Introduction to Proverbs

 Introduction to Proverbs 

from Ezra Nehemiah’s commentary on Ecclesiastes (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2009, p. 106) —

Because you never know –

VI. 10 Whatever is was known already, also what we are - known already. There’s no gainsaying any of it:  11 the more words only the more bullshit, and who’s the better for that?  12 Who knows what’s better anyway, who lives [as we do], we shadows in sunlight, a few empty days. And then what? Who knows that [either], what’s coming next?

Notes

vi. 10.  Though it has absolutely nothing to do with this verse, Fabianski’s essay on preference for the niphil perfect participle over the plural cohortative to translate נשׄמע is well worth reading again.

     11.   bullshit.  הבל.

     13.  knows.  ידצ, LXX ti&v oi]den. Who has a clue?

Commentary

“Stuff is as stuff is,” as God said to Job, if at much (much!) greater length (Job 38-42). “Stuff is as stuff is: Who are you to know?” And adamantine Job suddenly sees there is nothing to do but to shrug his melting shoulders, gather his ashen cards, and go home. Who had never been satisfied before has to be now. As Murphy says, these verses in Ecclesiastes are finally about “the basic inability of humans to find out what is good for them.” We might be able to if we lived in the fantasy world of Proverbs, where push always comes to shove, where there is for every action always the right equal and opposite reaction, where the wise ever prosper and fools will stumble. But we don’t. That’s a blabberer’s bullshit world anyway. The real world doesn’t work that way at all. If it did in the past, it doesn’t now. (See 7:10.) I mean, if it ever did! (See 8:15.)

01.31.18

The phone rings. Part 2.

continued from 01.27 

 The phone rings. 

Roz came back out of the kitchen. “You need to sit down,” she said to me - and Nils. “I do, too,” she said. We sat. Roz sat on the couch, and I sat next to her. And Nils sat in one of the two chairs.

     Axel and Bel came out with wine and cheese and crackers. And served them. And Axel sat down in the other chair.

Bel said, “Thanks for coming. I should have done this long ago, but . . . ,” she paused, “I didn’t.

     “What we’re going to listen to is an album called Live at Otter Crest by Gene Harris, who was born in my hometown, Benton Harbor, Michigan, and died where Axel once lived - and Nils - in Boise, Idaho. John Heard is on bass, and Jimmie Smith is on drums. And on side one are ‘Sweet Lorraine,’ ‘My Foolish Heart,’ and ‘A Little Blues There.’

     Then she switched on the turntable and put the needle down, and it hissed; then “Sweet Lorraine.” She handed the album cover to Roz as she crossed in front of her to sit by me. Roz looked at the album, which was both a plain and an electric blue with just words on it; then she handed it to me. So we passed it around while we listened.

There was kind of slender sweetness about “Sweet Lorraine” and “My Foolish Heart,” but the “Blues” pounds and plucks and pounds some more, and you can hear the audience drawn shuffling to the edge of their seats to hear what the bass and drums are saying.

     “On the B-side," Bel announced the songs as she stood up. There was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which begins with a bit of direct indirection, and “Shiny Stockings,” blocking out the chords, and “Cute.”

     The only movement in our audience was then, when she got up and turned the record over.

At the end, Axel said, “Wow,” as Bel stood again and made a purposely awkward curtsey. Then, she took the record off the turntable. Nils handed her the dustjacket, and she laid the record and the jacket on top of some books on a shelf beside the turntable.

     I took a second sip of wine, so I’d had two more than I’m supposed to.

And that was it pretty much it, I think. Roz started to say something, and Bel said, “No,” there wasn’t much to do. We left right after and walked home.

That was Friday night. Saturday mid-morning the phone rang again. Roz went to get it. She was gone awhile, and she didn’t bring anything back.

     “Who was on the phone?” she asked as she had Wednesday night.

     “It was either the Secretary of State of Nebraska,” I said.

     “About my transcript,” she interrupted.

     “Yes,” I said, “or it was Bel Monk.”

     “Spell it.”

     I shook my head. “What did she want?” I asked.

     “To know if you were all right,” Roz said.

     “I was,” I said, "as far as I know. Was I?”*

one more chapter in this episode

01.29.18

­­_______________

 * “Subjunctive,” Roz said. “Indirect discourse.”

