Politics Saturday comes midweek.

Ben Cline (R)

 Politics Saturday comes midweek. 

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I don’t like to play politics. For one thing I play it so poorly. But I’ve been thinking about this, and when Linda Greenhouse wrote in this morning’s New York Times a caption for the m ball drawing I already had, I decided it was a sign—even if I don’t believe in signs. Greenhouse: “The fact that members of Congress are sometimes called ‘lawmakers’ does not, evidently, bestow on them an actual regard for law.”
     As in the case of Ben Cline (R), representative of the sixth district of Virginia—my district but not my representative—who joined, with 126 of his fellow callow, craven, trumpophantic House colleagues, in Texas v. Pennsylvania. I’ve written him that my sister, who lives in Michigan, is joining in a suit to challenge this year’s sixth district voting here in Virginia: She will allege there were 56,000 votes stolen from Nicholas Betts and credited to him (Cline). It’s not true; none of it is true: The votes were not stolen. My sister is not challenging . . . though she does live in Michigan's first district. So, she clearly has standing.  

12.18.20

Snow

 Snow 

 I’ve written about it before, more than once—how godawful it is.
     Because here’s what happens, the snow comes and all is gray, then the voices come and all is garbled,*
     and I cannot see to see, I cannot hear to hear, I cannot think to think.

 12.16.20

_______________
 * Like cats retching, gangsters talking out of the sides of their mouths.
    Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

On mysticism

  On mysticism 

We met in our backyard, socially distanced. Axel was complaining about how difficult preaching is. “For example,” he was saying, “Sunday’s epistle is 2 Peter 3, and . . . .” Bel interrupted,

     “But that’s just what the mystics tell us, isn’t it?” she said. “That we don’t know what we’re talking about.”
     She was completely serious, so I didn’t say: “Of course they do. They know, only they can’t tell us: there are no words. Which is damn lucky for them.”
                                           ____________________

 Later, I was telling Roz about this.
     “Good,” she said.
     “Good what?”
     “Good that you didn’t say that.”
                                                            12.11.20

_______________
Catching up with my world: Axel Sundstrøm; Bel Monk; Roz.

A happier time.

 A happier time. 

Actually, it wasn't like this at all; I was a model of calm.

It was years ago, maybe more. I was waiting. It came to twenty minutes past my appointment time: I was still waiting. Impatiently, nervously, on the edge of “blowing my top,” as if I were a cartoon character. I was a cartoon character. Drooling, it felt like. My knee bouncing up and down. Roz put her hand on my sleeve without looking up from her book. The book: Charles Todd, An Unwilling Accomplice. “It’ll be okay,” the hand said. And I said, “But Dr. Feight* said they were always on time.” “It'll be okay,” she said.

 The color of the carpet, furnace-ash, and the odor of the music, country influenced by hip-hop: neither was helping. I went to the window: the sky was the color of tin, of a much-used loaf pan. Rain. A view of the parking lot.

     “It’s a test, maybe,” I was thinking. That’s what my notes say, that I was thinking: “It’s a test: Make the patient wait, to see how committed he is to whatever he has come for.”

 

Keep moving. Nothing to see here.

More from the notes: 

     “The music is execrable, whiny and wroth (beat, beat, beat, beat), plaining because something has been lost, at the same time growling because something has been taken away. It ain’t fair. Quiet would have been better. 
     “Quiet would be better,“ I wrote in my notebook. “I could hear my pen scrape across the paper as I write this down. I could pay attention to my thoughts.”

     Not that I had any thoughts, I was just “waiting!” “Waiting, dammit.” Fuming. “How much longer?” “Jesus, how much longer? It ain’t fair.”

“Hi, I’m Jennifer,” she said. “If you’ll come with me?” A rhetorical question.

     I elbowed Roz. She looked up from her book. “I’ll come after,” she said. “They’ll run the tests . . .” She looked at Jennifer, who nodded. “Then, when the doctor talks to you about them, I’ll come. They’ll get me.” Still looking at Jennifer, who nodded again while I'm thinking,

     “On my brain! The tests are on my god-d-forsaken brain.”

But I didn't say that. I didn't think it even. It wasn't that way at all. I was, as always, a model of calm.

