Green Onions

Wild Onions

March 27, 2015

Innocent Pleasures

       What fun would there be without guilt? – Joy, maybe, but no 
       fun. Are there any pleasures that are not guilty pleasures?
                                                                              - Uncle Albert

Maybe one or two.

Imagine, with John Lennon, there is no heaven. Or – and does this follow? – imagine a world without magic. There is nothing here but us and our stuff – a whirlwind of gnarled metal, splintered wood, broken glass, loose change, torn bills, shards of stock certificates, ripped clothing, shoes abandoned in the middle of the road . . . stuff – and all of it old and falling apart.

Then, spring arrives.

          Everything old becomes odd: this desire that takes hold of me walking home through the rain, so that, half shivering, I still stop by a tangle of forsythia to look into the buds. Then, when I come in and go into the bathroom to dry my hair and there are Roz’s pale blue panties and her gym socks in another tangle in the middle of the black-and-white tile floor, there is this sense that I’m looking at symbols as in Sanskrit or Mandarin and I could make sense of it, if I knew the language.  And this sense expands instantly so that I’m convinced, still standing wet-headed and dripping onto the tile floor – I’m convinced that every bit of the world touches every other bit - yews, flowering redbuds, gray squirrels and vultures; panties, gym socks, those lone shoes alongside the highways; sugar doughnuts, hard cider, soft shoulders, and blue song – but, again, they are like letters run together into a language I cannot read: av8ubrwĦǽЊчdeщлosgЖheaЙw.

I am at an age when I should begin thinking of renouncing the world: all stuff; all resentments and prejudices, including language; everything in which I find comfort and pain – sannyasa - going desert-wandering, sans roof, sans shoes, sans shirt, sans everything. But instead of thinking of leaving the world, I stand cold, dripping, shivering, and pining for it - yearning, aching for it, as if I had left and it had come running after me, grabbed and wrestled me to the muddy ground, to save me from renunciation, to reverse my sinful, sorrowful middle-aging, so I am become a child again. I will be that ignorant eight-year-old walking in the woods by the house on Hemlock Street where only years later the Dutch family, the Harmenszoons, would chop down and build – walking in the woods, looking for, finding, and stuffing myself with wild onions.*

          Worth it even when that night my stomach turned sour right up to my ears.

______________

     *A bit of whimsy from about the same time:

Theology, criminal law, and an old flannel shirt

March 26, 2015
I resemble that 

            Theology isn’t so very different from criminal law. Both rest on a complicated system of 
            philosophical thought which hasn’t much to do with reality.

                                                                                  - from P.D. James’ A Certain Justice,

in which a character is described as speaking “apparently without resentment,” but only apparently: there was something in her voice, a harsh “note of suppressed anger . . . .”

     From the same novel, another of the characters exclaims to Detective Adam Dalgliesh: “Surely there as to be a limit to hypocrisy.” To which he replies, “I’ve never found one.”

I haven’t either, or to resentment.

     Consider how often – how almost always – when we act out of resentment we claim other motives. “That’s not why I did it – because I resented his success. I may have done, but what I really wanted, what was really needed, was that the truth come out.”

There’s nothing more comforting than long-held resentments and prejudices. They are 
the soft, easy fit of an increasingly well-worn flannel shirt.

                                                                                  - Uncle Albert

Sunday, Sunday!

March 22, 2015
Crossways
          
          Not everything is about death and salvation; some is about wine, women, and song - 
          and farming. – Uncle Albert
 

We go to church almost every Sunday though, in my case, not always for the most selfless, highest minded reasons. This Sunday, for example, I was less interested in my salvation than in what  the hell the gospel 

lesson was about.

No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks around . . .

     You can find my honestly confused take here. But, I was thinking Sunday morning: Let’s get unconfused, if that’s possible.

If you want to get unconfused about a passage of Scripture, there are places not to go – churches with M, P, or B in their names, for example. So, we went to Grace Lutheran, Axel Sundstrøm’s church.

