Figure 2 - Area of Interest

July 31, 2015

Figure 2 - Area of Interest

There oughta be a law! (Warning: Contains Explicit Language)

                         July 30, 2015
                         There oughta be a law! 

 

Propositions

July 29, 2015
Propositions 

i
No one in Petronius’ Satyricon does Sudoku. All are too busy with art, poetry, and divination, with gluttony, lust, and prideful sloth. They hardly have time to take a crap, much less to drink coffee, crap, and calculate the Sudoku – all at once, in one porcelain temple dedicated to those arts.

 ii

No rule of two is as satisfying as the rule of three.

Future Quest

July 28, 2015 
Future Quest

We cannot anticipate the future, because we only have to guide us how the past became the present. But the present doesn’t become the future in the same way the past became the present. - Uncle Albert

As is clear in the following:

Figure 1

Funding for The Ambiguities research by
the Heisenberg, Moltmann, and Uhnn Trust.

Our Imaginary Friend

July 27, 2015
Our Imaginary Friend 

Note from Gaspar Stephens: he’s reading the Sermon on the Mount, wondering how we could possibly “do this shit.” I write back, “We can’t.” He agrees, goes on: “The gospels’ complete disinterest in psychology serves us ill, if, as I think Jesus is important.

D. H. Lawrence

     “There’s so very little to tell us who he was – not even a driver’s license: height, weight, hair eyes, distinguishing marks, bad picture. We know only where he went – some of the places – what he did – that the gospeleers thought were important. We don’t know if he did them right- or left-handed; we don’t know if he slept on his back or his side. Did he walk slowly or briskly? Did he sit upright and still, or did he slouch and fidget? Was he soft-spoken, or did his voice have an edge? Where did he stand in a crowded room?” 

Nevertheless

July 26, 2015
Nevertheless 

I went to church this morning – no surprise. To paraphrase a current TV commercial: “If you’re my mother’s son, it’s what you do.” Roz went with me. Sometimes she does, sometimes not. We went two towns down the Valley to hear a fellow from the town I grew up in. He grew up a Baptist but had become an Episcopalian; nevertheless, he was supposed to be an excellent preacher.

   Roz tends to doubt “suppos-ed/s.” What that means, she said, is that “There will be lots of rhetoric or lots of dumbing down or both.” She’s at her most cynical on Sunday mornings. But, she went. “I’m curious nonetheless,” she said. “And, we can meet the great man.” More cynicism. I shook my head.

She was more right than wrong. The images of God’s love were parental, homely: Mom holding one close, reading stories at night, tucking one tightly into bed, kissing one on the cheek, Dad correcting rough drafts of high-school themes, playing catch, hitting grounders and pop-ups into the dark. But also: gravity surrounding all of us invisibly, so we can count on, when we get up and swing our legs over the edge of the bed, they will come down on the floor; we won’t begin floating upward to knock our heads on the ceiling or go crashing down through the first floor and the basement and into middle earth.

   Still, the whole thing was well organized; and it managed to get back to Jesus, the way to find, the truth to seek out, the light to follow, the life to embrace. “Stop Look Listen” as the old railroad sign said – that was our job. And he had a lovely, rhythmic speaking voice, a comfort to old ladies and the old lady in all of us.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” Roz asked, when she saw me looking around for another exit.

   “No. He was grades ahead of me. I was a punk. He wouldn’t remember.”

   “But, he’ll play like he does. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

He did. It was. For her.

Uncle Albert in a can.

July 23 2015
Uncle Albert in a can (again). 

Three maxims, or sentences, from Uncle Albert.*

Uncle A,Paris 1996

Those that believe in “the power and authority of reason” almost always mean their own lines of reasoning. It doesn’t occur to them that those lines, however carefully and logically drawn, may have begun in utter nonsense.

We share our wisdom with the implicit assumption that those we share it with are the only ones capable of understanding both how profound and right it is and how wrong-headed and shallow is the rest of the world’s folly. Too often, this sharing takes place in church, synagogue, or mosque.

What comes of eating and, especially, drinking too much: We are quickly duzzled. We begin to act like politicians, pundits, or preachers; our tongues begin to wag, and we make foolish predictions and promises we shall soon forget.

_______________

*Regular readers of The Ambiguities will know my dear, maddening (unrelated) Uncle Albert. Others interested in the nonagenarian admirer of La Rochefoucauld, former French professor at Bretagne and Chanceux Colleges, and current yeller at Fox News, can check out the 2014 TA index here ["My Uncle Albert"] or send a self-addressed stamped envelope to crabbiolio@gmail.com.

