Please Stand By

 

10.30.19

Saturday night

 Saturday night 

Roz said again at supper that she was worried about her narrow man. (See here.) We were talking about her friend Maggie, who was thinking she might have to have carpal tunnel surgery. Roz said something about wishing she could call the narrow man to ask if he was okay. I wouldn’t want a woman I didn’t know calling me, I said, asking how I was, whatever note of compassion she could put in her voice.

     Roz asked me how I knew that if it had never happened to me.

We were eating spaghetti I had made with store-bought marinara sauce but doctored with basil and fennel and thyme, thickened with diced and sautéed onions, apples, peppers, and celery, and with ground Italian sausage. The noodles I boil just beyond al dente. Sometimes I make a salad as well. This time, though, I just threw two cups of frozen spinach in with the noodles.

     Afterward, Roz bussed the table and washed the dishes. I put on a second sweater, wrapped my legs in a blanket, and sat down in the den to watch the sad fourth game of the Series.

10.27.19

Deep Desire sung this song

 Deep Desire sung this song 

And now for something completely different:

  10.26.19

Demons vs. rashes

 Demons vs. rashes 

Sunday morning was rain, hard and cold. Uncle Albert didn’t want to get out in it. He wasn’t going to church; he wasn’t even coming over to watch Premier League football (though he would come Monday afternoon to see Arsenal lose its sad, sad game to Sheffield United).

     It was just as well. Roz wanted me to go to church with her: The narrow man* was preaching at the little Presbyterian Church near Red Spring, where our State Senator is a member. The Senator wasn’t there. There weren’t many there at all. I counted 17 including the two of us and the preacher.

     The rain was loud on the roof, sounding both angry and resigned.

with apologies to Martin Schongauer

The narrow man has grown a beard; it is sparse but neatly shaped. It gives him the resigned look of a prophet that knows no one is listening, however attentive any may appear. The true prophets have wild, thick, scratchy beards and are sure all must be listening as it is God’s word they are speaking. The Word cannot return empty, even when it - almost invariably - does. Did Amos topple even one idol?

     He apologizes, the narrow man, for departing from the assigned reading for the Sunday. He has no excuse, only one story has been picking at his sleeve, pulling at his ears, pestering him, so he can’t get it out of his mind, “The Gerasene Demoniac,” as he called it.

     “Picking? Pulling? Pestering?” he asked. It had been plaguing him, infesting him like the demons infested the poor man living naked in the cemetery on the other side of the lake. He tried to smile. He shrugged. The little beard was white. It made him look, I thought, paler than I remembered, more worn. I didn’t believe the story had been plaguing him, however. I took the smile and the shrug as an admission of hyperbole.

     But Roz said afterwards that she was worried about him.

He said something like this:

     The church came to believe - and his text for this morning was its proof - that demons could only be moved on, from a madman into a herd of defenseless pigs, for example. They could not be killed, and they could not be rehabilitated; they could not be taught a trade and settle into a quiet, productive life.

     Leprosy, on the other hand, could be cleansed. Whatever happened to them after, when the scales were lifted from one man’s skin, they didn’t go on to descend on another’s. A broken body could be mended. A troubled spirit could not be calmed.

     It’s one explanation, he believed, tentatively, for why we try to shift blame: why the problems of women are the fault of men, and the problems of men are the fault of their mothers; it's why conservatives must blame liberals, and liberals must blame conservatives; it's why the problems of the UK are the fault of the EU, and the problems of the EU are the fault of Greece; it's why “the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Muslims and everybody hates the Jews.”** He didn’t want to gore anyone’s ox, it wasn't any one's failing; indeed, the examples could be multiplied infinitely. If we can no longer, in the twenty-first century, find someone to cast out our demons, we ourselves can - we think we must - lay them on others’ doorsteps. Then, let the other be angry. No, the other is angry already at being blamed: It’s not her expletive deleted fault, God knows!

     So, is this what we have become, he wondered, a society of sects, shifting the blame, throwing it off on another herd because how else do we get rid of the demons that infest us?

And he stopped as if winded. “I’ll leave you with that,” he said. And he tried again to smile; he shrugged his shoulders.

     The rain continued until late afternoon.

10.23.19

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 * We hear the narrow man only occasionally. You may find the occasions here.
** Because it's National Brotherhood Week!

Another farable of Jesop

 A farable of Jesop. 

