Jesus and Proverbs

 Jesus and Proverbs 

Stalled on Highway 17 somewhere between Mattawa and North Bay, waiting for a tow truck. Uncle Albert said, “The Book of Proverbs is snootful of snot - and by ‘snot’ I mean ‘lies’ - wrapped in a tissue of half-truths.”

     “Where did that come from?" Roz turned around and asked just as I said, “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

      Uncle Albert said, “It came from this. I was thinking of Jesus. What would he have said to it?”

      Neither of us said anything. Only, I turned around as well. “Think of the Sermon on the Mount,” Uncle Albert said, holding up his right hand, palm up. “Now think of Proverbs.” He held up his left and made a juggling motion like he was weighing Jesus’ wisdom on one side of a scale and Solomon’s on the other.

     Sometimes his knowledge of the Bible, great portions of it learned by heart in Methodist Sunday School beginning in 1927, astound me:

You have heard it said that “The blessing of the Lord makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.” But I say to you, “There are no riches that do not bring sorrow.”

You have heard it said, “The righteous is delivered from trouble, and the wicked gets into it instead.” But I to say to you, “Neither the righteous nor the wicked escapes.”

You have heard it said that “The fool will be servant to the wise.” But I say to you, “Who thinks he is wise is a fool.”

You have heard it said that, “A slothful man will not catch his prey, but the diligent man will.” But I say to you, “The prey catches the predator as often as the predator catches the prey.”

You have heard it said, “A cynic seeks wisdom in vain, but knowledge comes easily to a man of understanding.” But I say to you, “There are cynics among the understanding, and they know that true knowledge comes easily to no man.” You have heard also that “He who gets wisdom loves himself.” But I tell you that “The wise know better.”

You have heard it said, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” But I say to you, “Spare the child.” By the same token, you have heard that “You should wage war only by wise guidance.” But I say to you, “Seek no guidance, wage no war.” For those that have a passion for violence, their bones will rot from their passion.

Dave hears the end of
what Uncle Albert has to say.

Unfortunately, the guy that got out of the truck - his name was neither Sol nor Jesus (Hay-soos). It was Dave.

08.30.17

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Proverbs 10:22; 11:8; 11:29; 12:27; 14:6, 19:8; 13:24, 20:18, 14:30

Return to Canada: "Park"

 Return to Canada: “Park” 

The day before we left Ottawa:

     We picked up Uncle Albert at noon. He seemed none the worse for wear. If anything the enforced rest had been good for him: his voice was stronger, he leaned less on his cane, the tremor in his hands was almost unnoticeable.

Shirley Wiitasalo, Park, 1992
https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/park

     “Two things I want to see before we head out,” he said, “the cathedral where you did - and didn’t - pray for me” and across the street in the museum just one painting - “Luc said I should see it, ‘Park.’” He’d had Luc write down the artist’s name, “Shirley Wiitasalo.”

So, we did those two things.

     Especially after the runaway baroque flurry of the church, the painting has a peaceful look, but as if something in it is about to break. It may be in the way the shape of the tree in the foreground mimics the shape of the lamppost in the distance, so the winded tree looks more solid, the stolid lamppost more fragile. When I turn away, I will hear behind me glass breaking on pavement, the fizz of something electric hitting wet ground. When I turn back, there will be something bilious where the edges between yellow and green have gone out of focus.

     I looked at Uncle Albert, sitting in the chair we hired just to push him from the ticket desk to this one painting. “Reminds me of Harold Altman,” he said. “He died of heart failure.”

The next morning we set out for Sudury where landed what one the largest meteors ever to hit the earth, burrowing 9 miles into it.

08.26.17

Canada Interrupta: the parable of the city

to listen, click here

 Canada Interrupta 

Another parable, from Genesis 4. This is what he told them:

Is the kingdom of God like this?

     For it was the Lord that put a mark on Cain so that no one would kill him. But then he sent Cain away from his presence. And Cain lived from that time forward in the land of Nod, or Wandering, east of Eden. It was there the Elders invented guilt, for none wanted his daughter to act on her desire for Cain. But one came to know him nevertheless, and she became pregnant and had a son named Enoch, which in Urdu means hook. And he built a city, where guilt could be more easily hidden than in the villages or among the herding clans so that, sometimes at night on certain streets, it couldn’t be seen at all.

Is the kingdom of God like this?

08.25.17

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For links to other stories from the TRV, click here.