     It would have been nice to slip in at the reading of the gospel and out at the end of 
the sermon. But it wouldn’t have been nice; so we stayed from bitter beginning to bitter end.

     That’s unfair: The liturgy is lovely; but much of it is sung, and I don’t sing well. I read music only approximately. And trying to juggle bulletin and book, I’m easily lost. I’m also frustrated listening to Roz glide along beside me. There’s a part of us that marvels at and a part of us that hates that what we struggle to do poorly someone we know does easily and well.

I know next to nothing about preaching, as many sermons as I’ve heard. I do know this, though not so much about preaching as about myself: it bothers me when preachers talk about themselves as if they don’t exist. Sundstrøm told a story this morning of this moment in his ministry, very early on, when a retired pastor on his way through wherever-Axel-was-then to wherever-the-old-man-happened-to-be going asked Axel after Sunday morning service if he could have a minute of his time. It was to tell him, it turned out, that if he (Axel) wanted to preach the gospel, he was going to have to get out of the way and make room – indeed, give all the room – to the cross.

     Axel was crushed – and immediately saw that the old man was right. So he said this morning: “If the choice of what to preach was myself – my thoughts, understandings, views – or the cross, what choice was that?” The choice had to – and has to – be the cross, because that is the lens through which the faithful must see everything. It’s not just that “all Jesus does points to the cross,” but that the cross changes everything that happens thereafter because now everything must be seen through it.

That’s what Jesus is doing, pointing to the cross, in the passage from John we read this Sunday (See here.) - especially when he tells his disciples, and all who will listen that “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified.” So, though his soul is troubled, he will not ask the Father to save him from this hour.” And in this hour, “is the judgment of this world”; in this hour “the ruler of this world will be driven out,” this hour “when I am lifted up from the earth” – meaning the ground, when he and the crosspiece he is nailed to is lifted up by his executioners and hung on its pole. We know that’s what he means because he says so: He has said all of this “to indicate the kind of death he was to die.” And to die for us, because in this death, he says, he will draw all people to himself.

     All people, Axel says, and all things. I like that.

But we must forget everything else.

     Yeah, but.

Yeah, but. I’m not a theologian and I’m never trying to play one here, but it seems to me that there are two problems with this.

     The first is in talking always about the cross, you forget that a particular human being is attached to it – you know, the guy that gives eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and tongues to the dumb, that cleans lepers of their spots and legs of lameness, the rabbi that tells odd stories about how what he calls the kingdom of heaven is like a farmer or a father, a bundle of smart and not-so-smart bridesmaids or a dishonest servant. Talk about the cross alone seems to me to ignore all that (and with it ¾ of the pages of the gospels). I blame Paul because he doesn’t really believe that Jesus, the Christ for God’s sake (he keeps saying), was human. I say that not because Paul denies that Jesus was human but because he (Paul) makes no attempt to reach into – he has no interest whatever in understanding – Jesus’ humanness.

     It’s no surprise that a Lutheran would follow Paul here. Luther was besotted with the Apostle.

The second problem: What the hell happens to the resurrection?

     Don’t ask me what I believe about the resurrection because I can’t answer – I don’t know. But whatever I do believe, I will not believe that its sole purpose is to authenticate the cross. You know: “The resurrection? Oh, it proves that the one that suffered and died truly was the Son of God, Trinity II.”

There’s a third problem. I don’t know where to go from here.

     Where Roz and I went was home. We walked from the church through downtown up the hill and home. We ate bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. I opened a Guinness draught and, because I wasn’t frustrated enough, turned on the basketball.

Fugue State

March 20, 2015
Cutting One's Losses

A story from the Gospel of John according to the Gospel of Ted, who cannot be trusted with the Gospel of John. Chapter Twelve: “Fugue State” – in which Jesus loses himself but follows Jesus and so finds himself again.

It is the truth, not the Truth, that will set you free.

