Hell hath . . .

D. R.                &                E. C.

April 28, 2011

Hell hath no fury.

Love, love don’t come easy, but we keep on waitin’, anticipatin’.

It’s unlikely, however, love will come at all, if we’re the unlovable shit-heels, Emil Cioran thinks we are. Cioran argues in A Short History of Decay that there are “no limits . . . to our whims.” Moreover, if we followed them with the same “limitless use of freedom” the murderer has, we would drag after us literally − as we do already figuratively (in our wishes and dreams) − “a cemetery of friends and enemies.” So this world, because of who we are, this human world would be a “slaughterhouse.”

          But Cioran gives us too much credit.  We are not so fallen, if only because, frankly, we didn’t have so far to fall.[1]  Our puny thoughts don’t turn to slaughter, only to mayhem. Consult your daily fantasies: in which that one’s wagging tongue detaches at the root and gags her till she vomits out with it the embarrassing contents of her stomach, including a caramel macchiato, two Snickers bars and six boogers; in which that one’s perky arsenic − whose lovely, firm image she’s checking out approvingly in the store window − sags to the back of her knees; in which that one’s robust rubidium shrivels to the size of an acorn or turns to fog; in which that other one’s pounding music makes him deaf to the horn of the Hummer that runs tank-like over the hood of his Cradillac; and that one’s distant gaze and easy grace misleads him into an open manhole. The possibilities are limitless, but we’re not seeking death or hell, only the justice mayhem, or farce, provides.

          Even when we say (most likely sotto voce), “Go to hell,” we don’t mean the forever flaming fire, only a day or two, a week − maybe a month − until a suitable punishment, as Procrustes’ bed or Sisyphus’ rock, teaches the lesson that needs to be learned.

          We don’t wish “forever.”  We can’t wish “forever”; we have no true conception of it. We’re not all murderers. Even if our freedom were limitless, our cruelty has its bounds, if not so much taught it by exalted reason as limited by our feeble imaginations.

          Because we didn’t have that far to fall.

---

[1] Reread Genesis 1-3. There is no evidence whatever that Adam and Eve were any smarter, wiser, more imaginative, or even better before the fall than they were after. They just had a better gig . . . and they couldn't hold onto it!

Disconnections

Not Ecclesiastes

April 25, 2014

Disconnections

You know by now that I think everything is connected to nothing else (and vice versa). Nevertheless, these poems by William Carlos Williams, “the Poor” and “The Term,” now sit in cyber  הֶבֶל , the fog, the mist, the murk, the word translated “vanitie” in the King James Version of Ecclesiastes:

Uanitie of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanitie of vanities, all is vanitie.

So: Arrange yesterday’s post, “Fractions,” on one side of your screen and this page, "Disconnections," on the other; it doesn’t matter which is to the left or the right. Put on your stereopticon glasses; put in your earbuds. Look hard and listen carefully.

          A pattern will not emerge.

ש

(bicbw)

Florida, last stop: Fractions

Key West, April 11

April 6-13, 2014 (again)

Dateline Florida: Fractions

“Did you ever notice no one goes anywhere cold to find themselves?” − Tom Nashe, among many others.

No, we go to the south-by-the-sea, to eat cheaply − olives and  fruit and loaves and fishes − to drink the wine; to lie on the beach and think ourselves pilgrims; to look out over the water and into the horizon as the sun turns to dusk turns to dark; to imagine we are free, and happy, ourselves, at last.

          And behind us, only yards from where the beach ends and the street begins, the already happy natives are cleaning our rooms, making our beds and mopping our floors; they are baking our bread, frying our fish, mixing our drinks; they are minding our stores and making our music; and they sweep the streets and rake the sand before we get up in the morning. They burn their candles at both ends, hustling by day and allowing themselves to be hustled at night, working two jobs eight days a week. When do they drink wine or watch the sunset? They go to bed in the dark and they get up in the dark. They may lie down next to another warm body, smelling of sea, sweat, and sand, but that body is already asleep; it has to be up even darker.

