Burning bushes II

continued from the previous post

 Burning Bushes II  

“What’s this week’s sermon about?” I was asking Axel.

     “The passage is ‘the burning bush’ in Exodus 3,” Axel said.

“That’s next year's,” I didn’t say. (But the story is here, in case you were interested.)

 

08.30.19

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 * Other stories from the TRV (Ted Riich Version of the Bible).

Burning our bushes

 Burning our bushes behind us 

Yab-Yum in a fishbowl

I was asking Axel about Nils, who was heading off on some sort of retreat with Bel Monk. “Uncle Albert says he is converting to some sort of Buddhism - it begins with a V, I think?”

          “Vajrayāna,” Axel said. “Nils is an idiot. He’s a Marxist, then he’s a Buddhist; and somehow he is going to hold those in tension ‘within himself.’ It’s bullshit. It’s impossible bullshit.”

          I started to say, “How so?” for what do I know about either? But Axel rushed right on: “They’re both bullshit to start with. Marxism is bullshit. And Vajrayāna Buddhism is bullshit.

     “At least in Nils’ hands,” he added after a pause.

     “How so?” I wanted to say again, but it didn’t seem like the right question at this point, so I said, “Oh.”

We were in Axel’s study at Grace, a cavern of a room with bookshelves on two walls and windows on a third, the shades pulled against the afternoon sun. Axel was in his big leather chair behind his big mahogany desk. He was leaning back, hands behind his head, trying to decide whether to put his feet up.

     I was opposite in one of the two overstuffed parishioners’ chairs. The whole office felt over-stuffed. There were too many books on the shelves, the blinds trapped too much air in the room. (You know, how water in a fish tank looks denser than water in a pond.) Axel had eaten too much for lunch; his stomach was rumbling. There were too many ideas in his head. Maybe it was his brain that was rumbling.

     There were too many butterflies in my stomach. There are always butterflies in my stomach. I am always anxious. That’s what I take medicine for, to kill the butterflies. But at best it only wounds them: some sink to the bottom where they continue to flutter their enfeebled wings. Others continue to sail drunkenly about bumping into one another. The few that manage somehow to escape the poison altogether yell at the others: “Get up, you lazy jackass!” “Watch where you’re going, you besotted son-of-a-bitch!”

“What about Bel?” And I found myself wondering if I’d said that out loud. It’s a delicate subject, I keep thinking.

     “Eff Bel,” Axel said, except he didn’t say “eff.” Then he must have wondered if he’d said that out loud. He decided he had. “I’m sorry,” he interrupted himself in a rush. “I shouldn’t have said that.

     “She’s an artist.” He stopped. He started again: “Not a wonderful artist,” he went on, “though I like her work. But she’s serious about it. So for her,” he hesitated.

     “Anything for art’s sake,” he decided. “She thinks this stuff may help. Somehow.”

     I was trying not to say anything out loud.

     “And maybe it will,” Axel said and pursed his lips.

“Today’s Thursday,” I said after a long silence. We’d come to the church after taking Uncle Albert home from Thursday lunch.

     “It is, Einstein. So?”

     “What’s this week’s sermon about?”

     “The passage is ‘the burning bush’ in Exodus 3,” Axel said. (Incorrectly, it turns out. See here.)

08.29.19

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* वज्रयान
Dramatis Personae: Axel, Nils, Bel Monk.
 

a pack of dogs

My recent absence from Twitter can be explained. I was blocked for ten days for “insufficient crass political content.” For my absence from these pages, I have no excuse, but I do have the following explanation.

 A farable of Jesop 

Jesop as the dog Zeke

“a pack of dogs”

A dog decided to form a pack. He went out looking for dogs to join. He found another dog and asked him to join. The other dog said he would if he could be the leader. The first dog agreed: “Sure, why not?” The second dog asked the first, “How many do we have to have to have a pack?” The first dog said, “Five, like the fingers on a human hand.” “Then we'll need three more,” the second dog said. Soon, they found one who knew another who knew another, but the last wouldn't join unless he could be leader. “Can a pack have two leaders?” the second dog asked the first.” “I don’t think it can,” the first said.

