Last Friday night.

 Last Friday night.

We took our turn.* Axel came and Nils, and Bel Monk. Roz served wine and crackers and cheese from the fancy big basket that showed up on our doorstep Christmas Eve instead of Moses in his ark or Jesus in a manger. “So God comes these days,” I said, “not as the one that will set his people free from bondage - or the whole world from sin and death - but as something pleasant to look at and to eat. Bread and wine,” I said, paused, “and cheese.” Or likely I didn’t say but only thought it. Or more likely I only thought of it later.

     I poured their wine, and a glass of water for myself. I put on the music. We ate quietly. The music played, Melody Gardot's My One and Only Thrill.

The album revolves around “if.” The first cut, “Baby, I’m a Fool,” begins: 

                   How was I to know that this was always only just a little game to you?
                   All the time I felt you gave your heart I thought that I would do the same for you.

The singer is the “fool who thinks it cool to fall in love.” The one she loves doesn’t seem to feel the same way. Or he doesn’t want the world to know he does. So, she promises that she “would never tell if he, too, “if you became a fool and fell in love.”

“If the Stars Were Mine,” the next cut begins, “I’d give them all to you.” If the birds were mine, if the world was mine, I’d give them all, I’d give it all to you: the stars in a jar, the birds in a song, the world in the brightest colors. IF. The lyrics are all in the subjunctive.

I can’t listen to Melody Gardot without thinking of her life, particularly how the bicycle accident, in which she suffered head and spinal injuries and a pelvis broken in two places, confined her to a hospital bed for a year, how she then had to learn how to walk again, how to remember again, how to tell time. How she still remained painfully sensitive to light and sound, so that she still wears tinted glasses most of the time and prefers quiet music. How her music aided in her recovery but didn’t take away the pain. She probably isn’t, but I see and hear her as both clear and confused, both sinewy and fragile. Likely I’m projecting.

We listen all the way through in silence: “Who Will Comfort Me?”; “Your Heart Is As Black As Night”; “Lover Undercover”; “Our Love Is Easy,” but “like water rushing over stones” (and won’t the stones get worn? I always think); “Les Étoiles”; “The Rain”; the title song, “My One and Only Thrill” : “When I’m with you, my whole world stands still.”; “Deep Within the Corners of My Mind,” which hopes eventually there will be “a place for you and me” in time, meaning, I take it, in the world as well as in the mind.

     There’s a bossa nova “Over the Rainbow,” which makes me think again about how the song ends - with another if. If “Little bluebirds fly over the rainbow, why, oh why (oh why!) can’t I?” Because, clearly, I can’t.

     Then the reprise of “If the Stars Were Mine to Give”; but they aren’t.

After we listen, Roz asks if anyone wants more wine - “Ted will pour it for you.” I am hoping no one does, especially when Axel declines. Bel hesitates; then Nils says, “I will, another glass of the red if it’s okay.” “Of course,” Roz says. Bel decides she’ll have another white. And I go to the kitchen to get it out of the refrigerator.

01.25-30.19

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 * For a musical evening. See here.

Today: this morning.

to hear this morning’s post, click here.

 Today: this morning. 

I don’t know where the books come from. Roz says I order them, and that it’s all right. It’s all right, too, she says, that I don’t remember why.

     For example, I have this little Andre Gide book on Oscar Wilde. I know who Gide is though I can’t find a novel of his I was sure I had somewhere, Strait Is the Gate. And I know who Wilde is though I can’t find The Picture of Dorian Gray either. I remember looking for it last week sometime, too; I can’t remember why.

As the epitaph to the first of Gide's two sketches in the volume, there’s a quote from Renan - I assume the historical Jesus guy. A bit of blah-blah-blah, then he says this about “harsh measures taken to assure the rule of our morals and manners,” that “the most serious abuses [against the rules] are less damaging than a system of inquisition which degrades character.” The cure is worse than the disease.

     For, is there an inquisition that is not degrading? Isn’t the point to raise the inquisitors’ righteousness over - and to place it in judgment of - any failure to live up to it? Righteousness despises any unwillingness to recognize its rightness, it can't stand any disinclination to take its seriousness seriously.

Art Carney as Ed Norton as Apostaticus Ludens

     For the inquisitors’ business is serious - it is a grave and solemn business, damn you.“Yes, damn you. God will damn you if you don’t . . . You, there, look at me! Don’t turn away. What you need to do is turn around, turn back. Save yourself before it’s too late.” It will be after I have killed you - after I have robbed you of all spirit and taken away all joy and then killed you.“Never overestimate either spirit or joy. They are nothing in God’s larger scheme of things.”

     Be ye solemn as he is solemn. As I am. Solemn!

 Tomorrow: last Friday night.

