The usual Thursday sh**

 The usual Thursday sh** 

“Great minds think alike - or completely unalike,” Uncle Albert said. “As the case may be,” he added.

     This was this morning. I was helping him into the car; we were on our usual way to see Dr. Feight. Mondays and Thursdays I pick him up. He reads the magazines in the waiting room while I’m in with the doctor, then we eat lunch: sometimes I fix it, sometimes we go out.

     He turned around, back to the car, and sat down. He pulled his legs in one by one. He finally got buckled. I shut the door, walked around the car, got in myself, and restarted the engine. It was cold; there was lots of sun, but it was cold. I hadn’t slept well, and maneuvering Uncle Albert, bundled up in his long wool overcoat, his stupid Cossack hat made of baa-baa-black-sheep, into, and settling him in, the car was a painstaking business - a painful business, especially watching him trying to pull the seatbelt around the increased bulk of the coat, his arms also covered in the thick wool, then his hands in gloves trying to get it latched.

     “Whose great minds?” I said as I buckled my own belt. I never to remember to buckle-up before I start the car. Who knows how many thousands of gallons gas I’ve wasted over the years, how much my idiot start-the-engine-then-fasten-your-belt clan has contributed to global warming.

     “Yours for one,” he said. “And your Cousin Jack’s. Here,” he said, leaning away from me.

     “What?”

     “In my pocket,” he said. The left one of his overcoat, underneath his seat belt. I managed to get three fingers in. A postcard.

 It was hardly mint.

     “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “but I just got it.”

     I looked at it, tucked it under his lap belt, shrugged. “Monday,” he said, “this Monday.”

* * * * *

“So, what do you think?” he said when we were home for lunch. I was heating up some chicken and vegetable soup Roz had put together on the weekend and putting two slices of bread in the toaster. He was sitting at the kitchen table.

     “Did you talk to Feight about it?” he said.

     “About what?” I was pretending ignorance, but I’m not very good at it.

     “You know what,” he said. “This loss of faith business.”

     “I did not,” I said. “Instead I told him what a jackass you are - and Jack, too. I told him ‘to hell with both of you and the horses you rode in on.’”

     “But you didn’t mean it,” Uncle Albert said.

     “No,” I said. “I guess not. At least not literally.”

* * * * *

Nothing I say can be taken literally.

11.29.18

Losing faith.

continued from here (bottom of the page).

 Losing faith. 

Sunday morning. About quarter ’til eight. Uncle Albert calls. I think it’s going to be about the Bournemouth-Arsenal game at 8:30. It’s not. It’s about church: Where am I?

     “You don’t remember,” I said.

     Nothing on the other end of the line.
     “Two Sundays ago.”
     Nothing 

     “I called you.”

     And nothing.

     “Very early in the morning.”

     Still absolutely nothing.

     “I told you I’d lost my faith.”

     “I do remember,” Uncle Albert said.

     “Ergo,” I said [Stage direction: sententiously]: “Ergo, I am not going to church.”

     “I didn’t think you were serious,” Uncle Albert said.

When, in Orwell’s The Clergyman’s Daughter, Dorothy, the daughter, tells Mr. Warburton that she’s lost her faith, he doesn’t believe it. As far as he’s concerned, she never had any. “You never did believe in it [really],” he says. “But I did, really I did!” she replies. “I know you thought I didn’t - you thought I was just pretending because I was ashamed to own up. But it wasn’t that at all. I believed it just as I believe I am sitting in this [railway] carriage.”

     Warburton still doesn’t believe her. She’s always been “too intelligent” to have faith.

And I, I suppose, have, in Uncle Albert’s eyes, been too naïve to have lost it.

     “Why wouldn’t I have been serious?” I asked. “It was four o’clock in the morning.”

     “I thought maybe you just misplaced it,” he said.

     “What does that mean?”

     More nothing on the other end.

     “Here’s what I think,” I said. “Jack can lose his faith, and you believe it.”

     Then, after a pause, there was something on the other end: “That’s different,” Uncle Albert was saying - insisting. There was that in his voice, insistence (as the near-relation to defensiveness). “It’s different,” he insisted, but when I asked, he wouldn’t say how.

