I'd say I try to be a happy person.

July 30, 2014
Describe Yourself, pt. 2

“I’d say I’m a . . . thoughtful person.”

Which means I think a lot about all kinds of things but especially about myself, which is depressing really, you know, because I’m not always a happy person.  I mean, I try to be; but mostly it’s try and fail.  I don’t know why.  I think it’s in my stars.

That is, another letter from cousin Jack (About Jack, see here.), July 28, 1992.  The letter, one of those you wrote when you were thirty (overly dramatic and . . . honest) and wish no one had kept, is here.

I'd say I'm a thoughtful person.

July 28, 2014

Describe Yourself

“I’d say I’m a . . . thoughtful person.”

As we learn early from the notes we carry home from our teachers and back to school from our parents, it’s important to portray oneself as thoughtful. 

          We’ve learned.  How often do we say now, “Give me a day or two to think about it,” when we already know what we think — the hole in the bottom of our stomach has told us: “Oh shit.” 

“After much thought and contemplation,” we write, ‘I’ve decided to resign from . . . .”  In fact, we decided long ago, in a single moment when we saw things were not going to go our way; and we decided in the same moment we weren’t going to compromise, so to  . . . with the rest of you (cretins).

          If there has been any thought or contemplation added to that, it has been how to cover over those feelings with justification, then put up a marker to it.

We bury a cat in the woods behind the house; and we cover the carcass with dirt and a small memorial mound of stones.  English ivy soon attaches to the stones then covers them, so we can no longer find the grave site ­— unless tromping around in the area we stumble over it.  And the hole at the bottom of our stomach tells us, “Oh, shit.”

f

Mass Confusion

July 25, 2014
Mass Confusion

“Hello.” “Yes, Ted?” “Yes.” “Do you know who this is?” [Sinking feeling.] “No, I’m afraid I don’t.” “Come on.” “Still nothing. Are you going to tell me?” “You really don’t know.” “No, sorry.” “Sally.” “Sally who?” “This is a joke right?” “I’m thinking. I know one Sally now . . . “ “This is Ted James, right?” “No. [Silence.] No, it’s not.” “Oh.  [Silence.] Sorry.” “It’s okay.  Bye.” “Yeah. . . . Bye.” “Wait. Sally who?” [Dial tone.]

If the link above doesn't work, try this one:  http://youtu.be/DgzqNRQXS8g. Incidentally, a milestone: my 100th post (beginning New Year's Eve).

golf-oscar-lamda-foxtrot

July 22, 2014

On Language, Pt. 2 

Il est . . . facile de se tromper sui-même sans s’en appercevoir  -  It is easy to deceive yourself without noticing - La Rochefoucauld (v:115)

For now we see through a glasse, darkely - I Corinthians 13:12

I ran into Hamlin Moody this morning. We play golf sometimes. He was on his way to the course; I was walking to work. He pulled over to “rub it in,” he said, though he didn’t look as glad to be off on a weekday as he said he was. He’s a bright enough guy, really good, so I hear, at what he does — real estate closings, I think. Because we only play golf together, we don’t talk about work. In fact, all he ever talks about, as far as I know, is golf . . . and sex.

     He’s thinking about some way to spice up his marriage, and he read somewhere or saw on the internet that . . . . What do I think? Have what’s-her-name and I . . . ? And it’s not nudge, nudge, wink, wink. He’s serious. At least, I always think so. And I shake my head — because I can’t quite believe the question? because I have nothing to say? because I want to change the subject? because no, we never have? I shake my head.

     And then he’s talking about golf — the state of his game — as if the previous exchange had never taken place. Shut the door: He knows he can play better than he has been if he can just stay back and let go through impact.

     I nod now. And I think: for all his duo-mania, his sad song on two notes, he is a likable guy. There’s something in and behind that self-effacing misery he tries to mock. He has two passions he really thinks about, broods about, wonders about, studies . . . and he can understand neither, why they have hold of him, how they work, what they mean. He reads what people that allegedly do understand write about them; he watches videos; he thinks he gets it, and he knows he doesn’t.

But, he doesn’t give up. After a round, he’ll head out to the range and pound ball after ball in 90+ heat trying to figure it out. He takes lessons. He won’t believe he can’t get better: it’s not that he’s a complete klutz — he played soccer in college, he’s a better-than-average pick-up basketball and slow-pitch softball player; he’s not an athletic embarrassment at anything except, sometimes-not-always golf. Which he loves. Which has him completely flummoxed. But he’s not giving up.

