Off on a cure

 Gone fishin’ (or Off on a cure) 

The Ambiguities is on a short - we hope! - hiatus.

02.28.18

Religious mayhem re-engineered

 Religious mayhem re-engineered 

This video originally appeared in February of 2015, titled “At it again . . .,” subtitled WWJBP for “What whimsy would Jesus be percolating” - if Jesus whimsy percolating were, for example, when he was cleansing the temple (as in the story in John 2*), or more when he suggested that if they tore it down he could rebuild it in three days. He couldn’t mean that, could he? But then, he didn’t have to mean it, did he? - they weren’t going to tear it down.

This is my first attempt at re-engineering the poor sound from a video of those earlier days of The Ambiguities. I couldn’t re-master it because I no longer had the master (if ever I did); and the re-engineering is less than the success I hoped it would be. Still, it sounds better than it did: you can at least make out the words.

02.27.18

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 * vv. 13-21, the Gospel lesson for this coming Sunday according to the Revised Common Lectionary.

Grim Neeper

 Grim Neeper 

Serious Radio

Usually I’m up before the alarm goes off, the radio starts sermonizing. I’ve wandered downstairs and am drinking a drowsy half-cup of coffee before NPR has begun its morning plaint, the teacher that demands complete attention from her classroom because she knows what she’s talking about, you don’t. So, “just shut up and listen.” So you shut up, look out the window, try to think of other things, swallow the gorge that keeps rising into the back of your mouth.

Only much later do you find out that she didn’t know: she just loved listening to her voice thinking it must.

02.24.18

The Cynics weren't mad.

 The Cynics weren’t mad. 

Diogenes by m ball

The Cynics weren’t mad.

     But what did they propose but madness? Walking the streets, now muttering, now screaming; sleeping in alleyways; pissing into fountains; shitting on sidewalks; screwing on the steps of City Hall.

     Arrest, conviction, off to jail - with the other Cynics, and even less healthy hikikomori.

02.23.18

Last night

 Last night 

We sat down late

to rice and beans,

a coin or two

of mild, gray sausage,

saucer of greens

in vinegar.

To talk of what?

(Water to drink.)

We ate in silence,

couldn’t think.                - rsd

                                                   02.22.18

Dead Midgets

continued from here.

 Dead Midgets 

Even the people we care about go in and out of our fickle heads, I wrote yesterday. My cousin, Jack Cousins,* who disappeared in 1997 - I got to thinking of him over the weekend, wondering I had notes from him on the black Ash Wednesday passage from Joel. His folder on the prophet, I discovered, had only one sheet of paper in it. Yesterday the recto; here’s the reverse**:

Thus endeth the lesson on the prophet Joel.

02.20.18

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 * Go back here for links.

** Click the page to get a better read on it.

Midgets in the Earth

 Midgets in the Earth 

Even the people we care about go in and out of our fickle heads, especially when we haven’t seen them for twenty years. My cousin, Jack Cousins,* who disappeared about this time of this year in 1997. I got to thinking of him over the weekend, wondering if he had any notes on the black Ash Wednesday passage from Joel. But his folder on the prophet had only one sheet of paper in it.

 

now continued here.

  02.19.18

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 * His story is here, then follow the links. (There's one more mention the next day, here.) For a clearer (enhanced) copy of the page from the folder, click here.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

 Ashes, ashes, we all fall down 

The day begins much too early because Ash Wednesday service is scheduled at seven-for-god’s-sake.

     Yet, when I picked up Uncle Albert, he was singing. Under his breath - not words, just syllables; da-da-dadada-da-tum, da-da-dadada-da-tum, dada . . .

     “What’s that?” I said.

     He said, “‘Nancy with the Laughing Face.’” I helped him into the car. “The Bill Evans-Cannonball Adderly version,” he said and da-da-tum’d another line.

     I got in behind the wheel. “Words?” I said.

     “Must be.” A moment’s thought. Then:

’f I don't see her each day, I miss her.
Oh, what a thrill each time I kiss her.
I got a terrible case
Of Nancy with the laughing face.

     “A Lenten song,” I said. He shook his head sadly, for I am never as funny as I hope to be.

We were among the first to arrive and sat midway down, where we sit on Sunday mornings.

    “Flowers,” Uncle Albert said.

     They were, more accurately, unflowers, bare branchlets, but carefully, artfully arranged in the gold vases shining more brightly as if just polished, behind the altar.

The priest came in, Susan, our former Miss Virginia. (See here.) “Bless the Lord who forgives all our sins,” she said. “His mercy endures forever,” we replied.

     A woman I used to work with, when I was still working and hadn’t seen since I left, read the lessons: the alarm sounding from Joel to gather the weeping, a black brrrrrrr as of a swarm of electric locusts; and Paul telling the Corinthians how brave he’s been through much more thick than thin - “afflictions, hardships, calamities, imprisonments, riots, labors, hunger, and sleepless nights” - how brave and pure, how patient and kind, loving and honest he's been for their benefit.