“the lamb lies down with the wolf”

A wolf and a lamb set out on a journey, taking turns riding on each other’s back because it was cold and that way they could keep each other warm. As day dusked, the lamb grazed while the wolf built a fire. Night fallen, they huddled together next to it. The lamb fell almost immediately asleep, but the wolf lay quite awake, tending the fire.

 10.22.19

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

Pancakes

 When Thursday turns to Friday 

See below.

“He sounds like a scold,” Dr. Feight said. He was talking about Stephen. (See here.)

     “He is rather,” I said.

     “Is he ‘arrogant’?” I am putting arrogant in quotes because Dr. Feight was quoting me. We had been talking about arrogance in our previous session. Whatever the Sikh Meher Babu, or any of us, might wish, arrogance cannot be conquered - it cannot even be countered - by humility. (See the same place.) Arrogance loves humility, which it also sees it as weak and properly so: Before Arrogance every knee should bow, every throat close up, and every tongue cleave to the roof of its mouth.

     “I don’t know if he is arrogant,” I said (meaning Stephen). “But his Boss is.” (I meant God.)

     “But not Jesus,” Dr. Feight said. He knows that while I’ve lost my faith in God, I still love Jesus.

“You’re mighty chatty today,” I said because usually we can get through an entire session and he’ll have said no more than, “Mmmm.”

     “Mmmm,” he said now.

     “I’m not saying to stop talking,” I said.

     “I did have one more question,” Dr. Feight said. “Jesus the Samaritan?” Another thing I mentioned in the last session.

“Do you ever read my blog?” I asked.

     “I have,” he said, “but I try not to. I shouldn’t.” Something to do with keeping our conversations within the room we were in.

     “I put something up about it yesterday,” I said. And I gave him the capsule version of the Samaritan Jesus that’s here.

     “Mmmm,” he said.

Uncle Albert was asleep when I opened the waiting room door. A copy of Les Inrockuptibles, one of the periodicals Dr. Feight subscribes to just for Uncle A (because he comes with me to almost every session) was on the floor by his feet. I picked it up, put it back on the shelf, shook Uncle Albert awake.

     He’s beginning to have trouble with Dr. Feight’s stairs, so I helped him up them and then into the car. I asked him if he wanted to go out today - for a change. Usually, we go back to the house, and I fix lunch; but I didn’t have anything in mind, I wasn’t sure I could bring anything to mind. But, “No,” he didn’t want to go out.

     So, I made pancakes. I had a mix. All you have to do is add water.

I asked Uncle Albert if he had read what I wrote yesterday. “You know you made pancakes on Tuesday,” Uncle Albert said.

     “You don’t remember, do you?” he asked.

     I didn’t, but I said, “Oh? Yeah.”

     He said he had read what I’d written about Jesus the Samaritan. “I try to keep up,” he said. “Are you sure you have the Greek right?” He took a bite of oatmeal, chewed it slowly, swallowed. I shook my head. I don’t really know Greek, just what I’ve learned from reading grammars.

     “You live in an odd world,” Uncle Albert said. “So many imaginary playmates.”

10.16.19

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 * For more on Dr. Feight, whom I’ve been seeing since January 2017, see here.

ODÐ The Samaritan Hypothesis

 ODР

From Offal’s Dictionary of Theology*:

Samaritan Hypothesis, The ▪ The Gospel writers want to create stories around Jesus’ origin that place him in the line of David. They want to mask his being a Samaritan. Yet Jesus’ sympathy for Samaritans, cf. The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), his traveling back and forth through Samaria rather than around it, his spending time in Samaria, suggest that he could have been one. Then, there is this direct evidence in Luke 17:16 - καὶ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον παρὰ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ εὐχαριστῶν αὐτῷ· καὶ αὐτὸς ἦν Σαμαρίτης. The verse comes in the story of Jesus, on his way between Samaria and Galilee. As he enters a village, ten lepers approach him. They call out for healing, and he sends them to show themselves to the priests. As they go, they are made clean. In the verse in question, one returns and throws himself at Jesus’ feet and thanks him, meaning Jesus; “and he was a Samaritan.” The natural reference of he (αὐτὸς) in this clause is to the third-person masculine directly preceding, him (αὐτῷ), meaning not the leper but Jesus!

 

10.13.19

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 * Author: Stércoré Offal, Refuse Press, 1977.