***

Contemplation has been for all my devoted non-effort at that non-activity something I have consistently failed at. And I consider that my good fortune. It is better for our humility to fail at becoming “mystical” than to succeed; for those that have succeeded − in whatever measure − are in my experience the most prideful prigs in all the south, unbelievably arrogant about their own humility before God. They are humble before nothing or no one else; no one else can be other than inferior before their God-infused selves. They may talk − and they are always talking − about their non-selves: they are no longer themselves but God in them; but it is always to boast. “We have found ourselves and it is God in us. We have God in us!”

***

We have just walked kitschy Key West – Castle and Neff and I. Now they are off looking for more birds and plants in the botanical gardens behind the golf course north of the town. I am sitting at a table on the sidewalk in town, drinking something Bobby brought me − “Whatever,” I said − something wide and cold, tasting of mango and gin. I am listening to the music bumping and ringing out of the bar across the street. A gaggle of seven-eighths naked girls wriggle by. Apparently, they’ve just been swimming. The youngest is complaining she smells “like butt.” Bobby chuckles from the doorway, where he stands, arms folded. I seem to be his only customer this early afternoon. “Never been in the ocean before, I’m guessing,” he says. “Another?” “Will I be able to stand up and walk away?” “I’ll call you a pedi-cab if you can’t.” “Good. Another!”

          Bobby’s from Miami. The mosquito-like waitress at “The Wooden Spoon,” where I had breakfast this morning, is from Brooklyn. The lanky, low-voiced woman or boy behind the cash register where I bought my US-1 zero-mile-marker keychain, explaining why a credit card would be better even if it only cost four bucks, because he or she can’t seem to get the damn register to balance, is from Madison, Wisconsin.

          Two-thirds in my cups, I imagine that they are spiritual failures like I am. They came to south-by-the-sea to find themselves, or at least to find freedom, but. . . .  When I ask how they got from there to here: The woman-or-boy just shrugs. Liselotte (the waitress) says only, “You know how one thing leads to another.” I nod, though I do and I don’t. I wonder what they make of these failures I attribute to them. Are they saddened by them – and envious of the mystical few, as I once was? Do they think, as I do now, of “that foolishness” as “a phase”? Are they amused (and bemused) at the grandiosity that led them to believe they could come where it was warm and the mangos were cheap and stuff their cheeks with the pulp of the tree of Knowledge and . . . live?! For aren’t all spiritual adepts would-be Gnostics like Adam and Eve? Eat or know the Right Thing, and you will be like God.

***

I sit and watch and listen and smell. Bobby brings me a third whatever, and I call Castle to tell him I can’t meet by the church, he’s going to have to pick me up. I give the phone to Bobby, so he can give him directions.

          “Thanks,” I say. “You know, you’re a great guy.” And I plan to leave a big tip, no matter what the drinks are costing. “You like it here?” I ask. Bobby shakes his head. He guesses he does. “Good as anywhere,” he says.

          I do like it here, in my stupor. I like that it’s warm and that there are girls that smell like butt and music that bumps and bongs and people that mix sweet drinks that take away your good sense. I like that it’s bright and noisy and gently rude; I like that it’s tacky and honestly dishonest, that somewhere within a couple of blocks, there is a store selling the right sort of crap for everyone from the cheapest to freest-spending, from the stinkiest to sweetest-smelling, from the humblest to most arrogant. Shop right up!  Buy happiness here.

d

Unholy Saturday Night

April 19, 2014

Unholy Saturday Night

Christ rises from the dead against all our expectations, and we have to adjust – by receiving the news, by embracing it as good news, though at the same time realizing we are trying to embrace what we cannot comprehend. (There is a reason he says, “Don’t touch me.”) Or we reject the news, disbelieve it, scoff at it, turn away. But we don’t turn far. If we claim we are indifferent to the matter, we’re lying.

