Trinity Sunday

                                                  May 29, 2015
Trinity Sunday 

We’re just back from church – Trinity Sunday! The Old Testament passage was Isaiah, chapter 6, verses 1 - 13: God comes to the prophet, asleep at prayer. And the Gospel passage was from John, chapter 3, verses 1 – 11: Jesus comes to Nicodemus by night, asleep over his books. At least, that’s how the TRV (Ted Riich Version) of those passages understand them. Here they are, almost as long as the sermon we heard.

"Try a Little Shutting-Up"

May 28, 2015
Try a Little Shutting-Up
 

I’ve read a couple of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels; and I’ve heard one, Last Car to Elysian Fields. It helped pass the time – delightfully – one long, otherwise lonely, road trip. But it’s not Elysian Fields I find myself thinking about today. It’s Crusader’s Cross.

     Particularly the section where Robicheaux has been called to the deathbed of a man he despises. and there’s no reason for him to go he can think of, except the man, a life-long bully named Troy Bordelon is dying, and his “estranged wife” Zerelda has called Dave, asking if he can come see Troy. That’s all she says, so Dave, who never wants to see Troy, asks, “He doesn’t have a telephone?” Then, Zerelda tells him Troy’s “at Baptist Hospital,” and for some reason wants to see Dave. “As far as I’m concerned, you can rip out his life-support system. But the poor fuck is scared shitless of dying. So what’s a Christian girl to do?”

What’s anyone to do? That’s Burke’s insight here. Robicheaux does not want to go; he isn’t good at deathbed visits or funerals either one. “Now with age,” he thinks, “I resented more and more the selfish claims the dead and dying make on the quick.”

     “Leave the dead to bury the dead,” someone once said. But Dave will follow neither his own resentment nor what the wise man advised; he goes to visit that poor fuck, Troy Bordelon.

I’ve got notes on practically everything; it’s a flurry of notes around here; so don’t think I’m quoting from memory (like the huge heads that write for The New York Review of Books). So this – what follows – is in my notes, but they don’t say if Dave is thinking about Troy Bordelon, which seems unlikely, doesn’t it? or someone else. It doesn’t matter really. He is defining for himself what he means by slide: “He doesn’t defend or attack. He treat[s] an insult like a compliment and an adversary like a misguided friend.”

     Dave is just enough of an optimist, for all he’s seen and heard, not to think, as I do, who have heard and seen a lot less, that (foe or friend) everyone is misguided. And there’s nothing we can do about it, except maybe on days when we’re not so wound up because some other poor, misguided fuck is winding us, we can live lightly and gently inside ourselves – and outside in the world, if we don’t venture too far.

If I sit still, lightly, in my chair – not venturing far at all, just looking out the open window – maybe I become aware of the color of the sky, or of the chokeberries ripening from green to red-grape to black on the tree outside my window, of a cardinal’s whistling and swallowing or the occasional truck grinding up old US-11 less than a block away. Maybe I hear voices next door (but not words), a far-off crow; maybe I see how the ivy has climbed two-thirds up the hundred-foot oak tree in the back yard of the large, beautiful, old brick house behind us that still looks lived in four years after its owners left to move out into the country.    

     The voices I hear: I think they may be on television. The birds fall silent.

More Robicheaux – 

     Question: What can dumb and fearful people always be counted on to do?

     Answer: To try to control and manipulate everyone in their environment.

     Question: What is the tactic used by these same dumb people as they try to control others?

     Answer: They lie.                      

But, if they’re clever, they “[wrap] a piece of truth inside [the] lie,” and challenge you to distinguish fact from falsehood.

     Don’t try to do that, Robicheaux seems to think. But you can’t not. Open your mouth and see. Maybe, though, if you can sit still a minute longer, one cloud will change the color of the whole sky and the ivy and the oak and the brick of the house, the cardinal will start whistling, the crow will caw again, you’ll catch a word or four of the conversation (“yellow” and “you know her”). And maybe you’ll see how things move along as they do, not in the straight lines history teachers draw on their blackboards, but in a misguided clutter of clutter.

Any attempt to control, manipulate, or even guide is misguided; and on every attempt to draw the truth (the whole truth and nothing but the truth) the chalk will crack or go crooked. Listen the next time you think you’re telling it like it is; really listen . . . to the crap that’s coming out of your mouth. Now, close it.

     Shutting up is more than half the battle. Hell, it’s more than half the war.

You can take my advice on this one. (Oh, let me be your guide.)

