MERRY *#$%-in CHRISTMAS

Gone fishin'

 Gone fishin’ 

 

Not literally, but The Ambiguities is on vacation until Epiphany. Miss it before then? Watch for links to the best of on my Facebook page and Twitter feed.

12.24.17

 

"God, I presume."

 “God, I presume.”      

My friend Gaspar Stephens is reading Blake, listening to Ray Wiley Hubbard, and jumping to conclusions. Blake is deriding Swedenborg and the angels,* aery prigs all, thinking they understand God. As Hubbard suggests,^† only the Devil understands God. Of course, he misunderstands Him.

     To his credit, however, the Devil takes none. He doesn’t claim to comprehend God. Only the righteous presume to.

Wednesday afternoon I picked up Uncle Albert after Midweek Noons at St. Jude’s. Roz had taken the morning off work, and she had dropped him off. I picked him up. He waved me down with his cane, refused help getting in the car, and as soon as I’d gotten back in from trying, thrust a paper at me.

     “Fatuous blather,” he said, “pretending at faith.

     “Look here!” he said, pointing.

John of the Asymptotic Cross,

considering the bread of the True Sacrament within him,

while holding the butter for it unmelted in his mouth

“‘We are created with an inner restlessness that sends all of us looking for our True Self,’ it begins.” He began waving I about. “Capital letters,” Uncle Albert said, “our ‘True Self,’ ‘the God that is in us’ if we but ‘surrender to the Real.’” He pointed to the word. “More divine caps,” he crescendoed: “The Real, The Real, The Real!” punching his skeletal index finger into the paper. “Jesus!” he stopped.

     “No, nothing to do with Jesus. Only to do with Us - capital-U. “For where is The REAL?” He moved the paper in and out until it came back into focus. “At the living-watery depths, the ‘wellsprings deep within us,” suspended in which we’ll find ‘the true sacrament’ of ‘the soul itself.’ And all we have to do,” he looked up. “Well, we don’t have to do anything because it’s really ‘no more than a matter of becoming who we already are.’ But all we have to be, because ‘we cannot “get there”; we can only “be there” - which is ironically to “be here!” . . . all we have to be is - you know what’s coming, don’t you? - our fornifreculating True Self.”

     He had been leaning progressively forward. Now, he threw himself backward in the seat. “Drive,” he said. “Seatbelt,” I said. “Fornifreculate that,” he said. I drove.

I helped him out of the care when I left him off. It’s easier for him to sit down into than to climb out of it. Then, I reached in for the paper that had fallen from his leap to the floor when he’d thrown himself backward. He shook his head. “Keep it, he said.

     “Read it,” he said. “Read each word. Reprehend each letter. Set fire to it. Wipe you asymptotes with the ashes.”

     I’m not entirely sure what lit him so hot and bright. The presumption, I imagine. The one who will find God within, whoever he or she is, has no need to fear God without, a transcendent, mysterious, indeed unfathomable God. Rather he, she - and we at his or her direction - just need to get a handle on the One that is already within us. There is no need to seek wisdom or righteousness. We are already Righteous; true Wisdom is already in us.

When I get home, smoothing out Uncle Albert’s paper on the kitchen table, I find I’m interested in how much presumption looks like hypocrisy, especially to those that dare not, or at least try not, to presume. But it’s closer to narcissism. The kind of presumption Whoever-It-Is evinces is less a moral flaw than a mental illness. Such mystics, I’m dismayed to discover (because I find them as full of noxious bloat as Uncle Albert does), are less self-righteous jackasses than they are unable to help themselves. In Ecclesiastes’ terms, they are part of what God has made crooked that we can’t make straight.

     Nor can they straighten out themselves. Hypocrisy may be curable.^‡ Thinking oneself divine is not.

12.23.17

to be continued

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 * in Plate 21 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 ^† in “The Way of the Fallen Is Hard”

 ^‡ I’d like to think so, there would be hope for me.

Miss Kitty

 Miss Kitty 

Hamlin Moody’s wife Kitty is one of the kindest people I know. She just wants to help; and she knows just what you need.

     She called this morning to invite me to her centering prayer group. “I know I asked you last year, or back in January” - this was right after I’d gotten out of lock-up but, I think, before Uncle Albert left Paradise to come keep an eye on me.* She said, “I know I asked you back in January, but I sensed you weren’t ready then.”

     I nodded, then realized I had a phone in my hand, and said, “No.” It was more a nervous than a persuasive “no.”

     “So, I put it on my calendar to ask you again. For today: it was on my calendar for today.”

     “I see.”

I forgot again I was holding a phone; I lost the thread of the conversation for . . . I think just a few seconds. Then,

     “So?” she was saying.

     I wanted to say that I’d tried centering prayer once and I just didn’t get it. I didn’t even get what there was to get. But I didn’t want to invite an explanation.

     I said, “How’s Hamlin? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

     “He’s fine,” she said. She sounded unhappy. To me she sounded unhappy.

     “Good,” I said. “Tell him I miss seeing him.”

     “But . . . ,” she said. I knew she was going to say it, “But” and then something else I didn’t want to hear, so as soon as she did - say “But” - I dropped the phone.