          At least that’s the case in my (admittedly small) part of the world among those of my (slowly dwindling) generation. It may not be the case in other climes or in other times. But here the matter comes up, and the arguments heat up. No one sits idly by.

          Or one does. That is, he pretends to be sitting by. He thinks he is projecting indifference. But anyone with half an eye can see that he is . . . seething.

          He is enraged, because he knows that his opinion − whatever it is on whichever side − his opinion, which he knows to be correct[1] − his opinion, however well argued, will not prevail. That is, right will not triumph. He knows this, because he also knows − this is a part (but not all) of why he is projecting indifference − he knows that no one is really going to listen to him. Everyone is talking, but no one is listening.

          So, to hell, and the deepest reaches of it, with all of them.  He bites his tongue, goes into the kitchen to get another beer out of the refrigerator.  He pops the cap off the bottle, takes a deep, cooling drink.  But, then he goes back into the fray, where “By God . . . ,” he says.

 l

---

[1] Everyone has his prejudices but, thanks be to God, mine are the right ones.  Who said that?

Chapter 28

April 18, 2014

A Reading of the Gospel 

     according to St. Matthew

Then there was a great earthquake, when an angel descended from heaven and rolled back the stone.  The angel sat on the stone, looking like lightning dressed in snow.  The guards posted at the tomb shook and fainted dead away.  But to the women, who were neither shaken by the earthquake or afraid of him, the angel said: “I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He isn’t here, as you can see.  So, go, tell his disciples that he has risen and is going before all of you to Galilee; you’ll see him there.”  So the women went running to tell the disciples, only to find that Jesus had not gone away, he was just around the corner.  “Hi,” he said. 

There’s some sort of commotion in the background. Matthew puts down his pen.  Something’s wrong, but he’s not quite sure what. Could it be the presence of the Roman soldiers he has dragged into the story so he can impeach their story doesn’t, finally, prove anything at all? Their testimony is clearly unreliable in any case: they were in a dead faint whatever happened; they slept through an earthquake. Meanwhile, the body really could have been stolen; or Jesus could simply have come to; or someone could have resuscitated him, and he hobbled or was carried away on a stretcher. The soldiers don’t know. If instead they swore he’d been raised from the dead, they’d still be testifying to something they had neither seen nor heard.

          But the angel. We would believe an angel, would we not, if we saw him, shining like lightning, woven out of snow-drift?  But he’s not a truly reliable witness either. “Tell the disciples he is on his way to Galilee ahead of you.” But he isn’t! He’s still in Jerusalem. In fact, he’s just around the corner. 

          It’s the oddest of stories Matthew is writing, soldiers paralyzed with sleep at the sight of an angel and the quaking of the earth, neither of which upsets two women at all.  Maybe that’s the lesson − the relative pusillanimity and chutzpah of Italian men and Jewish women.  The gospeleer is confused.

It is at just this puzzling point, that Matthew is interrupted again. (See Cyril Satorsky’s depiction above.) Here he is. We might think he’s casting a suspicious eye on future readers, but the sidelong glance is only the result of Mrs. Matthew calling again him to dinner, for the third flycatching time. “And, I’m not calling again.”

          She’s a loud woman − “lickerish,” too as Chaucer would say, loving not only the bodily pleasures of life, the release of liquid from her bladder, air and solid from her colon, eructation and lubrication, but relishing the obscenities that not only describe these pleasures but, as interjections and adjectives. can be brought to bear on practically any subject. You can see how that would be a pain to poor Matthew now that he’s contracted religion − her accusations that he’s pipiting away his time with his nose in a scroll, while his new friends think their shearwater smells like ice cream and pretend they don’t have petrels and tapaculos like everyone else. “My God, who has blessed me with every good thing: What is the world coming to?” He can’t put up his pen and take up a knife and fork and enjoy his meal, then put down his knife and fork and take his nose in his handkerchief and come to bed? “My God who had blessed me with every good thing, until . . . .” she yells from the kitchen.