Dancing an antick hay

L. R. at Hollywood Party, May 2014

May 26, 2015
Satyres Dancing an Antick Hay 

Quelque prétext que nous donnions à nos afflictions, ce n’est souvent que l’intéret et la vanité que les causent. (La Rochefoucauld, V:232)

Whatever excuse we may find for our sorrows, often it is only self-interest and vanity that cause them. (E. H. & A. M. Blackmores’ translation)

I was looking back over all twelve volumes – or the twelve novels I have in four volumes of three apiece – of A Dance to the Music of Time. I read them just a year ago, and I was thinking I might read them again, even if I still can’t quite figure out why I like Anthony Powell so much. He doesn’t really tell stories: it’s more a matter of stringing incidents together. But I opened the first novel in the second series, At Lady Molly’s. I started leafing through, looking at passages I’d underscored; and I found myself laughing again – out loud and several times in the space of a few pages.

The setting: Britain, between the wars but the second is looming. Powell’s characters are a mixture of England’s upper class and the intelligentsia that hang onto it – artists, writers, and so forth.

What Powell is so damn good at it is turning an ordinary conversation into something extraordinary – usually extraordinarily odd or foolish – by a single insight from the narrator, Nick Jenkins. Jenkins has an ability 

The Jenkins Crater

to see through things, or maybe only to pay attention. The reader is thinking to himself, "You know, there’s something off about this" – whatever is going on. He (the reader) is like the disciples from the road to Emmaus, except instead of saying to each other when Jesus disappears from sight, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us when . . . .” one asks the other, “Is the wine going sour, or is it just me?”

   Nick sees that things are going slightly awry, and he conveys what he is seeing calling attention to a particular character's gesture or tone. (If it’s paying attention, it’s better attention than most of us pay; it’s as if he has dog’s ears or vulture’s eyes – or Powell does – hearing or seeing what most of us can’t quite – it’s too high-pitched or far away.) For instance,

Frederica Budd, who had been listening to all this with a slight smile, imperceptibly inclined her head, as one might when a clown enquires from his audience whether they have understood up to that point the course of the trick he is about to perform.

Or: Here’s Nick, waiting in a cinema queue back in the days when one set of movie-goers had to empty the theatre, come out the street, before the next group could go in. There are those that burst out to get on to the next thing, but there are many more in 

the long serpentine of spectators to whom expulsion into the street means no more than a need to take another decision in life; who, accordingly, postpone in the foyer any such irksome effort of the will, by banding themselves into small, irregular, restless groups, sometimes static, sometimes ineffectively mobile.

On a weekend – Nick is visiting the too serious writer J.C. Quiggin and the vacant Mona whom he introduced when the latter was still married to his school chum Peter Templer with no sense of what was to happen, that she would run away with Quiggin, for who would?

        ‘Have you been seeing anything of Peter?’ she asked, without any self-consciousness.

        ‘Not for some time, as it happens.’

        ‘I suppose he has found a new girl?’

        ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

        She did not pursue the subject. It was just as if she had said, ‘Have you change for a pound?’; 
    and on learning that I had no silver, immediately abandoned the matter.

Finally,  Erridge (Frederica Budd’s reclusive brother) suddenly drops in on Quiggin, Mona, and Nick, who are eating dinner. 

                ‘I haven’t butted in, have I?’ he said. He spoke not so much to Quiggin [the
             host] as to the world at large, without much interest in a reply. .

The examples could be multiplied, many times. The question is what allows Nick to see and hear as he does, both perceptively and, to use Emily Dickinson’s image, with eye and ear so bent it must both see and hear aslant. It’s the quality or point-of-view I mean by “antick.” There is in it, whatever we call it, this marvelous ability to see that everything happening normally is not – ever. There’s always subtext, and those that are most deep, serious, and guarded about theirs – the people that use words like “subtext” and say afterward things like, “I wasn’t about to reveal my hand.” – are the biggest clowns with the most transparent tricks.

   But, there is no one that doesn’t have a place in that tiny car.

The reader is certainly squeezed in, because he is so delighted with Nick’s “reveals,” which are not shared with the other characters but only with him. Comedy works first for those that are in the privileged position of on the outside looking in. But it works best when we stop laughing and look away from the book and listen to ourselves.

        Then, . . . well the best of us start laughing again; the rest of us become pundits and politicians, preachers and professors of literature, art history, and philosophy, aware that we have our motives, but no one else is onto them.

