The feast of St. Mark

 The feast of St. Mark 

M. M.

Today is the Feast of St. Mark, and one of the readings of the day (an alternate reading admittedly) is Mark 16:15-20. But, the reading from the TRV (Ted Riich Version) must begin with verse 9, since that’s where this part of the story actually starts, with Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene.

Listen here.*

Here endeth the reading.

And here begins this day. Drivers in Atlanta are crashing into each other’s cars. Politicians in D.C. are giving their aides instructions in rewriting the facts, reinventing the truth. Young women in Prague are making porn films. Old men in Tampa are firing up their laptops.

     And today’s disciples of Jesus are wondering momentarily what to think of it all. “What would Jesus do?” some ask. But, of course, he would do just what they would do themselves.

04.25.17

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 *The story may be read here.

gnomes with drums

 gnomes with drums 

Today’s bit of wisdom - because wisdom always comes in bits - is from Palladas of Alexandria, a teacher of classics (ancient, pagan literature) in the age of the rise of Christianity, that is, sometime during the late fourth or early fifth century. Scholars differ about his dates, but he was almost certainly affected by the campaign of destruction and plundering of pagan temples under Bishop Theophilos (“friend of God”).

     Palladas lost his teaching job, but he seems to have come to terms with Christianity’s “violent advent,” as one scholar has described it; his marriage may have been preparation, as Palladas describes it. He (Palladas, not the scholar) continued to find buyers for his books even after he left academia; he seems even to have found work, though it’s unclear what the work was.

     What he didn’t find was relief in marriage or belief in the Christian God. (Which was a worse trial, “the unknown God” or “the unnamed wife,” is another matter of scholarly disagreement.) Palladas did seem to have found some sustenance, however, in a poetry that has been described as Swiftian, “imbued with [the] deep-rooted, bitter pessimism,” that has comforted many an unhappily married, and many an ungodly,  man.

Tony Harrison’s marvelous translation: Fate didn't hustle Gessius to his death.
                                                                           He ran there well before it, out of breath.

I have known some philosophers, some of whom I have also enjoyed knowing; but for the most part, as soon as they start trying to figure out how things work – instead of how this thing works and that thing works and the third doesn’t – they leave me behind. I still don’t see why tomorrow should be anything like today, which as far as I can tell doesn’t resemble yesterday even if/when wears the same shirt and pants. I don’t see how Australian butterflies are connected with Danish bees, except that we are convinced they must be. I’m not sure we wouldn’t all be happier if the law of gravity were repealed.

     So, I have to absorb the little wisdom that I can from people – like Palladas – that don’t know shit about metaphysics so have to talk about one thing at a time.

You can find that kind of one-off, antick wisdom almost every day on my Facebook page or my Twitter feed. Tech services says you can get to either by clicking somewhere over in that ➠➠ direction. Or, you can some days.

04.18.17

easter monday morning

 easter monday morning 

I got a call this morning from my old friend, Gaspar Stephens: “I was thinking of you yesterday. Mel Ball called me to tell me you’d been ‘under the weather’ – or the weather had become too steep for you: you were trying to roll a bale of cotton up clouds too sheer.” 

     “Yeah,” I said.

     “I told him I’d been reading the blog, but I thought it was fiction.” 

     “Every word that follows makes the previous fiction, didn't you tell me that? I mean, once you write down the second word, it's a lie isn’t it?” 

     “Well, yeah. A ‘story’ anyway . . . .  But: you’re okay?” He sounded genuinely concerned, though it’s hard to tell on the phone. Or across a room, or from the other side of the bed.

     “Not exactly,” I said. I thought a minute. “But the clouds are getting, how shall I say? ‘shallower’?”

Gaspar didn’t say anything for a minute. Then:

     “Ball also said, ‘Happy Easter.’”

     “Yeah?”

     “ . . . And I told him, shit, I didn’t realize it was Easter.”

     “We went to church, Uncle Albert and I, but to the early one, so we didn’t have to listen to the strings. Bart went with us. Roz's son.”

     “Yeah, I get that. I mean that you went to the early, non-folderol service. Did I ever tell you my dad refused to use the word, which he said was ‘pagan’? - as if Easter were a goddess with great breasts and a greater laugh. To say her name would set her cavorting naked through the graveyard behind the ‘kirk.’”

     “I always liked your dad,” he said after a brief pause. Then there was another pause: “Until he cut out on your mom. Though that may have been good, right? He also cut out before he could get his sticky fingers too far into your head and up your gut.”

Gaspar's dad and God -
not sure which is which.

Gasper wrote once about his dad, whom he likened to God, because even when he was absent – a lot of the time since he was a missionary of some sort, one that didn't take his family with him – even when he was absent, he was as constantly interfering as God, always meddling though with what Gaspar called – I just found his letter, dated April 22, 1995, the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. God, he said, kept wanting to pretend he wasn’t really there; he operated with “deniable intrusion.”