He hesitates only a moment more, then he puts down his quill and goes in for swill, smiling (just barely) at the little rhyme he’s made, realizing it’s not really fair, for Mrs. Matthew, Miriam, like the women in his story, short, dark, full-bosomed and -bottomed − “Look at these titmice,” she says, walking stark naked into his study, the birds fluttering in her hands. “Look at this albatross,” turning around. It’s really not fair, for his lewd wife is a marvelous cook.

          If only he could eat . . . and the other.  But until he gets his Gospel right . . . .  And afterward, will he be “back to normal”? (She wonders).  Look at the heaviness in that face, whichever way the eyes are cast.  He has sunk into the seriousness of his religion; he’s so infected with its gravity, he picks at the food he should enjoy, and he closes his eyes and ears and prays that she’ll stay on her side of the bed.

g

Florida III

April 6-13, 2014

Notes on Florida – Part the Third

We head south from Florida City on US - 1 and pass through Sugarloaf Key.  However commercial it's become, there is still in the Keys a vibration that suggests the air itself may talk. Will we stop to listen?

          Listen to Caliban now: your 55 seconds of Shakespeare.

The truth and nothing but

April 6-13, 2014

Notes on Florida – Part the Second

Castle’s nephew may think Florida is “ugly." (See Notes − Part the First). And he may not. What we say doesn’t always match what we think. This is true whether we say little or a lot. Neff is quiet − I like him for that; mid-twenties, a bit awkward; he’s always looking around, looking at, looking for. Watching him, I wonder what he sees and what he makes of it.
        What does he make of his Uncle Bob’s interest in − or mania for − critters, which has meant we’ll spend a second day in the Everglades National Park, looking for more alligators and crocodiles, more manatees and moose, more ospreys and anhingas, more wild pigs and an invisible panther?[1]

          At breakfast this morning, the two of us − Neff and I; Castle doesn't eat breakfast − were with a very quiet Indian couple, about my age. And Neff motioned with a shrug to a man coming in to take up a table next to us. Apparently, he'd seen the man before. "Watch what's coming," the shrug said, part of what the shrug said. 

          The man stood beside the table for close to a minute, still yet troubled: burly, almost brutish, short- and tight-limbed, grizzled hair cut almost to his scalp, dough-faced. The woman he was waiting for arrived − taller than he, lanky and blonde, her long face full of angles. They spoke in German. He sat down; she went to the breakfast bar, brought back two expanded polystyrene foam bowls of canned fruit cocktail.

          Then her daughter came in, same long hair, long frame, long face, red-headed son/grandson on her hip. Then his son, same burly, short-limbed build, same dough face, joined the table. But the “son” and the “daughter” were clearly husband and wife; either he had married the image of his mother, or she had married the image of her father. Or . . . what − brother had married sister?  (The grandson did have an Appalachian/Hapsburg look about him.) But that was highly, highly unlikely; still, it was impossible to know without asking, and Castle wasn’t there to ask as he almost surely would have, interrupted in his cracked German, “Sie ist Ihre Tochter, oder?”

Families are impenetrable mysteries to those outside them. And asking really does no good; they are unlikely to tell the truth about themselves. It isn’t necessarily willful deception; they don't know the truth about themselves. Families are impenetrable mysteries to those inside them.

          In American (salt water) crocodiles, the sex of the hatchling is determined neither by his mother or her father but by the outside temperature when he or she was inside the egg.[2] The mother crocodile, then, has no interest in that, the sex of her offspring. (The father crocodile has no interest in the offspring at all. He's at work.) But she at least watches them hatch. She doesn't, however, turn them over to check; she pushes them into the water, and she leaves. No crocodile law insures that brothers and sisters do not marry eight years later when they’re grown.

