from "the Ted Riich group"

Ringing out the old . . .

  Ringing out the old . . .  and ringing it back in again.                     

I can fairly easily – smoothly, glidingly, quick-as-a-winkingly – go lost. Now I have some vague sense of where I am, what I am doing, what is next; then, gone. Next is not at all what I thought it would be.

I am trying to stick and move, jab and duck away that I am taking so many blows to the body, because I leave myself unconsciously open, boom, bang, boom, boom; and the time arrives with one last one that my stamina, my strength, my faith, and my hope just run out. I go white with fatigue, and I crumple to the mat.

     I’m not out. I can sense light, if I can’t quite see it. I can hear . . . something. I can feel the pain pushing out from my diaphragm to the soles of my feet and the crown of my head, to the tips of my fingers and my toes, then rushing back into my spleen again. But I can’t stand. I can’t move. I can’t even blink until the light begins shimmying and rubbing its fists into my eyes and I close them to squeeze out the tears.

And they clear enough I can read.

     I finish the last few pages Sailor & Lula; and I look with aching head into Matthew 2, where the prophecies are fulfilled: the son of God goes down into and sojourns in so he can be called out of Egypt; all the other babies in the nursery are hacked to bloody bits, so their mothers – all named Rachel – can weep.

     The illogic – the sadistic senselessness - of the story: Don’t make no nevermind about that. The point is that the prophecies, wherever they came from, in whatever way they’ve been cobbled together, however their original sense has been twisted into another – the prophecies are fulfilled!

     At what cost? Cost not just in the children that are sacrificed – an incident not recorded, incidentally, in the fairly detailed historical accounts we have of Herod the Great. Cost not just in children destroyed but in the trustworthiness of Matthew’s account.

     If his writing hadn’t become Scripture, would we read beyond these 11 verses of chapter 2? Wouldn’t we just put the book down? “Unbelievable, we’d wag our heads, thinking “Why press on, when you can’t credit the story the man is telling?” I mean: Is the fulfillment of a prophecy found in an obscure corner of Jeremiah – about the Babylonian exile - worth this bizarre, savage tweak to the story of Jesus? The savior comes into the world, but not for the innocent children of Bethlehem? God has no power to save against the paranoia of a petty, pissant Roman client king.

Right at the end of Sailor & Lula, Lula writes, “I am ready for an answer why there is endless madness and suffering on the planet all I know is everything been out of control from the beginning.” The failure – let’s be honest – of both reason and revelation is this: they imagine a universe in order from the beginning. And, Lula looks around through common-sense eyes and sees that if there was someone or something trying to control the controls, one was never in sane and/or the other was never in whack.

“With God,” we say in church, “nothing is impossible.” Then we come on this “slaughter of the innocents,” and we have to think, “If nothing is impossible with Him, why didn’t He save them?”

     (One jackass commentator I found suggested – as if it were any consolation – that, well, Bethlehem was a small town; the number of children under the age of two was probably no more than a dozen. I’m feeling better already, though if that was true, God is that much more to blame: how much easier to warn a dozen families or hide – even make invisible – a dozen infants than, say, a hundred?)

     But the evil intentions of piddly Herod – death! – defeat the will of so-called almighty God – life and life abundant! This Sunday the preacher that wanted to defend the Latter wound up muttering something about human freedom and yet . . .

     At that point I stopped listening. In fact, I got up, only half-hoping the folks around me might think I had to relieve myself (though I did feign that kind of uncomfortable, apologetic face.) I walked straight through the narthex and out the front door. A faraway siren. The sun trying to warm a greasy sky. A pair of pigeons clucking on the line across the street, singing “God in his heaven and all the same with the world, everything still been out of control from the beginning. Amen.”

     Amen. And Noël, Noël. Godt Nyttår.

12.28.15

hamsterinwheelisms

 hamsterinwheelisms                        

i

the dog peacefully asleep on the couch he’s not allowed to sleep on

ii

eight words from Faulkner: “the magnolia-faced woman was a little plumper now” (Absalom, Absalom)

iii

fal·li·bi·lism : ^lfal-lĭ-bə-li-zəm  “ . . . the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge that you do not satisfactorily know already; . . . no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness.” (Charles Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 1, sec. 1.13)

 12.20.15 

Lord, I don't want to be a "Christian"

 Lord, I don't want to be a “Christian”                                         

 I live in a small late-19th-century house in a small fictional town not far from where Woodrow Wilson

“Who are you looking at, boy?”

was born. These days I want to hasten to add: he wasn’t brought up around here. “He’s really from South Carolina,” I want to say, as if no Valley-of-Virginian of his generation could possibly think the way he did, who said about reconstruction that it was detested “not because the Republican Party was . . . but because the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded,” and who believed that segregation was “not humiliating but a benefit,” no “distinctly to the advantage of” any belonging to that ignorant and inferior people.