     “Here’s what I think,” I said again. “Jack can lose his faith, and you believe it. But I can’t lose mine. And it’s because he’s serious, right? - and I am not. He’s thoughtful, and I am a funny little madman, who doesn’t know what he knows and what he doesn’t know.”

     “So, no church,” Uncle Albert said.

     “No, no church.”

     “Bournemouth-Arsenal begin at 8:30?”

     “Yes.” And I said I’d pick him up about a quarter after.

Did I say that, in so many words, “I am a funny little madman”? If so, is that what I meant?

     Maybe it is. I know - and you know - that there are people we take seriously, and there are people we don’t take seriously. It’s not because we don’t care for them, the ones we don’t take seriously; it’s not even that we don’t care what they think. But they seem to hold their opinions lightly; then, so do we.

    So, for example, while Jack tries not to take himself too seriously - he wishes he didn’t take himself as seriously as he does - still, at the end of the day, the Presbyterian minister who left on three weeks’ vacation from the Presbyterian Church in Jefferson, North Carolina, and did not return, is judged a serious man. Everyone thinks so, everyone that has ever known him. He can laugh at himself, we all know, but there’s always a hint of bitterness in the laugh, a bite of chickory.

    On the other hand, Ted (for another example) holds onto everything lightly, because anything could get up and fly away at any minute and it’s good to be ready for that. He holds onto what he knows lightly: he could well be wrong. What he knows of Science could be wrong; History he could well be misreading; the philosophers he thinks he does comprehend could be as misguided as psychologists (psychologists could be only as reliable as fortunetellers). Religion could misconstrue God - it’s likely that religion does misconstrue God.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang

Unlike Science, Philosophy, or Religion, faith (even in Science) doesn’t have to do with what we know but with what we trust. It’s one thing to find out you’ve been wrong about something. It’s another thing to have misplaced your trust.

     And here, it’s not just trust in God, it’s trust in Uncle Albert. (Obviously, I’m the Ted in the example.) When a good Catholic goes to confession, he trusts the priest is listening, that the man on the other side of the screen takes sin seriously, that he can hear where the sinner has gone astray, that he can offer forgiveness and keep a confidence. I guess I expected something similar of Uncle A, not that he could offer forgiveness, but that he took faith seriously and that he listened.

     So much for that.

Arsenal beat Bournemouth 2-1.

11.26.18

Her!

 Her! 

from Gregorius Gruntman’s commentary on Judges (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, forthcoming 2019, p. 196): the story found in in 14:1-4a, “Samson’s girl” —
 

XIV. 1 When Samson was down in Timnah, a Philistine girl caught his eye. 2 And when he got home he told his dad and mum. “I saw this girl down in Timnah. Get her for me.”  3 But they replied, “Wait. Isn’t there a girl around here, one of your cousins or, at least, your cousins’ cousins you could like? You have to want the daughter of one of those foreskinned Philistines?”  3 Samson only said, “Get her for me. She’s the one I want.”

     4 His anxious parents didn’t know that their son’s lust was God’s business: He was looking to start trouble with the Philistines.

Notes

vi. 1.  Zorah, where Samson’s parents lived - and Samson lived, too, because he was still living at home (Actually, until he will be captured, he’ll always live at home.) - was to Timnah as Borough Park is to Washington Heights, for example.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.

     3. cousins.  אִשָּׁה עַמִּי-וּבְכָל אַחֶיךָ בִּבְנוֹת הַאֵין. More like: one of my brother’s daughters or one of his brother’s daughters. Though it has absolutely nothing to do with this verse, rather because it has nothing to do with tribalism, Fabianski’s essay on preference for the niphil perfect participle over the plural cohortative to translate נשׄמע in Ecclesiastes 12:13 is well worth reading again.

     4.  anxious parents.  וְאִמּוֹ אָבִיו.  lxx ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ. Literally, “his mother and his father,” but what parents of a narcissist like Samson aren’t anxious - all the time!?

