves, then stumble around wondering where to start looking.

          This is not an every-Sunday occurrence with me, but it happens more Sundays than I’d like to think. It happens often enough you would think I’d begin paying attention, to come up with countermeasures. But: I never plan to misplace myself; I only look up and I’m gone, “How’d that happen? Now what?” And − here’s the difficulty − I have no answer to either question. I can’t say, “Wait. This happened, then this happened, then this; that’s how we got here.” But I don’t know where here is, and I can only say, “I remember this happened, then . . . I’m drawing a blank.”

          But, with luck I do stumble onto that place to start and there, a bit dusty in any-old-corner, there I am.  Good thing − or I couldn’t get to work in the morning. That would be a shame.

A new feature: Sundays at Go Around Back.  Quotes of the week – from various sources.  And the Sunday Funnies.  This week: Pogo.

Dogs and saints . . . and love

March 22, 2009

Four propositions (Desipientiae)[1]

1. The dog watches the garbage truck  from the upstairs bedroom through a slit in the plantation shutters − the gray men, the sound of metal dragged along the pavement and garbage dumped into the hopper. The hopper whines and grinds. A slight hiss as the brakes release. The truck inches away then begins to drift, coasting now, around the bend in the road. The dog lies down.

2. “Had there not been any illnesses in the world, there could not have been any saints, for until now there has not been a single healthy one.” − Emile Cioran

3. Yesterday: narrow, dressed black, and a black backpack, walking toward town along the littered shoulder of Veterans Highway. He looked confused; there was a disjointed hesitation in his step as if he had an artificial leg.

4. Discretion is the better part of valor, but not as love is the better part of wisdom.

u

(bicbw)

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[1] Follies.

Air Jesus

You gotta love Facebook!

March 21, 2014

Air Jesus

A reminder (from January 8, "Four definitions, two poems"): Preachers do it, those you see in churches and those you see on television; scholars do it, too. Here’s how to read Scripture, definitions of terms:

exegesis – getting the sense out of 

               something (usually Scripture)

eisegesis – putting your own sense back in

exorcism – getting the demons out of something, 

               anything at all

                                                                     eisorcism – putting your own back in

Perform these actions in the right combination and you’ll have the Bible you wanted all along.

Desipientiae: Vol. 2, Art.108. 

           Could Jesus die, if he never really lived? It seems unlikely, even if with God 

              everything is possible, if everything is possible with God.

The bulletin from the church I don’t go to arrives in my email today. The sermon is on John 4, surely one of the more disturbing passages in all of the gospels. Question: What does Jesus do with the drink of water he asks for? He doesn’t eat the bread his disciples bring him.

So, what does he live on, this messiah of John’s? It must be air. It isn’t food or drink.  And it isn’t human contact, because he touches no one. At least, he hasn’t yet.  Look at it.  (I am working out of the zippered King James Version my esteemed parents gave me when I was twelve, to lead me in the paths of righteousness.)

Summary of the Gospel According to St. John (according to me, chs. 1-4)

Chapter One ▪ The Word becomes flesh - but not my flesh, the glorious flesh that befits the Light, the Lamb of God on whom John the Baptist sees the Spirit descending. John does not baptize this Jesus, however. Nor does this Jesus himself baptize − only his disciples do.

 Chapter Two ▪ The water is changed into wine according to Jesus’ instructions. But he doesn’t so much change the water into wine as he says the water into wine. He does drive the money-changers out of the temple but with a scourge he makes for that purpose; at whip’s-length then he drives them out. Even to those who believe, “Jesus did not commit himself to them,” because he knows what is in them – that is, the dirt, my rotting human flesh.

 Chapter Three ▪ The conversation with Nicodemus, in which Jesus reaffirms the necessity of being born of the Spirit (See 1:13; to hell with the flesh really.[1]) and confirms that it is Light that has come into the world, from above!  And John (not the Baptist but the Gospeleer) testifies: “He that is of the earth is earthly . . . ; he that cometh from above is above all” − above everything, every thing of this earth (3:31[2]).

Chapter Four ▪ Jesus talks with the woman at the well, and with his disciples, and later with the Samaritans, who come to believe he is “the saviour of the world”. But though he asks for a drink, he drinks nothing, and he refuses the bread his disciples bring from town, because he has “living water” and “meat [we] know not of.” And it looks to me as if he lives on air, as his followers ought to, for God is Air, and so should we be − at least, in our worship (v. 24[3]). Later, when he arrives in Galilee he says his second miracle or “sign,” the healing of the nobleman’s son − but at a distance far greater than to the jugs of water standing nearby in chapter 2.