     Then Susan read the Gospel from Matthew 6 and said a few, blessedly few, encouraging words that had nothing to do with it.

We knelt and prayed and walked forward to get our ashes, and knelt some more for the Psalm and a lengthy Litany of Penitence. Then, at the passing of the peace, we, Uncle Albert and I, left.

                         A. W. B. E.

     We had to leave, before the Eucharist because Ash Wednesday is not a proper time for religious celebration, Uncle Albert says. So, we had planned ahead to slip out after receiving our ashes, while others were shaking hands and congratulating each other for getting up so early to be penitent and sad. Only, Uncle Albert cannot slip; he can sidle with surprising speed but his cane will bang against the floor.

     Then, there was the matter of going to the men’s room to wash off our ashes. Hadn’t the unattended to gospel warned us against practicing our piety in public? “Do not look dismal when you fast, like the hypocrites that mark their faces to show them off to others.” Rather, “oil your head and wash your face.” So, if most of the congregation would walk about happily, ostentatiously disfigured throughout the day, Uncle Albert would not. Nor would his supposèd nephew.

Especially since we were going to breakfast, meeting Nils Sundstrøm - and, it turned out, Bel Monk* - at Corner Coffee for coffee with too much cream and sugar and bagels too thick with cream cheese and jam, because: “This Lenten business,” Nils said, “must be broken early and hard!”

     “Why hard?” Bel said.

02.15.18

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 * See here and follow the links.

Ash Wednesday Eve

 Ash Wednesday Eve 

Uncle Albert has begun this “gig” at church, I’m not sure why. “It’s a way,” he says, “of thinking about things.” Lectio Divina. I looked up the term. It’s not a way of prayer, as I had thought, but of reading - though prayerfully. I should have known: lectio (a reading - aloud), lectionis, 3rd declension. The practice goes back, apparently, to a 12th-century Carthusian monk called Guigo (known to his Irish friends as “Little Topo Guigo”), who described and prescribed it.

     Uncle Albert’s group meets Tuesdays just before suppertime in the front of the sanctuary at St. Jude’s to read, to keep silence, to talk quietly in turns - or so I gather.

That’s all I gather, except that there’s a time-keeper, and a gong of some sort that marks the beginnings and ends of the silences. I can hear it from the church library, also the voices - but not what they’re saying - and the clank of the sanctuary radiator in the quiet times.

     I sit in the unheated library and read what I can find, not magazines like Uncle Albert reads at Dr. Feight’s, but books of sermons, books on prayer, histories, and commentaries on most books of the Bible. I don’t read according to any plan. Usually, I pick up one of the commentaries, open it up to wherever it opens up to, and start. Then, I just go until the last bell rings or until I get confused, turn the book over on my chest, close my eyes, and doze off. There’s one big chair one can doze off in.

Very rarely there is a magazine, left on the lamp table beside the big chair by someone not, I don’t think, a member of St. Jude’s. Crudely printed and illustrated on newsprint, digest-size, 16 or 32 pages, stapled along the spine. Sometimes it’s called Hidden Truth Revealed, sometimes The Revelator; but they are the same: the same bold and cranky typefaces, the same comic-book illustrations. Yesterday I read about how the Queen of Sheba came proposing to baffle Solomon, but instead, he baffled her. And how the eunuch in the service of the Candace became the great-great-great-grandfather of Haile Selassie. You can find it all, this conspiracy and its machinations if you know how to read Chronicles and Acts and the songs of Bob Marley. What the plot threatens I couldn’t be sure - that was the point at which I became confused - but it threatens something, and our way of faith is at stake.

     Who the we of “our” are wasn’t clear to me.

Afterwards, because yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, there was a pancake supper at the “cathedral,” All the Saints. And following the supper, there was a "burning of the palms," for which there is, there must be, a liturgy. If not Elohim, Uncle Albert said in the car on the way home, at least Haephestus must bless the lighter, the fluid, the bucket, the air that would blow the flame into light. Love would not keep him away.

 
We left the service while the palms were still burning in their holy bucket at the center of the labyrinth in the church courtyard, but taking the smell of them - reminiscent of marijuana - with us, already well-burrowed into my wool overcoat. Uncle Albert was wondering aloud about storage in Episcopal churches. The palms Father Tobias was burning were from only the previous Palm Sunday (eleven-and-a-half months ago), but the ashes made by burning them were not for this Ash Wednesday but the next, Ash Wednesday 2019. (The ashes for tomorrow morning’s service would be from the palms burnt Ash Wednesday Eve 2017.) So, where is all this sorted, labeled, stored, Uncle Albert pondered, the palms that had been kept from April 9th and the ashes kept from February 28th, 2017? Now, these ashes as well, to be kept for a year and a day? 