  08.27.19 

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

Reading Kristin Lavransdatter

 Reading Kristin Lavransdatter   

“What do you hear from your sister?” Uncle Albert asked. This was Monday on our way to my appointment with Dr. Feight. And Uncle Albert meant Moira, my dead sister, not Hannah, the alive one. He asks because he thinks it’s nuts that I get letters from a dead sister. That’s why he asks me about it on the way to Dr. Feight’s because Dr. Feight is in charge of “nuts.” Almost every week, he asks about it.*

     I told him I’d brought a letter to read to Dr. Feight. “You’re mentioned in it,” I said.

     He didn’t reply, and I didn’t look at him because I was paying attention to my driving. He didn’t reply. It happens more and more. He asks a question then falls asleep before you can answer – even in the car.

I read Dr. Feight the letter from Moira.

Dear Ted,

I see you are making plans again. Is that going to make it any better? But, maybe, for you, it is. You seem to like a plan. You’re anxious until you have one. Then, sadly, you’re anxious about its working. It’s not until you begin making a plan that you also begin to think about how it could go wrong.

Uncle Albert yukking it up with Sigrid Undset
Copenhagen, 1940 / by m ball

     How are you getting along with Kristin Lavrandsdatter? Are the characters as hemmed in and sad about their choices as I remember them? Is anyone going to get any release? I forget, it’s been so long ago.

     I wondered often as my life was winding down about how I could get release, maybe by taking a vacation from myself. No, I didn’t know that it was winding down; I didn’t know when it would end (though I never imagined it lasting as long as Uncle Albert’s has – how is he by the way?). I did know it was growing tighter and tighter as if I were getting too fat for my clothes (when I definitely was not!); but I was living in a smaller and smaller emotional space, there was less and less nearby room to escape into. Thus, the idea of a vacation! – getting somehow away from nearer-by to farther away. But where? And how?

     Reading Kristin Lavransdatter was not the answer. Reading was not the answer. I read much as I imagine you read now (from what you write about your reading, what you’ve written about Kristin). You don’t so much go to the book as it comes to you. You don’t lose yourself in it, but you are always present, wondering why? why? why? Or, you’re thinking, “This is just what I would do! How can she be so stupid?” You’re always judging what the characters are thinking and doing and simultaneously judging yourself. At least, that’s what I did, and reading ceased to be a joy; it became an exercise, increasingly demanding and draining.

     Sometimes drugs helped, especially mixed with a little alcohol – and the alcohol mixed with a little company if I could get myself out and I could find someone to talk (or listen) to. But that was hard. Who would want to talk with me who didn’t want to talk with herself?

     I’m a little easier about things now. Sometimes it’s good to be dead, not pressed by time or space  - where there is neither (in any sense I understood before; nor can I explain it now – don’t ask!). There is no harrying, no hurrying.

     So, don’t you be in a hurry to get started on new plans. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll be looking for the wrong turns you’re about to make. Take your time in getting started. Take your time once you do.

     I don’t know what else to say at the moment. I sense that reading this is only going to make you both more determined and sadder. I am sorry for that. Neither is the result I want for you. I only want you to be happier.

     Please, please, be more lighthearted, my beloved brother,

                                                                                                 Moira

“May I see it,” Dr. Feight said.

     “Well,” I said, “it’s just a copy I typed out.”

     “Hmmm,” he said. Then, “Is this right? Is this the way you read?” he asked.

     “Pretty much,” I said.

08.21.19

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 * Dramatis Personae. The Uncle Albert page still isn’t ready. But you can read about how (and why) he accompanies me to my appointments with Dr. Feight here. And about Moira here.

PB M&M

 PB M&M  

It was a Sunday like any other. Roz* had it in her hand; she’d brought it down from the top of the four-foot bookshelf in the back hallway, where she’d been dusting - the bright little reproduction in the worn tabletop frame, Bonnard’s lithograph of “House in the Courtyard. The shelves were mostly books I’d bought thinking I wouldn’t be afraid to read them when I got them home. Then, I got home, where I was more familiar with myself; I looked at the book I'd bought in that light; And cravenly unable to return it or still bleakly hopeful-against-hope, I put it on these back-hallway shelves largely out of my sight: Gibbon’s complete The Fall of the Roman Empire; J. M. Roberts’ History of Europe and History of the World; Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas (three volumes); The Golden Bough; Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity - though I did begin that; KṚṢṆA : The Supreme Personality of the Godhead (The Books of the KṚṢṆA Trilogy) by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, a boxed set.