03.05.20 / 12.10.20

_______________

 * Dr. Feight is my analyst, who has ordered the tests. About him, see here. About Roz, see here.

When Nemet and Zayna were here

continued from
When Nemet and Zayna were here 

 “I made red beans and rice for them,” I said.
     “Yes, from when we lived in New Orleans,” she said.
     “Yes. I went to meet them at the train. It came in in the afternoon. I’m remembering now. In March—not this last March when we were just curling into our pandemic shelters but the March before. It must have been a Tuesday because that’s when the train comes in.”
     “Thursdays. It comes in on Thursdays, too.”
     “No. Tuesday because you were working. And they left on Thursday. That’s why you wouldn’t remember, you were hardly around.”
     “I see,” Roz said (though she was shaking her head). ‘You met them at the station. And you’d made red beans and rice.”
     “I was making it,” I said.

I remembered mostly what we ate because I was cooking—red beans and rice on Tuesday and gumbo on Wednesday because I was on a New Orleans kick.
     But I remembered too that we visited the little museum in The Camera Shop, also that Nemet took lots of pictures. They met Uncle Albert; they had coffee with him and Nils and Axel, neither of whom had heard of Kristovia.
     “I can see that,” Roz said.
     But Uncle Albert said he’d been there in the sixties, and he was surprised because he thought the language would be like Romansh or Romanian, but it wasn’t. “More like Serbian?” he asked. “Not really like either,” Zayna said. “More like Azerbaijani though no one knows quite why.”
     “There must be theories,” Uncle Albert said.
     “More like hypotheses,” Zayna answered.

BOZOTUS
(digital scribble by m ball)

“But you were with us in the evenings,” I said, “as I remember.”
     Roz did not say, “Like I was with you in Kristovia.” She nodded.
     “We talked about Ottawa because we’d been there [link]. That’s where Zayna’s mother grew up.”
     “Yes.”
     “And about the president because they thought he was amusing. ‘I always imagine him in a clown suit,’ Nemet said, ‘like Bozo.’ They knew Bozo somehow.”
     “What was he up to then?” She meant the president, that clown.
     “I don’t remember,” I said. Then I said, “Wait! He was wearing a long red tie, and he was signing something.”
     “Very funny,” Roz said.

“What else did we talk about?” Roz said.
     “They were going on on the train to Chicago and from there—I don’t remember how—to Toronto. Zayna had an Uncle still there, her mother’s brother. He did something with the National Gallery. We went with Uncle Albert there to see a painting his friend recommended.* You remember that, right?”
     “Yes,” Roz said. “I do remember that.”§ [Our Canada adventures begin here.]

12.05.20

_______________
* Shirley Wiitasalo’s Park.
§ Tomorrow Roz asked, “Where did you get that picture of Nemet and Zayna (← all the links)?” “Mel Ball made it,” I said, “though I’m not sure how. Usually he says, but this time he didn’t.” “But where did he get a picture to make it from?” “I think I took a picture with my phone and sent it to him,” I said. “Oh,” Roz said. “I won't ask where the light was coming from,” Roz said.

You don't remember this?

 continued from
  You don’t remember this? 

 “You don’t remember this?” I said.
      Roz: “No.” She didn’t say, “How could I?”

Zayna & Nemet

“Look at me,” Roz said (again) a minute later. (Maybe it wasn’t a minute, it could have been right away; but it seemed longer: it seemed longer than right away, it seemed longer than a minute.)
     I did. I looked up out of my hands in my lap, and I looked at her. She is heartbreakingly beautiful, Not like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Eustacia Vye or like Julie Christie in Far from the Madding Crowd. Her glasses were slipping down her little nose again. Her face is, especially in the evenings . . . “careworn” is the word. But that’s what makes it so beautiful. She cares. For me she cares.
     “I know,” I said. “Not possible, is it?”
     She shook her head. I looked back into my lap.

