Axeliad II

to listen, click here

 Axel­­iad II 

If ignorantly, he declaimed also loudly, he wanted me to tell you:

What theology can do that philosophy cannot: recognize our total depravity. We humans (homo egoisticus sanctimonialis): our noblest nobility is poorly disguised self-interest sustained by thinly veiled self-righteousness. “Thinly veiled” and “poorly disguised,” but only theology sees through.

     Now, if it could only acquire a sense of humor, the end would not have to come with fire and ire. Instead of fire, there could be farce; instead of ire there could be laughter. Instead of judgment there could be redemption.

     The kind of judgment we find in Daniel, in Zephaniah, in Revelation, in Cotton Mather and Tom Cotton has nothing to do with redemption: 144,000 may be saved, a few more or a few less, but for what? They aren’t even saved really; they are only salvaged, kept alive.

     But redemption is not salvation of that pale sort; redemption is not salvation of any sort. Salvation may heal – that is the root of the word. But redemption carries on.

    

The problem becomes how to describe it, redemption. Is this why it has dropped out of theology in favor of salvation – that it is so difficult to define? It is not judgment; it is not salvation; it is not heavenly bliss – it has nothing to do with heaven at all.

It is not farce! There is too much violence – especially, there is too much anger – in farce. But it is not genteel (drawing-room) comedy either. There is not enough plain foolishness in that; it is not sufficiently . . . silly.

Maybe, redemption is a shaggy-dog story, a wandering from distraction to distraction, a chasing of a tangent by a tangent, a story that heads nowhere and gets where it is going, a world without end, world without end and so no “amen.”

     Judgment, salvation, “heaven” (and farce, most comedy) have this in common: they all have to get somewhere. There’s no point to them, if they don’t have a point, and there must a way to get to it.  Clearly! “Strait is the gate and narrow is that way.”

Redemption is not a way. Redemption is there wherever “there” already is, however accidentally.  For redemption direction is directionless; pointedness is ultimately pointless, because we never get to “ultimately.” Here is a story without a plot: There is no beginning, no middle; there is no end. Everything “done gone sideways” -  Thank God!

It doesn’t matter if the “shaggy dog” goes off the rails. If there’s no road nearby, it just lights out for the territory, heading cross country till it happens on a balloonport or an abandoned VW microbus that happens to have a full tank. In the back window is a sign that says, “Steal me!” And we do.

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” It’s the wrong question. The right question is this:  “Where does anyone get off thinking she is good?”

02.28.17

Holy Abba Anthony

to listen, click here

 Holy Abba Anthony   

My friend Rick Dietrich, except for very occasionally, stopped writing poems ten years ago. He’d allow that he wrote a few good ones – I’d agree – as well as many mediocre ones and a few stinkers that he didn’t kindly throw away, because he kept thinking he could “turn shit into shinola.” That’s what he said; I'm pretty sure I understand what he meant, even though I don’t know what shinola is; but neither does he, I don't think.

     As some of my younger friends say, “Whatever!” (meaning in this case, “Get to the point!”). It is this: Yesterday I ran across this disturbingly delightful painting of “The Temptation of St. Anthony” surfing the web. I can’t find who painted it. Maybe one of the 18 of you that will read this will know or know someone that does or know how to find out.

It reminded me of one of Rick’s poems, a piece of lighter verse, with the same name: “The Temptation of St. Anthony.”

Holy Abba Anthony lived all alone

in a cave of desert despair,

worn to a nubble by sin and hormones,

rubbed raw by psychoso-self-induced cares.

Delivered from hearing and speech and sight

(he would say again and later):

“The war is with the soul’s dark night,”

and the semblances that cater

to the brain between your legs.

None from nundom knew him,

the desert mothers stayed away.

But not the visions of sloe-eyed hourim,

nakedly lingering.

And not the demon (nose like a fixture)

cunningly fingering,

tickling the Scriptures

so they kept opening to Susanna,

clothed only in oil,

her sweet hosannas

shining like . . . shook foil.

Where was I? – nose like a cowlick,

his swollen lips nuzzling the poor saint’s ear:

“Dearest Anthony, dear, dear old stick:

Go back to the city. At least call her. Here.”

