Dee Ontological

Up for a cuppa with several Universal
Baseball Association teams.
(Original card lost, xerox made sometime in the '80s.)

Deontological ethics was invented by someone much too certain he knew the mind of God – probably one of the Old Testament prophets. It is a solemn business; and solemn leads to sad leads to angry leads to aggressive; aggression is the stuff of deontological ethics – universal aggression because the ethicist knows what is best for everyone everywhere everywhen in every circumstance. - Uncle Albert

True and false

September 23, 2015

The door between truth and (literary) fiction

There may be doors that “need to be knocked down.” But, just because a door is closed doesn’t mean it is locked; just because a door is locked doesn’t mean someone won’t open it when we ring the bell. – Uncle Albert

If there is drivel in these pages, it is because I am firmly convinced that life makes as much sense – philosophically and aesthetically – as a sagging helium balloon. Imagine drivel sucking the helium from the balloon and squawking in that high, airy, rasping whiny voice about whatever . . . shit . . . comes to mind. Then, drivel has captured life.

What really happens?

   But there is true drivel, and there is fictional, literary drivel, which, after it has come to mind, must be written and rewritten, proofed and galleyed, brought to press and sold on Book-TV. The soprano heliumo has become basso profundo in, let’s say, Verdi’s Don Carlo.

When in the Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, after surviving a father’s wrath and a tornado, Coop becomes a world-class “mechanic” (manipulator of playing cards) while one daughter of the father, Anna, falls blithely into bed with a gypsy, we’re clearly in the realm literary inspired literary drivel, that is, not true but operatic drivel, melodrama. (Ondaatje’s reputation as a serious, literary writer rests no little, incidentally, the way he writes of people not, as people are but as literary readers wish people were: subtle, clever, smart – rational and adventurous Romantics, who if they can’t administer their own destinies can legislate their own moralities.)

   When in the same book in the midst of the tornado, a badly injured Coop can walk for thirty minutes, blind! across an unmarked landscape, find his way into an automobile, and honk the horn and turn on the inside light just at the moment other daughter Claire can see it so she can tie a rope around her waist, lunge into the howling wind and driving rain and haul him out of the vehicle, across the yard, up the stairs, to safety, we are in the presence of great literary – but again not true, or truth-revealing - drivel.

Here on our second day of travel from there to somewhere else, we’re concerned that we may have inadvertently gone out of range of our shit schedule – every morning after coffee, book in hand - and we are in for an uncomfortable day. Then, when we manage at last at least to expel the plug before we have to finish packing and go, we celebrate – dance the antick hay. There is truth: it’s never in the drivel of melodrama, always in dribble of physical comedy.

What I learned in Sunday School this Sunday

September 20, 2015
What I learned in Sunday School

So: 

      Paul and whoever was with him come to Thessalonica, where, according to Acts, “there was a synagogue of the Jews.” Paul goes in, because that’s what Paul does, and for three weeks he argues with them until he’s proved “from the scriptures” that “the Christ,” who suffered and rose, was the Christ.

     Some, it seems, are persuaded by the argument, as are a number of Greeks and women.

     More, it seems, are not persuaded. They – the unconvinced, Jews from the synagogue – start a protest that soon gets out of hand, as, we know, protests can do; and some of the protesters attack the house of Jason, where Paul is supposed to be staying, trying to get him to come out.

     Paul seems to be conveniently elsewhere, but Jason is handy and a few friends he has over. So, them they drag before “the authorities,” and they charge them with (frankly) fornifreculating with the order of things, especially, the accusers say, declaring that there is a king other than Caesar, name of Jesus. Naturally, this upsets the authorities – hell, it upsets everybody. Still, they do the right thing: they let Jason and the rest out on bail.
     And Jason and the rest do some thing: they get hold of Paul and his peeps, and they help them slip away in the middle of the night to Beroea. There Paul goes into the synagogue, and the events of Thessalonica repeat themselves, except – according to Acts – the Jews of Beroea are “nobler,” so more of them accept Paul’s arguments, along with the usual Greeks and women.

Yeah, but:

                 According to Acts, those cursèd Jews from Thessalonica, when they hear that Paul is in Beroea – they come over and stir up another crowd there.

     And Paul has to get away again, farther away. The Beroeans that bought him buy him a ticket on a boat to Athens.

