Nature or nurture

 Nature and nurture 

Santayana’s The Last Puritan was on the doorstep this morning when I stepped out to see how warm it was (or wasn’t). It was tightly wrapped and rewrapped, having come through many hands from 1936. The copy was more worn than I had hoped, but it won’t fall apart in my hands: it’s sturdy enough.

     I began, after coffee and two slices plus a tiny heel of raisin toast. I read the prologue and thought, “worth the $8.39 in itself.”

Nature and nurture. We are born all the same, but we learn to love beauty or goodness from what we are allowed to see and wish for; we learn to be guided by our bodies or to reprehend them as they take us where they will and we choose whether or not to take the journey eyes open or shut.

When you count all the little things as I do - showering, shaving, washing the breakfast dishes - there is always far too much to get done. And I am both anxious to get it all finished and incapable of beginning because I won’t be able to get through half of it.

03.31.18

"Good" Friday

 “Good” Friday 

Good Friday:
“Why do you call me ‘good’? Only Sunday is good.”

03.30.18

The Metamorphoses

 The Metamorphoses 

Nils Sundstøm
(brush and sponge by Bel Monk)

Nils Sundstøm stopped by yesterday to invite me to his Wednesday book group. “We’re discussing Ovid, the Metamorphoses - I have no doubt you’ve read it.” I said I had - I didn’t admit “more than once” - but it had been a while, I did admit that. “I’d like to go still,” I lied, “only I can’t tomorrow,” I lied again.

     “It’s a different way of thinking about God - as a hell of a lot more than the three for one thing,” he said. I nodded.

     “Mary Lefkowitz - have you heard of her?” I said I thought so. “The anti-Afro-centrism woman,” Nils said. “Maybe that’s what you heard about.” I didn’t think that was it, I said. “She wrote a book about Greek religion,” Nils said. “Yes,” I said. I remembered (too vaguely) reading it when it came out, ten or fifteen years ago.* The dust jacket had a blue background with silver lettering.

     “She calls the Greek gods ‘a religion for adults,’” Nils said. I continued to nod. “The Greeks aren’t trying to please God for the sake of a reward; they are living with the gods because they can’t do anything else.” Then:

“I heard Albert is going to lectio divina.”

Publius Ovidius Naso
(pen and ink by m ball)

     “Yes,” I said. “I’m taking him.”

     “What’s the purpose of that?” Nils said though as if he already knew.

     “I don’t know,” I said. I didn't know, and I didn't remember well enough to explain what Uncle Albert had told me.

     “Well, you can bet it has one,” Nils said. “It’s not for the fun of it, there’s something to be accomplished.”

     “Maybe it makes better followers of Jesus.” What made me say that, what made me say anything, I had no idea - and wanted to take it back right away.

     There wasn’t time. Nils jumped: “Jesus, I assure you, has nothing to do with it.”

     “Then, to bring us - or whoever does it - closer to God,” I said. And why did I keep responding?

     “That may be right.” Nils paused. “But bringing us closer to the God within us.” He paused again, took a breath: “Like that damn centering prayer,” he said.

     Now, I said nothing.

“We get closer to him, he gets closer to us, we get saved,” Nils said. “That’s our reward. We build a maze under God’s direction, we learn to run through it, we come out at the other end, we get a pellet of salvation.”

     I nodded though not to agree. I wasn’t sure I did agree. I wasn’t sure where the hell the conversation was going; I wasn't even sure where it was.

     “If I had the balls,” Nils said, “I’d start a group, deflectio lippa - half-blind beside-the-point.

     “This is where Ovid gets it right. Everything is deflection. There is no path, or it is always diverging in the wood.

     “The way is not narrow, the gate is not strait. We’re wandering through a vast meadow, we’re sailing on seas out of sight of the shore, we’re flying through open skies. And at the end is not judgment, because the purpose is not redemption. At the end is another beginning. And it is strictly ad hoc. The gods are making it up as they go along, and, why not? - they aren’t accountable to anyone but themselves. They don’t need a plan to get us from here to there. Where is there? They are more mindful - the gods are - than any of us have ever been of Jesus’ advice not to worry about tomorrow, rather let today’s own troubles be sufficient for today - and today’s own joys, and today’s own excitements and boredoms: they’re enough.

     “For them, it is better to spend a late Tuesday afternoon - that’s when Albert’s group meets, right? . . . .”

     I nodded.

     “For them, the gods, it’s better to spend a late Tuesday afternoon in perpotatio vini than lectiodi vina. That’s the great advantage in being a God, isn’t it? There is no worship to pay (no Ass to kiss); there is only life to live. There is no narrow way to follow, there is only the whole wide world to skip around in.”