Abba Anthony was never really alone –

his eyes, across the desert sand

wandering to the pay telephone

and back to the number in his hand.

By Rick the former poet not Rick the former priest, I'm sure he would want me to tell you.

02.24.17

Dream: El Elyon

to listen, click here

 Dream: El Elyon 

Where does it begin, the story of Abraham,

                                                                   son of Terah of Ur of Chaldees, following his father to Haran on the way to Canaan, but going there only after he died, sent on by [God], then sent wandering, even to Egypt (to sell his wife for a mess of pottage, whose beauty, almost as great as Eve’s, could have commanded so much more), sent to Egypt and brought back and sent to war to redeem poor Lot, who when he chose the richer pasture chose also Sodom?

El Elyon

     Does it begin when Abram meets God in the dark, El Elyon, the Maker of heaven and earth, the one who in Moses’ time will become FourLetters, when he runs right up against Him at the edge of the dark, and He (El Elyon) swears to him (Abram-ham) a blood oath – by His (El Elyon’s) own life: Let Him be hacked in halves like these animals Abraham has butchered, if He doesn’t keep His promise to give him descendants as many as the stars and to give them the land of Canaan forever? That’s where it begins, isn’t it, when He writes the promise in the smoke that rises in the dark and drifts away with the wind?

And the rest of the story – from there to Malachi and from Matthew to the Apocalypse of Patmos John – is only the fine print, is it not, explaining how the promises are being kept even as they are not - the fine print that keeps the promises, and Abraham, and the One-Who-Swore-by-His-Life, microscopically alive, pored over, peered into by the entomologists with their lenses, the letters scrambling across the slide (formically) from right to left and from left to right again? 

02.23.17

Axeliad, or what Sundstrom said

to listen, click here

 Axeliad 

Sundstrøm said:

The selfishness of the group is no less strong, nor is it stronger, than the selfishness of the individual.

     Niebuhr’s contention that groups – especially states – are amoral, because they exist not to do good but to protect the interest of their members – citizens – there’s truth in that. But even Niebuhr underestimates individual human perversity. The Apostle has it right: “The good that I desire I cannot do; and the ill that I hate – I reprehend – that is precisely what I end up doing.” But his, the Apostle’s, true perversity is in his belief that he is exaggerating here to make a point: it’s not really, entirely, true of him. For example: of all people, he really loves those he hates – pagans, the self-righteous, the weak in faith, women.

     In truth, the only thing any of us, Paul included – the only thing any of us truly loves is his own self-righteousness. And we don’t so much love it as cherish it. And we relabel it; like a store that raises prices so it can cut them, we mark out “self-interest” and call it “the common good” (or sometimes “for their own damn good”). (We in the case of the group or the state refers to the clowns driving the clown car.)

     So, Reinie, the state isn’t amoral in pursuit of the interest of its citizens but in the headlong chase of the self-interest of its charlatans. Except ! – the plot twistens – the charlatans don’t know – they don’t even begin to know – what their own interests are. The Fall creates this bloody, stinking, murky, shrinking, shrieking, cloying, creepy, clawing morass: Sin is as much ignorance as willfulness. We cut the throats of others to accomplish what is the good for us, but we’re wrong about it. The good that we desire isn’t good at all. We aimed, we slashed, we missed by a mile.

 

Embrace hope, ye who enter here. Was $12.99, NOW $9.98.

02.22.17

Monday lunch: Frosted Shredded Wheat

to listen, read aloud

 Frosted Shredded Wheat 

Axel Sundstrøm

“You really should meet Axel before you go home,” Roz was telling Uncle Albert at supper two nights ago. “Ted doesn’t have many friends.” She looked at me – a millisecond of hesitation: “It’s not that people don’t like him – they do; but he isn’t close with . . . anybody, hardly. But he and Axel . . . .” Her voice trailed off.

     “Maybe I won’t go home,” Uncle Albert said. “I’m beginning to like it here. The food is better.” Roz coughed as if her mouthful of meatloaf had started down the wrong way. Uncle Albert said, “I’m kidding.