So, mothers tell your children, and preachers tell your congregations . . . I don’t know what.  But if you want to know what the ebionites in your flock are thinking about John and about the docetists in your midst, see above.

a

(bicdbw*)

---

* Because I could definitely be wrong, though Stevie Smith doesn’t seem to think so.

---

[1] ¹² But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: ¹³ which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

[2] ³¹ He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all.

[3]  ²⁴ God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. 

Building a fire

John Knox

March 19, 2014

Building a fire

In the spirit of the thing, this thing, in which every bit is a fragment ripped off something else, my friend Gaspar Stephens[1] sent me the following:

In Re your Scotsmen (TA, 3/18/14), this question from Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.

?

In short, my Scotsmen like “yond Cassius” have “a lean and hungry look”; they think too much? I don’t think so. It’s not that they think too much; they just take what they think too seriously.  

“Well, it doesn’t matter what you believe, it’s that you believe. Right?” she said. Not twenty-two years ago but twenty-two and fifteen more, I might have agreed. She was serious and seriously lovely. I was serious, too, and seriously young. And we were alone in the back seat of a car, parked at the end of a dirt road. (Was it Dave Barry that used to say, “I’m not making this up”?) I did agree, though it made me uncomfortable.

          But now − however serious and intense and intensely lovely − I can’t not say, “Bullshit.”

          Not very compassionate.  Not very smart.  I can take her home, now!  And I could be wrong.

q

---

[1] See March 9 “Kicked out for an apple?”; February 27 “Dappled, brinded, dim; folded, spindled & mutilated”; and February 25 “And that’s the way it is.”

The trick is . . .

March 18, 2014

The trick is . . .

βίος ἀνεόρταστος μακρὴ ὁδὸς ἀπανδόκευτος. - Democritus[1]

1.

In yesterday’s post, I included a letter from my cousin Jack. The letter was written in 1992. Jack was then, as I said, a “minister of the word and sacrament” in a Presbyterian Church not far from where I grew up. He complains about this and that − or he wails; complain may be too mild a term. He gnashes his teeth; he weeps. He ends, though, with a quotation from Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. (You can read the entire letter here.)

          I’m aware, when I read Jack’s letter twenty-two years later − I’m aware of how young we were twenty-two years ago. But twenty-two years older, I haven’t forgotten what kind of Presbyterians Jack was dealing with then. Scotsmen. The faithful servants of a serious-minded God that never cracked a smile or a fart, a perfect God that, expecting perfection, exhausted those who served him, worried them to tears, because he never weakened, weakens, will weaken, he never erred, errs, will err. So to be perfect as This God is perfect: Show no weakness, admit no wrong, hold others strictly to account. Two things to keep: immaculate books; and score.

2.

Here again is Jack’s quotation from Humphry Clinker. It occurs in a letter from Jeremy Melford to his friend Sir Watkin Phillips (of Jesus College, Oxon.), describing the scene at Bath, where Melford’s uncle, Matthew Bramble, has gone for a cure. But it isn’t frailty of body that ails Bramble so much as thinness of skin. Jack wrote that he had “the greatest sympathies” with the subject.

Those follies, that move my uncle’s spleen, excite my laughter. He is as tender as a man without skin; who cannot bear the slightest touch without flinching. What tickles another would give him torment; and yet he has what we may call lucid intervals, when he is remarkably facetious — Indeed, I never knew a hypochondriac so apt to be infected with good-humor. He is the most risible misanthrope I ever met with. A lucky joke, or any ludicrous incident, will set him a laughing, even in one of his most gloomy paroxysms; and, when the laugh is over, he will curse his own imbecility.

Matthew Bramble is aware − his own letters confirm − that his misanthropy is risible, his tetchy spleen laughable.  But he has great difficulty laughing at others’ misfortunes, even though he knows they are as ridiculous as he is. So, when he can’t help it and yelps out an unchokedback chortle, he feels sorry for having done so. This is a serious matter for someone − what strikes him as funny − so it is a serious matter (period).

          But funny.

3.

Uncle Albert has always been fond of saying, “The trick is . . . ”  On saying r in French: “The trick is sticking your fingers down your throat and pretending you’re not going to choke.” On making meat loaf: “The trick is using more ketchup than you think you need but not as much as you want.” On hitting long irons: “The trick is forgetting everything anyone ever told you.” These were things he was good at, incidentally. He taught French; he was an excellent cook; he played a good game of golf back when there still were long irons. But “The trick is . . . ” doesn’t carry only technological wisdom.  There is a trick to everything, that is the basic premise: a trick not only to French pronunciation but to living anywhere people spoke French . . . or Italian; a trick not only to making meat loaf but tricks to meeting and to loafing; a trick not only to golf but to religion. Uncle Albert: “If you have to have religion, the trick is not to be religious.”  Of course, knowing the trick doesn’t mean you can pull it off.  But at least you know it.

o

(bicbw)

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[1] A life without festival is a long road without an inn.