 

When Monday falls on Tuesday

 When Monday falls on Tuesday 

Down Dr. Feight's stairs

I have been seeing Dr. Feight on Mondays and Thursdays since early 2017.* I saw him yesterday. Which was Tuesday. Uncle Albert went with me as he usually does. He reads the magazines in Dr. Feight’s waiting room, or he sleeps. Afterward, we come home for lunch. Usually, I fix soup and a sandwich. Yesterday, though, I made pancakes. That’s when I realized it wasn’t Monday but Tuesday.

This morning I was telling Dr. Feight about another letter from Moira. She and I had been writing back and forth about humility, about which the Sikh spiritual teacher wrote could disarm hostility, could ultimately conquer it; or so Moira said. But she thought it depended on the source of the hostility. If it came from arrogance . . . . Well, nothing could conquer arrogance, she didn’t think.

     Speaking of which, I wrote her back, I had gotten another letter from Stephen.

And I had to explain to Dr. Feight who Stephen was. It seems the letters Moira and I wrote back and forth had opened some sort of channel, and now I was getting letters from someone in the Bureaucracy, a lower level acolyte of the Lord Most High, who, this Stephen assured me, was keeping an eye on me, especially since I’d stopped going to church except when Uncle Albert needed a ride.

     But I had been that Sunday, so he had written to congratulate me. “For some reason, he writes in red on yellow paper,” I told Dr. Feight.

     “Mmmm,” he said.

     “He calls me ‘Theodore,’” I said. “‘Dear Theodore,’ and he goes on to ‘commend’ me for getting to church. It did me good, he assured me, to hear the Word read and proclaimed, the prayers murmured, to watch the pageant of the Eucharist. Whatever my attitude, he said.”

     “Did it?” Dr. Feight said.

     I said I didn’t know, but sitting there I had developed a theory that Jesus was really a Samaritan. The gospels suppressed it, but it was there in - it had sneaked into - the reading from Luke.

     “Oh,” Dr. Feight said. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.” But not then because our session was over.

“Isn’t today Tuesday?” I asked Uncle Albert.

     “Yes,” he said.

     “I thought I saw Dr. Feight on Monday,” I said, “and Thursday.”

     “Not for a while,” Uncle Albert said. “Tuesday and Friday,” he said.

10.16.19

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 * My story with Dr. Feight, and links to the posts he features in, may be found here. About my poor dead sister Moira, see here.

No rest for the active

 No rest for the active 

I was in Axel’s odd study with its huge desk, huge high-backed, leather desk chair - furniture more for an executive suite than a pastor’s study; but there is nothing of the executive about Axel’s desk, covered with loose papers, stacks of paper, stacks of books, books splayed open. And the shelves, behind the cherry desk and all along one wall, beautiful built-in shelves but chock-a-block with beaten-up books, not frames for tasteful bric-a-brac. I was in Axel’s office; we were in a pause in our conversation, when Nils burst in. “You,” he barks at me. He’s always barking. He bursts in, barking.

     “This poem you read in your blog last week - guy lying in a hammock, looking around, listening around, nosing around, some farm in Minnesota. What’s that all about?”

     He’s red as if he’d been running or as if my reading the poem* had been a personal insult. He crashes into the seat beside me across from Axel, who takes his feet off his grand desk and stands up, slowly as an old man. Nils is a foot away from me, no more, but I can feel his heat. “Does he have a fever?” I’m wondering. I lean a bit away.

     Axel is getting a book off his “poetry” shelf, the VINTAGE BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY (sixty-five outstanding poets including Sylvia Plath  Robert Lowell  James Merrill  Louise Glück . . .). I watch him, absorbed. He’s looking at the Table of Contents. He sits down; he reads, slowly:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

     by James Wright

Over my head, I see a bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

“Boy, that is a pisser,” he says to his brother.

     Though he can’t quite sit still, Nils has cooled down. He has stopped running; he is sitting. Still:

     “Okay, smartass,” he growls at Axel. “Either of you smartasses,” he looks at me. “He has wasted his life, the guy in the hammock. I don’t get it. Why write about it?”

     Axel looks at me. I shrug. Axel looks at his brother. He (Axel) shrugs. “What’s the problem?” he asks Nils.

     “Of course, he’s wasting his time. That’s the purpose, isn’t it? - lying in a hammock, doing nothing.”

