For the love of God, man!

 For the love of God, man! 

In William Carlos Williams’ “A Love Song,” purity becomes stain, light becomes dark, what should float in the air falls in a steady drip.

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colors
Of the whole world.

There’s more to the poem than that. But there is that, smack dab in the center of it. There is love that stains, that turns white yellow, that consumes, that smears. There is love that is not transparent but thick, that coats like honey - or motor oil - that smothers. It is not only that white has been turned yellow but sky-blue purple; green is becoming gray, and brown smells like burnt cork.

   It doesn’t matter on or near which buckle of the Bible belt 

   you live, my friend Gaspar Stephens says, the God you wor-

   ship and adore and follow looks and acts something like
   Cliven Bundy. He loves his children, if some better than
   others; but for their own good he takes no shit from any
   of them or anyone else.

It’s the love of a woman - or a man - that doesn’t wish to caress but to scratch. It is the love of a parent that doesn’t wish to hold but to beat some sense into. 
     It is the love of a God that desires justice as He defines it, a God that desires discipline as He orders it and One that will beat us to within an inch of our lives to get it; it is the love of a God that knows why the blind are blind, the deaf are deaf, and the dumb cannot speak. One that has no desire heal the sick - they are sick for a reason. Or to lift up the poor - let them stay down. A God that will not set free the oppressed for they need to be under someone's thumb.

     Who have ears let them hear.

06.27.17

Jesop's Farables: when the lamb lay down with the wolf

Jesop

 Jesop’s Farables 

“when the lamb lay down with the wolf”

A lamb fell asleep at its mother’s side, but when he awoke he found she was gone; instead, he found himself nestled next to a wolf. “Where’s my mother?” the lamb bleated, waking up the sleeping wolf. “Your mother's gone to heaven,” the wolf yawned, “where the pastures are always green.” Comforted, the little lamb rolled over and went back to sleep.

06.23.17

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 * Jesop’s Farables (online reproduction of the 1887 edition) are available here.

Jesop's Farables: snow and cold

 Jesop’s Farables 

Jesop

“snow and cold”

In late March, somewhere in the borderless expanse that is now northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, Snow was bragging to a reindeer that he had grown so tall he would soon exceed the beast in height. Cold, who didn’t like Snow because he covered the beauty of the frozen ground and who could not bear boastfulness, overheard and said to himself, “Surely, it is time to leave here for the South.” He did. Snow began to shrink. Before long he was no higher than the deer’s ankles.

06.22.17

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 * Jesop’s Farables (online reproduction of the 1887 edition) are available here.

Jesop's farables: two crows in a field

Jesop

 Jesop’s Farables 

“two crows in a field”

Two crows found themselves in a field near Roanoke, poking about the same dead mouse. “There’s enough for both of us,” one said. “Certainly,” the other replied. Then, he asked, “Where are you from?” “Here,” the first crow answered. “I was born not far from where we’re standing.
     “Where are you from?” he then asked to be polite. “I blew in on the wind,” the other said.

                                                           06.21.17  

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 * Jesop’s Farables (online reproduction of the 1887 edition) are available here.

Jesop's Farables: the fox and the grape-buyer

Jesop*

 Jesop’s farables 

“the fox and the grape-buyer”

A certain fox owned a fruit stand on a corner in Jerusalem. One day a man came to complain about some grapes that he had bought there. “These grapes are sour,” the man said. “Well,” the fox replied, “they looked sweet on the tree.” 

06.19.17

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 * Jesop’s Farables (online reproduction of the 1887 edition) are available here.

Aesop, Jesus, and Jesop

 Aesop, Jesus, and Jesop

The Fābeler. We don’t know where he came from or where he went, when he lived or if he died. Aristotle thinks he was born in the late 7th century bce along the Black Sea in Thrace. Phaedrus, who translated his fables into Latin, thought he was born in Phrygia. The third-century poet Callimachus thought he came from Sardis. Other writers have said Lydia. He may have died at Delphi, thrown from a cliff because the authorities didn’t like the stories he was telling. He may never have been in Delphi, and just because he was thrown from a cliff doesn’t mean he hit the ground.

The Parābler. For his coming-from and his going-to we do have one set of records, but they don't always agree. Two manuscripts put his birth in Bethlehem. One says he spent part of his boyhood in Egypt. Four are pretty sure he grew up in Nazareth. For his birth, we guess sometime before the turn of the era (the one he turned), for his death maybe in the thirties in the era he turned it to. There are no dates with years attached to them in any of the records. They all agree he was crucified in Jerusalem because the authorities didn’t like the stories he was telling, but just because he was crucified doesn’t mean the crucifixion took.

The Farābeler. Medieval records aren’t much better than records from 500 bce or 100 ce. So, he may have come from England, that is one story, and he may have come from France according to another story; he may have been a figment of another’s imagination.  According to the introduction of the collection I have, he told stories that the authorities didn’t like, or the critics, or much of anyone. Saddened, he walked away from Nottingham and into the forest and was never heard of again.