Snow White Snow Triptych

 Snow White Snow Triptych 

The next day, when I followed Roz into his room, he was sitting up in bed, Uncle Albert, and Luc DuBoisson was there leaning against the wall, and they were talking in French about a poem by Apollinaire - about angels. Here it is in French with Uncle Albert’s translation alongside:

And the poem means what it says, they were agreeing, no less and certainly no more. “It’s just the way most of us think,” Luc turned to English for my benefit, “excepting maybe British analytic philosophers and petroleum geologists.”

Speaking of which, analytic philosophers and petroleum geologists: across the street from Notre Dame is Canada’s National Gallery:

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Red Man Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in the Sky,
1990 acrylic on canvas, 142.3 × 226.1 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo © NGC. See here.

08.21.17

Inside Our Lady

 Inside Our Lady  

Blocking the aisles were signs in French and English to the effect, “Don’t move me, don’t cross this line. You can see and hear, can’t you? - that there’s a service going on.”

     But even if it, the service, is in French only, I can also see and hear that it is coming to an end. Soon, on his way out, the priest, a large man in a glaring white alb and shoes that look like either would go on either foot, will move the sign that blocks the center aisle and turn it around so it says nothing. Then, I can walk into the nave proper. I can peer around. I can sit in a pew. Then, what do I say to whom, who labeled the picture in my previous post, “Notre Dame, where we prayed for Uncle Albert”? (See here.)

What kind of prayers will I tell him I offered? Will I say to him at all, “We prayed for you?” Then, will Roz say, “Well, I didn’t”?

     And what will either of us mean? Do I mean only this, that “I sat in a pew in Notre Dame and worried about you"? Does Roz mean she didn’t worry? “I sat, because he sat,” indicating me, “but I wasn’t worrying about you but about how long we would be sitting there,” meaning breathing the scattered glitter of the windows, the candlesticks, the columns, the paraments, and the incense.

And how will Uncle Albert answer, tucked in up to his chin in a glaring white sheet? Will he say, as I suspect, “He does seem to have a fascination for those things; or, at least, he believes he should”?

08.22.17

Bytown

Notre Dame, where
we prayed for Uncle Albert

 Bytown 

In Ottawa, we were at the Andaz Bayard Market, when we weren’t at the hospital or praying at Notre Dame.

Uncle Albert brought us there to meet another former student of his that now taught at the University, another spidery man but not so short as Maynard Hale nor with as much of a sting, Luc DuBoisson. We all met for lunch. We all got sick. Uncle Albert ended up in the emergency room, where he was hooked up to an IV. Then, he was admitted to the hospital: there was worry that he might still become dehydrated.

He spent a night and a day. Then, he spent another night and another day, none of us was sure why. We spent another day in the city to rest up; then we went on to Sudbury.

08.21.17

et ait Maria

 et ait Maria 

It was raining as we waited to cross the bridge.* “Can you drive - in the rain - and answer a question at the same time?” Uncle Albert asked me.

     “I think so. Depends on the question.”

     “The Magnificat.”

     “What about it?”

     “Can you say it? I thought I could, but I can’t.”

     “I can,” Roz said.

     “How?” I asked.

     “How not?” Uncle Albert said.

     And she said, “I was Mary in the Christmas pageant once.”

     “It must have been a very elaborate pageant,” I said.

     “English or Latin?” Uncle Albert asked.

      She turned around, at him peered past her headrest:

magnificat anima mea Dominum

et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

      She paused a second:

for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
      and holy is his name.
His mercy is on those who fear him
     from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm,
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
he has put down the mighty from their thrones,
      and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
     and the rich he has sent empty away.
He has helped his servant Israel,
     in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
     to Abraham and to his posterity for ever.

“I was thinking just about the beginning,” Uncle Albert said. “Why does Mary - what is it? - ‘magnify the Lord.’ It’s because he’s looked on her with favor, isn’t it? - ‘the lowly estate of his handmaiden.’ There’s always a ‘because,’ isn’t there? We aren’t homo orans - is that what it would be? We aren’t praying creatures, not by nature. We pray because we want something or we’ve gotten something.

     “We’re not humble creatures either. Mary mealy-mouths ‘lowly estate of God’s handmaiden.’ The next words out of her mouth are this gleeful cry, ‘Now everybody from now on in all the world will be talking about me.’”

There was silence as we paid our toll.

     “Well?” Uncle Albert asked. He was talking to Roz. Or, I chose to think so; this wasn’t something I wanted to get into the middle of in the middle of the river.

    Then she said, “He has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.” Then she said, “Hand me your passport.”

Then we were in Canada.