           God’s business. Yahweh’s. He will always be putting His oar in, but Samson is perfectly capable of batting it away.

Commentary

There are people that: when they want something, figure they should just take it - or better, order someone else to take it for them.

11.24.18

every day

 every (damn) day 

Dear Diary,

You asked about my mental health.

Every day since I’ve returned to Roz’s bed: the radio wakes us, NPR whinging about this and that, especially about how unfair life is and what we should be doing about it. We should be joining these brave people, who are already making things better even if, well, clearly, they’re getting worse. It’s like listening to fingernails on a blackboard. It’s like being in a fifth-grade classroom - Mrs. Brown is going on and on about our sins in greater and greater despair about what little shits we are. My brain knocks its head against the wall of my skull hard enough it hurts; it brings tears to its - and to my - eyes. I pull the covers closer, I put Roz’s pillow over my head.

Only after she’s gotten up, showered, brought up breakfast - that she’ll eat at her dressing table, I’ll eat in bed (a cup of coffee, a slice of toast with butter and jam) - only after she’s dressed and announced that she’s off; only then do I try to get out from under, try to get up, get stuck halfway, try again, and finally stumble into the bathroom with my cold coffee, try to take a shit, begin thinking about taking a shower.

     If the morning extends from six until noon, it is almost half gone. Half of it has wasted away. It hangs empty like yesterday’s clothes on the hook in my closet, yesterday’s clothes that - to hell with a shower - I’m going to put on again today.

     Eventually.

                                  Your friend,

                                   Ted

 11.23.18

Peaceable Kingdom

Jesop, the farabulist

  “a peaceable kingdom” 

A fox, a wolf, and a vulture fell into conversation, and the matter of the Peaceable Kingdom arose, that time to come when all animals would again be friends and all men would again be children. The fox wondered if it were not a riddle, but he declared he looked forward to a time when all grapes were sweet and within reach. The vulture was all for peace but didn’t see how he would survive where there was no death. “Or killing,” said the wolf, who laughed aloud when told the king would be a lamb. He would never be governed by his dinner, the wolf said. “As if,” the fox replied, “you are not already ruled by your stomachs, both of you.”

 11.20.18  

_______________

The Farables (online reproduction of the 1887 edition with an afterword by Ted Riich) is available here.

Talking the walk.

The night before and last night. 
 
 Last night I set the alarm because too many mornings these days I am having trouble getting up. And this morning I was picking up Uncle Albert for the Cardiff City - Brighton-Hove-Albion match that started at 7:25. “Let’s see what’s going on in the bottom half of the table,” he said. The Cardiff-Brighton match was the next-to-the-bottom team going against the team 12th in the standings. Then Leicester City (10th) at Burnley (15th). I asked him if he was going to stay through the final game, 14th-place Crystal Palace against 4th-place Tottenham. He was, he said, because he thought Palace had a good chance of knocking off the Spurs. He hates the Spurs.

He asked about the trip to New York. I told him about lunch at the Korean place near the church. “The church has always been better at talking than listening,” he said. “That church in particular.” He’d been there more than once, he said, though it had been thirty years since he was there last, back in the sixties sometime. I didn't say the sixties were fifty years since. “But they’ve always hired the best talkers,” he said.

linocut by Bob Hodgell

     “Mmmm,” I said.

     “I’m reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection,” Uncle Albert said. “Do you know it?” I had to admit that I didn’t.

     “I don’t know that I’ve even heard of it,” I said.

     “Well, I’m not very far along,” he said, “but there’s a trial scene early on; and as the trial is coming to an end . . . . The matter is about to go the jury,” Uncle Albert said, “but first the president, the presiding judge, has to give them his instructions. The testimony has taken longer than he had hoped; he is anxious to get away because he has a sweet young thing waiting for him, but she can wait only so long. If things go on much longer, he’ll be late; he’ll miss what he desires more than anything he can imagine. But now he has launched into his speech to the jury, about the case, about the law, about their responsibilities, he can’t stop. He is mesmerized by the sound of his own voice, his own eloquence; he can’t abbreviate, he can only elaborate. In short, he can’t shut up. Tolstoy's omniscient narrator remarks more than once that he can't help himself. He can’t shut up even though he is aware that the jury has reached the point they are only admiring the stream of words, they’re no longer listening: they can’t admire and listen at the same time. He knows all of this, that he is only piling up words, that his talk is for nothing, that he may miss his appointment. Yet, he cannot help himself, he goes on. He cannot stop.