Dem Dry Bones, Hear the word of the Lord

May 23, 2015
Dem Dry Bones, Hear the word of the Lord

Ezekiel the Prophet 

by Pedro Berruguete, c. 1500

What I know about Hebrew, you could put into a thimble – that it reads from right to left and that among its twenty-seven or twenty-eight letters, there are no vowels in the sense we think of them; and I could be wrong about that. But, I had heard that in the Old Testament passage for this Sunday, Ezekiel 37, the words for breath and wind and spirit are only one word, pronounced rue – as in RuPaul – ach – as in Bach, Johann Sebastian or Carl Philipp Emanuel: ru-ach. My Lutheran friend, Axel Sundstrøm, who had to learn both Greek and Hebrew in order to preach in English, confirmed as much.

      He also suggested that I preface the my (TRV) version of that familiar passage about the prophet’s vision of the valley full of dry bones with three other passages, preferably, he added, from more reputable translations. “You don’t need to comment,” he continued, just put them up there. Anyone that really wants to get it will get it.”

      You can jump straight to the “plodcast,” if you’d rather, but it would please Axel if you read these first. Couldn’t hurt. So, okay:      

           Genesis 1

     In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, until the spirit (ruach) of God went moving across the waters.

Genesis 2

     Thus the heavens and earth were finished . . . . On the seventh day God finished his work . . . and he rested . . . . [But]

     There was yet no plant of the field in the earth . . . for the Yahweh God had not yet caused it to rain; there was no man to till the ground . . . . Then the Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground and blew in to his nostrils the breath [ruach] of life, and the man became a living thing.

Jeremiah 8

     At that time, says Yahweh, the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of its princes, the bones of the priests, the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the people of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs; and they shall be spread before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which they have loved and worshiped, which they have whored after, and they shall be as dung on the surface of the ground.

     Death shall be preferred to life by all that remain in all the place I have put them, says Yahweh.

And here’s Ezekiel 37, the dry-bones part, in the TRV (Ted Riich Version):

Why you should listen to me, never mind what I wrote yesterday

May 20, 2015

Why you should listen to me, never mind what I wrote yesterday

I wake up from an afternoon doze, because the radio is talking: The situation is complicated – it can’t be more complicated – but let me explain it to you; I can do that, too . . . in terms you may well be able to understand. The kings and queens of smug.

There’s no monopoly on smug, though – not among the media, not among the religious, not among

politicians, not . . . .  No monopoly. There is no one willing to close with my friend Gaspar Stephens’ favorite five words: But I could be wrong. He suggests these be stamped at the end of any pontification.  I suggest we stamp at the beginning these six: From my limited point of view, 

      We don’t do either, we don’t consider doing either, because come right down to it, in the last analysis, in our heart-of-hearts, we know we are right. Occasionally, we’ll feign modesty. Still, our experience trumps everyone else’s, because, well, we’re on the ground, and they – the media, the religious, the litigious, politicians, and cosmologists, all of them – are in the air.

It’s the adolescent’s petulant, “You just don’t understand” in a wisp of intellectual fog, smuggery-smudgery; so the edges aren’t so clear, but our hearts are. Just listen to the beat.

The Russians Keep Coming, The Russians Keep Coming

May 19, 2015
The Russians Keep Coming, The Russians Keep Coming

               We're not a curious species, whatever we'd like to think of ourselves. At least we're not truly
                curious. We follow our curiosity until it has led us somewhere near where we wanted to go -
                but no further. - Uncle Albert

Chekhov. (See here.) Now Gogol. Ah, Dead Souls: I’m reading around in Part 2. Chcihikov is dancing like a ping-pong ball from mismanaged estate to mismanaged estate, every landowner a caricature of himself. How closer can anyone write to real life?

Shine on, Shine on, Nikolai up in the sky.

I think: “By the time we are my age – over sixty (barely!) – we are all caricatures of ourselves.” As if that hadn’t happened much sooner, as if at fifteen we were not caricatures of ourselves at fifteen, at twenty-five caricatures of ourselves at twenty-five, and so thirty, and thirty-five, and forty, and forty-five, and so on – always caricatures of ourselves.

          We are always more than, yet never more than, the role we are playing, even when we are alone, when we ourselves are our only audience. We narrate, we posture; we deliver grand soliloquies, we whisper revealing asides. We enter, but we never exit. We are the constant objects of our own wonder and disappointment.  We hiss and cheer ourselves on. We are our own grand melodrama, if only acted by poor traveling players in a series of small-town high school auditoriums. So, now we tie ourselves to the track, now we scream in mock horror – we hear the chuffing of the train bearing down on us. Now we ride in to save the day.

