Rant on!

October 30, 2014

Rated R

suspecting is not-knowing   to stay suspecting is not-wanting-to-know  eve again   who does want to know   who wants to be “like God knowing good and evil”  but she already knows good  she wants to know evil though she can want that only if she has no idea what evil is or only a muddle-headed-middle-class one   say she thinks it would be gloriously wicked to sleep with lots of men   have   bib

                                                                                                               lic

                                                                                                                      al

                                                                                                                           knowledge of them  and all of them will worship her as – what did miltons serpent say? – queen of the universe    to be kissed by one and then the other and then another still   to feel them come alive and collapse in her arms scream and faint   she doesnt imagine one plans to jerk an arm free and cut off her head as he is swooning away    is this why we  who are middle-muddled like eve  why we are so obsessed with Lust because we can both imagine /and imagine we can tame/ it    the other side of lust Greed  we dont have to imagine   It has tamed us we live in it no longer sin  the insurance of our freedom – 

                                          thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gory          

                                          by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

                                                                                         by god

naomi is about obsession how it takes one apart though jōji somehow puts himself back together without giving it up  the obsessed : what wonders!  reginald marsh never without a pad never not sketching in it  anaïs nin living her life by writing about each pretty petty petit bit of it  poets-I-know always moving sounds around in their mouths  always-even-eating shifting them around with the potatoes and spit

          can you teach yourself obsession   maybe start with small things  maybe it only applies to small things - looking at Little long and hard  ignoring distractions : gas in your colon blood in your loins the crickets in your ear the gadzook- great-big  balloon things blowing up your brain : generalizations philosophical questions theological arguments :  God   Life   Death   too big   too broad   too much   naomi is just right  - the god that lies between right and thigh or wave and offering in Leviticus 9:23   - the third day of the 9day life of a mosquito sucking a particular ear  drunk with pleasure shuddering    - the incomprehensible death by drowning of a frog choking on warm swamp-water  the plaything of what kind of cruelly humorous god

true philosophers cant be obsessed with Knowledge but (only) with certain ideas of how some things work   theologians – or Mystics! whatever they may wish to tell us – cant be obsessed with god when all they can see is the bright-colored Dust they have chipped off gods shell swims now in glitter around them hissing like insects  a Flea from gods beard carried by the wind  swept along the floor and under the hem of  teresa-sanchez/ s skirt      let eve become the mother of mankind by bedding six hundred men     she-teresa   . . . .

b

Better to keep silent and be thought a fool than . . . .

October 29, 2014

Rant 

Listening to Last Car to Elysian Fields  one of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels  I try to listen the way I read but I cant  I cant stop and look away  turn back and make a note in the margin  watch it expand to run inside out and upside down around the page  attaching itself to the text in arrows and asterisks  I can only think vaguely of how Theodosia tells Dave he has unresolved anger issues  meaning he is angry  most of the time  and how Dave describes Castille LeJeune’s attachment to the truth as tenuous  if not non-existent he’d just as soon lie as tell the truth  Dave doesn’t draw the inference – and there aren’t many inferences he doesn’t draw – that that means as well LeJeune would just as soon tell the truth as lie  because truth and lie are all the same to him  because life doesn’t distinguish  or because it can’t be reduced to truth any more than families can be made into trees  Dave has a great regard for the truth  a great stake in finding and establishing it  hence his anger  it is those that believe in Truth that are angriest in a world that can’t tell the truth from a lie  the world has no regard for the truth  it has no stake in our search for it; it doesn’t rush to help  its slovenly untidiness hinders  In the end – whoever God was  or is or is not  will be or will not be  pale Ramon  the world has no blessed rage for order  nor does it bless our rage  to it  however enraged we become  we are Punch and Judy  

it is – the world – like Kawai J­ōji’s little house under Naomi’s management

At first, Naomi had looked after the house and done the cooking, but this didn’t go on for more than six months or a year. An even bigger problem than the laundry was the house: it got messier and dirtier every day. She left her clothes wherever they fell and her dishes wherever they happened to be when she stopped eating. The house was littered with plates, bowls, and tea cups, their contents half-consumed. There was soiled underwear everywhere. The floor, chairs, and tables were always covered with dust; the dingy India-print curtains had lost all of their original charm. The atmosphere of our bright “birdcage” – our fairy-tale house – had changed completely, and the stuffy rooms assaulted the nose with the smell of neglect. At one point I became so annoyed I said, “All right, I’ll clean up. You go out into the garden.” I set to work sweeping and dusting, but the more I cleaned, the dustier everything got. And I didn’t know where to begin straightening up the things that were scattered all over the house.