Yes, we have no bananas.

March 19, 2015

But St. Patrick’s Eve continued

“Gone!” Sundstrøm is saying. “What was I talking about?” (If you don’t know, or remember, see here.) The question is surely rhetorical, but I have an answer nonetheless.

     “You were talking about what is true and what is not true, right? You’re claiming, aren’t you? that what we can see – touch, taste, and smell – is real. What we hear, on the other hand, may not be.  Our mugs of coffee are real and the table under them.  But your words are air; they blow away as soon as I turn my head.”

     “I should be more careful what I say maybe. You were listening, even if I was not.” He looked at me faux-forlornly then smiled out the window.

Both of us, Axel and I, make our livings with words. He talks them out; I write them down. And we both assume – I think – that we can arrange them in a way they can at least describe what is real. But the description is accurate – it is true, Axel is saying – only as long as the words remain tables, chairs, coffee in sturdy off-white mugs. If we want to tell the truth, we can’t detach our words from what we know by sight, touch, taste, and smell, from what we know in our own experience.  Here’s George Santayana:

“A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency 
not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol but a fraud.”

Put your money where your mouth is. Don’t show me a spreadsheet or a pie chart or tell me how I can pay my bills electronically. Put your nickels, dimes, and quarters on the table, where we can both see them.  Here are mine; we can count up what we have between us.

     Many of us want to locate our ideas - and especially ideals - out of time.  The truth is that the Truth is timeless – so we want to think, so we want to say.  But, we live in time, and Truth is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to import.  It’s like bananas.  You can buy a bunch in the store, perfect for eating, but by the time you get to the parking lot, there is not one you would put in your mouth.

Cuppa

 March 16, 2015
St. Patrick's Eve

          You can feign indifference to Fortune, but so what? – she doesn’t care. 
                                                                                                                            - Uncle Albert

Corner Coffee

Not much going on at work today – it's St. Patrick’s Eve, so it's easy to slide out mid-morning for coffee with Axel Sundstrøm. He’s there when I arrive at Corner Coffee; he's at his table; he has his mug in front of him; this is his place, and he’s buying. “I’ve already paid,” he says. “Just tell the girl – the barista,” he corrects himself – “what you want.”

    “Just coffee,” I tell her. “Dark.”

Axel is like “yond Cassius” in Julius Caesar. “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous" – most often to themselves. Axel has come to know himself too well – to the point self-knowledge no longer profits but freezes him into a dither. “The cure,” he tells me, “besides lots of coffee” – he chuckles: “The cure would be action. But that only treats the symptoms, so it doesn’t really cure. The malady remains.” (When was the last time you heard that word – malady?)

“At least, I’m not a liar,” Sundstrøm starts off in another direction. “Or, I should say that, I’m no more a liar than anyone else is. We all lie – from ignorance, because we can’t distinguish truth from fiction.”

    “‘What is truth?’ – right?”

    “Ah, you know that great Roman statesman-philosopher Pilatus. Earlier Jesus had said ‘I am.’ To Pilate's question ‘What is truth?’ he answered ‘I am . . . and light, too.’ That is, according to John, who tends to ignore Jesus' humanness. Because if he is human . . . Well, that's our spēcial problem, isn't it, the problem of our species? We aren't able to tell truth from fiction.” Sundstrøm makes a toasting motion with his mug; it's my turn to say something.

I don’t know what to say, so I ask: “Do you ever listen to what you’re saying?”