The phone rings.

 The phone rings. 

This was Wednesday. Evening.

     The phone rang. Roz went to get it. She was gone awhile, but she came back with popcorn.

     “Who was on the phone?” she asked as if I had answered and made the popcorn. Which was good even though I only had water to drink with it because after supper I can only drink water for some reason.

     “It was the Secretary of State of Nebraska,” I said.

     “Why was she calling?”

     “He,” I said.

     “Oh.”

     “John Gale.”

     “Oh. . . . Why was he calling?”

     “Something about your Hastings transcript,” I said. “I didn’t get exactly what. I told him to call back when you were here.”

The popcorn was very good, even with only water to drink.

     Roz said, “Do you know a woman named Isabel Monk?”

     I didn’t know, so I said, “I may.”

     “She said you wrote about her - and you misspelled her name.”

     “ . . . . ”

     “She said you spelled b-e-l, short for Isabel, b-e-l-l-e, the French for ‘beautiful’; and you spelled m-o-n-k, as in Thelonious, m-a-n-q-u-e, suggesting ‘lack.’ She thought you were commenting on her paintings.”

     “Nobody reads what I write,” I said.

“Was she upset?” I asked.

     “I would have been,” Roz said.

     “It was an honest mistake,” I said. “It’s what I heard.”

     “Oh,” Roz said. Or maybe she just shook her head.

Gene Harris by m ball

“She said it had been almost a year, and she apologized,” Roz said. “She should have done this before now.”

     I waited.

     “She had asked Axel - and he could - and so she was asking you - and me - to a musical evening on Friday. I said we would come. Then, something about Gene Harris - did I know him? I said I didn’t. She said to ask you.”

     “A little,” I said - that he toured for a while with Ray Brown, Jr, who had been married to Ella Fitzgerald; but I didn’t say that.

Yesterday morning (Friday),

     Roz said at breakfast, “Should we bring a bottle of wine or something?”

     I wasn’t sure what she meant, but she said, “I think so. We should.” And she told me to get one.

We brought it that evening.

     I thought we were early and wanted to walk around the block before we went up to Bel Monk’s apartment. Roz shook her head, and she was right because Axel was already there - and Nils,* who answered the door.

     “This is Axel’s brother,” I told Roz.

     “Axel and Bel are in the kitchen,” Nils said, pointing; and Roz took the wine there. I waited just inside the door, too close to the door because Nils put his hand on my shoulder and cleared his throat so I would shift and he could close it.

to be continued

01.27.18

_______________

 * Axel’s brother: See here. And here.

Vassar

 Vassar 

This was Thursday.

     I asked Dr. Feight about my medication. Was there any combination less tiring that would keep the demons away as well?

     Were the demons staying away? he asked

     “No,” I said, not completely, but they didn’t seem to be stopping by as often or staying as long when they did.

     “Mmmm,” he said.

     I was reading a book about Horace, I told him, Horace and His Art of Enjoyment. “There was a man with no demons,” I said.

 
After the session, as he was walking me to the door as he always does, Dr. Feight asked me how far I’d gotten with the book. “On Horace?” “Yes.” “Well, really, only a few pages in,” I said.

     He knew it, it turns out. “By Elizabeth Hazelton Haight,” he said, “of Vassar College.” She had taught his mother, who had a picture of her - among others - in her study.

     “Mmmm,” I said.

01.24.18

Butterflies

 Butterflies* 

i. Apologizing in advance. In his introduction to The Saturnalia, Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, because he was “born under an alien sky,” asks for “a reasonable indulgence” if his words “lack the elegance of the native Roman tongue.” Then he comments on apologies-in-advance**:

The release of Macrobius balloons.
Saturnalia in Alexandria, 1993

But I am indeed imprudent, and I have incurred that neat rebuke which Marcus Cato gave to the Aulus Albius who was consul with Lucullus. This Albinus composed a History of Rome in Greek and wrote in the preface to the effect that no one ought to criticize him for any lack of arrangement, or faults of style, “for,” said he, “I am a Roman, born in Latium, and the Greek language is altogether foreign to me”; and on that ground he claimed the privilege of being excused from censure for any mistakes he might have made. After reading this, Marcus Cato said: “Upon my word, Aulus, you carry your trifling too far in choosing to apologize for a fault instead of refraining from committing it. As a rule, one asks for pardon after making a mistake through inadvertence or after doing wrong under compulsion; but who, pray, compelled you to do that for which you would ask pardon in advance?”