      Also, what happens to the ashes unused from one year to the next? Where are they kept? (Nils Sundstrøm claimed this morning at breakfast that there was a rite for their disposal held in each parish; then, they were gathered from throughout the diocese for the sake of the bishop's roses.)

On the way home in the car, Uncle Albert said that he was glad he’d grown up a true-blue Protestant: it gave perspective on these Anglican goings-on, he said. On the other hand, all the saints seemed to be enjoying Ash Wednesday Eve, in a spirit of Fat Tuesday taking none of it seriously at all. The dinner was sufficiently sumptuous, the pancakes good enough and a tableful of toppings. In the service, whether God stopped by or no, there was the exciting off-chance that their rector might catch fire as he added palms to the bright-burning bucket. And, one of our tablemates told us that she took her Palm Sunday palms home, for her cat. There was no toy Jinx enjoyed as much.

02.14.18

This week . . .

 Wisdom, conveniently boxed 

The wisdom and wit of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Boxed and translated into contemporary English. Follow along
by following me on Twitter: twitter.com/TedRiich.

02.10.18

In control

 In control 

Yesterday.

     “What are you reading these days?” Dr. Feight asked - out of the blue. Or, it felt out of the blue because he never asks anything.

     “Women in Love,” I said, turning and looking back at him, his pen scratching on his paper on his clipboard. “D. H. Lawrence. Why?”

     He nodded. As if that explained it. But explained what? “Mmmm,” he said.

     “I’m at the point,” I went on because I felt compelled to go on. “I’m at the point that Thomas Crich is dying, the old man.”

     “Mmmm.”

D. H. Lawrence, thinking about sex,
or death, or sex and death - and horses.

“And Gerald, the son, has asked Gudrun Brangwen to stay for dinner. And then he’s invited her to stay for coffee. And they’re drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in the library. And it’s to hold onto something rather than be taken over completely by his father’s death - that’s why he’s invited her.

     “And he’s telling her about it all that ‘you don’t know what to do’; and she says, ‘What can be done?’

     “And he says he doesn’t know but something: you’ve got to find something to resolve the situation, otherwise you’re done. It’s not that you want to, you have to. You can’t give into it. Or, you can’t if you’re Gerald. You manage it.”

I stopped. I was thinking about her funeral, Moira’s, which Hannah managed - because Mom couldn’t at that point. Where was I? On my way from somewhere to somewhere else, knowing nothing until I got home. 

It’s at this point in the novel that Gerald’s mother comes in and suggests he go away somewhere: there’s nothing he can do at Shortlands but work himself into a lather about seeing it through - the death - as if that were doing something, seeing it through.

     “There’s the thing, isn’t it?” I said to Dr. Feight. There are those people that know that there’s nothing to be done about some things and those that must do something about the nothing that can be done.

     “And then there are those like Rupert Birkin,” I said. “Do you know the novel?”

     “Yes,” Dr. Feight said.

     “There are those like Rupert Birkin that will talk even death to death. They will figure out what it must mean, and when they don't, they think they will yet if they put enough words to it.”

“Well,” said Dr. Feight, “those are the last words for today, I guess. Time’s up.”

     I got up, thinking, “That’s all too convenient isn’t it.” And as he always does, he walked me to the door.

02.09.18

Gregory's tapeworm

No particular reason. For an easier read, click here.

The 26th Sunday in Premier League Football

continued from here

 The 26th Sunday in Premier League Football 

Both games ended in ties, 1-1 Crystal Palace and Newcastle, and 2-2 Liverpool and Tottenham, a game decided not by the players but a linesman - “May his testicles shrivel up inside him then die!” Uncle Albert said. “I mean that charitably,” he added, because he wished much worse, I suspected.

Mo Salah

    By the time the games were over and we’d had lunch - split pea soup and bread and butter with a glass of milk with a dollop of bourbon - the dust motes turned to gnats had turned to grainy sleet. The steps and the sidewalk were a mush of slippery slush. Getting Uncle Albert home didn’t look as if it were going to be possible.

     He had me call Maggie, one of the students he lives with, the one that catered our lunch that time. She said she’d just gotten back from Smithfield and the roads were okay, but she could see why Uncle Albert shouldn’t be walking on the sidewalks. “I wouldn’t let him,” she said.

     “I’m walking over,” I said, “to pick up his pajamas and a toothbrush and stuff.”

     “I’m here,” she said. “Zenobia and Carl and I are going to watch the Super Bowl though none of us cares who wins.

     “As long as it’s not the Patriots,” she said.

For supper, we had “crack slaw.” It’s called that, Roz’s friend that she got the recipe from says, because it’s that addictive. It is pretty good.