When Roz is God, things will be different.

01.29.19

The will of God that man seldom prosper.

 The will of God that man seldom prosper.

Looking for something to read this morning, and I found a book Bob NLN* gave me for Christmas - a surprise, I hadn’t seen Bob for quite a while. The book: Why Can’t We Get Along? a conversation among a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew, all academics or former academics in Britain.**

     And here’s the first line: “Religions are seldom complimentary about human nature.” Moreover, “the human predicament is rooted in human nature itself.”

     It is a “predicament”***: the plot is contrived before the actors come on stage. Anyone that has read the play - or even about the play - can predict its outcome, for example, that, a miserable sinner for more than sixty years, I will be sitting here constipated, nursing a bad back.
     Right?

01.26.19

_______________

   * No last name. My former uncredentialed cognitive behavioral therapist. See here.

  ** Dawoud El-Alami, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, and George D. Cryssides, Why Can’t They Get Along? A conversation between a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian. Oxford: Lion Books, 2014.

 *** from the Latin prae + dicare (not dicere), to announce - or pronounce - beforehand.

A master had three servants.

 A master had three servants. 

 from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012, p. 213) – 

The so-called unrecorded sayings of Jesus are often difficult to reconstruct, especially those attributed to the so-called “Gospel of the Apocalypse,” since we have no manuscript for the “Gospel,” only references to it in third-hand copies of the sayings of unnamed oasis fathers. As in this case, which begins as follows:

 

   kai\ ei]pen au00toi=v : kurio&v tiv ei)xen trei_v doulou&v. 

   He said to them, “A master had three servants.”

The parable goes on something like this:

Going away for the night, he left them in charge of his household. When he returned suddenly at midnight, he found them up waiting though they had fallen asleep. He shook each gently and sent them all to bed. Then, he went back out into the night. When he returned in the early morning, he found them again up waiting, but again asleep. Tell me: Will God not know his own whether they are awake or asleep?

Commentary

The parable cannot be genuine; that is, it cannot belong to Jesus of Nazareth. Even less, even though it has been attributed to the “Gospel of the Apocalypse,” can it have come from any early apocalyptic tradition? And the answer to the question, “Where does it come from then?” can only be “We do not know.”

     However, it does ask that tradition an interesting question, “What might God know that you do not, you supercillious, hypocritical, pig-headed prigs?”

01.25.19

For links to other excerpts from Rantrage Press commentaries (Joshua, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Revelation, et al.), click here.

*2*Ba-dum-tss-bam*2*

continued from here

 *2*Ba-dum-tss-bam*2* 

“Brenda Lee,” I said.
     She shook her head, sadly.

     “Patsy Cline, then,” I said.

     “Edgier,” Roz said. “I think edgier.”

     “Edgier than Patsy Cline?”

     “Etta James,” she said.

We compromised on Melody Gardot, which suggests we may have different definitions of “edgy.”

01.21.19

**Ba-dum-tss-bam**

 **Ba-dum-tss-bam** 

“Is this a good time?” Roz asked. This was yesterday. Just after three in the afternoon. I wasn’t sleeping, but the phone woke me up, and Roz was in the earpiece saying, “Is this a good time?”

     “For what?” I said, thinking why was she calling me, she never calls me?

     “You know,” she said. Then I did. Ten days is not so long a time that a conversation cannot be resumed where it left off. At our stage of enervated life, exasperated love, and patched-together conversation, ten days is not that much different from ten minutes or ten hours. “Enervated” and “exasperated” are my words, incidentally; she wouldn’t use either of them.

     “It’s not something to talk about on the phone, maybe?” I said hopefully but not full of hope. But then:

     “Maybe not,” she said. “But be thinking about it.” She took a breath. “For next week!” she said.

     “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

I meant “yes,” but I added “of course” because “yes” didn’t seem enough. I needed to sound more enthusiastic, less enervated, to sound more engaged, less exasperated, than I felt. Not that Roz would be fooled about what I was really feeling, but she might give me credit for the effort. She usually does.

     Some people have all the luck. I’m one of them. My life seems to run into more than its share of difficulties these days, and maybe I make them though maybe bad chemistry does. In either case, I’m a difficulty for others. Yet people stick by me. Roz especially: she sticks by me when it must be far easier to slide away. She doesn’t even take a rest while she’s sticking by. She’s one of those people that are never distracted. When she’s there, she’s there, nowhere else.

     So I added, “Of course” to sound like I really was going to be thinking about it. And I tried to though I don’t think very well at all these days. There's too much noise, too many voices all talking at once. I can’t keep one thought separated from another; every one is whirled into every other one.