     I live in a small late-19th-century house in a small fictional town not much farther from where Jerry Falwell, Jr. was born and brought up, who said recently (jokingly!) that if “some of those people in that community center [in San Bernardino] had what I have in my back pocket right now [meaning a handgun] . . . Well . . . I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.”

Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian preacherman. Falwell’s father was a Baptist preacherman. Wilson was president of a great Christian university; so is the younger Falwell.

ii

I am declaring here and now that I no longer want to be a Christian if Wilson was one, if Falwell is one. I am assuming they were/are, taking them at their word. In which case, I am from now on reserving the term “Christian” for those that proclaim they are, profess they are, professing, professional Christians - institutional Christians, graduates of Christian colleges certain about their God’s race and nationality and their own righteousness and the triumphal futures such a God has reserved for them.

     I am taking the term “follower of Jesus” for any that try to do that, follow Jesus, whatever their claims. However, I will assume none of these followers have concealed weapons permits, since the purpose of a concealed weapon is not to have to turn the other cheek; I will assume that none of these followers despise anyone Jesus would not despise, rather they will try with all might and main to love all Jesus would love.

iii

So, to paraphrase the old spiritual,

Lord, I don’t want to be a Christian . . .

Lord, I don’t want to be more holy . . .

Lord I want to be more loving . . .

Lord, I want to be like Jesus . . .

. . . not like Woodrow or Jerry or Pat or Billy – or Aimee or Tammy Faye – or anyone else. But knowing, Lord, I will fail, I will not judge anyone. Only, over there, please put your damned gun down and your hateful tongue back in your mouth.

12.07.15

The road to Jerusalem

 The road to Jerusalem 

Luke provides this context for the parable we have come to call “The Good Samaritan”:  A lawyer stands up from a crowd Jesus is teaching and asks him a series of questions, the last of which - according to Luke is “Who is my neighbor?” in answer to which Jesus tells the parable.

     But what if the lawyer doesn’t ask last, “Who is my neighbor?” but “How does one walk through the world – it’s a mess?” and Jesus tells the same parable:

     “A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and left him for dead. It happened that a priest was going down the same road in the other direction, and when he saw the bloody, beaten man, he crossed the road – he walked around him on the other side. And Levite, also going to Jerusalem, when he came to where the man, bloody and beaten, was, did the same thing: he crossed the road and passed by on the other side.

     “Then a Samaritan on the same road came to where the man was, but he stopped to see if he might still be alive. He was! And the Samaritan wrapped up his wounds, put him on his donkey, and carried him to an inn that happened to be nearby.

     “He spent the night with the man, who told him what had happened to him. Indeed, they talked of all manner of things. The next day, the Samaritan took money out of his purse and gave it to the innkeeper, saying,‘Use this to take care of the man until I get back.’”

     Then, Jesus looked at the lawyer. And the lawyer said, “What?” And Jesus said, “Why are you always walking a straight line to Jerusalem?” And the lawyer said, “What?”

     If you have ears, let them hear.

12.04.15

Frick and Frack Yik and Yak

Frick and Frack yik and yak. 

No doubt most of you are thankful for my silence given last week’s rant. You’re welcome; but silence was not my intention, having brought my laptop with me to New York City to spend Thanksgiving with Roz’s son Bart, who has moved in with his girlfriend of longer than we knew, a Dominican woman with a seven-year-old son, a pocket Junot Diaz, already sardonic - and gifted almost beyond belief. (How could a seven-year-old be sardonic, if he didn’t have the brain and soul of a twenty-seven-year-old?) To spend the holiday with Bart, who has read Oscar Wao and who writes himself, besides the novel he admits he may never finish, three dozen weekly articles for sixteen different English and Spanish Manhattan weeklies, scratched out to pay his half of the rent on a not-half-bad flat in Washington Heights, his half of the food and clothing, as long as they eat cheap, dress cheap, and eliminate most non-necessities.

     I brought my laptop and Gaspar’s email from several days ago with my dilapidated response to this flat of three twenty-seven-year-olds (for Alfredo’s mother, Dominga, was actually born the same day as Bart, May 13, 1989). To these three rooms set up for our comfort, so we slept in Bart and Dominga’s bed, while she slept with Raphael in his bed and Bart kipped on the couch.

We got in late Thanksgiving morning after the briefest of twenty-minute delays at the George Washington Bridge. And Bart and Dominga’s friends, Will and Verónica, came three hours later with the turkey and stuffing and their daughter Leona, Alfredo’s best bud. And we ate turkey and green-bean casserole and something spinach and at least two different somethings sweet potato; mashed potatoes and the stuffing with gravy, and the cranberry chutney we brought; and after, the pies and whipped cream we also brought. And we drank wine from about three till eleven, talking about everything under the Manhattan sun, dusk, and dark.