Bonnard’s courtyard mit Max und Moritz

     The reproduction looks itself to be cut from a book, then pasted on a piece of shirt cardboard and put into a frame that happened to be at hand: it’s not a perfect fit, but it’s a close-enough one. The reproduction is small, less than half the size of the original, but it is clear.** From outside the frame, we are looking through an open window at the apartment block opposite. Three of the eight windows we can see are shuttered, and in another three the curtains are drawn. A man stands in one upper-floor window: we can’t tell if he has his back to us or is looking out. Below him, a woman is shaking her dust, her dead skin cells off a small rug or a towel or a pillowcase into the white air.

“Do you know who did that?” Roz said. “I don’t mean Bonnard.” She is pointing to the lower right corner of the open window. At some point, when I was asleep or away, not paying attention in any case, someone had taken the picture out of the frame and India-inked the backs of Max and Moritz, peeping over the sill of the open window. “I never noticed it before,” Roz was saying.

     “I have my suspicions,” I said, “but no, I don’t know. It was a while ago though.”

     “I wonder what they were thinking,” Roz said.

     “Who, the defaçeur” - I made up a French word because I couldn’t think of an English one - “or the boys? In both cases, probably some prank.”

     “I meant whoever inked them in. But, the boys,” she said. “Who are they?”

     “I’m pretty sure they’re Max and Moritz from the German stories. If so, they’re probably thinking about how to disrupt the lives of the man above and the woman below him across the way.”

     “Why?”

     “You don’t know the stories, I guess.”

     “No,” she said.

She handed me the frame, turned, and sat in the chair across from me. I was half-sitting, half-reclined on the couch looking into a book but not reading it. I was trying to remember the stories.

     “Wilhelm Busch,” I said; it just popped into my mind. I still didn’t remember the stories all that well, but I thought I was right in saying that the characters, the boys, had no reasons for what they did but there was “reason” in the stories: the amoral pranksters came to a bad end, baked into bread then ground up into feed for ducks, lamented by none.

“I don’t remember the picture being in the back hall either,” Roz said.

     “But you must have dusted it a hundred times,” I said.

     “That many?” There was an edge of sarcasm in her voice.

When I bought the picture at a book and junk shop in Marion - near where Roz saw her sign - I had found a place for it on the top of the two shelves over my computer desk. On the bottom shelf are books: the Bible, a Complete Works of Shakespeare, Roget’s; a hymnbook, several dictionaries, and Hodges’ Harbrace College Handbook (twentieth edition, not Hodge on Romans!). On the top are pictures: Roz at about twelve between her parents; Moira, Hannah, and me at seven, four, and eleven; a crude but very effective drawing of a bearded preacher on fire pocket Junot Diaz** had made for me on the back of a church bulletin; and a display of what pretended to be ancient Roman coins, trapped in a plastic cuboid. When I put the Bonnard among them, I rearranged the shelf so the family pictures were on the left, the coins were in the middle, and Alfredo’s fiery Pentecostal preacher and Bonnard’s quiet courtyard were on the right. I remember trying to picture the invisible courtyard: what it would look like if we could see it: cobble-stoned, a dry fountain. I tried to imagine what the summer air smelled like. It looked like summer to me.

     “I moved it when I saw the addition,” I said. “As I said, that was quite a while ago.”

“Why did you keep it at all?” Roz said.

     “I don’t know,” I said. “I was wondering this morning why the small pleasures of life seem sometimes so much more than the great pleasures, and why it’s the same way with the hurts.”

     “Maybe you’ll find out,” she said. Her voice suggested action: If I did something about it, “made inquiries,” I might find out.

     “What?” I said.

     “Who actually did this,” she said, “and why.”

     “I think I know,” I said.

     “So you said,” she said. She stood up, took the frame from me. “But you could be mistaken.

     “For now, I’ll put this back,” she said.

08.19.19

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* Roz is the one that tries to live with me; for most the part she succeeds with great grace. Pocket Junot Diaz (Alfredo) is the son of Dominga, Roz’s son Bart’s inamorata. “All the links to Roz” is still under construction. For more on Alfredo, see here.

 ** The lithograph of 1898, “Some Aspects of Life in Paris, 4: House in the Courtyard” (Quelques Aspects de la Vie Parisienne: Maison Dans la Cour) is based on a drawing of three years earlier. The original is apparently ca. 14 x 10 inches (34.5 x 25.6 cm). The one I have is about 5 inches high.

Advice for the lectionarylorn

Jesus of Za'am

 Advice for the lectionarylorn.
 Luke 12:49-56 - Don’t do it!

