Elsewhere . . .

 Elsewhere . . . 

Elsewhere in our not-so-grand media empire - on Facebook and Twitter [Follow here (Fb) and here (tw).] - are posts every Monday through Sunday: the wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans - and now(!) ancient Jews as well. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem!

     This week we feature sayings from that wise old fraud, Qoheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes. For example:

"They make sweet perfume sour - dead flies."

Again, follow here: Facebook . . . Twitter.

11.27.17

Saturday

 Saturday 

This past Saturday.

     Roz woke me before seven. “Uncle Albert,” she said, handing me the phone that had been ringing in my dream.

     “Yes?” I said.

     “When will you be here?” it asked. “Kick-off is seven-thirty.” It was talking about the Arsenal-Tottenham match. The Gunners are Uncle Albert’s team.

     “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said.

I was, if still a bit sleep-drunk. He was standing on the front porch that extends the width of the house he lives in. The young woman that served us lunch was with him. He was leaning on his cane. She had her arms wrapped around her shoulders. I started to get out of the car.

     “Stay there,” he said, waving his cane at me. She had taken his arm and was escorting him down the wooden stairs from the porch. Then, down the concrete stairs to the street. She took his cane from him and put it on the roof of the car. She held him lightly under his arms as he slid backside-first into the seat beside me. He maneuvered his feet into the vehicle; she handed him his cane.

     “You remember Maggie?” he looked at me. I waved at her across him. She dropped her fingers over her palm, shut the door, and turned; rewrapping herself in her arms, she turned and started back up the stairs.

To Uncle Albert’s delight, Arsenal beat Tottenham 2-0. Mustafi and Alexis Sánchez scored the goals.

Katje Ogbonna and Alexis Sánchez

     Roz made brunch for the three of us, waffles with a scattering of pecans and syrup, coffee blacker than anthracite, which I lightened with half-and-half and sugar. She was playing a CD of Cuban jazz, Rubén González bumping his piano against Carlos González’ congas bumping against Orlando “Cachaito” Lopez’ bass in a series of descargas.

     After, Uncle Albert lay under an afghan on the couch in the living room, snoozing, while I policed the kitchen. Roz went to meet her young friend from work, Katje Ogbonna, who told her, she said later, that the differences between black and white weren’t shades of gray but of fuchsia.

     “What did she mean by that?” I asked.

     Roz shrugged, but not as if she didn’t know, rather as if I should.

11.22.17

what it's like

 what it’s like 

It’s like when you see it well in advance and deke your way around a pile of dogshit on the sidewalk. Remember that youthfuldrunken lightness of mind, divided only into three parts, one directing the exaggerated action, one providing the commentary - “He fakes right, he goes left, and, oh my, did you see that?” - and one supplying the accompanying laughter: there’s the thrilling play, the breathless play-by-play, and the delighted response. We act. We watch. We watch ourselves watching.

It’s like that.

11.16.17

sleeping and waking

 sleeping and waking 

It’s harder and harder to get up in the morning - it’s the medicine. I fall asleep in the afternoon, sometimes while I’m drinking my second cup of coffee: I’m sitting on the couch; it’s on the table beside me. I’m listening to music - this afternoon it was Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version of “Don’t Think Twice.” I’m listening to music, and I’m trying to read - I’m working my way - for almost two months I’ve been working my way - through Naguib Mahfouz’ Cairo Trilogy. The coffee is on the table beside me; Kamal is getting ready to give up on love again - it is easier to be lonely - for however long it takes. I have a slice of headache behind my eyes, and I put the book aside, because of the headache and because the loneliness Kamal is choosing is too palpable. If I put the book aside, I won’t feel it as much. Peter, Paul, and Mary are singing Igavehermyheartbutshewantedmysoul. I put my feet up on the coffee table, sliding down into the back cushions of the couch.

Sometimes I sleep only ten minutes but sometimes two hours when it’s harder to wake up. It’s the medicine.

the time signature keeps changing

The grocery store is in walking distance. When I wake up, I look for a recipe. It has to be simple in the sense that it takes one step at a time; it can’t have “while” in it. It’s good if it has a lot of chopping; I like chopping, I’m good at it.

     After supper, I do the dishes. I’m good at that, too.

It’s not hard to go to bed; it’s not hard to go to sleep. But it’s hard to stay asleep. The dreams come, and I become anxious and have to get away. They’re not frightening, but I become anxious because they have “while” in them; the time signature keeps changing; the keys are all minor.

     It’s the medicine.

11.15.17

Duck. Soup!

 Duck. Soup! 

“What’s up?” I asked Uncle Albert because he’d asked me to lunch at his digs. I wondered what he might want.