A handful of propositions about truth (depending on how many fingers you have):

1. Finger prints. Not only are no two fingerprints the same, no one fingerprint is the same twice.  That is, its image changes every time the fingerprint is taken.
2. Coincidences are as more powerful than equations as Superman is more powerful than a locomotive.
3. Superman is a fictional character, created by two Cleveland, Ohio high school students in 1933.
4. If everything is connected to everything else, but one thing is not, how many other things can be connected to everything else? (The answer to this question is not found in the back of the book.)
5. What we call truth is, then, like a colloidal suspension . . . or, even more, like potato salad.

This could have been what Neff was also saying with his shrug.

a

(bicbw)

---

[1] With the exception of panthers, which are exceedingly rare – only some 160 in all – and moose, inserted only for its alliterative value, we saw everything Castle was looking for at least two times over.

[2]  So that even a short-term change in climate might make the species extinct. 

Florida! - Part the First

April 6-13, 2014

Notes on Florida – Part the First

I had hoped to write about Florida last week, when I was there; but it proved impossible. Rather, I did write, but given the state of the internet on the peninsula – at least at the kinds of place Castle wanted to stay: motels the color of sherbet with flamingos hand-painted on the shower curtains − I couldn’t post anything I wrote.

          I begin here with a general observation. Pray that I become more specific as this week of retrospection goes on.

 ***

There is much in Florida that is ugly, even if I don’t see it through Castle’s nephew’s narrow young eyes − “ugly” is his word − but through my own older, sadder, blurrier ones. There is something slapdash about the buildings, the lawns, the trees, the soil, the oddly made critters. It’s as if the peninsula itself was an afterthought, squeezed out of Alabama, Georgia, and a sliver of Mississippi, and left there alone between the Atlantic and the Gulf for a very long time. People came late, and they came running from something – the cold, perhaps, or the law, or everyday life. They didn’t intend to stay; so they threw up shacks made of what they found lying around. In any case, they didn’t need more than a roof to sleep under when it rained and a fire-pit to cook fish and hares, whatever they could net or snare or whatever jumped or walked right into their hands and pots.

          There was no need of prayer, no need of providence; everything, fish, fruit and vegetables, was there, to hand. There was no need of prayer, no need of providence, no need of God; so there was no need of churches, or of zoning or school boards. There was only need of a woman or a man and only as long as the need lasted, which was often not very long at all, given the heat and one already had a full belly.

 ***

This was Adam and Eve’s mistake − apart from their sin, which was quite another matter. (Sin and mistake are not synonyms.)  They needed nothing, yet they invented Law, the prohibition of eating from the one tree; and with Law they invented God, and zoning and school boards soon followed. And following zoning and school boards came not only the division of property but sex education and free lunches, because the Law corrupted innocence, and Agriculture made food scarce.

*** 

The sin of Adam and Eve was, incidentally, a form of Gnosticism, believing they could know what they could not.

 f

(I’m pretty confident about this one; but I could still be wrong.)

Dateline: Sanford, FL

The Sunshine State

April 6, 2014

Dateline: Sanford, FL

Subject: Waiting for BC

That’s Bob Castle (See “Saint Jack.”) and his nephew Randall. We’re to spend a week in the Sunshine State, doing this, that, and the other thing. I arrived today, just before noon. Castle and Randall don’t get in until late tomorrow.

          So there’s plenty of time and opportunity for panic. For example, I’ve already lost the keys to the rental car. I will add that I’ve also found them, but in the meantime . . .

          None of my friends have ever mistaken me for cool-hand Luke. Most obviously – you don’t have to watch me in action − I look nothing like Paul Newman. The picture under “About Me” is clearly a caricature; but, sadly, it flatters me. I’m not nearly so joyful, especially when I’ve lost something. Then, I exhibit the opposite of either joy or cool: panic!

