Love in a Time of Cholera

Episode 8 - Weldon Kees

Episode 1 - Ernest Dowson

Episode 2 - James Dickey

Episode 3 - Raleigh and Regina (Sir Walter and Elizabeth I)

 

Episode 4 - Christina Rossetti

Episode 5 - Richard Hugo

 

Episode 6 - Edward Lear

Episode 7 - the prophet Joel

Independent existence.

 Independent existence. 

Click on the phone for a
picture of the sound it makes.

The landline chokes, clatters to life, tweets, chokes-tweets. Roz answers. She brings the handset in to me.

     “It’s Nils,” she says. “He wants you to know he’s talked to me. I’m to tell you he has.” I start to take the phone. “No,” she says. “He wants to talk to Uncle Albert first. Where is he?”

     “He’s upstairs, I think, lying down. Don’t bother him.” She heads up the stairs. I hear her tapping on Uncle Albert’s door, a muffled reply. Some off-stage business. Sound effects: suppressed cough, whispered belch, broom sweeping sidewalk. Then Roz’s feet on downward stairs.

     “He told me to tell you he’d talked to Nils.”

     “What did it smell like?” Uncle Albert claims he can smell cats; they are like raw liver and lime sherbet. Roz goes to the foot of the stairs, climbs up until her head is above the second-story floor: “What did it smell like?”  Hesitation. A muffled reply. She comes back down.

     “He says, ‘very faintly of Canadian whiskey.” She reaches out with the handset. “‘In a plastic cup,’ he says. Nils,” she says.

     “Nils,” I say into the handset, all jolly.

     The voice at the other end has no smell I can detect: “Just calling to say though I’m not there, I do have an existence apart from you.”

     “I see,” I say.

     “As Roz and your uncle A. can testify.”

     “I see,” I say again though, I confess, I don’t. Or I’d rather not.

03.29.20

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* I don’t want to see, but Nils may be talking about this. Links to other posts featuring Nils are here. 

AND, check out «love in a time of cholera» on YouTube. 

Click here for links to episodes 1 & 2. Episode 3 in production now!

Chapter DCCXX.

 Chapter DCCXX - Raw Liver and Lime Sherbet. 

Before last time. Well before last time. A week or more before last time,

     Roz said, “What are we going to do about Uncle A?”

     “What do you mean?” I said.

     “What do you think I mean?”

     “What you call the pan(dem)ic.” She spelled it out, “pan-parenthesis-dem-unparenthesis-ick.”

     “Oh,” I said. And waited, hoping for more. But she was also waiting - for me. “Do you mean, ‘What am I going to do’ about him?” I asked.

     “No, definitely not. You haven’t thought about it, have you?”

     “No,” I said. “I guess not,” thinking (but not adding): “Things don’t always have to change, do they, because they ought to?”

     “Well, I talked to Maggie. You met Carl and Zenobia?”

     “Yes, her friend from the college and the mechanic-is-it?” (See here.)

     “Truck driver. Well, she went to Roanoke last weekend to see her boyfriend, the nurse, and she decided not to come back. And he’s stuck in Bolivia - he was on a mission trip.”

     “So, she’s by herself, Maggie?”

     “No. Her mother’s come up from Smithfield.”

     I nodded as if I understood.

“They’d be happy to have Albert stay, but . . . ,” she trailed off, and I could hear Maggie trailing off at the same place in the same sentence, an echo in a lower register.

     “He’ll have to climb the stairs,” I said after a minute.

     “He has to climb the stairs there,” Roz said.

     Yeah. Right.

     “He’s doing fine with them,” she says. “Slow but fine.”

     “He doesn’t like cats,” I said.

     “Tough. Besides, we don’t let Flap in the guest room.”

     “I didn’t say he was allergic to cats. I said he didn’t like them. He says they smell funny.”

     “They don’t smell at all.”

     “Like raw liver and lime sherbet, he says.”

     “I’m going to call anyway.

“Is he ready?” I asked Roz when she came back from the kitchen.

     “He’ll be on the porch,” she said. “Two suitcases,” she added.

     “Did you tell him about the cat?”

03.24.20

Metafriction.

 Metafriction. 

Nils called. Could he and Axel come by? I asked Roz. She said “yes” as long as we sat on the front steps at least a meter apart, all of us facing north. I measured. There was plenty of room. “We can sit six feet apart,” I said. “Good.”

     “Yes,” I told Nils. “It’s about Rantrage,” he said.

Nils       and       Axel
and me.