He calls me at work after his round, wants to know if I want to go out to get a beer later. I’m not sure I do, because we never have and do I want to start this?, but I end up saying, “Sure,” because I can’t think how to say, “No.” He says the golf went a little better today, at least than last time he and I played. If he could just be putting the way he should be putting!

     So tonight, after our beers, he’ll go out and roll putts. He’ll ask me if I want to go, and I’ll say, “Sure.” And we’ll roll putts — hundreds of them in dozens of directions — until we can’t see. Until, as the Poet says, we cannot see to see.

Bravo-Alpha-Bravo-Echo-Lima

July 21, 2010

On Language 

And the LORD said; Behold, the people is one, and they haue all one language: and this they begin to doe . . . . Goe to, let vs go downe, and there cōfound their language, that they may not vnderstand one anothers speech. – Genesis 11:6-7 (1611 KJV)

Sergei Bulgakov

Nous sommes si accoutumés à nous déguiser aux autres, qu’enfin nous nous déguisons à nous-mêmes. - We become so used to disguising ourselves from others, that we end up disguising ourselves from ourselves. – La Rochefoucauld (v:119) 

I mentioned Venitia Pettice two posts ago. There I noted that she was a friend of Tom Nashe’s and that she’d read Bulgakov — the theologian father not the novelist son. (See here.) The name, hers, got me thinking, remembering, and scratching back through a middle drawer of one laptop ago.  There I found an email from Tom I’d saved.  He’d gone with her to visit her parents in South Dakota.

        Tom Nashe   traveler@xyz.net   Tues Jul 20 2010   11:46 pm
        To: Ted Riich   crabbiolio@gmail.com

I’m the stranger and fool in a household whose wisdom is always sure, whose opinions are (therefore) invariably correct, and who never shut up.  No silence.  None.  The noise is everywhere always as if every word spoken is absorbed by the walls, which whisper it back.  Every room moans, croaks, gabbles endlessly.

The people are like walls.  What is the saying: “If the walls had ears”? – yes, subjunctive, condition contrary to fact, because they don’t; there are no ears, only mouths.

So the deaf mumble, grumble, mutter, murmur, whisper, shout without knowing there are echoes.

All are speaking a foreign tongue.  It sounds like English, I tell myself it’s English; but it is such “dialectical” English that every word means something different from what it means in the English I speak.  Sometimes it seems as if the differences are slight but how to be sure as there are words that have become unrecognizable? – a word I’m sure I know is a disguise for a meaning I would never associate with it.  It’s like playing tag as dusk turns night with cousins so distant you see them only every three years or so.  “There,” you think, “is Margaret”; but when you run closer, you realize it was only the shape you thought Margaret had; as the shadow darts around the corner of the house, you aren’t sure if it is Melanie or Michael.

Ven seems to understand the conversations.  Of course, she was born into the dialect; she spoke it at home from the time she could speak until she left at sixteen.

     Milan Musil opined once, as we watched our mutual friend Anna Stein, who wanted to leave Nebraska behind and assimilate in Prague, to become Czech, as we watched her struggling to find the right word in English (his third language, her first), that it was pretense: “No one forgets her mother-tongue,” he argued.  I don’t know that I agree.  Fru Bjørnsen, an Englishwoman married to a Norwegian, whom I knew as a child when we were living near Oslo, and whose English then, as I remember, was crisp and correct, if it had already acquired a hint of a song, seemed at sea in her “mother-tongue”when I visited there in my late twenties, even looking to her husband for words.  And she was a woman of no pretense whatever.

If Ven understands her parents’ stream of speech, she doesn’t try to translate.  Perhaps she doesn’t realize how confused I am.  Perhaps she’s being kind; she thinks it would make me look even more odd, foolish, stupid, if she stopped every other minute to explain.  But perhaps she cannot translate.  If the same word means different things from one English to another, how would you translate except with synonyms that would also mean different things?  Confusion would only reach another dimension, the one behind the walls(?).

I am spending more and more of each day on long walks through the fields.  It’s less stressful among the completely foreign tongues of birds and insects than trying to follow a conversation that seems sensible but cannot be, if I am understanding it correctly.

One Act of One Apostle

July 18, 2014
The Sad Case of Ananias & Sapphira

Is it a good thing, is it helpful, to be able to look at things from a different perspective, a story for example? I found in my father’s papers a version of two chapters of Kings written from the point of view of a prophet or priest of Ba’al. This is not quite so extreme, I don’t think, to tell the story of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5) — perhaps my least favorite in all of Scripture — from the point of view of their nephew, definitely not a Ba’alist though admittedly no longer on The Way after this incident.