08.17.17

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 * from Ogdensburg to Prescott. For the whole story from the end to the beginning, start here.

Not parthenogenesis

 Not parthenogenesis or a Jesuit, maybe or not a man named Smith

The next morning - the morning after the night in Dexter (See here.) - we went to the cemetery in La Fargveville, where Uncle Albert’s mother is buried.

     “Like you,” he said to me at breakfast as Roz was joining us, “Like you I had no father. That’s not quite right,” he said, looking at my dismay. “You did have a father for a time, though not a long one.” He continued looking at me. I looked up from my eggs.

     “No,” I said, “not a long one.” Roz was looking at me, too, I could tell. Then she turned to look at Uncle Albert.

     “A conversation for another time,” he said. “This is . . . As that is all about you, this is all about me.

     “Obviously, I had a father, too. I am not the result of parthenogenesis. But I never knew my father. I never knew who my father was. You know this, of course.”

     I hadn’t thought of it in a long, long time, but I did remember something of it; my mother had told me the story as she understood it. I nodded.

     “Your mother told you, but probably not the details.”

     “No.” I realized I knew so little about the story I didn’t even know until the night before why we had come to northern New York, that Uncle Albert was born and grew up there.

     Actually, he was born in Albany, where his unmarried mother was sent to live with an aunt before all La Fargeville knew she was pregnant. There she gave birth, and some months later with a new last name if no husband, she came back as far as Watertown, where Uncle Albert grew up.

     “I am not the result of parthenogenesis,” I heard, “but I never knew who my father was.”

He turned to Roz. “As little as he seems to remember,” he indicated me by tilting his head, “you must know none of this.”

     “No,” she said. “Nothing.”

“Actually,” he said, “there is nothing to know. No one found out who Mr. Smith was or if his name was actually Jones, or Black or Brown or Giallo. It certainly wasn’t La Farge, though that fanciful rumor circulated for a while. I enjoyed believing it, even though I knew it wasn’t true - that I was the bastard son of John La Farge, the Jesuit, son of John La Farge, the artist, son of Jean Frédéric de la Farge, who came up from New Orleans to buy land and turn Log Mills into La Fargeville. I knew it wasn’t true because it couldn’t have been. The La Farge mansion may belong now to a Jesuit university, and the Jesuit in question may have lived in the same state as my mother, but he did not get her into her state.”

       Uncle Albert stopped. Roz said, “Go on.” He waved her away. “There’s nothing more to tell,” he said. “As I said, there is nothing to know.”

After breakfast, we packed the car. We went to the cemetery and put flowers on Uncle Albert’s mother's grave.

     “What does the ‘C’ stand for?” Roz asked.

     “Creed,” Uncle Albert said.

We drove north northeast along Highway 37 through Hammond and Morristown to Ogdensburg. We crossed the bridge to Prescott and continued to Ottawa.

08.15.17

Matteus Interruptus

 Matteus Interperruptus 

We interrupt our journey to bring you this important message, as the TRV (Ted Riich Version) goes off message, Matthew 14 demythologized. As I understand it, that means making a story over so it makes sense to you.

     In this case, Jesus doesn’t walk on water but through it. Still the disciples are afraid.

Listen to the story here.

If you want to watch Jesus pop out of the water and scare the disciples, click below.

And remember, there is more damned foolishness where this came from. For links to all the stories from the TRV so far on audio and video, click here.

08.11.17

Hell-bent from Paradise: Near Watertown

Fourth in a series, that begins here.

 Hell-bent from Paradise: Near Watertown 

After lunch with Bart, Dominga, and Pocket JD, we - Roz, Uncle Albert, and I - went off Manhattan Island the same way we’d come on it via the George Washington Bridge. From there we took the Thruway around Albany and around Syracuse, then north to Watertown. We spent the night in a B&B on the water in Dexter.

Uncle Albert reclined and slept. And Roz and I listened to track after perfect track of Miles and Monk. We stopped only once at the Oneida Travel Plaza, where with the help of his whirring seat, we folded Uncle Albert at the hips, knees, and ankles and unfolded him again on the pavement, where he stood for a moment as if uncertain he wanted to move. Then, we all limped off to the bathroom and, that taken care of, to sit for a while in different kinds of chairs in a different place. Starbucks, where we drank short squat decaf coffees and ate long, slender crullers.