When in doubt: stone wall.

July 15, 2015
When in doubt: stonewall. 

A note from Gaspar Stephens:

Re TA –

     The Paul and marriage stuff (click here and here) is stimulating: it invites revisiting empathy – and the degree to which it is possible. There came to my mind an experience you related to me some years ago. [This was back in my activist days, which meant mainly that I was attending a lot of boring meetings, solemn workshops, and sanctimonious speeches.] You were in the Caribbean (Jamaica? Puerto Rico?) for some kind of conference during which one of the natives said there were aspects to the issue of poverty/oppression/governance in the Third World that you white North American white folks would simply not be able to comprehend because you were white North American white folks. And I recall your reflecting that any incomprehension was more about that gentleman's (and any other's, who shared his view on the matter) failure to communicate than about your inability to take it in.

   Did I dream this? Or do you have some recollection of it? Anyway, as I was reading TA, I began to think about the artist’s responsibility to hike empathy over, to percolate empathy through, to transport empathy beyond walls to places otherwise difficult for empathy to get to. I thought: “Maybe Paul didn't read enough Madame Bovary’s or Good Soldier’s to appreciate marriage's complexities. Maybe God wasn’t reading enough either to get into the mind of Adam – the letters of Heloise and Abelard or Portnoy’s Complaint.

One thing’s for sure; stories can wallop walls, ring the bell of even the thickest head.

   This morning, Jack, of Mad Bill Blake’s ’Weeps, called to say that his tech would be running late for the scheduled 8:30 appointment to inspect my fireplaces. In another part of the world, that would've been enough. Conversation over. But this is the South. Thus, Jack had to answer the unasked question, “What’s the story?”

   The tech, T-ball, overslept because he was at the hospital last night later than he'd expected. He was at the hospital in the first place because his son was wounded by a .22 caliber bullet – not aimed at him – at a bar the night before. Emergency surgery; the kid is still recovering. He was there in the second place, because T-ball's wife – who’d been there, at the hospital, the whole time – needed a break to go home, shower, and . . . whatever. I heard “whatever” – the way Jack grumbled it into an implied question – to mean whatever T-ball’s wife, DelMona, might “have to” do when she knew exactly where T-ball was. Anyway, she didn't get back to the hospital until after midnight. So T-ball was running late.

Voilà: empathy! When T-ball finally showed, he was no longer an anonymous ’weep. He was a pitiable victim. And while I didn't delve into his business with him, I found myself fashioning my responses to him so that they might possibly comfort. I've never had a son – much less one wounded by a bullet. And to my knowledge I haven’t been cuckolded by any of my wives. But I thought I had at least some inkling of what I would feel like in such a situation. And I’d want comfort, even from an old white North American white guy.

   Of course, I was assuming Jack’s story was true.

*  *  *  *  *

The book is James Dwight Dana's Manual of Mineralogy and Lithology.

Gaspar did not imagine the incident – or my reaction. It was Puerto Rico, a gathering of the self-righteous, some more than others.

     On the one hand, I don’t want to back off what I said then, put in terms of empathy, that it decidedly depends on how much one wants to understand or be understood by the other. The speaker in Santa Isabel had no real de-
sire to explain, because he didn’t really want “me” to understand. Paul has no real desire to comprehend. Why should he – he would risk giving up his superiority?

   On the other hand, I find myself of two minds about all of this, partly because why should antick nebbishes like me be held to the same standard as the righteous, as God or his Apostle or Prophets or Mystics, the axe-grinders of any revealed religion, or any axe-grinder, anyone that claims to know – physicists, pundits, Supreme Court justices, militant atheists, et al.? These should be able to communicate clearly what they know and want me to know because I ought to know it, too, dammit. But I can't communicate clearly, because I don’t know; and I don't know because the world is marvelous, confusing, opaque. So, I can only wave at the wall, point dumbly to the gaps I can’t see much less get through, the ladder of invisible ink I can’t climb, the magic carpet I don’t know how to fly.

Truly God and TRULY man

July 10, 2015

Truly God and TRULY man

There are three stories of Martha and Mary in the gospels. There is one in Luke 10. (Listen below.) And there are two in John – 11 & 12. And in all of them, Mary is just the sort of fey (meaning faux-unworldly) teacher’s pet that when I when I was a kid gave me the creeps.