So, it’s Friday. Again. You’re not exactly stuck, but you’re not exactly gung-ho about the Gospel passage for this Sunday. So, you’re reorganizing your shelves. Stop! Help is on its way.

Before I bring it to you* . . . . You’re wanting to know: Where do I come up with this shit? Commentaries. Axel has six on Luke (one in two volumes, another in three), and the church library at the Presbyterian Church has three others. Conversation. I talk to people that know what they’re talking about and others that have to listen to people who think they know what they’re talking about. Imagination. A lot of it I make up.

    So, with regard to this Sunday’s Gospel passage. Here it is, in context:

                41 Peter said, “Lord, are you telling this parable for us or for everyone?” 42 And the Lord said, “No. Who then is the faithful and wise steward, the master will put in charge, to give the rest the right food at the right time?

                43 “Blessed is that servant whom his master finds taking care of that when he comes. 44 He’ll give him much, much more. 45 But if that servant begins thinking, ‘Hmmm. He’s not coming for a while,’ meaning the master, and he, the servant, begins beating his fellow servants, men and women, and eating until he’s gorged and drinking until he’s drunk, 46 then the master will come just when he knows he doesn’t expect him. And the master will punish the servant and throw him out like chaff.

                47 This assumes the servant knew the master’s will and didn’t act on it. At least, he’ll be beaten. 48 But the servant that doesn’t know, even if he deserve worse, he’ll get a light beating. I’ve said something like this before in another context, ‘Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and if much is given to her, much will be demanded.

                49 “Because I am here to bring on the earth fire, and I’m wishing that it was already alight.

“I’m going to be baptized with fire, and I can’t do anything really mean until I have been.

            “I mean, ⁵¹ Do you think that I came for peace on earth good will to all? No, I came to tear things apart: ⁵² so that in one house where there are five there will be three against two, or else two against three. ⁵³ Fathers will turn against sons and sons against fathers; mothers will be turned against daughters and daughters against their mothers; where it hasn’t happened already mothers-in-law will turn against their daughters-in-law and daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law.” 

⁵⁴ He also said to the crowd, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A shower is coming’ because the west is where showers come from; and so it happens. ⁵⁵ And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘It’s going to be ho’ because it will be. ⁵⁶ What a bunch of hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky; how can you not know how to interpret the present time? ⁵⁷ This is why you don’t judge for yourselves what is right.”

(TRV)

So:

     If you don’t think Jesus of Nazareth said this - here comes, then, the advice for the lectionarylorn - don’t spend a lot of time explaining that, all that business about Luke and the church and church leaders and so forth. Here’s a way to avoid it! Preach on another passage. This is a good week, in fact, to end your unhealthy dependence on the lectionary. Begin now. Find another dependency.

     (Here’s one possibility, lectio continuo. Start now. Preach through Obadiah and Nahum for the rest of August until Halloween. Then, too, you can set the limits to the passages where they belong, not where some committee wished they did.)

08.09.19

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 * Like the miracle spring water, “It’s absolutely free. And I want to give it to you.”

The Economist

 The Economist 

I am sitting across from Nils. Axel is on his left.* It’s another hot day. The fluorescent lights inside are trembling against the sun banging on the window. “Fern” brings our coffee. She looks at us one by one, more than usually confused, hesitating as to which cup to give to which though we’ve all ordered the same thing and the cups are identical.

     Then, Axel is wondering aloud how much to tip her. He’s paying for everyone.

     Then, Nils starts in on an article he read in The New York Times Magazine or somewhere like it about the woes of a Harvard professor or an op-ed writer for The Washington Post or a “senior fellow” at the Brookings Institution, who has been caught up through no fault of his own, “meaning because he’s clueless,” Nils barks like a large dog. Something odd, terrible, and more than slightly icky has gotten hold of the poor naïf while his more practical wife and children are spending their usual July and August in France. (Twice a month he flies to spend the weekends with them).

     It’s at this point I seem to have lost track of the story, watching Nils’ mouth. My senses seldom act in concert, to reinforce one another. Especially I can’t see and hear the same thing at the same time. So, I’ll close my eyes when I want to really listen to a song or to follow a piece of hectoring on the radio or at Corner Coffee. I’ll turn off the radio in the car when I’m looking for a turn.

“that jackass Paul Klugman” as a fair-haired child
by m ball

I look down into my coffee cup, and I hear: “That jackass Paul Krugman,” Nils is saying.