Paulie & Siggy's Best
(for the Greek and women's market)

     Luke – let’s say he wrote Acts, a man named Luke (This also I learned in Sunday School; his name may have been something else.) – Luke seems more than a little discombobulated by all this. Why would the Jews of Thessalonica want to be such rabble-rousing budvases, when all Paul did was come into their place of worship and start an argument?

Well:

          There are, in my experience, people that can reason with people and people that can only yell at them; and, if they don’t get their way, yell some more, maybe even ad hominem – meaning the yellers start calling the yellees names.

     Who knows exactly what Paul said to the Jews of Thessalonica, but here’s what he said about them not long after he left. (This is the second part of what I learned in Sunday School: the first from Acts and this from the first letter Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, meaning presumably Jason and his Greek neighbors and women friends.)

     As you know, I don’t hide the truth, so I don’t make mistakes. I don’t flatter; I’m not in this for the money or the fame or to make people feel good - God knows! Still, I am the gentlest of men, as you also know; I am like a nanny with his lordship’s children.      But the Jews! who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets – they had to try to stop us. It’s the way they are.

Sing:

         For the Bible tells me so.

    

But:

         Bible scholars have a different idea. There is a way around around this crude argumentum ad stirpem jackassery.* Paul didn’t do it. So, it’s in the Bible, but it’s not somehow. Or so the well-informed teacher tells me. And the eldest among the elders and the Greeks and the women agree.

 

_______________

 * . . . not paulassery, because . . .

Figure 9 - Horn player and drummer boy.

Figure 9 - Horn player and drummer boy.*

______________
 * with apologies to Giovanni Bellini

Humorless in Gaza

September 14, 2015
Humorless in Gaza
 

               There are wits with no sense of humor.  - Uncle Albert

On wit and humor. Several propositions in no particular order . . . .

Alexander as Pope

I’m afraid sometimes that I’m losing my sense of humor. This happens to people when little things begin to matter. The big things become irritants, because they distract you from the minutia that must be dealt with – ruthlessly, or it won’t get dealt with at all.

When I say I’m afraid I’m losing my sense of humor, I’m assuming I had one, not just a sharp wit. Sharp and sometimes mean. Wit is often mean, though it needn’t be. Humor can be nasty, but it’s very, very seldom mean.

     Both wit and humor can be exasperated; but humor tries to allay, wit wants desperately to exacerbate.

Dog farts are humorous. Commenting on a dog fart – particularly to make a point – witty.

Wit loves metaphor. Humor has a dick, wit a sword.

Wits can be – they often are – enjoyable drinking companions, but they never follow you into the can when you run from the bar, puke already leaking out of your nose. Those with a sense of humor will hold your head over the bowl, though they may be laughing at you.

Humor chortles; wit’s laugh is a bark.

There can be wit in humor, but it can’t overcome the humor. Wit can be used in the service of humor – Aristophanes, the best of the Restoration comedies, Blazing Saddles. But humor cannot be used in the service of wit; inevitably it will become its slave – Juvenal, much of Pope and Christopher Hitchens.

People are born with sunnier and darker dispositions. But it isn’t true that everyone with a sunny disposition has a sense of humor – think of a regularly church-going Southern Baptist, a rabid Auburn fan that teaches middle school science.

Discandidery

“I don’t know, scrodhead, when is a 2 x 8
  not a 2 x 8?”

September 8, 2015
Discandidery 

There are good reasons to tell lies, just not the ones you think.    – Uncle Albert

 

The limits of honesty, land- and seaward

September 7, 2015

The limits of honesty, land- and seaward

 

Let’s be honest about our own dishonesty, or at least about the limits of our honesty – that is, if we know them, if we have the guts to get anywhere near them.    – Uncle Albert

a very merry unbirthday

September 2, 2015

a very merry unbirthday

“Life is a . . .  sad piece of buffoonery; because we have in ourselves, without being able to know why . . . the need to deceive ourselves . . . by creating a reality (one for each and never the same for all), which from time to time is discovered to be vain and illusory . . . .” – Luigi Pirandello

Each of our realities – or the reality belonging to each of us – is an illusion. For the most part we manage to ignore this, but we’re always at risk of bumping up against some one, some thing, or some idea that cracks the image we’ve shined together with glitter and a glue gun. We’re no longer walking blithely down the street basking in the sunshine, whistling a merry tune; we turn to look in a shop window and find instead of the well-arranged shimmer of things we have to have that we’re looking at ourselves in a mirror that is cracked and distorted. And someone tiny but crystal and clear is hovering at our shoulder. We shrug, but he doesn't go away. We turn around, and