“Ted,” she said. I looked up. She raised a finger. “A minute,” it said. And she got up and went into the kitchen.
     She came back with bowls of oatmeal and raisins.
     “So, tell me about it,” she said. “Remind me.”
     “What?”
     “When Nemet and Zayna were here,” she said.                                                          to be continued

 12.04.20

I was saying to Roz

  I was saying to Roz 

 “I was thinking,” I was saying to Roz, “that in retrospect that was kind of fun.”
     “What was?” Roz said.
     “I thought we were talking about Nemet and Zayna.”
     “What?” Roz said. “Who?
     “We weren’t talking at all,” Roz said.
     “Oh,” I said. “I thought we were.”

She looked at me. “Are you okay?”
     “Of course, I’m okay.”
     She looked back into her book, something by Louise Penny; that’s who she’s reading lately. I was watching Law & Order, the one where Lennie’s daughter is arrested for dealing drugs, just the pictures, no sound. Then: “No,” she said, looking back up. “Look at me,” she said.
     “I am looking at you,” I said as if I had been all along, but I was now anyway. Away from Lennie and the daughter arguing in a cell.
     “Who are Nemet and Zayna? Nemet and Zayna who?”
     “Kristovia,” I said. “You remember Kristovia.”
     “Yes,” she said, “I remember your telling me about Kristovia.”
     “We went there.”
     “Yes. So you said. You told me after you’d gotten back.”
     “Oh,” I said again. “We,” I said, though maybe to myself.

Garden of Gethsemane Cathedral, Pompeijo

“What did I tell you?” I said after a long minute.
     “We went by boat,” she said. “And we stayed in Pompeijo—is that right?”
     “Yes.”
     “In a hotel near the harbor—we could almost see it out of our window. And we visited the cathedral, and we went out to eat, and we went to a photography exhibit, and . . .”
     “That was Nemet’s,” I said, “the photographs.”
     “And we were going to stay for a while, maybe a long while. Only we didn’t because you came home instead.”

 I didn't say, “We." I said, “But later Nemet and Zayna, that was his girlfriend whose mother was going to teach us Kristovian—they came to see us here.”
     “When?”
     “I don’t remember. A year ago. More, I think.”
     “How could they have?” Roz said.                                                                            to be continued

  12.03.20

from Nemet (and Zayna) again

lux hominum
another cellphone drawing by m ball

 from Nemet (and Zayna) again 
more on Tess of the d’Urbervilles

To Ted (crabbiolio@gmail.com)
From Nemet (NemetN006@Kmail.nat) :

Zayna and me hope you read the last we write about Tess, how she is so beautiful and how you cannot understand the book if you miss this. We have one other thing we think you and Trudy in heaven miss. The word is the same in your English and our Kristovian, autodidakt (from the Greek, “teach self”).

The novels of Thomas Hardy are full of these. There is Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native, who will become a teacher. There is Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd. Jude Fawley in his book. Here are two, Angel because he cannot go to Cambridge because he will not become a priest and Tess who will learn all that Angel can teach her if he will. But then she will learn wrong things because he is wrong about those things. The narrator may think he, Angel, is right, but he is wrong, the narrator.

It is another one: You cannot understand the book if you do not know this.

From Nemet (and Zayna)

12.01.20

Powers and priciple-ities

 Powers and principle-ities 
(Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, pt. 2)

Nedum verum, hiemem unamquamque carpe. ^§

Correspondence with the dead continues.*

Dear Trudy,

Trudy’s Tess

Addendum. Still thinking of Angel. His principles. What they’re good for? (Like war: “Absolutely nothing!”) → Do they make sense of his feelings for Tess? Maybe they could, but only if they left Tess herself completely out of it: They can make no sense of her. Actually, they don’t even try to. The sad thing about Angel – at least at this point – is that he is only ever truly interested in Angel. He lives entirely within himself.

     Granted, it’s not good to live completely outside oneself as Alec does when he is Mr. Clare’s evangelist or as Tess tends to, giving all her thought (and all her thinking) over to Angel. Or over to her idealization of him. She doesn’t yet realize what a jackass he is. (And will she ever?)

     So . . . You keep giving me assignments. Here’s one for you: Is there a principle by which we can judge our principles so they don’t run away with our humanity?