     Uncle Albert wanted to know what he had missed, and I told him about the music, the Miles and the Monk, how in “Blue in Green” from Kind of Blue, the muted trumpet slips out of the piano thin as a wire, how in “Body and Soul” from Monk’s Dream, every connected note disconnects and every disconnected note connects. Roz, who had been driving, had seen a red-tailed hawk in a dead tree, its gold eye glaring, “the color of Miles’ trumpet,” she said.

     “How could you see its eye?” Uncle Albert asked.

     “With the eye of my imagination,” Roz said. “What else you missed,” she said, “was a pair of bottle-blue Corvettes, “sliding around us nose to tail as if each were in the wake of the other.

     “What did we miss?” she asked then.

Uncle Albert looked at her. He looked at me and shook his head. Then: “I saw in my dream Aesop’s fable of the one-eyed deer that protected itself from hunters by grazing along the edge of the sea with its good eye toward the land: It was killed by a sailor.

          “At least that’s what I imagine I dreamed.”

The B&B in Dexter was very nice, did I say that? It was on the water.

08.11.17

Manhattan Island

 Hell-bent from Paradise: Manhattan Island 

Junot Diaz by m ball

We drove to New York City, coming into Manhattan by way of the George Washington Bridge, so we could leave Roz for the night and part of next day with son Bart, his paramour Dominga, and her son, the pocket Junot Diaz, Alfredo, now nine. (See here. We spent Thanksgiving with them in their cramped Washington Heights apartment two years ago.) 
     Uncle Albert and I went on to our hotel, the Andaz on Fifth Avenue. And he called the reason he was in New York, a former student recently retired from teaching at CUNY.

“Does he know you’re coming?” I asked when he told me why we were in the City.

“Sort of.”

    “Meaning what?”

    “I told him I might be by sometime this summer.”

    “Oh.”

We met him the next morning, a bantam spider of a man in black jeans and black t-shirt, gray jacket - gray hair scattered sparsely around his ears and around his mouth; we met him at a sidewalk table someplace in SOHO. He was there before we were and stood up when we were still half a block away, then walked briskly toward us, “Albert, mon oncle,” he boomed - a remarkably deep voice, not what I had suspected when he’d stood up. “Maynard [Meh -'närr],” Uncle Albert croaked, “Comment ça va?” “Bien, mon ami. Très bien.” And they embraced, the spider man practically crashing into the old man leaning on his cane. I reached out and put my hand on Uncle Albert’s shoulder, but it was steady. It began to shake only because both men began to laugh, aloud.

We sat. Introductions. Cups of coffee all around, sugared and creamed to the color of peanut butter. Then, they began “chattering like waves,” as the Philosopher put it, in French. I gave up three sentences in, sat back with my coffee and watched the people swarming the street as they came in and went out of focus, narrow men in a narrower suits and wider men in jeans and work boots, women in short, black jackets and skirts, in clicking high heels, and women in swirling ankle-length pleats and flat sandals, men and women black, white, yellow, cinamon, and the color of peanut butter - in and out of focus.

     Until I heard my name. “We are switching to English now,” the spider man was saying. “I didn’t say before, I should have: I am Maynard [Mā-'nahrd] Hale, May. Your Uncle Albert and I went through the war together, I was the battlefield.” May had been a student of Uncle Albert’s pretty early on, one of those students of the early sixties, May said, that started out in Physics then descended to Math, Economics, and Political Science. He took a junior year abroad in Paris living on coffee and cigarettes, then stayed in school a fifth year, so he could get in every course the French Department offered. He moved to Lyon, somehow talked his way into a job teaching in the lycee there, married, divorced, and eventually - “much battered about” - found his way “home.” “I grew up here, in the City.

     “God, I was so glad to get away, somewhere quiet, for college. But there’s been nothing quiet since.
     “Even though I live by myself,” he laughed.

I wondered what that was like, living by yourself. I found I had forgotten.

08.09.17

Hell-bent from Paradise: 'Once upon a time . . .'

 Hell-bent from Paradise: ‘Once upon a time . . .’ 

As all stories do, this one begins before its beginning. “Once upon a time . . .” connotes there was something before.