Still, some of the stories live on. The 19th-century collection I acquired I don't know how (Jesop’s Farables - London, 1881) contains two dozen printed stories but also 50-some blank pages.

06.18.17

Hot dogs for lunch

to listen, click here

 Hot dogs for lunch 

with all the trimmings: chili, onions, green pepper, mustard, ketchup, pimiento cheese (!)

The usual Thursday routine: I picked up Uncle Albert; he went to Dr. Feight with me, sitting in the waiting room with his thoughts and the doctor’s odd collection of magazines, while I tried to untangle my own thoughts, lying on Dr. Feight’s couch.

     It was not a good session. I had nothing to say that I wanted to and many things to say that I didn’t want to, so I started to talk about how I left the woman I was seeing before I met Roz and before she (the woman) could leave me. Then I stopped midway through the story because I wanted to say something about my sisters - it seemed somehow pertinent. Then it didn’t seem pertinent, so I stopped again. And Dr. Feight looked tired when he opened the door to let me in. He seemed tired; at least, he didn’t call me to account but let me ramble this way, stumble over that and even fall, and get up to set off in a different direction. Only at the end of the session did he say anything: the usual “Well, that’s all the time we have for today,” but also “You’re sad today, aren’t you?”

     I said, “I don’t know. I guess so, but I don’t know why.”

     “Mmmm,” he said. “Usual time on Monday?”

     I nodded.

I took Uncle Albert home with me because when I’d had friends in for lunch two days before, I’d done hot dogs with all the trimmings, and I wanted to get rid of a few more hot dogs, a few more trimmings, and, I hoped, finish off the potato salad. And he, Uncle Albert, was willing.

     I don’t do anything fancy with hot dogs, just heat them up in a frying pan with a splash of beer and a tablespoon or two of the chili. I poured what was left of the beer into two whiskey glasses, and we sat down to eat.

Uncle Albert said, “I read your blog, you know.”

     “I know,” I said, “you and 4 others.”

     “More than that,” he said. He paused: “At least 8.”

     “Thanks,” I said.

Moira

“You haven’t written anything in several days,” he said.

     “No, I guess not.”

     “Not since you wrote that fantasy about Moira,” he said.

     “No,” I said. I could feel the tears - they came up right away. They’re not behind your eyes, are they? but just on either side of the bridge of your nose, pushing upward. I looked across at Uncle Albert. He took a bite of the hot dog. I said, “I don’t think that’s the reason I haven’t written anything.”

     “No?”

It’s a part of my nature that I want people to be happy; whether they are or not, whether they want to be or not, whether they’re alive or dead,I want to think of them as happy. “Imagine what happiness would be like,” I think to myself. It’s odd then how often I find that what I’m imagining is set somewhere else, like Madrid - in a different country in a different time.

     I didn’t say any of this to Uncle Albert. I said instead, “No, I don’t think that’s it.”

     “Okay,” he said. “You make a good hot dog, I’ll say that.” He took a sip of beer.

06.16.17

Madrid on my mind

to listen, click here
for what's gone before, here

 Madrid and Moira on my mind 

Having escaped tying the rope around her neck and kicking the kitchen chair out from under her – what an extraordinary thing for a woman to do, especially one with no physical courage. But that’s a wrong thing to write. Write instead: “a woman who had never before displayed a drop of physical courage.” Having escaped all that, let's say, by having gone to Madrid ten or a dozen years earlier -

     There she would be sitting at a small café, outside in the gathering night. I don’t know where – I don’t know the city well enough – but not far from the Prado. She would have spent an hour there in the late afternoon, looking at El Greco’s John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist and wondering about the painter’s eyesight: Was there some sort of twist in one cornea or something about the way the image on his lens was transferred to his brain that made the world appear to him so elongated, narrowed, thorny? She could be thinking that, if she had the nerve to reach out and touch the picture, not only would some sort of alarm go off but her finger would be pricked; it might even begin to bleed.

     She would be telling this laughingly to those sitting with her, knowing she was mangling her story with her clumsy Spanish, making it even more comic than it really was. She felt herself tripping over her clumsy tongue, and she thought she could see the words stumbling into their clumsy ears, some of her fellow students gathered after their class: and they were smiling and laughing with her. The soft Russian was there across from her and to his right the tiny woman from Hong Kong; and to her – my sister’s – right the long, thin Angolan that might have been a shadow in one of El Greco’s works had not he, Agostino, been always so merry.

     Maybe he would come back with her to her room that night, Agostino, and they would “lie together.” That would be how she would be thinking about it, because that would mean to her that he would spend the night; they would sleep wrapped around one another. Maybe he would wake her, talking in his sleep in Umbundu. She would listen very, very carefully – with her brain as well as her ear. And she would ask him in the morning the meaning of the words. And there would be more laughing because she wouldn’t be able to get her tongue around them even as well as around her poor Spanish.

06.06.17

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 *It might have happened, if she had only gone to Madrid.