Unnerved, Ted

 

 

 Dear Ted,

A principle to govern our principles? Sounds like metaphysical mayonnaise in a baloney sandwich. And, yes, I know that’s not the way you spell the meat, but it is the way you spell the bull-jabber. But don’t mind me: if there is anything I am not, it is a philosopher. But it sounds like, too, that you have met Angel, and he is you. I don’t know why you think so. He will never be able to live with Tess for more than a day or two. Poor ’Liza-Lu! Am I being too harsh? I suspect I am. If so, sorry.
     You have read the book to its bitter end, I take it. If you have not, don’t read on here until you have because I am going to tell you what happens, and I am going to tell you why it happens. And I am going to tell you who makes it happen. – The men in the story: Alec and Angel, and Thomas Hardy in particular. Which is not to say that there aren’t others, especially “Sir” John and Mr. Clare and Farmer Groby of Flintcomb-Ash, EVERY ONE of which is mean, not in the sense of cheap but in the sense of narrow, in the sense of lacking in imagination. And, yes, I include Hardy, who because he can’t think beyond Wessex, so he can’t get Angel and Tess farther north than Stonehenge, where she must be captured and hauled back to face man’s justice.  

     Besides, if they went on, Angel would have to continue living with her and loving her and suffering her love, which would end up scattering his principles like so much chaff in the wind. For the book to come to an end and he escape with his mangled sense of purity: Tess must die! And don’t say, “But ’Liza-Lu is left to carry on,” because she won’t carry on: she’ll become under his tutelage what he wanted Tess to be: pure, doggammit! as the driven snow. You can bet she hasn’t fooled around with any “cousin” smart-Alec! 
     Scribble on, you say, or screed on: I am blaspheming, misspelling, throwing around underlines and exclamation like pick-up sticks. But you see my point, don’t you? I’m not doing these things without a purpose. Hardy’s brain may be on the side of Paganism, but he hasn’t weaned his heart from the prudishest Paulinism: it (heart) remains mean and narrow and dry. The Apostle is passionate, but he doesn’t love flesh and blood, only the Spirit. It’s why, I think, he never writes about Jesus. It’s not that he doesn’t know him but that he doesn’t want to know him but only the crucified Christ, drained of all blood and lymph, wrapped in bandages and laid in a tomb to rise again from the bone-dry dead to float into the Ether.
     But what do I know? I’m only a girl. But one that loved flesh and blood, yours, you poor benighted fool.

Yes, Trudy

 11.29.20

_______________
§ “Seize not only the spring, but everywhich winter.” – Gaudius
* This correspondence with Trudy Monae began with The Return of the Native, starting here. How I got, and how I still have, her copy of Tess I do not know.

from Nemet (and Zayna)

 from Nemet (and Zayna) 
more on Tess of the d’Urbervilles

To Ted (crabbiolio@gmail.com)
From Nemet (NemetN006@Kmail.nat) :

Thank you that you are writing about Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Trudy, but. It is not that you are wrong in what you write to the other, but Zayna and me think you miss the main point. It is that Tess is so beautiful even her young girl friends must see it is so.

The novels of Thomas Hardy are full of women of capturing beauty. There is Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, who has two men in love with her. There is Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, who has three men in love with her. And there are others maybe, but there is none so beautiful as Tess. No man cannot desire her, and no woman cannot understand why the man she want desire Tess first instead. In the book.

You cannot understand the book if you do not know this.

From Nemet (and Zayna)

11.27.20

_______________
Background: Nemet’s previous email is here. Our Kristovia adventure – mine and Roz’s – begins here. We meet Nemet and Zayna, here; and we attend his photography exhibit, here.

Untitled No. 38

Untitled No. 38

Uncle Albert’s Game Boy – cellphone drawing by m ball
(He only plays Tetris.) 

Thanksgiving Day
11.26.20

Calvinist angels

  Calvinist angels
(Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, pt. 1)  

Correspondence with the dead resumes.*
               - non curat cauda insignem esse illam, / Dum pinguis siet. **

 Dear Trudy,

Did I say, “Let’s go on” – meaning to Tess? And did I mean it? Are you having as hard a time getting into it as I am?

Shit! Ted

 

Dear Ted,

No, I am not. Are you going to fink out on me? I sense you are, that you are going off to look for something . . . breezier, let’s say.