I’m not talking about the God that shines the sun and sends the rain, or the God that preachers and politicians petition, but the God that meddles in our affairs, the doings and non-doings of little people like you and me, of children. I’m talking about the God that pinches our brains between his thumb and forefinger and pokes at our hearts with darning needles, that sticks his fat middle finger up our anuses or down our throats and plays with our guts – constipates and diarrheas and gags and nauseates us – that uses the rough whorls of that same finger to sandpaper our nerves.

     That was my dad, relying on his ability to make heads hurt, our hearts go out of rhythm, to rattle our entire digestive apparatus, so it was shaking in every twist, turn or sack of it, to scrape his nails across our skin till it was as raw as one huge picked-at-scab.

     The omnipresence of that part God isn’t in the world, as I see it - omnipresence isn’t omnipotence; it's not in the world - it’s in us, it’s on us, it’s sticking like permanent peppermint candy to our every finger - it’s not the power to move mountains, it’s the shriek in the night that shivers our nerves.
 

So, that was my Easter Monday morning.

04.17.17

Not standin' in the need of prayer - or anything else

 Not standin’ in the need of anything 

He kneels on the earth in Blake's engraving. It's an empty place except for his friends hexing him with varying degrees of concern and satisfaction. We love to give good advice to those that need it.

     Later we say: “I really didn’t want to interfere, but he had wandered so far off the mark, someone had to say something.” “Yes, whether he listened or not. That was his decision, wasn’t it? Ultimately! You can only say what you know to be true.” “Say what you know to be true? – what everyone knows to be true. But he’s the one that has to do something about it.”

     It’s an intervention for Job’s own good. Oh, admittedly, as much for the good of the interveners (Eliphaz and Bildad* and Zophar), who do wish their friend would straighten up and fly right – and especially exercise a modicum of modesty – but who also want to get on the record. Then, they can go home and tell their wives with a shrug, “Well, we did what we could.”

Job’s own wife is behind him, not hexing but pleading: “Think of me,” gently. She may well be thinking herself, “The man is a jackass”; but he’s long been her jackass. And she doesn’t yet know that she’s going to die because of this particular piece of jackassery.

Finally, there is Job. Kneeling. Proudly. Hands open at his sides. Naked from the waist up, gazing into the distance though away from the hills from hence his help might come. Proud, sad, and, especially, knowing. Proud. Thinking, “פוק you guys.

     “פוק you all.” It’s the refrain of the self-righteous in every age. And Job is – don’t believe anything else you may have read or will read – Job is the epitome – he is the definition - of self-righteousness. His friends are wrong; his wife is misguided; God, if He is God of the Righteous, is on the wrong path entirely. But not Job; he is right. Job Job’s-self can confidently say, “פוק you guys. פוק everyone and Everyone of you. פוק you very much.”

And they are – all but God** – they are פוקך – wife, children, friends and foes alike, not to mention every sheep, goat, bird, and bush from one side of the Ponderosa to the other. All will פוקין die and rot into the ground. Every buzzard will die, every hyena – there will be nothing to poke at the bones.

     But not Job. He will live, and he’ll get everything back seventy-times-seven-fold. And he’ll die not of wind, fire, sword, or plague; he’ll die in his bed as self-righteous as the day Blake got out his Brownie and snapped his picture.

04.11.17

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 * Answer to that greatest of all Bible trivial questions, “Whose the shortest man in Scripture?” [Bildad the Shuhite]

** The doctrine of aseity. God cannot be פוקך.

dos marinos

Lorca, Barbarous Nights

 dos marinos 

     Dos Marinos en la Orilla

        Federico García Lorca

        1

Se trajo en el corazón

un pez del Mar de la China.

A veces se ve cruzar

diminuto por sus ojos.

Olvida siendo marino

los bares y los naranjas.

Mira al agua.

        2

Tenía la lengua de jabón.

Lavó sus palabras y se calló.

Mundo plano, mar rizado

cien estrellas y su barco.

Vió los balcones del Papa

y los pechos dorados de las cubanas.

Mira al agua.

I am sitting in the rocker on the upstairs sun porch, listening to Tito Puente. The old dog is curled up – so far as his old bones will let him – on the rug at my feet.

     I have read “Dos Marinos” twice through. I read it again. I am looking for a word or a phrase to float up from the page and into my mouth; I will swallow it, see how it sits on my stomach.

     Two phrases pick at me. I am wondering how the first sailor can have forgotten the bars and the oranges – maybe some of them, but surely not all – and what does his forgetting have to do with his sailoring. And, I am wondering about what the pope on his balcony has to do with the golden breasts of the Cuban women. It’s not that I believe they are not connected, both no doubt proudly on display. Vanity!

 “Vanity, vanity,” saith the Preacher. “All is vanity!”

Maybe so. And maybe not. Is the vanity of the Pope, dressed in his rich robes and high miter, the heavy cream-colored cloth stitched with gold thread, not only vain but also breathtakingly real for the faithful. He raises his right arm, extends his first and second fingers, and they receive his blessing. This day at least will go well.

     And the full, creamy-golden breasts of the Cuban women, nipples the color of dark rum pushing against the thin cloth of their dresses, they are not air, they are flesh: And why shouldn’t they be proud of them? The sailor that gazes on them, why shouldn’t he feel blessed? This afternoon and evening will go well.