     “Talkers are like that.”

“Tolstoy,” I said, letting out a breath. “Boy! When do you read?”

     “Between naps,” Uncle Albert said.

     “I don’t read anymore,” I said.

     “Why not?”

     “It’s too daunting. Or books are anyway. They’re too big. There are too many words,” I said.

11.10.18

“Where are you going?” Roz said.

     “I need to call Uncle Albert,” I said.

     She rolled over to look at her clock. “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” she said.

     “I know. He won’t mind.”

“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” Uncle Albert said.

     “I know. But look: I can’t take you to church today.”

     “Why not?”

     “I wanted you to know before you got ready.”

     “Why can’t you take me to church?”

     “I lost my faith.”

     “Where? When?”

     “I don’t know where. I just woke up.”

     “When, then?”

     “During the night sometime. I woke up, it was gone.”

     “Oh,” he said.

 11.11.18

Otto Dix

 Otto Dix 

Last weekend, we drove back to New York City, Roz and I. We took the old car because we hoped to park on the street. We arrived Friday afternoon: we parked in a garage. So, it’s only $25 a day; and we were staying again with Roz’s son Bart, the writer, who lives with Dominga and her son, the pocket Junot Diaz,* Alfredo, Bosilla Junot I, Prince of Sardonia. The conditions are crowded - they’re still in the same apartment I visited them in two years ago: the guests sleep in Bart and Dominga’s bed; she sleeps with Alfredo in his bed; and Bart kips on the couch.

Dr. Hans Koch by Otto Dix

Saturday we went to MOMA. Alfredo wanted to show us Otto Dix’s portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann. We looked at it for some time, or so it seemed to me. “Why?” I asked him, meaning why did he want to show it to us? “So you could see it,” he said. Downstairs in the museum store, he showed us a book of Dix’s work. “I don’t have this at home,” he said. I asked him if he wanted it. “No, I can look at it here,” he said.

Sunday we went to Big Liberal Presbyterian Church except for Roz, who said she had a headache. “What was the sermon about?” she asked when she met us afterward for Korean food, her headache miraculously gone. (“Poof!” she said.) She was there waiting for us, sitting at one end of the table. I sat at the other. Bart sat between us on one side and Alfredo, next to me, and Dominga, next to her, on the other.

     “It was about the raising of Lazarus,” I said.

     “Yes,” Alfredo said. “Jesus raised him on a Sunday, so he could vote on Tuesday.”

     “Yes,” Bart said. “And there were sample ballots in the narthex if he needed one.”

     “Likely he did not,” Alfredo said. “Because he was ‘woke.’”

     “I see,” Roz said.

Alfredo beckoned to me: “Do you think she does?” he whispered. “Did she get the pun?”

     Leaning, toward him: “I think she did,” I whispered back. “She sometimes likes to pretend she doesn’t get it to make you uncomfortable.”

     “Oh,” he said. He smiled. I bent down again. He whispered, “That’s a very good strategy, I think.” Then, “Heh, heh, heh,” he laughed, just like that: “Heh, heh, heh.”

     Roz looked down the table at us and shook her head.

     “That means she does get it,” Alfredo said a little louder.

     “Yes, I think so,” I said.

“Oh, there’s Will,” Dominga said. She waved. Bart turned in his chair. “I didn’t see them in church,” Dominga said.

     Will came over. Roz and I had met him and Verónica and their daughter, Leona, two years ago, when we were up for Thanksgiving. He was teaching English at CUNY, she was Dominga’s boss at Macy’s, Leona was Alfredo’s best bud. (See here.*) But that was two years ago, I reminded myself; and Will looked more than two years older. He waved at the waiter, who brought another chair. Will sat down by Bart, who was saying,

     “We didn’t see you at church.”