     With regard to love-and-marriage, who would know better than Jesus? So, no, we don’t marry; nor are we given in marriage. As for love – or lust, its kissing cousin – we can contemplate but not fall victim to it – to either. At least, so I am told. But nothing is ever quite as it sems, even where everything is True so there should be no seeming.

Or so it seems to me, Trudy

 

Some time later, apparently

Dear Ted,

Are you going to write back? Are you going to tell me where you are in Tess – or that you have abandoned her (as men are wont to do)?

     I am pressing on. Something between love and passion, or maybe the combined force of love and passion have conduced Tess to agree to marry Angel and – so far – not to tell him about her past, that she succumbed to the wicked blandishments of her “coz,” Alec Stoke-d’Urberville and bore his child.

     What do you think of that? She is asking against her better judgment, that is clear: what is also clear: she cannot do otherwise. What did we think of that when we read the novel those many years ago? Did we blame her for being dishonest? Did we blame her for sleeping with her cousin? (You came from a much more conservative background than I did. What would you have done if I’d told you I’d gotten pregnant at 16 when we were living in Lagos – before Dad got demoted to Bamako – and had had an abortion? You’d have been disgusted, I think. That’s not too strong a word. But then you would have forgiven me and even put it out of your mind. Maybe?) (It’s not a rhetorical question. Answer.)

     Here’s another question. One of the maids quotes the old saw, “All’s fair in love and war.” Is it? There are “rules of warfare,” are there not? There Is “just-war theory,” I think it’s called. There is a “Geneva Convention,” and there are other unwritten rules. So not everything is fair in war. There’s also the idea that “love is a game” – and games must have rules, even children’s games where one calls a rule and another explains why it doesn’t apply in this case.
     I don’t know. I don’t know either – I don’t remember – how the story goes on, how the book ends. But this is Hardy, I am thinking: any secret untold will be revealed, and the reader will be convinced that it would have been better told sooner than hidden. I’m guessing, but I’m pretty sure I will be proved right.
     In any case, you will write back soon, won’t you? There are rules of correspondence, too. When I go to my mailbox, I find nothing but announcements, (gilt-edged (and guilt-edged) promulgations from the Powers on High.

So? Trudy

 

later still

Dear Trudy,

I want to write you today, but I’m not sure I can: There is too much to say about poor Tess, feckless Angel, and that ill wind that blows no one good (not even himself) Alec d’Urberville: If he never truly (completely) deceives himself (as Angel surely does – and Tess must, too), he may be the most unhappy of all. And is that maybe because he never truly, completely deceives himself? (Does happiness depend on self-deception? Are the happiest among us the least self-aware? Etc.)

     So, not only were you not a virgin when I knew and loved you, you had aborted a child. You had fooled around with some Nigerian boy, gotten in trouble and somehow gotten rid of it? Hypothetically! (So you’re saying.) What would I have thought?  – I don’t know. I did grow up in the sixties in the fifties, and my ethics (if I had such things) came to me from the Swiss and the Scots and were as much like Mr. Clare’s as anyone else’s in the novel, that is, brisk, narrow, foolishly certain and uncompromising. (And how much have I grown from then till now?) On the other hand, I may well have loved you more than God at the time though I’m not sure I could have admitted it.

     Angel can’t admit that he loves Tess more than his principles, especially those he’s inherited from his father and mother and hasn’t been able to modify – purity! Maybe he doesn’t (love her more). “What a jackass!” I say now. But what did I say then? I find these later pandemic days I become more what I was: more forgiving of myself but less of others.

     You see why I can’t write: I can’t get my thoughts, or my feelings, organized. And I don’t know that spending more time with them, pen hovering over the page, is going to help. Still, I am going to try to finish the book today though I still have most of the last two “phases” to go. Then, I’ll try to write more, whether I know more or not, or less.

Okay for now, Ted

 11.24.20

_______________
  * This correspondence with Trudy Monae began with The Return of the Native, starting here.
** “The cook doesn’t care that [the bird] had a brilliant tail, only that it was fat.” – Lucilius
Graphic: “card catalog” - cellphone draing by m ball