    “I do. But not too hard. I don’t worry overmuch, or not with you, I don't. But, better than ‘What is truth?’ you might ask, ‘What are words?’” He blows a faint raspberry. “Those that say the pen - or the mouth - is mightier than the sword are . . . .  As we say in the call to confession, ‘They deceive themselves; they are strangers to the truth.’ They love to listen to themselves. They love their own words as if they really existed; but about sticks-and-stones they know nothing. They do exist: the stick Balaam beats his ass with; the stone Sam Johnson kicks down the road; the ass, and the road; Johnson's poor toe. Those are real. Our bodies are real - the muscles and the joints.” He shrugs his broad shoulders and cracks his neck: “Hear that?  – our poor bodies growing around the pains of getting older - they’re real. The bitter, skunky smell of your coffee; the floor, walls ceiling.  This table.” He raps it with his knuckles. “But what I'm saying . . . .” He shrugs again. Then he says urgently, “Look over there,” pointing out the window. I look: “What?”
“Poof. What have I been going on about? It's gone.”

to be continued

In Honor of Pi Day + 1

March 15, 2015
The Rule of 2.1416 

From Wikipedia –

The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things. The reader or audience of this form of text is also more likely to consume information if it is written in groups of threes. From slogans (“Go, fight, win!”) to films, many things are structured in threes. Examples include The Three Stooges, Three Little Pigs, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Three Musketeers.

A series of three often creates a progression in which the tension is created, built up, and finally released. Similarly, adjectives are often grouped in threes to emphasize an idea.

The Latin phrase, "omne trium perfectum" (everything that comes in threes is perfect, or, every set of three is complete) conveys the same idea as the rule of three.

Consider the following:

               i

I like to think of the Bible as a comedy. After all, it ends with a wedding. But: the bride, New Jerusalem, has to be careful as she marches down the aisle on the arm of God the Father not to step in the charred remains of those hacked to pieces and the pieces thrown into the fire, not to soil her white pumps in sinners’ ash.

     (And why were the sinners cremated alive? To put things in the proper balance. But that’s the business of tragedy, where what goes around will come around, even if everyone has to die in the end. Comedy is never about fair.)

               ii

George Meredith
by Max Beerbohm

I am reading The Egoist to better understand a “friend” (meaning someone that has inserted herself in my life, because I need her as much as she needs another jester in her court).

     Already it’s helping. (The Egoist, not the friendship.) Meredith describes in fine, cutting detail how the egoist (Willoughby Patterne) “cultivates" himself; how he receives admiration, real or feigned or a figment of his own imaginings, with “the composure of Indian gods undergoing worship”; how he is constantly glancing (with an air of carelessness) into the “glass of his mind” to see how he, or the attitude he is striking, looks; how he can’t imagine that anyone else’s feelings can be different from what he imagines to them to be – or how their best interests might be different from what he knows they are.

     This is one of the more interesting – and irritating – characteristics of my new friend. She has known me six months; already she knows me better than I know myself. She asked me two days ago what I was thinking about when I wrote about Rocky Colavito, Saint Isidore of Seville, and the Spanish words for hair and hare. (See here.) “I wasn’t thinking. I was just making a jumble.” No, that couldn’t be right. Here is what I must have had in mind, she said and went on to explain in great detail (while I hummed "Stairway to Heaven" as loud as my inner ear could tolerate).

               iii

This page purposely left blank.

A Theory of Nearly Everything and Next to Nothing at All, continued

March 12, 2015
Flagellation

Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else, so yesterday a hare is run over by a truck on Highway 2 approximately 39 km west of Okayama, and today the temperatures inches above 80°F in Lima, Peru.

Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish that were so. It sounds as if it must be.

i

The Japanese word for hare is ウサギ [usagi, pronounced with a hard g, o͞o 'sa gē].

ii

Stalking rabbit stew.

The ingredients of Grape Nehi are as follows: carbonated water; high fructose corn syrup; artificial flavors; phosphoric acid; citric acid; potassium benzoate (preservative); red 40; blue 1.

                                       iii

from Madame d’Aulnoy’s Memories of the Court of Spain (1691):

     "The  first time I saw them I almost swooned. . . .Imagine a man coming so near you that he spatters his own blood on you: c’est là un de leurs tours de galanterie.  [Still] there are rules for performing flagellation in the correct way; masters teach the art as they would dancing or fencing. The penitents are oddly dressed. They wear skirts, tall sugarloaf hats, masks, and shirts that leave great patches of the back bare. They scourge the bare spots until the blood runs down in streams. They walk slowly through the streets till they come to the house of the lady whom a penitent wishes to honor, and then he scourges himself while she peeps through a hole and contrives to give him a sign of her gratification."