I nodded. “Sorry I can’t do it,” I said - about the book group meeting

03.28.18

Monogrammed Towels

 Monogrammed towels 

Roz and Uncle Albert are conspiring to make things easier for me, whatever that means - other than that I’ve been wallowing and need to be drawn “out of the mire,” to be made “easier in myself.” They're moving furniture, so I'll look out of windows more, even if it's at the damn mire - the snow that continues to crap down and crap up the view.
     I told Dr. Feight yesterday, “I’ve been wallowing.” “Where?” he asked. “In the mire,” I said. Typically, he didn’t ask what I meant by that. So I started talking about my sister Hannah, who is, I was contending, as messed-up as I am, only she won’t admit it.

Here is a phenomenon I don’t quite understand (so while I believe it to be near-universal, I can’t claim that it is). (It is not an admirable trait): We want those we love to be happier than we are, but the evidence is clear to us: they are not - they can’t be.

     My sister is very well off. She was born organized. She went to good schools. She married well, into a highly successful family. She set up her own business, and it has been ever more successful.

     She and her husband own three homes and four cars. The cars have different purposes: there is a pick-up for hauling and a convertible for summer evenings, for example. There is a house in town and a house on the lake. The house in town has a view of the lake. The house in Florida is on a river.

     All the houses are big, with open floor plans, and beautifully furnished. She and Ike (named Dwight David after President Eisenhower) both love “stuff,” from furniture hand-made to fit where it belongs to thick monogrammed towels that match the walls of their bathrooms. This can’t be healthy, can it? They are compensating for something they are missing, they must be?

I asked Dr. Feight, "This can't be healthy, can it?" But he didn’t say.

03.23.18

Post card from Canada.

 Post card from Canada. 

“Hannah says you hear from Jack,” I said.

     “Hannah who?” Uncle Albert said - wriggly, I might add.

     “Hannah, my sister,” I said.

     “Oh. [Pause.] Jack who?” he said, still wriggling but he didn’t mean it - he knew Jack who.

     “I don’t know why you didn’t tell me.”

     “I don’t either, it hasn’t been long,” he said. “Besides I thought you knew.” And I might have - and forgotten. So,

     “Where is he?” I said.

     “In Quebec somewhere, near La Doré.”

     “How long?”

     “How long, what?”

     “How long has he been there, how long have you been hearing from him, how much longer weren’t you going to tell me?”

     “Not long, he said.”

     “Which?”

 

However long Uncle Albert has been hearing from him, Cousin Jack has been living there or thereabouts with a French-Innu woman for a decade or more. They hunt and fish and gather. She makes things with feathers and bones and fishing line and sells them somewhere. He has a typewriter, maybe electric. The postcards he sends come typed. They come “every so often,” the deceitful Albert claims. He showed me one from last spring about this time.

     Just the one.

Click to enlarge.

03.21.18

_______________
I know it's hard to keep up with all these characters - it's hard for me. If you want background, more of Jack's story, you can click here for links.

Five from five.

 The fingers of my left hand 

Five notions from five years ago:

1. There is no escaping Fortune. And indifference to her is always feigned.

2. There are those that lie for sport and those that lie in an attempt to get at the truth.

3. (You remember what Strabo said about lies "in the likeness of truth." That they work doesn't mean those that tell them are to be trusted.)
4. Action is no cure for inaction; it only treats the symptoms - the disease remains.

5. The egg-man was never a walrus.

03.20.18

Sunday, Sunday, can't help that day

 Sunday, Sunday, can’t help that day 

Uncle Albert by m ball

As we left the church, I took Uncle Albert’s arm to make sure he got safely down the stairs and down the walk and into the car.

     “Do we listen to what we say?” he asked, as I got in. “Do we listen at all?” He was clearly irritated.

     “Mmmm,” I said.

     “This bit about how ‘he was tempted as we are but without sin’: If he was tempted as we are, he couldn’t be without sin, because for us the sin is already in the temptation.”

     I started the car.

     “Right?” Uncle Albert demanded. And I nodded.

     “Right,” I said, because he was.

 03.18.18

Dear Anne,

When Wednesday follows Thursday and morning becomes afternoon the next day.

 Dear Anne, 

I was going on back Wednesday morning, I thought. Instead, I found myself in a talk on Anne Bradstreet, whose poems tend to jingle - at least in my ear. Even then, the serious way the serious woman talking to us read them, they were jingling.

     I’ve read some of them, the poems, before.* I find like the poet, especially her clear love of home and family tempered by genuine faith, where love of God must come before all things, whether it does or not. The woman talking to us, tall and earnest, was of a different denomination with different hopes, a different understanding of love, with different struggles.

     But, however she struggled with Anne Bradstreet’s poems, they are real: the words can be found on pages between covers.

My pathetic fallacy - if I can call it that - encompasses all things: the room like a piece of chipped china, the plastic chairs dull blue and dull red, the sun turning gray as it falls through the dirty window, the woman’s ardent voice. All could well be imaginary.

     Likely they were.

03.16 & 07.18

_______________

 * I do like “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet,” which doesn’t jingle. Read it here. Listen to it here.

Being Frank

It is difficult to know where you’ve been if at any point you’re not sure where you are.

 Being Frank 

Monday.

Frank knocks on my door.