     After supper, we watched the game until it got to 3-3. Then, that was enough sports for one day. Especially it was enough American football. “This is a shit game,” Uncle Albert said. He meant “compared to Association football.”

     It was an extraordinary thing to hear, Uncle Albert saying “shit.”

02.04.18

The 5th Sunday after Epiphany

 The 5th Sunday after Epiphany 

The plan was this: to pick up Uncle Albert at twenty till eight; we would go to church and be back in time - we would come here - to watch Crystal Palace vs. New castle and Liverpool vs. Tottenham. Roz was going to make waffles - from scratch! I had already set up the ancient teak TV-trays, so we could eat - and drink our coffee and orange juice - in front of the first game.

     It was snowing when I left home - lightly, dust-mote snow floating gently through the gray air; it wouldn’t impede us. What did impede us: Uncle Albert was up and dressed - and he still dresses for church, coat and tie and Sunday shoes, today galoshes both to protect them and for better traction. He was up and dressed - in his galoshes if still unbuckled, and his wool overcoat and wool watch-cap. He was sitting on the porch, leaning forward onto his cane. But he didn’t want to go to church.

     “Why not?”

     “I can’t say,” he said, then paused, “though cant may have something to do with it.” He had been rehearsing that sentence.

     “The Bishop,” I said, remembering His Grace was coming on his annual visit. “Maybe the weather will have prevented him,” I said.

A bishop in a pear tree.

     “You don’t think he came last night and stayed at that posh B & B down the street from you?”

     “That posh B & B closes in February,” I said.

     “He’s here,” Uncle Albert said. “I can feel it.”

     “In your sigmoid miter,” I said.

     “He’s here,” Uncle Albert said again. “And he’s ready to set his crooked, yellow, soft English teeth into First Corinthians: ‘Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel, though if I do, it is no grounds for boasting. Rather I have a duty, to proclaim it free of charge. I am a servant to all!’”

     From my stance on the steps I climbed onto the porch to get under the roof - the snow was falling now not so much as dust motes but as gnats. “You don’t like the bishop, do you?” I said, kneeling down to buckle Uncle Albert’s overshoes.

     “Not so far,” Uncle Albert said.

     “You’ve only heard him once,” I said, “that I know of. We’ve only heard him once.”

     “Maybe I just don’t like his voice,” Uncle Albert said. It grates in my ears. It gets under my hearing-aids and runs around like a microscopic colony of mealworms in a rotting french fry.”

We decided to skip church.

     “Roz won’t be ready for us,” I said. “I don’t want to . . . ,” meaning get there before she expected us.

We went Corner Coffee for a cuppa with - “We’ll join the cheerful atheists,” Uncle Albert said - only they didn’t look so cheerful, flapping their New York Times or Washington Posts, or peering self-pityingly into their screens.

     “He’s a bureaucrat,” Uncle Albert said of the Bishop, “a mid-level manager of religion. Jesus hated the class - the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Scribes and High Priests, angels and archangels, archbishops and bishops.”

     “And our bishop,” I popped the p to emphasize the singular.

     “Career politicians,” Uncle Albert hadn’t finished his list: “superintendents of schools, assistant principals, coaches, band directors . . . ”

     “Would Jesus hate our . . . ?”

     “ . . . deans, house-parents, vice-presidents multiplying like hares, COOs, CFOs . . . ”

     “UFOs,” I said.

     “Their captains and first mates, yes,” Uncle Albert said.

I helped Uncle Albert get back into his overcoat; I rebuckled his overshoes; I began humming “Jesus Loves Me,” then put it quietly! to words: “Jesus hates them, this I know.” Uncle Albert joined in, “For the Bible tells me so.

     “It does,” he said.

to be continued - here       

02.04.18

The Parable of the Man That Touched God’s Chair

 The Parable of the Man That Touched God’s Chair 

There are no scholars at the TRV, the Ted Riich Version of the Bible. There’s only Ted Riich, who continues to wonder about the possibility of reading most of Scripture as parable. This week’s wondering led to the following “translation” of 2 Samuel 6:2-7, the story of Uzzah, who, when his oxen stumbled, put out his hand to steady the ark so it wouldn’t fall on the ground. For his concern for his throne, the Lord of Hosts struck him dead. Is the kingdom of God like this?

02.03.18

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

Coda

 Coda* 

Dave Brubeck by m ball

Roz stepped into the doorway of the guest room that is also my study. I was reading.

     “Do we have to take a turn?” she asked.

     “At what? - I don’t follow.”

     “A musical evening.”

     “If we do, it wouldn’t be till the end of the year - or the beginning of next.”

     “Oh,” she said. She looked up and backward as if into her brain. “I guess you’re right.” And she wandered away, I hoped not to put it on her calendar.

02.01.18

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 * See here and here. And here if you want to go back so far, to the beginning.