A Theory of Nearly Everything and Next to Nothing at All, pt. 2

March 11, 2015
Fun with Futility

Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else so that the humidity in the Roanoke Valley causes a coed in Salem, Virginia to curse her hair, and a hare^† is run over by a truck on Highway 2 approximately 39 km west of Okayama.

Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish that were so. It sounds as if it must be.

Therefore, as we know already . . .

paella

i

In the summer of 1959, Rocco Domenico “Rocky” Colavito, a graduate of Teddy Roosevelt High School in New York City, hit 42 home runs and drove in 111 runs for the Cleveland Indians (which had won 111 games in 1954).

ii

In 1636 or 37, I don’t remember which, but at about this time of year, the body of Saint Isidore of Seville was shown to a Father Victoriano, a Minorite, who had come from France specifically to see it.  The body was perfectly preserved until a finger was cut off and given to the friar to take to the Queen of France, who had requested it.

                                                        iii 

Neither the Spanish words for hair and hare (el pelo / la liebre ) nor the French (le cheveux / le lièvre) are homonyms.

________________
     ^†Lepus brachyurus brachyurus

Part 1 is here. And there is a third, equally absurd part with a picture of Elmer Fudd here.

Whips and Wafers

March 8, 2015
Whips and Wafers 

How do I put this? – a friend of Roz, or a sort of friend, a former colleague, a woman who used to live here, Peggy: actually, from here – she grew up here, her family is from here, except they’ve all moved away except one sister that she can’t stand and that can’t stand her. Even her name in her mouth, the sister’s name (Miri), turns Peggy’s soft round face square.
     She is one of those women who loves Family history, Family stories and legends, Family connections, who loves all things Family but gets along with no one in it.  Peggy, for Margaret, named for her maternal grandmother, has been staying with us since Thursday; she leaves tomorrow.

     Today we got up before the sun to go with her to her paternal family church, a small limestone, red-doored, dark-inside Episcopal church one town west of us. Roz drove; I sat in the back seat.

With regard to church I’m always – how do I put this? – more interested in the lyrics than either the music or the dance: more attentive to the words in the prayer book and from scripture, and the sermon than to the standing, the sitting, the kneeling, and the eucharist.*

Purple Huxley, 1923

     The young priest, long, narrow, attenuated, looked strikingly (even to the shape of his glasses) like Max Beerbohm’s cartoon of the young Aldous Huxley – his white and purple dress adding to the Oriental cast of his small, dark head. He preached on the gospel passage from Matthew, the one often called “the cleansing of the temple.” 
     He gave several definitions of whip, then explained that here it was Jesus’ whip hand we were seeing, not his hand for blessing children, not his hand for healing the blind, not either hand that for our salvation received its nail. This was his whip hand raised against all those things that stood between us and God.

     What were those things? he asked. What keeps us from being with God and God from being with us? What separates us from our neighbors? He was thinking particularly about habits of mind and heart and spirit, the kind of “thing” that keeps Peggy and her sister at loggerheads with one another.  But he ignored, it occurred to me as we wandered to the altar rail – that separated us from the table, from him, from the elements themselves until he tremblingly laid the wafer in our hands and raised the cup to our lips (though not mine or Roz’s; we kept our wafers in our hands and intincted the wine).  His hands were the color of ivory – they were unsteady but beautifully kept; he wore the most beautiful black shoes.  He was ignoring, I started to say, that it is the employees of the temple that Jesus chases out. They are the ones separating the people from their God.

There’s no moral to the story. There is no story, only an observation.

     We stopped for breakfast on the way home, at McDonald’s.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­__________________

     *Which my spell-checker tells me to capitalize; I have decided not.