     It wasn’t Klugman this icky thing had happened to, and I realize the story is over; we’ve advanced to the moral. There’s a dull clatter of porcelain: someone’s dropped something in the kitchen but hasn’t broken. I’m thinking how hot the days are: “The sun pounding at the window is all fire, nothing else,” I’m thinking, “and we’re falling into it as fast as it’s rising to meet us.” I know it’s not true, and I hear again: “That jackass Paul Krugman,” Nils repeats, “wants to say that it isn’t that ‘the rich are different from you and me’ but that the superrich are different from all of us. How can someone so damn smart miss that the ‘merely rich,’ his buddies in high-level academics, the press, the think tanks, etc., are different from you and me? Widely. Wildly. The op-ed writers, Yale profs, and the opinion-makers that have more than more than more than enough so they’re flying back and forth to France to visit their all-summer-holidaying families on the weekend, while at home with the couple staying for the weekend their dogs are eating better and sleeping in more comfortable beds - they’re getting better health care than our friend Fern. Those that want to tell ‘you and me’ how to think have no earthly fucking idea about how we live.

     “‘We’re not the superrich,’ they protest because they want us to think they know us. How she lives,” Nils barks again, looking around the room to find Fern, so he could get a better look at her himself.

“What does she know about them?” Axel asked. He didn’t mean to be snide, I’m pretty sure, but to insert a bit of whimsy into the conversation. But tirade doesn’t understand whimsy; it is offended.

     “Axel,” Nils comes back. He is addressing me, not his brother. “Not even Axel goes in for that kind of gold-dusted bullshit, running off to Turin for three weeks’ vacation, off to Uppsala for study leave.

     “And he’s richer than any of us. Not only doesn’t he do it, he doesn’t even dream about it.”

I look up again. Axel shakes his head. But I’m not sure I believe him. It’s not the first time I’ve heard he has hidden “resources.”

     I’d even asked a mutual friend about it once, how much Axel “had,” I think was the word I used. “Not all that much,” the friend said. “But he’s richer than he wants to be.”

     “I don’t know what that means,” I’d said.

     “It means he’s got more than he needs - quite a bit more - at least, he thinks so,  and he feels guilty about it. He’d give it away if he could, all of it. He gives away a lot as it is. But at some point, he thinks, ‘Something might happen, and I’ll need at least this much.’ Then, he realizes almost immediately that ‘this much’ is more than he really needs. But he’s settled on it. So, he keeps that much, and he feels guilty.

     “He shouldn’t, but he does,” the friend had said. “He’s a Lutheran pastor,” he said in a there’s-the-explanation tone.

I can’t remember where we were when we’d had that conversation. It wasn’t in a coffee shop. No, we’d been walking somewhere, I do remember that, so I could listen to what he was saying because I was watching my feet on the sidewalk.

 08.14.19

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 * Dramatis Personae, click here.   

Prepare to meet thy God.

 “Prepare to meet thy God.” 

Roz was showing me this on her screen. She’d brought her laptop into the kitchen, where I was sitting at the table, trying to decide what to do next. That’s what I seem to do most of these days, decide what to do next. This time I was trying to decide whether to take a walk or watch television. It was a nice night, and the bats were coming out soon. On the other hand, there was nothing on TV. I’d almost made up my mind.

She’d seen a sign “just like it” in southwest Virginia - “near Marion,” she said. She and her friend Maggie were driving back from Friday and Saturday and Sunday morning in Abingdon. They’d ridden bikes and gone to the Barter Theater. I’d stayed home and read a book by Max Boot about how he wasn’t a conservative any more or else he was the only true conservative left; and I’d gone to church with Uncle Albert. The sermon was about Jesus and love and forgiveness. All the sermons lately have been about Jesus and love and forgiveness. I helped Uncle Albert up to the communion rail, but I didn’t take communion myself because there’s Jesus, who loves and forgives, and then there’s Christ who offers his body and pours out his blood for us. They’re not the same. One was a man. The other is a Concept. I’ve stopped believing in Concepts.

     But Roz was showing me this on the internet, a different Concept. “I should have taken a picture,” she said. “The sign I saw was just like this one. 

“Before I go back down that way,” she said, “I’m going to make a sign that says, “Yes, I’m ready to meet my God. Are you ready to meet yours?” There’s a place across the street that it doesn’t look like anyone owns. I could put it there.”