          “Oh, SHIT!” And my gorge fills at the same time I begin running around turning everything I can lay my hands on upside down, crawling around on the floor peering under every piece of furniture, emptying every receptacle – suitcase, briefcase, waste cans, looking like a character in a poorly made cartoon, where the cels aren’t turning over quite as quickly as the eye can see.[1]

          It doesn’t matter that this kind of thing happens on a more-than-once-a-week basis. Every panic is new. And none gauges the consequences. How bad can this be?  I haven’t lost a child − or a wife. This is why we don’t have children, Roz says, and why we’ve never married. I haven’t lost a beloved uncle or a Fabergé egg. But the panic couldn’t be worse, if I had lost him, or the egg, or had gotten married.

          I’m never saying to myself, “So what?” If the rental car company can’t unlock the car and start it from outer space, surely they haven’t given me the only key that will open and run it. So what if the lost key rate is . . . I’m scouring my contract to see, but the print is too fine. But, say it’s $250 − that seems fair. It’s chump change for Castle, I imagine.

Roz has never warmed up to Bob. And I don’t think has to do with the kind of law he practiced from the time he began practicing, defending the sleaziest criminal cases, the mother- and father-rapers on the Group W bench. She didn’t warm up to him when he walked away from his practice. He didn’t run, only walked. It wasn’t that some mother-raper he’d gotten off with probation descended deeper into the muck of father-rapery. Apparently, BC came into some money and decided he was done. Where the money came from I don’t know. When I asked, his response was, “Sometimes these things happen." He may be a hard guy to warm up to.

          He’s a hard guy to know. He walked away from law, and he took up “lassitude” − his word. He writes a little, draws a little, plays piano in a bar. He’s skillful at all: a clear-eyed writer of stories that begin in a messy middle and end when the sun comes up; a maker of pen-and-ink sketches of buildings that seem never to come completely to rest − they look as if they are about to fly away piece by piece (or line by line); a fluent fake-book reader. But he is only skillful and always leaves the sense on the eye or ear or narrative portion of the brain that something has been forgotten or, more accurately, remembered later, but he didn’t have the energy for or see the sense of going back and putting it in.

          Still, I find him an endurable companion, if I keep in mind that I have to be willing to take what he offers and not want more. He is, perhaps, the best of acquaintances but a disappointing friend.

Roz and I had agreed to spend a week in Florida with him, because he had invited us. It seemed foolish to turn down a free trip. To me, it still does; so I’m pressing forward. Roz backed out, when the nephew was added to the itinerary, rather late in the game. She didn’t want to be the fourth wheel, she said.

          The keys, incidentally, were under my book, Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice, face down on the bed. If I had put a bookmark in it and closed it properly (as I was taught), they would never have gone missing.

S

---

[1] The term herky-jerky is, my dictionary tells me, a “reduplication” of jerky, in its meaning of characterized by jerks or tics. I'm a cartoon running at 8 cels per second.

Bad back blessings

The blessing of a bad back – a day off 

(Friday, April 3, 2009)

Emile Cioran writes, “I am neither unhappy enough to be a poet nor as indifferent as a philosopher” (Tears & Saints, 104). But are all poets unhappy? Are all philosophers indifferent?  Philosophers are always arguing a 

Emile Cioran

case; they become philosophers because they are not indifferent. And poets may write of unhappiness, but they can be happy doing so.

The blessed bad back means above all that there is no need to be doing something every minute. I've left John Calvin at work, where he likes to sit on my shoulder like a giant parrot, talons digging into flesh to maintain  his balance, squawking loudly: “Don’t let me fall. Don’t let me fall.” How could he sit on my shoulder anyway, if I am lying down?

          The blessed bad back means I can lie here and just listen to the day tapping at the window, the the weather blowing in and out; I can hear the dark pushed apart, the ping of a slant of sunshine. “Come out. Play. The air is lighter now.” Here is why Cioran spent his days in the bowels of the library. He didn’t want to hear the sun’s invitation. But I like the sun. And if I cannot go out today, I can follow it hobbling from room to room with the dog.