Snow Dream

March 7, 2015
Alcedo Cristata

Somewhere in the tropics. A bar, quiet, sweating, air so heavy the ceiling fans can hardly move it. The skinny bartender in a wife-beater leans on his elbow, back to the room, looking up to where a screen might be; but there’s no screen. Two men, side-by-side but a stool in between. Both in hoarse tropical shirts – parrots, toucans, hornbills, kingfishers plash through yellow skies – colorless cargo pants, sandals. Half-eaten beer in front of one – thick gray hair, bristling mustache, tan and almost fit; pastel white fizz in front of the other – bald, glasses, pale, quiet.

     But it’s the quiet one talking, if only a buzz above a whisper: “What I don’t get . . . .” He sips his drink. “Maybe I don’t want to get it.” Puts it down. “It’s  interesting though . . . .” Another sip.  “You’re right,” the other guy says.  “Look at us.”

The Sun Also Falls

March 5, 2015

Snowbound but free

Aahhh. At home. Snowed under. Snowed in.

          Which can’t seem to prevent my checking my work voice-mail and my email – which I should have given up for Lent. I thought about it; what I could give up for Lent: email! I did think that. But I am never one to follow my own best wisdom; I am only one to regret not having followed it. “Look how smart you were. If only you’d paid attention.”

So I’m snowed in; I’m not going anywhere. Just wandering:

Sad. After more than two weeks, putting Don Juan down, and away, the sixteenth canto having ended with a bang – or the promise of one – and the action of the seventeenth opening so coyly and then only space, the loose laces left untied.  Byron doesn’t say what may have happened between Juan and the frolicksome ghost-impersonator Fitz-Fulke, though they are late for breakfast, looking somewhat the worse for wear. And we don’t know if he would say, or chasing after myriad of tangent upon tangent, he would ever have gotten to it.

Repentance: It’s a big deal in the religion I pretend to follow. According to Jesus’ parable in Luke 13, we’ve got another year. But until then, until we do repent, we’re no better than the Galileans Pilate hacked up, mixing their blood with the blood of the animals they’d hacked up. We’re no better than the citizens of Jerusalem the Siloam Tower flattened.

          What if they had repented? Let’s say the Galileans’ sacrifices were sin offerings, accepted by God. Are they better off? Our answer seems to be “yes.” But, are they better? Does repentance make us any better, or only repentant?  Briefly. There is great rejoicing, we are told, at the return of one sinner; but how long does the party last? Plus, we know from the movies what can happen at parties themselves.

          Repentance – the Greek word is metánoia. That has in it the notion of turning around, as if from now on we’ll be heading in another direction. But, we’re not going to get five minutes down the road before we remember something we’ve forgotten at home; we need to go back to get that. And on the way back, we see one of our friends from the party pitifully wandering the border of the road with his thumb out, and good Samaritans that we’ve become, we stop to pick him up. And the next thing we know we’ve stopped at the 7-11 to ask a six-pack to join us.  It takes us to Skinny Dick’s La Merde Saloon. We meet girls named Candy and Apple; and we wake up smelling of White Shoulders, cat urine, athlete’s foot, and bleach. Our stomachs need dusting.

I know I own – or I used to own; it’s gone from the shelf – Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; it was one of those sturdy Scribner Library paperbacks. I wanted to find that scene at the end, where Lady Brett wants to tell Jake how good – damned good, I think she says – they could have been together. There’s a bump in the traffic, and they bump against each other. And he says, “Yes." And he has to hesitate: "Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

I was just writing about fallenness, wasn’t I? Only a few days ago. [See here: Dateline: Pangloss California.] Wouldn’t it be pretty to think that we are only fallen and not incorrigible? We can get up and walk the other way.

          On the other hand, our incorrigibility could be our joy and crown.  Not even God – not even almighty God – can save us. It would be terribly, terribly sad but pretty to think so.

t