     Will teaches English at CUNY, and his wife does something quite lucrative at Macy’s. Dominga works for her. And Bart knows Will from a writer’s workshop. Everything: we talked about everything – from politics to football to food to books to languages. (Roz and I are the only ones there not fluent in Spanish. Will spent three years of his adolescence in La Paz; his father was a mining engineer. Verónica is Mexican. And Bart did his Peace Corps stint in Paraguay. Roz and I are the only ones not fluent in Spanish, but her French is very good. My Dutch from my grandparents and a couple of exchange half-years in Amsterdam is passable.) From languages, particularly how they work (and don’t), to living in the City to religion’s fading away until it is only a smudged cloud in the backdrop to politics and football.

No, my intention was to get this posted on Friday, only I forgot my power cord and the damn PC ran out of charge before I could get it done. So you’re welcome, but I’ll apologize – if only to myself – for taking so long to wake you back up. I’ll do it gently. I’ll let Gaspar begin:

Gaspar Stephens 

to me                                                                                                                                          6 days ago

The hate-sown American society you describe may fly around on TV and into practically every corner of the internet, but does it have legs in reality? In the life I walk into and around in day-to-day, I don’t see it, so much hatred among races, ethnicities, varying sexual preferences. (I don’t run into many cowboys or Indians.)  But what I do see is people getting along fairly well with one another.

Only when I turn on a TV, open up a news site, or unfold a paper do I see discord described, or purveyed, perhaps even sown, by people who have a vested interest in profiting from narrative conflict.

This is not to say that there are no conflicts which erupt into hate. But the scope and breadth of hate, I've come to believe, is outlandishly exaggerated.

Begin again: I don’t want to suggest there's no tension and even hatred between various groups, the ones you identify. My point is that there is a media hobgoblin land in which this shit (to use a philosophical term) is highly magnified or amplified, a mediated reality that is almost always considerably different from (read: that exaggerates) our immediate reality.

This brings me to my fascination with our apparent (and appalling) need to embrace exaggerated reality. Perhaps this owes to our living in a society that's numbed by creature comfort.  Maybe we still hold a primal need--one from which our species has not yet evolved--to excite ourselves, to perceive ourselves as in some imminent danger. This seems to be true even when conflict and tension aren't immediately present.

You know how I have embraced “bad coffee Thursday.” (How will we know good coffee if we have no bad to contrast it with?) So down each Thor’s day to the Kwik-Kwak three streets over and one down, where I also buy the local weekly, circulated Tuesday – fifty cents for mostly ads – usually featuring on page 1 faces of smiling white kids that had achieved some minor distinction the previous week, scored a touchdown or learned and demonstrated (and are now seeking to patent) a new technique for applying blush. I could never figure out how the rag kept going, the rack almost always full when I bought mine two days later. Then a couple of weeks ago, I found it empty. “Shallo Shopper finally fold, ay?" I said to the cashier.  "No," he told me, "the front page had a picture of that black guy shot the woman in Licklack Valley; and they sold out in less than an hour."

The moral of the story? Journalism in a "free-market capitalist society" profits from scare-mongering, rage-mongering, from creating a version of reality in which the world is tilted toward destruction, and the tilt is clearly the fault of someone unlike me. Journalism in a “free-market-capitalist society” is like the circus come to town. Only this circus has camped out and is not leaving until it has extracted every nickel from every sucker born every minute. 

Ted Riich

to Gaspar Stephens                                                                                                                    2 days ago

I’m with you – and I want to be with you . . . Or I’m with you until . . . Your fable actually supports my argument. Why does that issue of Shallo Shopper sell out? Because people love to hate. “Say it ain’t so, Gas!” But it is. It still is.

11.30.15

 

God forgive me.

 God forgive me, he ranted.    

                     Back in February, explaining that I didn’t have the guts for it, I turned the “political side” of my vast media empire (two blogs and facebook page) over to my friend Tom Nashe. I didn’t “enjoy my anger enough,” I wrote, “it turns too easily to gall.” Tom wasn’t so bothered by his anger, because – or so he claimed – his politics were non-existent: he belonged to no party, he said, “but the anti-hypocrisy party.” Since Nashe had no web presence, I did (and do) continue to publish Go Around Back, and it was I that prevailed this October upon our mutual (much younger) friend Melchior Ball to join Tom as “drawer,” as he (m ball) calls it. 
     
This is probably not a good time to get back into political commentary; and it’s probably never a good idea to post something written in the middle of a sleepless night, awake in part because I was so damned mad at what Tom had written on Carson, Trump, and Cruz, taking their xenophobia to its logical extremes. Not Tom's intention: he seems to have some patience with these jackasses, but I found I had none. I hated their hate-filled-ness. Worse – here’s what I wrote, only a bit cleaned up for prime time.