As another sign of enthusiasm, I made spaghetti for supper. It’s one of the few things I can cook and have any sense that it’s going to turn out. It’s going to turn out because I make it the same way every time with Paul Newman’s Sockarooni sauce, which I’ve poured over minced onions and peppers and apples sprinkled with basil and fennel and powdered thyme and sautéed in olive oil and red wine. When the sauce begins bubbling, I stir in a teaspoon-and-a-half of sugar and turn the burner down to as close to nothing as it will go. I boil the noodles for twelve minutes so they are just past al dente.

     I set the table and poured Roz’s wine. I don’t drink wine because of some medicine that I’m taking - that I’m still taking:  It’s been two years. I won’t say I never drank a glass of wine - or had a beer - in those two years, but if I did I don’t remember it.

We sat down to eat.

     “Thanks,” she said.

     “You’re welcome,” I said.

     “What do you think?” she said.

     “Brenda Lee.”

     “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant when. We were talking about when. I said I thought this next week sometime.”

     “Okay,” I said. “I remember. Only not Saturday. Axel doesn’t do Saturday.”

     “I figured as much.” She ate three bitesful. “Brenda Lee is a terrible idea,” she said.

     “How do you know?”

     “I just do.”

     “Patsy Cline, then,” I said.

to be continued

01.19.19

The living dead.

 The living dead. 

I was thinking this morning about a story told about John Wilmot, Lord Rochester.

     This happened when he was a young man still in his teens. He was serving on the Revenge - this was during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. During the fire-fight in Bergen harbor, he entered into a pact with George Windham, another “young man of breeding,” according to Rochester’s first biographer, Gilbert Burnet, that, should either of them die, “he should appear, and give the other notice of the future state, if there was any.” A third young man, Ned Montagu refused to enter the pact - perhaps he was a few months older. But all three fought bravely until under heavy fire Windham began to give up the ghost. When Montagu saw his friend trembling - “violently” - he ran to help. He also ran into a cannonball that squashed Windham and ripped out his (Montagu’s) stomach. The first died immediately, the second within the hour.

Eddie Anderson as Lord Rochester in Carolingian Capers,
1674 (with Stuart’s Cavalier Gueñon as his monkey).

     So, would Windham come from beyond the grave to give him a sense of “the future state”? Rochester wondered, apparently as soon as the battle was over (no sentimentalist he). But no; much to Rochester’s disappointment, he did not. Not then, or ever. And Windham’s failure to appear was, according to Burnet, “a great snare to [Rochester] during the rest of his life,” even if “it was an unreasonable thing for him to think that beings in another state were not under such laws and limits that they could not command their own motions but as the Supreme Power should order them,” not to mention that he, Rochester, really “had no reason to expect that such an extraordinary thing should be done for [him].” Because dead people really aren’t bosses of themselves. And live people are foolish to expect miracles.

The story almost certainly came to me because Dr. Feight asked me yesterday if I had heard any more from my sister.

     “Which one?” I asked since he didn’t specify the dead one though that’s the sister he meant.

     “Well,” he said backtracking, “either one, then.”

“No,” I said. “Not really.” It was not entirely the truth. I don’t hear from Hannah now that Uncle Albert lives here, but I still hear from Moira frequently. It’s not a miracle, though; there’s an explanation.*

01.18.19

 _______________

 * This is not that explanation; but it started, the reader may remember, my hearing from Moira, back in the summer. We talked about it once, Dr. Feight and I, in late October, I think it was. See here and here.

End-game

 End-game 

I took Uncle Albert to his Lectio Divina group tonight. There were no tracts in the library, where I wait for him; so I read under the letter E in a Bible dictionary. 

Full disclosure: I made this cover up.

     It said about encroachment (in the Old Testament) that it referred mostly to hidden crimes generally missed by men so punishable only by God, but He would normally take speedy action as He did when Uzzah touched the Ark. Then there was something about the Korahite rebellion, which I didn’t quite understand, maybe because I didn’t re-read Numbers 16 and 17 and all I remembered about them was that the ground swallowed up the rebels, then there was a plague on all the people. But the article quoted Numbers 18, concerning the gift given to Aaron and his sons, of “every thing of the altar and within the vail.” It was for them alone and “the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death.”

     The dictionary said about endogamy, how if Ezra had not insisted on it, that all strange women be put away, the people of Israel would not have survived and Christ could not have come.

The articles might have come from the same tract I found once before. (See here.)

I asked Uncle Albert afterwards, “When you pray for the nation and the world, the President and Congress and others that are violent” - because I’d heard them praying about those things -“and when you pray for the church that it might love the world; and you know that the prayers aren’t going to do a damn bit of good, what do you do?”

     “I say ‘Amen’ under my breath,” he said.

     “But that means ‘So be it,’ right?”

     “Yes. Right.”

     “I’m saying it won’t be so, none of it.”