     “Why should something be up?” he asks. “Nothing’s up,” he said.

     Then he said, “But what does it mean ‘she could eat me up’?” – referring to Maggie who’d made our lunch. [See here.]

     “It means,” I said, “that she’s not her mother. That’s something her mother would say, so she’s not saying it.”

     “But she did say it.”

     “Do you really like milk?” I said. “You said you did.”

11.10.17

Uncle Albert update

 Uncle Albert update 

Uncle Albert continues in the house he moved out of our house to. It’s nearby. He continues to share with the same two university students and construction worker that were there when he moved in in May.

     He continues to come here, but not every day anymore. I pick him up at nine, and he stays with me much of the day. Most days we eat lunch together. Monday and Thursdays late morning he rides with me to my appointments with Dr. Feight.

After I saw Dr. Feight this morning – or after I saw him and Uncle Albert read his magazines – we went to his "boarding house, as he calls it. (“I’m Major Hoople,” he sometimes adds.) He had invited me to lunch, which one of the young women he lives with had contracted with him to make for us.

     The young woman’s name is Maggie – she’s a sophomore from the Tidewater, majoring in biology. She loves Uncle Albert. She could “eat him up,” she says.

     “But that’s not what we’re having for lunch?” Uncle Albert says. Maggie looks at him, he smiles, she shakes her head. “No,” she says. Uncle Albert looks at me.

     “What then?” I ask her.

     “Tomato soup,” she says, “and grilled-cheese sandwiches.” And a glass of milk.

     “Do you like milk?” she asks.

     I say I do just as she says, “Albert likes milk.”

     I look at him: “You do?”

     “I guess I do,” he says.

     “You know you do,” Maggie says. “You’ve said so.”

Mae West

We sit down at the kitchen table, Uncle Albert and I. The soup smells good, and the sandwiches hiss in the frying pan. Then, Maggie is ladling the soup into bowls and levering the sandwiches from the pan onto plates and cutting them in half corner to corner. She puts the soup and then our sandwiches in front of us.

     “Serve from the left and take from the right,” she says under her breath, adding aloud, “though I won’t be here to take.” She has a class to rush off to. “But just leave everything on the table.” She’ll take care of “it all” when she gets back.

“Bye,” she says, looking back in on us an instant later, sheathed in a blue slicker with matching blue wellies.

     “Bye,” I say. Uncle Albert raises his glass of milk – he’s got a mouthful of grilled cheese.

“What’s up?” I ask as he swallows. “Why should something be up?” he asks. “Nothing’s up,” he says.

11.09.17

fallen

 fallen 

So, I don’t remember last November. Do you? I do remember voting, of course. And I remember the results – as you do. But do you remember what you were doing the Thursday after the Thursday of Election Week without consulting your calendar? Maybe I’m not alone.

     A sappy enough beginning? – the hero identifies a flaw in himself then invites the reader to find the same defect in him or her: we’re all in this fallen world together.

    

Sappy meaning “exploitative.”

The reader responds, “‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.’ Yes, the world is fallen, and we have fallen into it. But only you were in Bedlam by Thanksgiving.”

     I have smug, self-righteous jackasses for readers. And I thank God for you.

Always up to date as well as timeless, He responds, “No problem.”

11.07.17

. . . loose ends . . . .

 . . . loose ends . . . 

I like loose ends. They are one difference between life and fiction. So, I tend not to tie them up here. But in answer to two readers’ questions . . . .

            1.    “Your Uncle Albert was commiserating not long ago [See here.] because Roz’s 
          mother Patsy was visiting. What happened with that?”

            2.    “You didn’t go to lunch with Sundstøm and Fjeldheim (or Pettersen). Then what?”

The answer to the first question. Nothing happened. One of the many things I hadn’t thought of, one of the many things I wouldn’t anticipate: Patsy didn’t come.

Re the second [See here.] : Sundstrøm called this morning: “I’m sorry you missed Lonnevig," he said.  “He’s friends with your hero, Ezra Nehemiah.”

     “Ezra Nehemiah who?”

     “Give me a break. The author of that commentary on Ecclesiastes you read - you wouldn’t stop talking about it. It couldn’t have been more than a year ago.”

     “Oh.”

I went to my shelves - I have six of biblical commentaries, many of which I've actually read. There was a time in my life when I read commentaries like novels, from page one to the end - difficult novels admittedly, like Ulysses (though not like Finnegan’s Wake).

     Sundstrøm was close to right. It was a year ago the middle of this month that I finished Nehemiah on Ecclesiastes: I put the date (11/16) on the inside back cover. That was about a month before I woke up in Bedlam.* And that was in the middle of December of last year. And I remember little if anything from weeks before then.