They were going to come over about two. They arrived at twenty after. From the door, I showed them the chalk marks I’d made where they were to sit. “Face the street,” I said though they’d have had a hard time sitting on the steps facing any other direction. “I’ll be out in a minute,” I said. I put on a jacket. It was none too warm to my skin.

     “About Rantrage?” I said when I’d sat down.

     “Yes,” Nils: “I don’t find any of the books on Amazon. And Axel didn’t find any on Cokesbury.”

     “Cokesbury?” I said. “Does that still exist?”

     Axel: “It does.”

     “So, you’re making this stuff up,” Nils said.

     I shook my head. Then, “Look at me,” I said. Then, “No, don’t. North.” Then, “I mean, How could I?”

     “Somebody could,” Nils said.

     “The two of you, maybe.” There was a pause.

“Somebody could be making all of this up,” I said.

     There was another pause.

03.22.20

Deviled ham.

 Deviled ham.

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. 197 - from the section “Late”) –

L3, the third of four fragments found near Siena, 1956 and since lost.

dixit,Cui simile est Eius medicus hominem misit ad . . . si potuerit curare Si daemones possintne ex homine ejieci Misit illum ad adiutorem eum qui intellexit linguae alicuius daimonis sed non omnium.Sed unum potuit intelligere affirmavit loqui pro omnibus.Dixit qui aures habet,audiat.

He said, “Is it like this?

     “His healer sent a man to a tester to see if he could be healed. Could the man’s demons be cast out? The tester gave the man to his assistant, who understood the language of some of the demons but not of all of them. But one he could understand claimed to speak for all.”

     He said, “Who has ears to hear, let her hear.”

Commentary

Of the four fragments in the same hand discovered together, this, L3, is the most complete though some have argued that it is not complete at all. All agree that the saying has its introduction - “He said, ‘Is it like this?’” All agree it has its conclusion - “He said, ‘Who has ears, let her hear.’” But is all the middle there? Does the story make sense? That depends, I argue, on what sort of sense the teller intended it should make. It does not depend on the sense the reader might wish it made.

     Those that argue (Simeone and Oxlade-Chamberlain, for instance) that the story is incomplete take (with variations) the following line: It begins with a doctor sending his (demon-possessed) patient to a specialist to run tests and report back. Is this a case that can be treated or not? The specialist asks a resident to conduct a preliminary exam. The resident begins and seems to reach a conclusion but one based on what kind of evidence? The story is broken off there. We don’t hear of his report to the specialist or the specialist’s to the physician. The story works its way from beginning to middle in four steps, interactions between patient and doctor, doctor and specialist, specialist and resident, and resident and patient (or patient’s demons). There is no middle to end. (Four steps in; there should be four steps out.)

     But need there be a middle to an end (four steps out to match the four in)? Jesus’ stories - and though he is not named here, the story is clearly attributed to Jesus, named in another of the fragments¹ - do not always have beginnings, middles, and ends. See, for example, the parables of the mustard seed, the leaven, and the pearl of great price.

Facsimile of L3, enhanced. The fragment was discovered in 1956.
It was photographed some time later. It was lost by 1961.

      Moreover, I would argue (in agreement with Klopp, and Morata & Savič) that the story comes to precisely the end (the point not the conclusion) that whoever created or preserved it intended. He (or she) understands Jesus’ interactions with demons this way: they are cast out not by understanding but by, well, casting them out, sending them on their way. (See when he comes down from the Mount of Configuration or the story of the Gerasene demoniac.) To try to understand them, to converse with them as if they had something to say, is damned foolishness. Scatter them to the winds and hope they blow them back where they came from, probably into pigs and thence pork products, Smithfield hams, deviled ham, rinds, and pickled feet.

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 ¹ L2, in which the saying is effaced except for the word ager, field. The first two words of the fragment are legible, however: Dixit Iesus, Jesus said. As is the last word: dixit, he said.

03.19.20

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

Another saying.

“cranberry Edith” by m ball**

 Another saying.* 

He said, “Is it like this?

     “His healer sent a man to a tester to see if he could be healed. Could the man’s demons be cast out? The tester gave the man to his assistant, who understood the language of some of the demons but not of all of them. But one he could understand claimed to speak for all.”

     He said, “Who has ears to hear, let her hear.”

03.17.20

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  * Source unknown. For commentary on other sayings, from the Gospel of Thomas and other sources, click here and scroll down. Stay tuned for Farah See's take on this one.

 ** Edith Wharton, from a 1987 photograph.

Nothing to see here.