     This day, this afternoon and evening, will they be forgotten, too, like the bars of other evenings ashore, the oranges for breakfast the next morning. (How do we forget?)

I read the poem through again - and again. So what do I see now? What do I hear, taste, smell, what rubs against my skin?

     My mind wants everything to come together in one place, a bar on the beach at Varadero, orange trees in the courtyard, a large, stuffed fish mounted high on one wall, a stylized photo of the Pope giving his blessing instead of a television over the bar. And at the bar, the women in their low cut dresses, leaning toward the sailors. The sailors inhaling their perfume mixed with the tangy smell of the oranges, and the sharp salt of the sea air. They raise their eyes from the golden breasts and look over the golden shoulders and out the open window to the water, rising into gentle hills and washing against the shore.

For all its attractions, we can’t seem to stay – we can never quite be - where we are. We are always thinking of where we must be going.

     That is why all is – all this, everything now (the Pope, the golden breasts, the rocker, the dog, Tito Puente, the sun on my shoulders) – all here and now is vanity, as the Preacher cries out, a mist [הבל]^ we keep squinting to see through. Across from where I sit, several books on Revelation. Catching my eye: Harrington’s Understanding the Apocalypse, the ultimate looking away from the present –"Forward, forward!" it cries. (Everlastingly forward!)

     Forward not to the orange I may eat at lunch, not to wondering this evening at Roz’s nakedness as she changes for bed, not even to imagining some future trip to Havana or Rome, but dragged by the longest of ropes into the fictitious time way, way, and way away from here when a sword-wielding Christ will come swooping down with his band of angry angels, one of whom will surely lop off my head.

04.10.17

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 ^ The Hebrew translated “vanity” means literally “fog” or “mist.”

espesura de besos

 a thicket of kisses 

 

    Variación

       Federico García Lorca

     El remanso del aire

     bajo la rama del eco.

     El remanso del agua

     bajo fronda de luceros.

     El remanso de tu boca

     bajo espesura de besos.

My Spanish isn’t very good – that’s an understatement – but I feel as if I almost understand this little poem which avers there are still waters, a haven, a safe harbor underneath, or behind or within, quite dangerous things: a multiplication of echoes, a dazzle of stars, a thicket of kisses.

I wish the poem were more first-person, if that makes sense, the last verse

     El remanso de mi boca

     bajo espesura de tus besos.

Garcia Lorca, El Beso

I am remembering a time a girl I had been dating – we met for a movie, because we had stopped and were seeing other people. Then, afterward, down the street from the theater, in the dark around a corner, she turned and rocked to her toes and kissed me so hard our teeth knocked together. How many quiet times beneath – or since – that kiss I have thought of it?
      And how many times when I have thought about it, have I wondered when desire for that kind of desire, passion that knocks people’s teeth together so they hurt or creates a thicket of rough kisses between their lips – when did desire for that kind of desire go out of my life? I usually think immediately (even now when I am almost sixty), “No. That’s not right.” Because the desire for desire remains. It’s the foolish spirit to sneak away and to look for it around a dark corner; that’s what we decided one clear, earnestly sober day to misplace with a sad but relieved sigh.

     Because we had become unconvinced that there is un remanso beneath desire’s danger to catch us when we fall.

04.06.17

Pontius Pilate

Sorry, no audio today. Pepsi.

 Pontius Pilate 

Can we begin anything truly new until the old is forced out (or in the unlikely event it leaves of its own accord)?

Pontius Pilate
Berlin, 1938

I found The Master and Margarita on the floor under a chair this morning, because when I’d finished reading it, I couldn’t put it back on the shelf. It wouldn't let me let it go. I leafed through it. Chapter 2 - “Pontius Pilate.” He’s never going away, is he? – at least not until the last person that (not only says but) affirms the creed - “suffered under Pontius Pilate” - dies, and his grandchildren stop telling stories about him.

Bulgakov (fils) was neither theologian nor philosopher; he was only trying to figure out how the world works, and how it doesn’t work more of the time than not. There are too many loose ends. As soon as you come up with even a partial explanation, a cat wanders in that doesn’t fit where you're going or something you were certain was essential disappears with not even a silent fart.

     And whatever God’s place in it – the cranky world or your explanation of it – it must be off-stage. In the meanwhile, Weiland and his henchman are – Mischief is – as ludicrously in charge as anyone. Mischief or fate, fortune, or luck: All are unpredictable; how they function cannot be explained. It can be described. You can write a story about it, but the story must begin before its beginning – thus the Pilate chapter in The Master and Margarita; and it won’t end at the bottom of the last page: the merry bandmust be off, on its way to another confusement. Maybe the current political crisis is their doing. American capitalist democracy is these days no less foolish than Soviet-style communism was in those; indeed, if some predictions of how the climate will change are correct, it may be more deadly.

I had written this and printed it out, and I was going over it. Roz had come home to check on me, and she was reading over my shoulder.

     “As usual,” she said, “what’s the point?” I took my crayon and circled “on its way to another confusement.”

     “That’s the point,” I said. “That’s almost always the point.

     “If there has to be one,” I said.

04.04.17