“Classic Bible Sketches from Vacation Bible School”
Peter and Andrew running off the page after Jesus
PCUS (1955)

ii. Christian cannibalism.  Most scholars attribute the charge by pagan apologists that Christians were cannibals to a misunderstanding of John 6, where Jesus tells the Jews murmuring at him that unless they “eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood,” they “have no life in them.” On the other hand, he goes on, “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life . . . . For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” I have read none that take into account the role of this past Sunday’s gospel lesson, where Jesus calls Simon and Andrew. They are casting their nets into the Sea of Galilee, “for they were fishermen” (Mark adds redundantly). Jesus says, “Come. Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” They follow immediately. In some lost manuscripts, according to Pseudo-Pseutēs, as they run to catch up with Jesus, Peter turns to his brother and wisecracks in his best Australian accent,*** “Will we grill ’em on the barbie?”

iii. Null set.

01.23.18

_______________

  * “Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else so that a butterfly flutters its wings in Fiji and a dog in Brooklyn gets diarrhea. Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish it were so.” See blog post for February 21, 2015. 

 ** Translation by Percival Vaughan Davies. The Saturnalia (Columbia University Press, 1969).

*** None too good, according to Pseudo-Pseutēs.

Mistill*

 Mistill*

Monday through Friday, I mistill* the wisdom of the ancients.

You can follow the action on Facebook or Twitter —>

01.22.18

_______________

 * as opposed to distill (in the sense of “purify of extraneous matter”) - i.e., to garble by extraneous thoughts

Yesterday once more

 Yesterday once more 

Yesterday is Thursday. (Note tense.)

Uncle Albert, asleep after lunch.

I pick up Uncle Albert; we go together to see Dr. Feight. I talk to the doctor, Uncle Albert reads his magazines. We get lunch.

     Or, this Thursday we get lunch. Usually, I make lunch - soup and sandwiches, and often I drink a Pepsi and forego my afternoon cup of coffee. On my current medication, I can drink one cup of coffee in the morning and one in the afternoon. I take the medication at night before I go to bed.

     Usually, I make lunch, but today we get lunch. We meet Axel Sundstrøm and his brother Nils. We have agreed in advance that we’re not going to talk about politics so I can eat with the rest of them; I don’t have to move to another table. [See here.]

Then, damn it all, we talk about religion. I don’t move, but I try not to listen. So, only this much filters through:

     The question seems to be whether religion will survive this century. It’s an “anthropological” question, Axel says. He means that it has to do with whether we anthr­ōpoi need to have a god, or we don’t. “It’s Tillich, isn’t it?” he asks, “that maintains we have in us a ‘god-shaped void’ that is waiting for something to revere, to worship and adore, to rush in to fill it, the void.” Whatever is most important to us at any given time will come in, it will fill us; we will give ourselves to it, we will be guided by it, it will become our god.

     Nils is nodding his big hairy head. I think: Axel is bald because Nils has appropriated his share of hair as well as his own. Uncle Albert appears to be dozing, his eyes are closed. Then, he wakes up, they open. “You said ‘Tillich,’” he looks at Axel. Axel nods his head. Uncle Albert closes his eyes again.

     We wait.

“Two problems,” he says, coming to.

     We wait some more.

     “One, the shit that others fill us with.” He looks at Axel, then at Nils. “I mean you guys,” he says. (I know what he means. As soon as we start talking about what’s important to us, there will be someone that will want to explain to us what we mean. “Yes, I know what you’re saying,” they’ll say. “Let me explain it to you.” Preachers. Teachers. Others that think they’re the “adults in the room.”)

     “Thus,” Uncle Albert goes on, “God becomes religion.” He closes his eyes.

Kent Tekulve pitching in the fog
to no one, Pittsburgh, 1977.

Nils holds up his hand to interrupt. It’s an odd thing to watch: Nils holds up his hand, and, though Uncle Albert can't see it, his eyes remain closed, Axel reaches over, takes hold of the hand, and puts it back down on the table, then leaves his own hand on top of it.