Uncle Albert was reading Thérèse Raquin for the third or fourth or tenth time. He was complaining to me that it was no better than when he’d read it the second, third, or ninth time. “It always begins well,” he was saying. “Then those fools Laurent and Thérèse kill Camille, Zola’s inner Del Tenney takes over, and the book becomes like a bad early-sixties zombie film. But, it will, I trust - it always has before - pick up again in the final third after Madame Raquin discovers she is living with her son’s murderers. The way Camille haunts Laurent and Thérèse becomes less spooky, less green and fishlike, less putrid - Zola loses interest in it. Laurent and Thérèse are no longer dealing every hour of the day and night with the slimy presence of the murdered man, and they turn back to the murder itself, and that they are murderers.

not Thérèse

     “They are no longer trying to escape Camille, because he has effectively disappeared; they are trying to learn what to do with what they have done and what they have become. The novel becomes once again psychological. Passion!: the lovers-haters rely on their passions to slake their guilt. It doesn’t matter that none of their experiments works - or none but the last. They are again themselves, the brutes Zola has assured us they were, not the hypersensitive souls they become in the middle section. Thérèse whores herself; Laurent beats her black and blue; they exhaust each other, so they can sleep.”

     “And?” I said.

     “And,” Uncle Albert said, “that’s it. They sleep.”

It was Thursday not long past noon. He was eating an egg; I was eating an egg; we were just back from seeing Dr. Feight in my case or reading his magazines in Uncle Albert’s.

     “I’ll finish it tonight,” he said.

     “Thérèse Raquin?” I said.

     “Yes,” he said. “And I can go back to listening to Patsy Cline.”

     I didn’t know if he was kidding. It didn’t look like it. And anyone that knew Del Tenney movies could well like Patsy Cline.

     “I’m going back to listening to Patsy Cline. And I’m going to plan a trip.”

Uncle Albert had met the mother of one of the co-eds that lives in the house he’s living in now, and he had discovered that she worked for a concierge service, a making-arrangements-for-just-about-anybody-for-just-about-anything service. You tell Jeeves’ Enormous Brain what you want and when you want it, and they make it happen. The co-ed’s name is Zenobia - her father is Syrian apparently, a dermatologist in Fairfax. The mother-that-works-for-Jeeves’ name is Ann-Marie; she grew up in Chicago.

     So Uncle Albert said.

 08.07.17

Hell-bent from Paradise: fine rerum

 Hell-bent from Paradise: fine rerum* 

We got home Saturday just before eight. I was driving. Dave Feather was riding shotgun. Uncle Albert was in the back, just short of fully reclined, his head just high enough I could see his face in the rearview mirror, just high enough that if he turned it, he could see out the window. But he didn’t turn his head; he was staring at the ceiling. I stopped the car in front of the house. Dave turned around to look at Uncle Albert. “You alive, sir?” he said.

     Uncle Albert groaned to indicate he was.

     “Good enough, then,” Dave said. “We’re letting Ted off here, then I’ll take you to your place. I’ve got a mat in my kip. I’ll sleep on the floor, make sure you’re all right.

     “Head home tomorrow, I guess?” he added. Home for Dave was Newberry.

We had just driven the 925 miles from Paradise here in one day.

                           ______________

the descent

It was the last leg of the journey.

     When it began in front of Uncle Albert’s place here, I was sitting where Dave was Saturday, shotgun; Roz was sitting where I was, behind the wheel; and Uncle Albert was sitting up in the back, tapping his cane on her headrest, saying, “Tally-ho! my dear.” We were going to New York City, to Watertown, to Ottawa, to Sudbury, to Paradise. Uncle Albert had made all the arrangements, for the luxury SUV with seats that were like luxury recliners, for the four-star hotels, for Roz’s plane trip home from Sault Ste. Marie, and, later, for Dave Feather to help me drive the 925 miles.

     Until that last arrangement was made - by telephone from Paradise - I was assuming I’d drive home alone. I was also at least half-assuming that Uncle Albert was going back to Paradise not only to stay but to die. Or, I imagined that he was. It made to me a sad sense that I couldn’t shake.

     But to die in Paradise was never his intention.

     His intention was to go back to Paradise via New York City, Watertown, Ottawa, and Sudbury. Then, he'd come back here, to what he now calls “home.”

Next: Why.

08.03.17

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 * We begin not in medias res but at the end of things.

On the road: introduction

Jesop by m ball

 On the road:
introduction to“Hell-bent from Paradise” 

One of Jesop's parables: “a man went on a journey”

A man went on a journey, telling his neighbor that he did not know when he would return. “In the meantime,” he told the neighbor, “please use my house as if it were yours,” for the man knew that the neighbor had a wife whose temper often got the better of her, and then his neighbor needed a place to escape to.

     When the man returned from his journey some time later, he found the neighbor had moved into his house and taken up with another woman, whose temper was even hotter than his wife’s. Indeed, the man found the angry woman settled into his house while the neighbor now spent most of his time at home with his wife.

  08.01.17  

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