     “And I’m not,” he went on. And he began thinking aloud about getting an apartment – or a room in a boarding house: were there still such things? An apartment more likely: maybe he could find some college students to share with. When he said he might not go home, he didn’t mean he intended to live with us. Then, there was silence – a thousand milliseconds, two thousand milliseconds, three thousand milliseconds. Then he said, “I would like to meet Sundstrøm. I was disappointed he wasn’t preaching the Sunday we went.”

     “That was last Sunday,” I said.

So, yesterday we went again. Axel was preaching, but he didn’t have anything to say. Still, Uncle Albert shook his hand after the service, and they made a date for coffee this morning.

When he came back, I asked Uncle Albert what they’d talked about. He said, “I liked him. I said, ‘You didn’t have anything to say yesterday.’ He acknowledged it was true. ‘Or,’ he said, ‘I did have something to say, because there is always something to say about the gospel; but I didn’t say it very well.’ He hesitated, looked at me, then: ‘Actually, you’re right. Whether or not I had anything to say, I didn’t say anything. Good to know someone was listening,’ he said.”

     “That’s it?” I asked.

     “Just about,” Uncle Albert said. “I asked him if he knew anything about apartments, places to stay. He doesn’t know any more than you or your paramour does.”

     “What kind of word is ‘paramour’?” I asked.

     “Your significant other, then,” he said.

Frosted Shredded Wheat

I looked it up anyway. Apparently it needn’t mean “mistress” or “concubine”; it can mean “sweetheart.” And it was originally a term for Christ (for women) or the Virgin Mary (for men).

     I asked Uncle Albert if he knew that. He said he thought he had known it at one time, but he hadn’t known it today until I told him.

We had cereal for lunch. He had Grape Nuts with a banana. I had Frosted Shredded Wheat.

02.20.17

Getting away

to listen, click here

 Getting away 

Roz thinks Dr. Feight looks like Bob Newhart in Elf. I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know. There is something elfin about him, though, a puckish wit he ought somehow to have outgrown but did not. It shimmers even when he is only listening – so there isn’t anything “only” about it. He is listening almost all the time we’re together. He says little, very occasionally asking a question I don’t realize the ramifications of until much later, after our session is over.

     Yesterday, for example, I was telling him about a dream I’d had the night before. I said first, “Can I tell you a dream? Is that fair?” He said, “Mmmm,” meaning (I took it) “Go on.” So I did.

     “I have this kind of dream,” I said, “all the time: I’m lost, or I’m in the wrong place; and I can’t get unlost or away.

Quentin Crisp again.

   “Last night – this is just an example – I was the ‘poor relation’ at this huge, luxurious, elaborate wedding party, a full weekend of it. Clearly I didn’t belong. I didn’t have the clothes for it. I kept unpacking and unpacking my suitcase onto the bed, while the old man I was sharing a room with, festively but precisely overdressed, was watching me. For the first night’s dinner I had an almost acceptable pair of slacks and a navy blazer that fit well enough; I had a shirt and a choice of ties, but whoever had packed for me – I hadn’t packed for myself: I had a dozen ties, most of which I’d never seen before, and two-week’s worth of underwear and socks; I kept pulling things out of the suitcase and onto the bed – it seemed bottomless. But whoever had packed for me hadn’t put in my black shoes. All I had, however much I might look, were these beaten-up brown clodhoppers. The old man was shaking his head, mocking sympathy - so sad, disappointed, confounded - as I decided what choice did I have? and put on the shoes.

     “Some young boys, brothers of the bride, burst out of the hallway into the room. They were perfectly dressed: their slacks were perfect, their blazers perfect, their ties perfectly knotted, their hair cut and combed as by professionals, their shoes a gleaming black - stairstep versions of Barron Trump in the inaugural parade. They looked at me, then at the old man - they knew each other, they all belonged; he shook his head. They looked again at me; they laughed and ran out.

     “I looked at the old man, tiny and bright in a huge burgundy-leather Queen Anne lounge chair. He laughed. The dinner bell rang.

     “I was thinking – in the dream – I was thinking, ‘I don’t need this.’ As we went out of our room and he turned right, I turned left: There had to be back stairs – I would go down them and out the back door and . . . away.

     “‘Hey!’ he said. I waved without turning around. And I woke up.”

“Mmmm,” Dr. Feight said.

     “For once,” I said, “I was getting out of this wrong place – I was getting out. Then I woke up, so I didn’t. The dream ended before I got away, so I got away but I didn’t.”