     “But he doesn’t say ‘I’m wasting my time,’” Axels says. “He says, ‘I’ve wasted my life’ - by not wasting enough time, I gather.”

     “By spending too much of it not lying in a hammock on William Duffy’s farm,” I say. Then I get hoity for some reason, maybe too warmed by Nils’ heat. “It’s a kind of carpe diem poem,” I say.** “Seize the day by leaving the day - or the world - behind.”

“What’s he got against it, the world?” Nils is barking again.

     Axel looks up from the book. He looks at his brother and shakes his head. “If you don’t get that, you’re not going to get the poem,” he says. He starts to say something else, but

     “Wait a minute,” Nils pushes in. “This isn’t any kind of that mindfulness shit, is it?”

     I assure him it is not.

     Nils says, “Good.” And he leaves.

“No?” Axel asks.

     “No.” I look at him. “Nothing to do with mindfulness,” I say. “Nothing to do with that shit at all.

     Axel says, “Good.” And he sits down.

10.14.19

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  * James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Click here.

 ** In the dark of December 2014, I spent several posts trying to explain carpe diem to myself and twelve others (the readership at the time, before it declined). That begins here and goes on a ways, soliciting the help of Horace, Abraham Cowley, Ernest Dowson, Jean Garrigue, Dave Brubeck, and The Chiffons, among others. To hear two carpe diem poems from that series, Abraham Cowley’s sweet and gentle “The Epicure” and Tom Nashe’s (since revised) rendering of Horace’s tu ne quaesieris, click here.

 *** Who is Axel? Here. Who is Nils? Here.

Supererogation

 Supererogation 

I’m taking these walks. Practically every day. It gets to nine o’clock in the morning, and I don’t know what to do. Even now, it’s often hot already, but if I cleave to the shadows of the buildings - and they are getting longer - I can at least walk downtown and back.

So, today. I walk down to Crowder Street, then down Crowder to Division, down Division to Levy. I am waiting on the corner of Levy to cross Johnson. I’m on the northeast corner at the crosswalk. The light turns green, and I step into the crosswalk. I hesitate to make sure the transit bus is stopping before it turns left. It starts forward, but then it stops. I continue walking. The bus turns and roars away; and a man in a pickup truck behind it, yells at my back: “Asshole!”

     I keep walking, but I’m starting to stew. Anger begets anger in my experience. I try not to think about it - being yelled at, called an asshole; at the same time I’m trying to think of all the things I might have yelled back, but I only get to two: I might have flipped him the bird over my shoulder; or I might have shouted: “Takes one to know one.” Or here’s a third: “God bless you, sir.”

     Instead, I keep walking though I find myself taking a more roundabout way than normal. I don’t want someone so angry because he had to wait a few seconds for a man in a crosswalk to chase me down to yell some more or challenge me to a duel. Or beat me up, which didn’t sound as if it would be hard for him to do. The voice belonged to a young man; I am not a young man.

     At the same time - this is the nature of my stewing - I want to have a rational argument with this irrational jerk. Who has the right of way - the pedestrian in the crosswalk or the driver turning left from Levy onto Johnson? If a car had been coming up Levy from the south, would he have yelled at the driver because he would have had to wait for it to clear the intersection before he turned left? Clearly, he would not have.

On the way home, I circle by Grace, the Lutheran church where Axel is.* The side of the church is bright with the sun but not white with it, and I can see the fluorescent lights on in Axel’s study. I ring the bell and look up. His face is at the window. He extends his palm, “Wait!”

     I wait. He opens the door. “Sorry,” he says, “Frampton’s off today.” That’s what he calls his secretary, a thin woman about my age named Lucy Burke, “Frampton” because she looks like Peter Frampton - of the farewell tour.  I always wonder then if she was as beautiful as he was when both were young. Usually, if you ring the bell, she just buzzes you in. She’s a trusting sort; no one calls her “asshole.” But Axel someone must have - someones, many times - because he always checks to see who is there. He peers out his window; then, he comes down to let you in.

“What?” he says.

     “A theological question,” I say. “Do you have time?”

     “Why not ask Miss Virginia?” he asks, turning in a way that invites me to follow him up the stairs to his study. He means the priest at St. Jude’s, where I take Uncle Albert to church. She was Miss Virginia - in 2004, I think.**

     “A theological question,” I say.

     “And?”

     “I want a Lutheran answer.”