I like the sun. I’m not looking for a dark, tragic vision. I know, Emile, that life will end in death and after that there will be either nothing  or judgment.

          I’m not looking for a comic vision either, because it, too, depends on an after. I’m not looking for a vision at all, but for a ph&ra, if I can mean by that a bag of tricks as well as sustenance.[1]  Here are not only lentils and figs, a spoon and a cup for water. Here is the trick for enjoying a sunny day; here is the trick for soaking in the rain. Here is a reverie to calm the day; here is revelry to pass the evening; here is a dream to while away the night.

          I’m not looking for a philosophy. I lack anyway the philosopher’s “indifference”; and I’m not interested in finding it. I’m not looking for a psychology – for psychology is either philosophy (as in Freud) or a science; I’m no good at science even of the softest, smooshiest kind. And religion? No, I’m not looking for religion either: nothing so high and mighty, so serious; nothing with theologians and lawyers and priests.

          If not a ph&ra, since I’m not much of a traveler, I may look for a bar, where hypocrisy is acknowledged because some drunken night or another it will out. But then, it will, after it’s been the joke for several days – it will fade, not forgotten but not never used as a weapon.

          Peace!

I think on the bar, there will be a copy of the Greek Anthology. Here’s a drinking song certainly in the mode of and possibly inspired by the Anthology.

---

[1] The Cynic’s knapsack. Here is John Desmond’s definition: “traveler’s bag of sack. Part of the Cynic’s typical garb and the name that Crates gives his utopia, because it contains no coins but only simple, natural things such as figs and thyme” (Cynics, 243).

Shaving Cream Pies

April 2, 2014 - More School for Scandal & Shaving Cream Pies

Here’s an email from Tom Nashe.  He’s always way ahead of me, but he gets ahead by free-associating – I think that’s the right term; but it's a form of sneakery. For example, reading last week’s post on John 9 (Naming names), he picked up on the reference to Sheridan’s School for Scandal and went with it where he wanted to go.

From: Tom Nashe [mailto:UnfortunateT@sadsackmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 9:49 PM
To: Ted Riich [crabbiolio@gmail.com]
Subject: School for Scandal

So, we have met the scandal- and sentiment-mongers of “the School,” and they is us, only they is more articulate and amusing – and better dressed.  We are by comparison a rout of tongue-tied sad-sacks.  If our stage is still that of drawing-room comedy, all the appurtenances have shrunk: the screens are too short and narrow to hide behind; when we run to get into the next room or a closet, we hit our heads on a door-frame and end up cold-cocked on the floor, blood seeping from the gashes on our foreheads.

                Or maybe it isn’t that the screens are too short and the doorways are too narrow, it is that the actors have expanded; we are puffed up to once-and-a-half normal size.  In which case, “Stick, O Lord, a wicked, holy poker up our arses and deflate us, I pray.”

The saving genius of farce is that it is mean.  It de-means without regard to status.  The high and the low and all in between slip on the same banana peels, they are hit in the face by the same pies.  Whatever their pretensions – to intelligence, talent, wealth, power – all are bags of guts and gas.  The saving genius of farce is that there is no high-minded, great-hearted, deep-souled concern with minds and hearts and spirits.  There are no high minds, only low, spongy brains; there are no great hearts, only slowly failing pumps; there are no soulful spirits only gas.  Gaaaassss.

                Then the curtain falls.

                And it rises again.  And smeared with fake blood and real shaving cream, we bow to the cheering, jeering, gagging, ragging, chortling, snorting crowd.

                And afterwards we all go out together for a beer.

                And a fight breaks out in the bar.

                And the cops come from Keystone.

                And

All the world’s a stage, and all the plays are knockabouts; the applause is thunderous, and what comes next ends and begins with And 

«      “Oh Jake,” Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together.”  . . .  

         “Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so?”                                                            »