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