And, now we tie ourselves to the track, now we scream, now . . . .

Holy Father Church

May 11, 2015
Holy Father Church 

               “We are all selfish beasts and without knowing quite why, we have so little
                insight into ourselves.” – Uncle Albert

We went to a Presbyterian church yesterday, one we were assured would ignore Mother’s Day, because, to paraphrase that Israelite without guile, the disciple Nathanael (John 1:46-57), “Can anything good come out of Kansas City?

It was dismally awful. The music was mournful; the preaching was somber. (The text was the tenth commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.”)

What does he keep under his hat, our John?

     The music was mournful, but the Confession of Sin was like the singing of a National Anthem by a proud chorus of Montenegrins: “We have sinned, Almighty God, in thought, word, and deed. We have let the enemy put unkind, unholy, and unprofitable thoughts into our minds; we have failed to think the thoughts of love, peace, and righteousness Your Spirit would have given us had we asked. We have said things we ought not to have said, and withheld words of kindness, blessed reproof, and praise when they should have been said. We have been busy about many things that should not have occupied our time, and we have neglected to do those things that would have served others and pleased You. Therefore we condemn ourselves before You. We can only plead that Your grace and mercy be upon us, to forgive our sins, heal our broken places, and return us unto ways that are profitable to your kingdom: through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

It rolled off our self-satisfied tongues like that patriotic hymn learned by heart; then . . . silence. The lugubrious preacher had for this one moment the comic timing of a Henny Youngman – the right silence, precisely the right weight, timed to the second and: “God is merciful as well as just, ever ready to forgive us, his erring children. As far as the East is from the West, so far let the Lord put your sins from you. I declare it so: in the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.”

     So he declared, perfectly timed; but I was let down. Why? What had I hoped for? Maybe something like this: “God is merciful as well as just, but frankly today he has his justice hat on. Don’t just sing your sins. Go fix that shit. By that I do not mean the fog of ‘unkind,’ ‘unholy,’ or ‘unprofitable.’ At least try to fix stuff you’ve actually done.”

It was a Presbyterian Church. Surely, had he said that, the Session would have called an emergency meeting for immediately after worship. The matter of God’s resolute justice would have been referred to the presbytery. A task force would have been formed, the greatest talkers of each theological stripe brought together to speak the truth boldly (and hold hard to their heart-felt grudges against one another). They would “reason together,” precisely because they really wouldn’t want to have anything else to do with each other – sit down in one or another’s den and watch a ball game; picnic or play golf, certainly not drink a beer side by side by side along one long bar. Of course, they would do any of these things; assuredly they would! But at the end of the day what those bold theological hearts desired truly was to get their tongues into a conference room and really piss each other off. Then they could go home and whine to their poor spouses about how unjustly misunderstood they had been.

What the scholars call an “excursus”* :

I want sometime to write an apology for what I will call “transparent hypocrisy,” meaning more than the tacit acknowledgement that not only do we live in a fallen, therefore duplicitous world, but we are fallen and duplicitous as well. What others have seen clearly, what they would know as clearly, if they paused their talk to take one breath, idealists and ideologues alike would say loud enough all can hear (themselves included): “Here are the hidden rules I am playing by (and the ones I am making up as I go along); here is the spiritual, emotional, or cash credit I’ve accepted to take this position.”

Then, today’s sermon on the last commandment – could it become a true confession? - the sermonizer himself, the one croaking “Fidelity!” at his congregation, could he admit how long he has coveted his neighbor’s ass, how many times he has snuck into the stable next door to whisper in a soft, warm ear, to rub along its neck and down its back, along its flanks, as if it were one of his own. God be merciful. God forgive him the nights, the dark, the opposite of transparent hypocrisy.

     He says none of this, of course. Like all of us he hides his sin, how he does one thing while he says another. “Fidelity,” he says – how important it is that we hew to it, for strait is the gate and narrow the door.

     I shake his hand as we leave. “Thank you for that.” I, too, say what I don’t mean at all.†

 

What was under Calvin’s hat – and, therefore, always on his brain? For the R—rated answer, click here. Must be 18 years of age or older.

---

* From the Latin excurrere , to run off course. In scholar speech though, as I understand it from my philosopher friend Tom Nashe, it means: “I am, you see, wandering away from the path we set out on, but watch how cleverly I am able to get back to it.”

† But then we are never more ourselves than when we are being truly hypocritical, homo
 sapiens bisulcilinguus.