     “It’s a quote,” I said.

     “I’m going to make my sign red and white,” she said. Then,

     “Yeah?” she said. She’d just heard me - about its being a quote. And she added - there was a sigh under her voice: “You would know.” She meant that this is the kind of thing I know, but not to my advantage. She’s right.

     “It’s from Amos,” I said. “God is yelling at the Israelites again because they’re screwing up again. He’s yelling for the hundredth time because they’ve screwed up for the one-hundred-and-first. It’s something about how he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and yet he saved them - meaning through Lot and his daughters - but they just kept wandering away. So now he’s going to destroy them the same way he did Sodom: ‘Prepare to meet thy God’ - that’s what he says.

     “I can find the passage for you,” I said.

Times like this, she’ll often look at me, and she’ll shake her head. And I know she loves me, but she wishes I were different. I wish I were different, too. But I try to make a joke out of it. “Anyway, the guy down in Marion has to meet that God, not you.” I say it like a joke, but it’s not a very good joke. It’s really not a joke at all.

     She shakes her head again, then she wraps her arms around me. She says, “Poor baby.” That is a joke. It’s both true, and it’s a joke. She’s both thinking it’s true, I am a poor baby, and she’s teasing me, why should I be? - there’s no good reason.

“Why don’t we get soft ice cream after supper?” she says this time. Actually, she’s says that a lot. She likes soft ice cream as much as I do. “Prepare to meet thy Dip Cone,” she adds this time.

08.12.19

New Age Jesus

Luke 12  

 New Age Jesus  

So, it’s Friday. You may be pressed for time; there’s not enough to make your own translation of this week’s passage (Luke 12:32-40) as you usually do, but you’re not entirely happy with the standard translations, or the parameters of the pericope: it’s all too much. The answer, however, isn’t to narrow your focus; it is to expand your mind.

Expand your mind at the same time you fewer your words. The NAT (New Age Translation)* begins in verse 22.

08.09.19

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 * The NAT is a strictly oral translation (from the Vulgate). Still it is under copyright:

©The Cerebri Mortui Religious Trust

Berkeley, California

1967

Who's to blame.

 Who’s to blame. 

A knock on the door. This was last night late. The damned itinerant preacher.*

“Do you read Amos?” Nils asked apropos of nothing. I was trying to distract him by talking about the Nats-Giants series, which I was trying to watch. The Nats were up 4-1, batting in the top of the fifth.

     I waited as long as I could. “The prophet?”

     He nodded as if “Which other?” “I’m sure I have,” I said, “but I don’t make a daily practice of it.”

     “You should. Or: At least once a week you should read Amos.”

     “Yeah?”

     “Then you’d know,” he said.

     “Know what?”

     “Read the damn book,” he said.

I turned the down the game, because that’s not all he said, of course not, talking so fast I couldn’t write it out in my head. 

 

Nils' first wife Judith's family home

    Basically: It’s all the fault of the rich, no matter how they got there - the court, or (today) the government and its hangers-on; the courts - lawyers and their hangers-on; the church, or the opinion-makers and their hangers-on; the traders, that is, business and its hangers-on; all those that live in glass houses behind iron gates or doormen; all those that fly first class to Paris or Rio or Tokyo or Perth; all those that sleep in ivory beds, that eat lamb in expensive restaurants and drink old wines they hoard in their cellars; that go to the opera and the symphony, and premieres of the movies their friends make.

     “They can point every which way,” Nils said, “but take semi-automatic weapons,” he paused, “and the morons poisoned by whatever they’ve been drinking that together can kill thirty people in thirty seconds.” Ultimately, it’s the fault of the rich because it’s not enough to say that you hate evil and love you’ve effing got to do something about it.” It’s not enough to affect being good if you’re only good in the abstract because the bad can’t get past your gate or your doorman; when you clearly don’t intend to act on your so-called affections.

This morning I’m trying to explain it to Uncle Albert. I am doing no better than what I’ve written above, but he seems to get it.

     “Nils,” he says and shakes his head. “It’s not a very nuanced position,” he says. He rocks slowly, tiny tick-ticks, back and forth and back and forth. We’re sitting on the front porch of his boarding house. It’s still cool at nine in the morning - the cardinals are still tweeting and chirping; the porch faces north.

     “But that doesn’t make it wrong,” Uncle Albert says.

08.07.19

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  * Drammatis personae, click here.