I counted to seven, slowly, and picked it up.

     “I’m sorry,” I said. “I dropped the phone.” And before she could start again, “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Sorry.”

to be continued

12.20.17

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 * The story beings here, and Uncle Albert enters here.

Ecclesiastes 7

 Ecclesiastes 7    

“We are magnificently impotent in matters of religion,” he began, “and reason.” This was last night.

He, Sol, is the product of divorce, a popular rabbi and a research biochemist that went very separate ways, she to teach in California, he to a new congregation in Miami.

    Sol stayed, to play piano with a jazz trio at home five nights a week in a little, little-known club in Brooklyn. His bassist, Bob, is Baha’i, the drummer, Blob, a born-again free-thinker. Sol keeps holding on to being a Jew as hard as he lets it go, so what kind of Jew he is now he can’t be certain - other than one with a mic. For occasionally during intermissions, he will take it up and start talking to whoever will listen about those things without thinking he’s been thinking about.

     For example, about what God can and, especially, can’t do: among other things, explain himself to us or help us understand each other.

Recently:

     “It’s his problem partly, God’s, for sure; but mostly it’s ours. (Even for God, it’s easier to shift responsibility. If you’re all-powerful, too, you can be all-shifting. But that’s for another time.)

     “We can pretend to wisdom and natter on about this and that, make up rules, and pretend they apply:

     “’A good name,’ we can say ‘is better than gold.’ ‘Listen to the wise man’s counsel, not the fool’s song.’ ‘Patience is a virtue; and anger leads to folly.’ ‘Wisdom, too, is like gold. Wealth and wisdom are a wall.’

     “Except, of course, when they’re not, or the wall’s a window or screen. A good name is better than gold, until there are debts to pay. It is better to listen to good advice than foolish singing, except when you really need music to soothe your savage beast. Patience is a virtue, except when something rash is required. Anger leads to folly, except when anger is what is needed to end folly.

     “Yes, we know, except when we don’t.

      “One thing for sure though: everything will work out in the end. Except what doesn’t.

“We can pretend to be righteous, but we are no more righteous than we are wise. I’m talking to you, my friends, on the right. (Applause? Is that - ‘right’ - short for ‘righteous’? Any of you out there?) That’s your blind spot, your self-righteousness.

     “You think you are right with God - and if you’re right with God, you must be right. But what if you’re not? Or, if you are, listen: there’s no claiming credit for it. You’re not right with God because of anything you’ve said or done.

     “On the other hand, my liberal friends . . . (Applause? I can't see. Six of you?) Your blind spot: you must be right because you’ve thought things through. But, hey, no credit to you either. It’s a gift, what you know (or think you do), it's not something you’ve actually worked for.

     “Think about it. . . Did you ever want to be uninquisitive?

“Both of you: No amount of righteousness or wisdom - religion or common sense - will avert disaster. We can’t escape either wickedness or stupidity, any of us. There’s no one on earth so righteous he or she does only good, never stumbles. There’s no one on earth so reasonable, he or she’s never going to do something foolish.

     “So what we do - or should, all of us: We do what we can, meanwhile not thinking too highly of ourselves - or our ilk. Practice not thinking about how good you are - how blessed - or how smart you are - how reasonable. Work hard, eat just too much and drink just too much, listen to music, dance naked with the one you love. Accept the good you get out of all of that. Joy in it.

“Speaking of music and dance, hey! Bob and Blob are on their way back up here. Guys! Let's hear it for them: Bob Blaine and Blob Baines. Wave at your adoring fans. Our next number is an arrangement they worked on together, a jazz version of the doo-wop classic, ‘Let’s Go to the Hop.’”

12.06.17

Espair and despair

 Espair and despair 

“There is no more reason for despair than there is for hope.”

                                                                                       - Uncle Albert

           

He means that both suggest a future we can in nowise predict. Every time our predictions are borne out is another coincidence, or the result of retroactive wishthinking: “Yes, this is what I thought would happen.” It doesn’t matter that we didn’t think that at all; it is easy to convince ourselves we did, we so desperately wish to be right.

If we could control our feelings, we might realize a state close to Ovid’s in Augustus’ Rome,* merry and bright, frivolity undaunted - not afraid to be foolish because gravity is greatly overrated: Few of our actions have any measurable consequences, and when they do, they (the consequences) are not what we so gravely planned.

Uncle Albert, Orrin Hatch, and P. Ovidius Naso

Bucharest, 1961

Planning is the enemy - and planners. Not only is planning itself work, but most planning is about work to do, which the planners will manage (gritting their teeth, “dammit!”), a series of burdens they will lay on us. “So,” Uncle Albert continues, “fornifreculate Orrin Hatch, whose yoke is not easy, whose burden never gets lighter.”

     “How did you light on Hatch?” I find myself asking.

     “I met him once,” he said. “A friend and I were traveling in eastern Europe. A foggy day in Bucharest town. Typical lawyer - scribe, Pharisee - he couldn't keep his tiny mouth shut. The koine for fornifreculate is e)mpiplana=i, incidentally. I learned that in Sunday School.”

12.02.17

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 * according to Kelsey and Scudder