     “Yes?”

      He opens it, stands in the doorway. “You are a liberal,” he says, only a hint of question in his voice.

     “Why?” I say.

     “Sure,” he says. “Sure.” He waits a minute. “You know what the problem is?” he asks.

     “With what?”

Frank

     “CNN,” he says, “the Washington Post, New York Times, the jesters of your tribe.” He waits again. “By jesters I mean the self-righteous cheerleaders.

     “I watch CNN,” he says. “Yesterday, they were saying that the president doesn’t have a sense of humor about himself.’ They didn’t add, ‘any more than Wolf does.’

     “This morning Cuomo is saying, ‘We keep hearing . . . ’ as if he had thousands of sources, he isn’t just listening to six friends and his own idolatrous gut.”

“Idolatrous?” I say.

     “Yes,” he says. “You know what the word means?”

     “I thought I did.”

He waits again. He shakes his head. “Are you going to lunch?” he says.

     Though of course, I am, I say, “Maybe,” and shrug.

     “I’ll stop by on my way,” he says.

03.15 & 07.18

Time does pass.

I don’t remember - ever - what I do before I go away. Nor do I understand what “away” is supposed to do for me. I don’t understand what it does for me. And, I don’t know how far away I get. A block, a town, a county? From one side of the bed to the other - I’ve not gone anywhere at all?

     Except away - I’ve been away.

In Hogarth’s engraving (See here.): there’s a dog barking, there are musics playing, baroque in one layer of the burnt air, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in another; people are talking to the air, and the air answers though not as if it had been listening. It is the color of an old high school gymnasium. It smells like a gymnasium the day after the prom. A half-dozen of you have come back to take down the decorations, which look like clothes bought at a second-hand store without having been tried on. 
     The undecorating goes as quickly as you can make it: no one wants to stay any longer than necessary; but there’s a day-after-the-night-before clumsiness that slows everything down. It takes much longer than expected.

Time does pass.

     The days run together, but one can keep track of them. There’s a day-and-date calendar with pasteboard numbers below the clock on the gymnasium wall.

So:

     I arrived sometime before two on Wednesday. Next I knew, it was Friday, then on the third day I woke up again, and I went to church. One day after that I saw a man named Frank. And on another day there was a program. A woman talked about Anne Bradstreet.

     I thought I was coming back on Wednesday-again; but then it was Thursday. Then, finally I did come back on the second Friday afternoon though I felt no better by then; I felt no different. As I remember.

* * * * *

 Blest 

Last Sunday before yesterday.

     The man comes with his Bible and song sheets, his full, deep voice that he loves, a jolly fat man as angry as Choler himself. He tries to hide the anger – in the folds of his fat, under the sweet jelly of his jolly; but he fools only the mad – and himself. (He is as mad as the maddest among us, yet he can come and he can go.)

     We sing the songs he bangs out on the piano though you can’t hear us over the hammers pounding the wires and his barking basso. We offer shaky suggestions when he asks us what he should pray for: he will do the praying; whatever we ask for, he prays for the world, for the nation, for the church, “for the congregation here present and those that minister to them” (meaning him), for forgiveness of sin, and life everlasting. And he prays for God Himself – whatever we do to f**k things up, may His will be done.

     Then, “may the words of his mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable,” and he will harangue us like the most self-righteous of stand-up comedians. (Have you noticed how self-righteous most of them are? Just listen to them some time talking about comedy. They are like Casuists talking about the law or Presbyterians talking about religion, like NRA members explaining the Second Amendment or advice columnists writing about men.)

     We don’t listen to the words, though. At least, I don’t, only the voice rushing this way and that, imitating the waves lapping the sand, the wind coming around the side of the house, a clap of thunder, the hiss of rain, a cook banging empty pans together to call ranchhands to dinner.

     “Old Maria,” who was here last time I was (and will be the next time and the every), shouts an occasional “Alleluia” or “Amen” timed with admirable, amazing skill to cover her farts.

Afterward, we all shake his hand, or those of us that can stand to be touched do. Some reach out, decide differently, and pull away with a wave.

     Then, we go to lunch. On Sunday it’s chicken and broccoli and mashed potatoes, all beaten into the consistency hard-scrambled eggs.

 03.12 & 03.07.18

The Parable of the Poisonous Snakes

 The Parable of the Poisonous Snakes 

Back from where I’ve been, I go to church by myself: Uncle Albert is indisposed by the time change; besides, he needs to rest for the Arsenal-Watford match.

     I continue to hear the stories from Scripture as parables. For aren’t they all about “the kingdom of God,” what God is going to do when God gets around to doing it, sometimes now, sometimes later, sometimes already? Don’t they all begin as Jesus’ parables do, “The kingdom of God - isn’t like this?”?

     In today’s lesson, straight from the New Revised Standard Version,* it’s like snakes. Listen!

03.11.18

_______________   

 * Numbers 21:4-6.

     In today’s lesson, straight from the New Revised Standard Version,* it’s like snakes.