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