Saint Jack

March 17, 2014 & March 17, 1992

“Saint Jack”

“For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler.

                and from the deadly pestilence.” – Psalm 91

I’m going to find this in a box in a couple of days − it would have been too coincidental to have come upon it this morning, the day it was written 22 years ago, or the date it was written; the day was a Tuesday.  It’s from my cousin Jack, then a Presbyterian “minister of the word and sacrament,” serving by chance, or grace, or one of those rare odd concatenations of the two, one town over from the one I grew up in.  

        (To read the entire letter, click here.)  

In our mid-thirties then, when Jack wrote, though mentally we were probably still sophomores in high school, even if we’d read a bit since then.  See the reference elsewhere in the letter to Tom Jones, which was one of the books in a canon of “scripture” that four or five of us were forming to describe life as it fallibly, comically was instead of as Leviticus and the Apocalypse thought it should be. It was then, and always, an ongoing project, still in the suggestion stage.  So, in the P.S., Jack is proposing Humphry Clinker.

     I’ve titled this post, “Saint Jack,” partly because Paul Theroux’s novel by that name was on our list to be considered.  I was pushing instead for the movie with Ben Gazzara.  The canon was open in that way (as well as just open): plays, movies, music, paintings, sculptures, no category of culture − high, medium, low, or outside − ruled out.  Bob Castle, a lawyer, proposed the “monkey trial,” “not the movie with whoever was in it but the trial itself, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes," or at least Mencken’s coverage of it for the Baltimore Sun. There was some push-back. Then, Castle proposed Secretariat.

t

(bicbw)

Why "The Ambiguities"

Last page of Rolfe Humphries' wonderful translation
of The Aeneid with my sophomoric marginal note.

March 16, 2014

Why “The Ambiguities”?

“So, what happened next, Uncle Ted?”  Now, another Ted is the nephew, and this Ted is the uncle.  “What happened next with Uncle Albert?”

          “The best answer to that is ‘hmmmm.’  The story ends with ‘Get your keys.’

          “All true-life stories end with something like that: ‘Oh . . . boy.’  ‘See you tomorrow.’  ‘Get your keys.’”

The epic begins in medias res.  Stories in life, however epic or trivial, end there. 

                                 m

(because it’s in the middle)

A friend in need

from Vanitas by Simon Renard Saint-Andre

March 13, 2014
A friend in need

On incommode souvent les autres quand on croit ne les pouvoir jamais incommoder. - La Rochefoucauld[1]

Uncle Albert stumps into my room before seven. We’re still without plumbing. It was down below zero last night. The snow is knee-deep.

          “Wake up.”

          “I’m awake.”

          “Get dressed.”

When I get out into the living room in my tee-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, sweater and hoodie, in my long underwear and two pairs of pants,

          “Where’s my cane?”  This is a rhetorical question because Uncle Albert knows where all of his canes are. Everything has its place and is in it; there are rules for every where, every why, and every when except meal times. There are dietary laws; there are use restrictions on water and light, noise ordinances, shower, sink, and stool privileges, shoe and slipper stations, diagrams (albeit in Uncle Albert's head) about what can be hung where in the bathroom or what can be put next to what in the kitchen cupboards. I’m always on edge, I’m going to put something in the wrong place, ask a question for the wrong reason, get off schedule; and there are consequences: “I’m going to kill you, if you don’t start wiping the faucets off when you use the sink.”

          “Where’s my cane?” It’s a rhetorical question, but it demands a response.

          “The one with the icepick on the end is leaning against your chair.”

          “That’ll do. You ready?”

          “For what?” Since Uncle Albert is dressed to go out, I’m wrapping myself into my big coat. I’m getting ready.

          “Let’s go, then. Get your keys.”

          “Where are we going?”

          “There’s a woman I know, about your age.”  Since he has no idea how old I am, I have no idea what that means.

          “What about her?”

          “Nothing about her. She’ll let us shower and shave, relieve our basic needs at her place. Bring what you need.”

          “How do you know?”

          “I called her.”

          “When?”

          “Don’t worry about it. If she’s not there I know where the key is.”

          “ . . . ”

          “She may be in Florida for all I know. Sometimes she just takes off.”

          “I thought you called her.”

          “Get your keys.”

---

[1] We often annoy others when we think we cannot possibly annoy others.