     “I know,” he said.

     “So?”

     “We don’t pray that the church love the world,” he said.

     “Ever?” I said.

     He said, “That sounds like your agenda.”

01.15.19

"Snow on snow"

 “Snow on snow” 

  “Oh, isn’t it beautiful.”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t it the yew bush
and the magnolia tree and the house
across the street that is beautiful? Take
them away, the snow looks like this:”

 Last night it snowed. I hate snow.

     I hate this snow; I can’t wait for it to go away. May it never come back. Let climate change submerge Virginia Beach if it will keep snow out of the Valley forever.

“Oh, but it’s beautiful!” No, it isn’t. Look at the pictures. It may be beautiful in a snow globe, if you like white. Outside my house on this globe, it is cold, it is wet, it robs the street of all color. It covers all the imperfections - the cracks in the sidewalk, the patches in the pavement, the brown scrapes on the lawns’ knees - it covers everything that makes the street homely and lovely.

     And it seeps inside. It invades at the imperfections in the house, the places the windows and the doors, even the boards, don’t fit exactly. Cold, wet, paler than death.

     It seeps inside. It slips through my pores: It reaches into my gut; it grabs hold of my heart; it pulls out my soul, turns it over in its icy hands, snickers, and hands it back to me, shaking its ugly head. Having been in its hands, it feels in my own like a dead fish.

     I can’t, then, think what to do with it. I can’t put it back in me until it’s been warmed a little, and I can’t think how to warm it without the fish-smell taking over the house.

I hate snow. It makes no accommodations. It has no forgiveness. It thinks it is beautiful because it’s heard that so often. It thinks it’s beautiful, and that’s enough - we should accommodate to it - entirely!

     I hate snow. It is the ultimate narcissist. It is cold and wet; it takes the color out of everything it touches.

01.13.19

**Ba-dum-tss**

 **Ba-dum-tss** 

Before she left for work this morning, Roz said through the bathroom door, “So, what are we going to do about it, now we’re in the new year?”

     “About what?” Then, I thought, I really don’t want to know what. “Now’s not a good time,” I said.

     “With you, it’s never a good time," she sighed. But we were going to talk about another ‘musical evening,’ whether we shouldn’t take a turn.”

     “When?” I said. “When were we going to talk about ‘another musical evening’? When did we ever talk about it?”

     “Last February,” she said. “I made a note.”

     “Now’s not a good time,” I said.

     She didn’t say anything for a minute, but I could hear her standing there, suppressing another sigh. “It’s not going to be a good time either when I bring it up this evening.”

     Then I could hear her going.

I didn’t exactly thank God because I’m not believing in God these days, but also because evening follows afternoon as sure afternoon follows morning as sure as night follows day. Even if there's no God, there’s a law of inevitability where Roz is concerned.

01.09.18

_______________

 * As far as I can remember there have been only two of these, so it’s not like they’re a regular, obligatory thing. Axel hosted the first one. And Bel Monk hosted the next. There’s a list somewhere.

Not just another Sunday

 Epiphany 

The three-headed god, Epiphany

I had forgotten that today was the Feast of Epiphany. An alien attending the service this morning would discern this much: Epiphany is one of the lesser gods of the pantheon, but an important one, not the least.

These lower gods have arisen out of - or, perhaps better, have multiplied from - the Trinity for various purposes: to privilege certain hopes, to allay certain fears, to test our memories. In the Protestant churches, they seem to have proliferated sometime in the seventies when their (the churches’) commitment to monotheism began to wane. Before, since the Reformation, it had waxed. At least, in the church I grew up in, the Trinity had become two; the Holy Spirit had become but the ghost of a god.

     Now there is a sea of gods, from the Baby Jesus to Bible, from Armageddon to Inclusion. (The first two and fourth of these are, in the church Uncle Albert and I attend, among the most powerful, but other gods have more cachet in other churches, I believe.) The chief advantage of polytheistic religion is that there soon becomes a god to petition in practically every circumstance, one committed to listening. The greatest drawback is that the possibilities become as distracting as social media.

01.06.19

Email

 Email 

It was in my box (crabbiolio@gmail.com) this morning: “When was I coming back to church?” Thank you for writing.

     The answer is “Soon.” It’s harder to arrange rides for Uncle Albert than to bring him myself. Plus, since I gave up public radio, I miss being hectored. But, I’ll have to sit out the transubstantiation* as long as he can get to the rail on his own.

     Yes. Thank you for writing.

01.05.19

_______________

 * According to Thomas Aristotle (Handbook of Pecclesiological Terms), “in which, though the church purposes it, by accident cardboard and cabernet are changed into flesh and blood. That they continue to taste like wet wafer and weak wine is the result of ‘a failure to communicate.’”