     “What woke you up, do you think?” Dr. Feight asked.

After our session, I took Uncle Albert for a cup of coffee as I’d promised. I can have a second cup of coffee at two in the afternoon; and it was past two by the time we got to the coffee shop. My appointment was at one.

     “He was wearing a scarf,” I told Uncle Albert – I was talking about the man in my dream – “and a matching pocket handkerchief, a black felt hat with an enormous brim forward and back but narrower, it looked like, on the sides – what would you call it? - and glossy-black Chelsea boots.”

     Uncle Albert, who knows almost everything about everything, said he thought he knew what kind of hat I was talking about, but he wasn’t sure what it was called: “Slouch?”  

02.17.17

Angel Gabriel

to listen, click here

 Angel Gabriel 

Marcel

Uncle Albert asked me two things this morning. First, when, if ever, were we going to get out of the house? If I was going to stay penned up for the foreseeable future, he wanted to know; he was going to call a cab and get a ride at least to the coffee shop we went to once, where even if no one talked to him, he could see different people and smell different smells. And the cab driver would talk to him, he was pretty sure. Second, did I know anything about Gabriel Marcel?

     I didn’t know, I said, when I was going to get out; I did have an appointment at two with Dr. Feight, if I went. (I’d ducked out of my Monday appointment, though I did call to say I wasn’t able to come.) If he didn’t mind sitting in the waiting room while I was in with the doctor, we could go somewhere after – if I went.

     I didn’t know anything about Marcel. Did he invent the wave? “No,” Uncle Albert said, “he didn’t.” Then: “Don’t ask me how I know this, but that was another Frenchman, François.” “Maybe they were related,” I said.

The question about Gabriel was related, it turned out – loaded. It also had to do with my not getting out, my crispation (contracting) into a shell of indisponsibilité.  

     “You think of yourself as a philosopher,” Uncle Albert said – to which I responded I did not. “You would like to think of yourself as a philosopher,” Uncle Albert said – which I wish were not true. According to Marcel apparently, Gabriel, who was a philosopher, a real one, the primary task of the philosopher is to be disponsible, “disposed, available,” and that meant “to . . . whatever might be out there,” Uncle Albert said. He went on to compare me to a roly-poly being poked at by a pencil, “except the pencil is imaginary,” he said, “in your mind.”

Riich

I thought – I’m sorry, but this is what I thought – I thought, “Fuck this shit. Fuck this shit. Fuck this shit!” But I said, “Okay, fine” by which I meant we’d get out.

     “Good,” Uncle Albert said. “I won’t mind waiting, but we do have to go somewhere after.”

Out the window: sun. But it’s cold, and the wind is poking at the tops of the trees, hard, and they can’t roll up, or run away, though they are trying to.

02.16.17

MIA

to listen, click here

  MIA  

As Bad as a Mile

Watching the shied core

Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,

Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading back up the arm

Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,

The apple unbitten in the palm.

                                                - Philip Larkin

 02.15.17

Fourteen Fun Valentines

 Fourteen Fun Valentines - Links below! 

12 o'clock: Agamemnon and Annette Funicello   |   1 o'clock: Barbarella and Bob the Builder   

2 o'clock: Confucius and Katy Perry  |  3 o'clock: Francis of Assisi and Lola Falana   |   4 o'clock: Teresa of Avila and Tarzan of Jungle   |   5 o'clock: Lady Jane Grey and Lonesome George Gobel   |   6 o'clock: Nebuchadnezzar and Nancy Drew   |   7 o'clock: Orrin Hatch and Oscar Wilde   |   8 o'clock: Hillary Rodham and Henry VIII   |   9 o'clock: Queen Elizabeth I and Quentin Crisp the Only   |   10 o'clock: Sappho and Sara Teasdale   |   11 o'clock: Socrates and Sandra Dee   |   center of the dial: Mary Queen of Scots and Murray Slaughter   | hour and minute hands: Isabel Archer and Iggy Pop

More Valentine's Day fun: make up your own!

02.14.17

Sainte Anne

to listen, click here

 Sainte Anne 

“You think,” Uncle Albert was saying, “that you might like to meet people that feel more intensely than you do, but you don’t.”