     He goes behind his desk, sits down. I sit down across from him. He puts his feet up and looks across his knees at me.

     “I don’t want to get into a conversation about how I feel about the matter,” I say.

     “And centering prayer is not the answer,” he says. “Mindfulness is not the answer.” I can see he’s thinking. “Imagining yourself on the beach in the Caribbean: Feel the prick of the sun on your skin, hear the waves bumping against the shore, smell the salt and sand. Not the answer,” he says.

     “Rule of three,” he says. “Spiritual practices division.”

Thomas Aquinas by m ball

I tell him about my walk.

     “You should ask a priest,” Axel says.

     “Why?”

     “I don’t think you’re in Luther territory.”

     I shrug. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

     “More in Aquinas territory,” he says. “But,” he says. “I’ll take a stab at it.”

“Before I get to the Dumb Ox, however . . . I won’t ask you how you felt about it, but I’ll opine that it is best to walk away from people yelling ‘Asshole!’ at you. They’re not inviting you into a conversation.

     “But you asked me what you should have done. Point,” he raises his right index finger. “Point: It was not wrong of you to cross the street when the light turned green, but you might have waited for the bus and the pickup to turn before you did.

     “Why?” he raises his index and middle finger: point two: “Consider ‘The Good Samaritan.’ The question that prompts Jesus to tell the story is . . . ?”

     “Who is my neighbor?”

     “But the answer isn’t what most think it is. Look again at the logic of the parable - when you get home,” Axel says. “Your neighbor is the one you go out of your way to help; and if he is your neighbor, then you are also his.

     “It is from this parable that the term supererogatory or supererogation comes. From Jerome’s translation of the Greek into Latin. Here it is, just a minute.” He drops his feet off his desk, swivels around in his chair, and returns with a coffee-table-size book, which he puts in front of him and leafs through until he finds the page he wants. “Curam illius habe,” he reads with surprising facility. “et quodcumque supererogaveris, ego cum rediero reddam tibi. ‘Take care of him and whatever you expend beyond’ - meaning the more than enough I estimate I’ve already given you - ‘I will certainly pay you back.’

     “So, as you know, . . . Nod your head,” Axel says, and I do. “As you know, both Luther and your Calvin reprehended supererogation because of the use the Roman church put it to, selling the merit accumulated by those that went beyond the call of duty to those that didn’t wish to rise to it, assuming they had the means to pay: The slackers could reimburse the saints by contributions to the pope’s treasury. But that wasn’t the only reason the Reformers thought it, supererogation, was so much pigswill: There was also the matter that not even the most saintly could earn more in good than they spent in evil. All depended on God’s liberal grace. If there could be anything supererogatory it would be that, God’s grace.

     “On the other hand, I can’t believe either Calvin or - even - Luther could have objected to Aquinas’ notion that it was good to aim at going beyond the fulfilling - or letter - of the law, assuming our reach could exceed our grasp. Or yours. Your doing that, going beyond the letter of the law, humbly waiting for the bus and truck, might in this case have forestalled the anger of your pickup driver. Certainly, it would have checked his calling you ‘Asshole’; and you would not have stewed the rest of your walk. So your act of, we’ll call it ‘supererogation’ even if supererogation is not really possible, could have had two benefits.

     “But,” Axel looks up from the book finally and raises his first, middle, and now ring finger, “you would not have waited for the second purpose of avoiding stewing about being called an asshole because to perform an act for one’s own reward would not be humble or unselfish.” And he closes the book, swivels around in his chair, and puts it back.

* * * * *

I am always amazed at the shit that Axel knows. When he turned around again, I said so: “It’s amazing the shit you know,” I said. He shrugged as if (unfortunately) he couldn’t help it. Likely he can’t.

10.10.19

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 * Axel’s story is here.

** More on Miss Virginia here.

Interlude (2)

 Interlude (2)  

It’s been awhile since . . . last March - Anne Bradstreet’s “In Memory of My Dear

Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet” - and the October before - Three by by Su Tung P'o from Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese.

It’s been awhile, but once again, and briefly:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm 

in Pine Island, Minnesota

by James Wright

10.08.19

Interlude

Pumpkin Spice

 Interlude 

Dear Newspaper of Record,

     I have died and gone to hell. I am content here. Please, cancel my online subscription; I do not wish to know any more of what is going on there. I am no longer

               Sincerely yours,

           E.T. Riich

10.07.19