    Look at the stories. The two from John:

P. P. Rubens pic

In the first, Jesus is coming to Bethany, because his friend Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, has died. And he comes despite the danger: Bethany is not far from Jerusalem, where he has enemies who have already tried to stone him, the story tells us, and who will crucify him. He comes because
he loves Martha and Mary and Lazarus.

     As soon as she hears he is on his way, Martha goes out to meet him.  But Mary’s too delicate, too broke up, too whatever she is,
to come, too.  Martha has to go back and tell her what you think she’d know already: “Jesus wants to see you.”  Then, for reasons I certainly don’t comprehend, Jesus seems gladder to see Mary than Martha.

In the second story, after Lazarus has been raised and is well enough to sit down to a

meal (prepared, we must assume, by Martha), it is Mary that anoints Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair.  It is a beautiful thing, no doubt, but isn’t it just a little over the top?

     We only hesitate to ask that because that’s pretty much Judas’ point, and we do not want to be associated with him. But put him and hesitation aside for one minute: Isn’t it just a little much? It’s not just Judas that thinks so. At the least, Martha must be shaking her head, if only on the inside so it won’t be seen. A little much – the way her dress slips off her shoulder and down . . .  (Look at the photograph Rubens took. What is James looking at? Why does Peter put on his glasses?) A little much.

That brings us to the story from Luke, when Jesus stops by the house – which is Martha’s – because she has invited him for a meal. It follows the parable of the Good Samaritan, which doesn't have anything to do with any of this.* From the TRV (Ted Riich Version):

From there, Jesus and his disciples went on their way and came to a village, where he knew people. One of them, Martha, invited him for lunch.

     Martha had a sister, Mary, who welcomed Jesus into the house as if it were hers not her sister’s and then sat down with him to listen to him talk. This added to Martha’s distractions, getting everything ready to put lunch on the table, one that would be worthy of the rabbi. And why did Mary sit just there? – not because it was the best place to hear but because there (she knew) the light would catch her hair just so.

     Finally, Martha could stand it no longer. She came out of the kitchen. “Teacher,” she said. “Could I borrow my sister for a few minutes?”

     “Why?” he said, and her sister’s face echoed “Why?” adding feigned innocence. Maybe he really couldn’t see why - probably not, men are such dopes - but she could.

     Martha bit her tongue, shook her head. “Men are such dopes,” she thought again, “not least rabbis, who think anyone not talking is listening to them.”

______________

*Unless it also has to do with empathy, about which I promised a word or two. That involves, or calls for, I’ve been at least implying (here and here), putting ourselves in another’s feet (in both the current and Old Testament sense of the word), imagining what they are feeling or will feel. Paul has no empathy for married persons (1 Corinthians 7), because he has no experience with marriage, and he can’t think outside his own experience. God can’t predict what effect Eve will have on Adam, because God knows no more about married love than his Apostle does; besides God doesn't have genitals. 
     Those that empathize with Martha in the story from Luke do so, because they (we) know she has every right to feel sorry for herself, so do we.

Dangling conversations 2

July 8, 2015
Dangling conversations 2 

Desipientiae Theologicae, Vol. 1, Art. 2

“Funny position . . . . I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don’t know. . . .  I only know that he who forms a tie is lost.” – Axel Heist in Joseph Conrad’s Victory

He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. – the Apostle Paul in his own 1 Corinthians

(Translation: Better everyone be like me, for anything else is sadly less.)

Quantum Entanglement by Matthias Weinberger

Yes: “Better like I am,” the Apostle says, “like Adam before God gave him Eve.”

     That was a mistake, clearly. For one can be righteous, or one can be entangled. Either . . . or!

     Then, sin did not originate with Adam and Eve’s disobedience but in the Creator’s invention of Eve herself, blind to what Conrad (or his main character, Heyst) sees, that anyone that forms a tie will go wandering and eventually, inevitably, get lost.

     Is it heresy to suggest the Creator is blind – to anything (in any way)? Would it be better to call it a lack of empathy?* For it doesn’t look to me as if the fall began because God could no more put himself in Adam’s bare feet than his Apostle could understand married life. (See here.) Perhaps Jehovah’s aseity and his Apostle’s certainty are blindfolds cut from the same righteous cloth?

_______________

* More about which (empathy) on Friday. Deviating from the lectionary, this week’s podcast is the story of Jesus’ visit to Martha and Mary (Luke 10).

     The Latin of the “title,” incidentally, is best translated Theological Follies.

Dangling conversations

July 7, 2015
Dangling conversations

The Apostle writes (1 Corinthians 7) –

He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he 
may please his wife.