 - from Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi,

a novel (so far as I’ve gotten) about entropy  how order becomes disorder – the order was never real – about how a man’s bright ideal becomes grimy obsession  it is Adam (and God) and Eve (and the Serpent) all over again  and we know from the beginning  because we know their story  that the woman and her pet snake (or the snake and his pet woman) will prevail  because the Cosmic Order the Creator of the Universe is so proud of – “and it was good  and it was good  and it was very good ” – is a sham  he doesn’t see what he has created only what he wishes he had   he only wishes he’d created free will: the man has no choice; he is besotted with the woman – with the smell of her  the way his lips fit in the curve beneath her jaw  with the weightless weight of her breasts in her hands  and frankly with the way the inside of her clasps the outside of him; he can’t not accept her gift – her breasts are like apples  her sex like its pulp         Eden’s order was a lie anyway  if it were not exposed now  it would be later  If it were not brought to light his way  it would be another  “let there be light” - not just that which glances off the neat surfaces of what God has made  but that which sees into its innards  where the Goldberg cobbles together a machine to repair machine to repair machine  because all collapsing under the weight of their irreplaceable parts

there’s the truth

Naomi and Jōji return from a dance at a café  They part with their friends  heading in another direction  and go to stand on the platform  waiting for the last train  It’s a windy late-winter night  “My heart was full of the loneliness that follows merriment” J­ōji writes  “Naomi didn’t feel anything of the sort”    in the same tribe as those that search for the truth expecting to find it are those that reflect on what has happened for something - some understanding – that will redeem it, so it is not only vanity (הֵבֵל). no  all is vanity  the wise man says      can there be deception where there is no regard for the truth – if for the deceiver” truth does not exist  or falsehood – only a kaleidoscope of circumstances

there is the search for the truth on the one hand  and there is what will happen to us when we find it  as Jōji begins to uncover Naomi’s deceptions  I stop reading  I put the book aside  I can’t be surprised by what he will find any more than he can be  since his is telling the story after the fact  but the truth – the kind he is uncovering and the kind Dave Robicheaux discovers         there are things  we are better off not knowing  

z

Folderol

Penn Station

Various Octobers

In which we hear from Uncle Albert and from J.V. Cunningham; and take a train to New York City.

What we almost always fail to account for is that we cannot make an accurate accounting. We don’t have enough numbers. Some of the numbers we do have are wrong. And, the equations we are using can’t be inde-
pendently verified; there is no way of telling whether they are useful – whether they adjust for missing and wrong numbers, for example – or completely void of sense.
            – another of Uncle Albert’s sentences

. . . the elected [sic] of God and the elected of themselves
are scarcely distinguishable . . . – J. V. Cunningham.

And neither care to make the distinction. Both are certain that their election is of God.

****

On the train to New York City, October 2012:       

          Wondering why? Does Roz need my help to visit her older child? I need to slow down – thus, the train; but we are on the way to giddy-up.

          Bart is in that generation (x, x', y?) of giddy-up: it may be good sometimes, if rarely, to stop, but it is never good to slow down.

On the train, I am reading Schopenhauer and re-considering Murphy’s Law. Isn’t it true that as soon as we say, “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong,” something must go disastrously right or the law invalidates itself?

I look up. We must be approaching D.C. Those of Bart’s generation are zipping their laptops into their cases, picking out the earbuds that attach them to their phones, and, suddenly untethered, are gawping nervously about, looking like untrained seals.

          “Alexandria comin’ up,” the conductor barks. We are only at hell’s outer gates. As we get closer, will we catch a glimpse of the Pentagon, squatting, massive five-headed Cerberus, beside the river?

As the train slows, conversation begins. Young black tasseled loafers, dark suit, $150 haircut says something solemn and sage about George McGovern’s death. The other, about my age, scuffed around the edges, bangs off on an eager disquisition on the Corn Palace, then stopping mid-sentence, interrupts himself: “Oh, I was thinking of George Mitchell.” One puts on his hesitant, so as not to appear condescending, smile. Two rushes on to ask, “Or was it Bobby I was thinking of?” A hair moves; the wheels underneath the haircut are turning . . . Bobby? . . . Mitchell? Click. He begins, “Sonny Jurgensen . . .” Scuff interrupts again, “Or, Dennis? Was it Dennis?”

 l

Uncharted Territory

October 24, 2014
Uncharted Territory 

I was re-reading the Revelation of John – God knows why, or
maybe God does not. It was not something I ever planned to
translate for the TRV.* But, here a small, small slice from
chapters one and twenty-one, leaving out everything
before, in between, and after. No doubt I have committed
the usual mistakes against Greek grammar and syntax, the
usual sins against church dogma. But because I am ignorant anyone can add any words to
the prophecy of this book.

A kai_ W

Trouble with the video link?  Try clicking here.

____________________

 
*Ted Riich Version.  It is really foolish to start a theological argument in a footnote to a blog post, however banal, but contra both Luther [“Christ is neither taught nor known in it.” ] and Calvin ["The study of Revelation either finds a man mad, or leaves him that way."]: however I became mad, I do find Christ in Revelation.  Get rid of chapters 2 - 20 and 22, and you can hear a friend of Jesus, talking about kindness, if we can believe in it.  Granted, for many, if not most, there's a lot to let go of first.

For an almost complete list of stories from the TRV, click here.