     “Two,” Uncle Albert says, eyes blinking open. “And this would be no end of frustrating for the explainers if you were self-aware enough to see it: We’re all polytheists. What is more important than anything else, what we give ourselves over to this morning, is different from what was most important, what we gave ourselves to last night. We rolled over. We went to sleep. We bumbled through our dreams like bees from flower to flower, and we woke up coated with a different pollen.

     “Add to that, when we get out of bed to write down our dreams, we change them. We add a mountain here and there to make them more solid, though then we color the sea orange, forests yellow, the grass teal.” He stops. “Serial polytheists,” he says then.

Axel lets go of Nils’ hand, and Nils says - his hand loosed, he thinks he has to say something - he swallows and says, “What?”

     Uncle Albert shakes his head. His eyes close again.

01.18.18

The epilogist's colophon - Ecclesiastes 12:9-14

 The epilogist’s colophon 

from Ezra Nehemiah’s commentary on Ecclesiastes (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2009, p. n - 4) —

 

He (the “Epilogist”) is just walking it back.

XII. 9 Besides being a wise man, Qoheleth was also a teacher and an editor of note.  10 He was good with words, especially at making them say what he wanted them to.  11 Truly wise men’s words are like goads or like nails—the wounds are worth collecting.  12 But of any more than that, watch out, my son. More and more books are coming out, don’t wear yourself out paying attention to any of them.  13 Instead [of reading]—or listening [to writers], fear God and keep his commandments. Forget the rest:   14 God is the one that judges—everything seen and unseen, everything good or evil. [Don’t judge yourself—Numbers 15:39!]

Notes

xii. 9.  The reader will have noted that חקר and תקר  are united asyndetically unless they’re not.

     10.  The MT vocalizes  מאזנים as a passive participle, better to read it (revocalize it) as an infinitive absolute.

     11.   דרבנות is a hapax legomenon, as is  אספה also in v 11 and  להג in v 12. Jerome translates the first of these as  stimuli and the last as meditation.

     13.  Fabianski’s essay on preference for the niphil perfect participle over the plural cohortative to translate נשׄמע is well worth reading again.

     14.  Note the absence of the definite article before  מעשה . There are lots of ways to massage the Hebrew to make a translation say what we want.

Commentary

The Epilogist—as scholars like to call him—is no fan of the Writer—Qoheleth (or Koheleth or the Preacher or the Teacher or the Sarcast, the Crab, or the Foghorn, let me remind you, before we part, dear reader, of some of the possibilities). Underlying every word of these last five verses (the 218th through 222nd) of the book is the notion that if you have read this far, you’ve wasted your time; don’t waste more by going back and reading again, forget as quickly as you can as much as you can of what you have read. In fact, God himself is It, only God himself is It and that’s the end of it (period); best quit reading altogether. Starting now.

     (The “Don’t judge yourself—Numbers 15:39!” added at the end in some manuscripts is the rough equivalent of Rockin’ Rollen Stewart’s holding up at the 1980 Masters a “Jesus Saves” placard with John 3:16 on his T-shirt. “Don’t judge yourself” means for the sign-waving Epilogist both “Don’t judge your own actions” and “Don’t judge for yourself.”(See 11:9 and comment.) “God will judge (period).”

     Qoheleth would surely add, “unless He decided not to.”

01.18.18

Shaggy dog story

 Shaggy dog story 

Sundstrøm’s brother has written a letter to the editor. In it he catalogs the epithets members of his own party, allies, have used to label the president - “bloviating ignoramus” (George Will), “moron” (Rex Tillerson), “[engaging in intercourse] idiot” (Rupert Murdoch), “pathological liar” (Ted Cruz), “dumb as [excrement]” (Gary Cohn), a “cancer on conservatism” (Rick Perry). Then he suggests that name-calling is both juvenile and unhelpful, even when it is accurate.

     And there the letter ends.

Uncle Albert pointed it out to me - on his phone. “The rare man that knows where to stop,” he said: “in mediis rebus.

     “Unlike yesterday’s guest preacher,” he said.

     I said, “I thought you said of him he never should have started.”

01.15.18