Translation: Better everyone be like me, for anything else is sadly less.

Though how could the Apostle know? He has no idea what it means to be married; and it’s not only that he hasn’t been but that he cannot imagine what anyone else is thinking or feeling – he’s never learned how, because he’s never cared. So, he doesn’t realize the effect of his diktat on the married, or attached, that he gives them permission to care only for the things of the world, since – the Apostle says so! – they are unable to care for anything else.

* * * * *

I was talking with Roz last night after a day of meetings. Across the room: I was half-reclined on the couch at one end, staring at the air; she was sitting in the chair in the corner under the lamp, reading.

     “It’s going to be good growing old with you,” I said.  She turned her book over on her lap, slid her reading glasses down her nose, and looked over them at me. “I find I like talk less and less, especially the kind that 
likes listening to itself,” I said.

      “Are you talking about your meetings today?”

                                                       I nodded. But, I was also talking about politicians, pundits, talk-show

 hosts and their guests, the self-absorbed subjects of TV reality shows, doctors, lawyers, and Apostles. I said: “I’m also talking about you, because you talk so relatively little, and you’re never trying to be clever.”

     “Thanks.” She drew in a breath. “I guess.”

     “No,” I said. “I like sitting here with you, even across the room, knowing you’re not rehearsing your next speech.”

     “Maybe I am, and I’m just inarticulate,” she said and stuck out her tongue – she can roll hers, I cannot. “See?” she said.
     (She can also tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue. I cannot. Inarticulate, hell!)

Ecclesiastes: The Absurdist Commentary . . . Last Page

July 4, 2015
Free at Last

1:2, 5, 7, 6, 15, 13-14.  Vanity of vanities, fog of fogs! –

all there is, the Preacher says.

The sun rises and the sun sets,

the sun rises again.

The rain falls and rain rises,

and rain falls again.

The wind blows every which way,

but the fog doesn’t lift:

What God made crooked cannot be straightened
and what God made infinite cannot be counted.

So, sit down, figure it out – all of it; this business that God has given us to be busi with. 
See everything there is to see, and what will you see? – that you cannot see very far: all
is emptiness wrapped up in fog, and you are beating and eating the air.

* * * * *

Sartre’s conception of freedom wiped away the last traces of the Enlightenment’s belief 
in man as a naturally social being.  It also fiercely negated the world as it is consti-
tuted by modernity.*

Or, what we thought worked does not. But neither does what we think. Therefore,

A Spirit Appeared to Me

A spirit appeared to me, and said

‘Where now would you choose to dwell?

In the Paradise of the Fool,

Or in wise Solomon’s hell?’

Never he asked me twice:

‘Give me the Fool’s Paradise.’^†

Well, maybe.

_______________

  * Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History, 338.

  ^†               Herman Melville. See 7:4.

Ecclesiastes: The New Absurdist Commentary . . 4

June 3, 2015
Words, Words, Words

6:10.  The more words the emptier they become. Who is better for them?

Better a dead lion than a yappy dog.*

_______________

  * See 9:4. (My note.)

Ecclesiastes - The New Absurdist Commentary . . 3

July 2, 2015
Qoheleth, camels, and needles

 7:13, 16.  Consider the work of God: who can straighten what he has made crooked? . . . . Do not be overly righteous; do not try to be too wise. Why destroy yourself? 

4:9, 11.  Two are better than one . . . . If they lie together, they will be warm. How does anyone keep warm alone?

A man walks down an alleyway that comes to a dead end. In the last building on the left is a small bar. Inside, at the bar is a woman, in front of her a glass of wine. The man sits down beside her. He orders “what she’s having” and thereby begins a conversation.

     They speak quietly. The bartender, politely standing at the other end of the bar, can hear only a word here and there: wine, wind, calypso; camels. Seams, soft. Coffee. Blue.

     The man raises his hand, pays the bill. The man and woman leave together. They go outside, in another door in the same building, up wooden stairs. In the entryway there’s a scribbled note taped to the wall: there’s a part-time job washing dishes and sweeping up at the bar.

The woman’s apartment is slovenly and warm. She turns on the television. They sit and watch. The man falls asleep. He wakes up around two with a headache. There’s an old black-and-white horror film crawling still across the screen. He switches it off.  He finds the bathroom, pees. He finds the bedroom, drops his shoes, socks, shirt, and trousers on the floor, and crawls in beside the woman, who shifts to make room. Against her, he falls quietly, easefully, back to sleep.