     “Mmmm?” I said, waiting. We were sitting on the sleeping porch, he in the rocker and I on the edge of the narrow bed. The porch is lined with book shelves on the inside wall except over the bed and on the outside under all the windows. He had a used paperback I’d picked up somewhere thinking I’d read it more often than I have, Contemporary American Poetry.

     “Did you ever see a picture of Anne Sexton?”

     “I may have.”

     “She must have been lovely to look at,” he said. He started reading “Music Swims Back to Me” –

Wait Mister. Which way is home?

They turned the light out

and the dark is moving in the corner.

He stopped. “And so on,” he said.

Later, when he’d gone to his room for his before-lunch “lie-down,” I picked up the book. Page 318. I must have read the poem at one time, because there were notes in the margin in my handwriting, something about “making excess simple” and (the one word in small caps) “Husserl.” What I was thinking: at this point, who knows?

Anne Sexton's chair

I sometimes sleep in that single bed on the sleeping porch; sometimes I sleep with Roz in what I increasingly think of as her bed (in her room), sometimes on the double bed in the front bedroom where my desk is, sometimes on the couch in the living room, sometimes on the couch in the room with the TV, sometimes in a chair, sometimes on the floor. Wherever I sleep the dreams have preceded me – they are waiting for the middle of the night to pounce; and when I wake up my brain hurts and my joints, shoulders, elbows, fingers, hips, knees, ankles. The day almost never begins well. I am up by 6:30, but I am never easy before 10:00.

     The uneasiness hasn’t to do with feeling life more intensely than others though. I’m not sure what it has to do with to tell you the truth.

After I read through the poem - “There are no sign posts in this room,” and so forth* - I went down the back stairs to see if Roz had made sandwiches for lunch. She hadn’t, but in the refrigerator on the top shelf were strips of bacon, slices of tomato, and torn lettuce on a plate wrapped in cellophane. There was a sticky-note attached: “Add mayo! (There is bread in the bread box.)”

The weather today is bright enough to hurt your eyes if you stare too long out the window. 

02.13.17

_______________

 * The entire poem is on the audio.

Misfigured

to listen, click here

 Misfigured  

Uncle Albert and I were both under the mistaken impression that this was Transfiguration Sunday, so we decided to skip church. But we were both up very early: Uncle A was already at the kitchen table with his tattered copy of La Rochefoucauld when I came down. That was shortly after six.

     I started the coffee pot and sat down opposite him. “What’s the word from the wise?” I asked.

     “What I’m looking at right now,” he said: “‘Les vieux fous sont plus fous que les jeunes.’ ‘Old fools are more fools than young fools.’ I’m not sure I agree.”

     “Hmmm,” I said, having nothing else to say. Then, “Since we’re up – speaking of foolishness . . . Since we’re up, we might as well go to church. Grit our teeth, when Jesus starts glowing.”

     Roz padded in just then, shaking her head: “There’s a seven-thirty service at your pal’s Lutheran church – I saw in yesterday’s paper. Maybe they’ll make less of it than the Episcopalians.”

     “Couldn’t make more of it,” Uncle Albert said, “I don’t think.”

Kurt Waldheim in the rain.

So, we decided we’d do that. I hadn’t seen Axel Sundstrøm in ages, I realized. But I didn’t see him this morning either; apparently he’s on vacation.

     Presiding in his place was Kurt Waldheim, not the fascist former U.N. general secretary but the almost equally ancient pastor emeritus of Grace Lutheran, who did not so much preach as free associate on the passage from the sermon on the mount, the antitheses: “You have heard . . . but I say . . . .” About adultery he practically cackled: “‘But I say to you that anyone who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery.’ Jesus was obviously speaking to a younger crowd. At my age lust is like a speck in the eye – you can’t get it out, it stays there.”

We were home in time to watch almost all of the Burnley-Chelsea match, a good one with a good result. Then we had our Sunday morning breakfast: croissants with marmalade, a cheese-eggs-sausage medley, apple sauce, juice, and more coffee. Sunday is the one day of the week I am allowed three cups of coffee.

I looked up Transfiguration Sunday; it’s the 26th, we were three Sundays off.

     This Sunday as morning becomes afternoon it begins to rain.

02.12.17