     In short, late-November/early-December 2016 is mostly a blank. Even when I open Nehemiah’s book and look at my underlines and the things I’ve written in the margin: Here I’ve underlined a quote from Augustine, “True wisdom is such that no evil use can ever be made of it.” And I’ve written beside it, “But we marvel at technology.” I don’t know what either of us was thinking. The note doesn’t even look like I wrote it - it’s my writing but as if written with someone else’s hand.
     “Oh,” I said.

     “Nehemiah was in school with Jon Bill Swiftmahr.”

     “Oh,” I said.

     “The commentator on Revelation.”

     “Yes,” I said. I remembered yesterday. Or, was it the day before?

11.04.17

_______________

 * For that story, begin here. I do remember pieces of this.

Revelation 4

 Revelation 4 

from Jon Bill Swiftmahr’s* commentary on Revelation (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2014, p. 53) –

DOOR NO. 1

IV. After this, I looked up and saw an open door. And the voice I’d heard earlier, the voice like a trumpet, motioned to me. “Come here,” it said. “Let me show you the future.”

     ² And I was spun around by the Air, and when the spinning stopped, I saw a throne, hovering. And on the throne: ³ It looked like Jasper and Carnelian and around them a rainbow as in Emerald City. ⁴ And around it, 24 more thrones and sitting on them 24 old men, dressed in white with hair like spun gold.

     ⁵ From the main throne came flashes of light, a babble of voices, and thunderous drumming. In front of the throne were 7 columns of fire. “These are the Spirits of God,” a voice said. ⁶ And swimming in the lake also in front of the throne, clear as glass, were ⁷ a lion, an ox, and a man, and flying above them an eagle. ⁸ Each had 6 wings and each wing had 1,000 eyes (24 wings and 24,000 eyes), and the eyes were singing “Who Was and Is and Is to Come.”

     ⁹ And whenever the quartet sings, and the wings and the eyes on the wings, ¹⁰ the 24 old men fall on their knees, so they’re never sitting, they’re always falling onto their knees and always throwing their spun gold hair into the lake, ¹¹ and singing, too in their old man voices “Who Was and Is and Is to Come.”

Notes

4. It’s back to the future for John Patmos though his future is the ghost of Apocalyptic Past.

   3. Jasper and Carnelian. Some of the scholars that hold that Patmos John’s visions transcend time believe this to be a reference to the vaudeville team (actual names Eos O’Day and Dämmerung Wehnacht, active 1919-1928) whose gags included Jasper’s removing - with great clatter and squeak - tools from various of Carnelian’s orifices, a hammer from one ear and an anvil from the other, saws from his eyes, a chisel from his nose, a two-edged sword from his mouth, and an adze from his anus.

   5. seven columns. Orthodox commentators continue to insist that 7 means 1 and columns is singular. (Pax nonatarians.)

  10. always falling on their knees. The writer is clear he is not to be taken literally, as the 24 old men can’t be simultaneously sitting on their thrones and falling on their knees - unless there are 48 of them with one leg apiece (a proposal by Madeleine Blatant in The Literalist (Vol. 8, No. 4 - 1986).

Commentary

This much is true: every weeknight I go to bed just before twelve, whether I’m tired or not. Usually, though, I am, and I go right to sleep. Before long I’ve fallen into a dream that pulls me this way and that until I’m pulled apart: I wake up and go to the bathroom; I get back into bed and dream until morning - trolley cars and subway trains, empty classrooms and cathedrals, a mockingbird on the rail and a crow in the magnolia outside my window. I’ve never had a dream like John Patmos’, so precisely and chaotically literary, “The Vision of God on Their Throne Pastiche.”

     First, the dreamer standing at the open door and the doorman with the voice of a trumpeter swan, “Come into the future.” And the swan holds the door, the dreamer walks through. Then, the crowd of smoke, sound, light, and mirrors.

     Heavy metal from God’s throne, the music between the gags of Jasper and Carnelian, and jerking and twerking to the music the Seven Spirits of God beloved of the nonatarians, the atonal singing of the old men in the blonde wigs they snatch off their heads and throw into the sea to be devoured by the ox, the lion, the man, and the bird, “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.”

     The reader can only stand outside the door, listening to the sweet Bobby Vee hit clubbed to death by Iron Maiden; perhaps, he (the reader) peers around the corner of the jamb: there he sees none of this, only words on a page. It’s only words on a page, thank God.

     I wake up from my dream, and I look out the window: there’s a mocking-bird on the rail and a crow in the magnolia.

11.02.17

_______________

 * 2015’s “the angriest man in the Bible biz” (Roiling Stone)