Worse, I think I am beginning to hate my country. I haven’t liked “us” in a long time, but I do hate American exceptionalism and American capitalism. The first allows us to be our own moral compass; whatever we say or do must be right, because we say so, we do it. The second has become our form of government. We are no longer a republic but a plutocracy. We are also a hypocrisy, because we have always to pretend we are what we are not; whatever the rest of the world may think, we are never rude, never crude, never unthinking, never a nation of xenophobic jerks.

    But our xenophobia is not only jerky; it has become complete. We hate not only all aliens but anyone remotely alien. It’s not only Syrians we hate – or the Lebanese, or Libyans, or Algerians, or the French for that matter. We hate each other. American men hate American women; American women hate American men. American whites hate American blacks; American blacks hate American whites. American Christians hate American Jews and Muslims and vice versa and versa vice in every permutation. Atheists hate the religious; the religious hate atheists and agnostics; indeed, we have come to loathe anyone that has sinned even once and failed not only to confess but proclaim it, so God could be gracious and we can be the one that said he was.

    Cowboys hate Indians, and Indians hate Cowboys. Everybody hates Hispanics, and they hate one another: the Mexicans hate the Dominicans, the Dominicans hate the Guatemalans, the Guatemalans hate the Ecuadorans and round and round it goes: Cuban Americans despise them all. Everybody including every kind of Hispanic hates Arab-Americans; in fact, they think that is a contradiction in terms; no Arab can be American, never mind that his family has been here 150 years.

    The rich hate the poor, and the poor hate the rich. Democrats hate Republicans – they lie when they say they don’t. And Republicans hate Democrats and are not afraid to say so.

    Gays hate straights almost as much as straights hate gays – perhaps more. Lesbians hate gay men. The transgendered and bisexuals hate everybody; fair enough: everybody hates them.

    We all hate God – not just the atheists among us. (Their hate is actually less than that of the religious.) We hate God the way the most conservative, fundamentalist, macho, narrow-minded father hates his gay son: We say we love him but we wish he were different; he isn’t right, so we put him into re-programming. There are centers, several, in every city, town, and village: there are rural reprogramming centers. Wherever there is a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, there we are reprogramming the God we claim to worship and adore, because frankly God isn't right; God is strange and needs our help. But lest God be dismayed, let God know this: hate-filled Americans of all religious stripes want to help.

    Our most popular entertainers embrace and espouse hate, wanting to help: rappers and Rush Limbaugh; hip-hoppers and Sean Hannity. They pretend they don’t really hate, but those clucks of sympathy you hear in their throats with regard to anyone else: it’s actually gagging.

    We’re all gagging on the antics of the alien. How can he fail so miserably to be us?

That’s where I stopped and got back into bed. But it doesn’t stop there. That’s the problem: once started, it just doesn’t stop – at all.

11.21.15

if you thought the unrecorded sayings of Jesus

 If you thought the unrecorded sayings of Jesus could pass without commentary . . .

      from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings
      of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012,
      p. 211) –

The so-called unrecorded sayings of Jesus are often difficult to reconstruct. This one is not. It is certainly some variation of the following:

kai\ ei]pen au00toi=v o( 'Ihsou=v: o(moi&a e!stin h( basilei&a tw~n ou)ranw=n dido&nti a)ndri& a0delfw|~ au)tou= ixqu&n.

   Then Jesus said to them, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who gave his brother a fish.”

Commentary

This is one of the shortest of the parables, very much like Matthew 13:45 – “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls” – about which Petra Bozohoff writes in her commentary on the first gospel. Bozohoff has an advantage we do not; she can read the parable in its larger context, which tells us what Matthew thought the parable must mean when he has the merchant find a pearl of great value, then go and sell all he has and buy it. So Bozohoff can comment further that the parable must be “connected with the supreme worth of the coming reign of Christ,” not, she adds rightly “that that can be purchased.” We have no such context. Still, we can be fairly certain that here Jesus is comparing the kingdom, his reign, to a fish his brother (or sister) could cook and eat. 
     Then we are reminded of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. When we give to one another as Christ gives to us, the gift may be superabundantly multiplied.
     In some ancient manuscripts, the pericope is enlarged to include a comment by Jesus on his own parable: “When asked what the parable meant, he said, ‘I do not know. You may know, someday you will know; but I do not.’” This is certainly a later addition to the parable; it is in no way to be construed as having anything whatsoever to do with what anyone has written about the parable. That includes yours truly. Present-day biblical scholarship often looks like it knows what it is talking about; usually that is a ruse.

more unrecorded sayings of Jesus

November 18, 2015
more unrecorded sayings of Jesus. 

Another parable: “It is like this. A man gave his brother a fish.”

     When asked what the parable meant: “I don’t know. You may know, someday you will know; but I do not.”

“No man died for lack of a comb.”