     “I was in the balcony,” Will said, “out of the line of fire.”

“Vero and Leona?” Dominga asked.

     “Off somewhere with my mother,” Will said. “Somewhere not to do with church.”

     “What do you mean ‘out of the line of fire’?” Bart asked.

     “It’s not the right expression,” Will said. “‘Out of the line of righteousness,’ maybe.” Bart shrugged. “Don’t you think sometimes that we have forgotten that we are all miserable sinners, strangers to the truth? That our ‘compassion’ that we're so proud of is pretense. All we do, it seems to me sometimes, is for show. Especially, we’re going to show them, the real sinners; I mean, they’re just mean.” Now, he shrugged. But then he went on. “Mean! But it’s not that we can’t be mean, too. We wouldn’t act mean, of course. But we can say all the mean things we want. They deserve it. They can’t heat up the kitchen and then try to slip out for a quiet smoke on the porch. So, it’s not just meanness, ours isn’t. It’s a question of fairness as well. Our meanness is fair. Again, they deserve it.

     “Maybe I can take that in the sermon,” he said, “but not in the prayers. My God, not in the prayers.”

     “What do you mean?”

     “You don’t hear it?”

     Bart shrugged again. “Maybe you have better ears,” he said.

     “My dad, bless his all-too-gentle soul, used to say that you could pray while you were preaching, but you should never preach while you were praying.”

     “I’d forgotten he was a preacher, your dad” Bart said.

     “Sometimes he forgot, too,” Will said. “Maybe his most endearing trait.”

The waiter came with our waters and flatware. Alfredo beckoned to me, and I leaned toward him.

     “I don’t think Will is very happy today,” he said. I shook my head “no.”

Roz said Bart and Will should order for all of us, and we could put everything in the middle of the table and share. That didn’t make everything better, but it made it less bad.

Monday we came home.

 11.07.18

_______________

 *For mel ball’s drawing of the real Junot Diaz, see here.

Windy, clammy, and cool.

 Windy, clammy, and cool. 

Uncle Albert came over Sunday morning to watch the Arsenal match. It was something of a disappointment. His Gunners had played beautiful football against Leicester City on Monday, and now they couldn’t manage better than a draw against Crystal Palace. Mesut Özil had disappeared again. One day he’s one of the best footballers in the world; the next he’s barely visible.

     Taking him home - in the new car - I told Uncle A I’d said something to Dr. Feight about the letters from Moira. [See here and here.] Why I told him I don’t know. How he found about the letters to begin with - I don’t know that either. He said at the time that Roz had told him, but I doubt that. I doubted it then, and I still do, though how else he could have found out I don’t know. I can’t see him nosing around my desk.

     And I don’t think I told him, though here is the trouble with all of this: I’m always telling people things they really have no business knowing, and why I do this - another thing I don’t know. It has something to do, I think, with a misguided sense of what it means to be honest, that the truth isn’t true unless it’s whole. The truth is the whole truth, down to the last jot and tittle of it.

     So, while I had no intention of telling Uncle Albert that I had finally talked to Dr. Feight about Moira’s letters, while, in fact, I’d been telling myself that I wasn’t going to say anything to him about it, because it was none of his business - let him stew if he wanted to know and why was he poking around in my sadness about my sister anyway? - now I found myself telling him. I was hearing myself say,

     

Crosby, Stills, and Nash

“I told Dr. Feight about Moira’s letters.” Not to say it would have left the truth half-said, our conversation from July half-finished. From July! I’m yelling at myself to just “shut the fuck up” - loudly and that obscenely, but I’m not shutting the fuck up, I’m babbling away: “I told Dr. Feight about the letters.”

     “What did he say?” Uncle Albert said.

     “Nothing,” I said. “He didn’t say anything. He just wanted to know where the letters came from.”

     “What did you tell him? That you wrote them? Right?”

     “No. That’s not what he meant. I told him ‘Spain’ and ‘Morocco.’”

Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth, but it was a gray morning, at the same time windy and clammy, and cold.

11.01.18