COW

“All is vanity and a passing of wind.”**

 COW.* 

Berkeley, CA. Invited to participate in a low-level panel at the Conference on Oriental Wisdom (COW), Confucius brings with him to the (also low-level) reception following a pamphlet copy of the book of Ecclesiastes in which he has highlighted several random passages. He leaves it on the buffet table beside some bean dip.

04.29.20

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 * Confucius in America, Episode 2. Continued from here, where there are also links to more Confucion.
** Hebrew רוח ורעת

Confucius in America, 1968

 Confucius in America, 1968. 

The people of Ch’î sent Lû an all-girl band. Chî Hwan took charge of it, and for three days normal court business was suspended. Confucius left after the first.*

NOLA, spring 1968.†
Wearing Wallabees.

New Orleans. He is listening to the girl on the streetcar, long brown hair, long flowered dress, smelling of gardenias, tuberose, and sweat: She is singing to herself the names of the streets: “Urania’s called Felicity, Polymnia’s in church. Euterpe is on keyboards, Terpsichore’s on dance. Melpomene cries out, Thalia laughs; Erato writes it down. Clio then Calliope . . . .” He can’t hear the end. She has pulled the cord and is walking to the door. Her feet are bare.  

04.27.20

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 * The quotation is from The Analects 18, 4.

 † The last we saw him was playing parabolic golf with Old Tom Morris at Prestwick. See here.  A brief catalog of his adventures in Europe and the Middle East before then begins here.

Story Corpse.

 Story Corpse.

It must be Friday: Uncle Albert, Roz, and I go on the new app.

             Ted: Uncle Albert, you remember that time when . . . [pauses].

Uncle Albert: Yes, I do. [Pretends to chuckle.]

             Ted: That must have brought us closer.

Uncle Albert: One would have thought so.

Ted (to Roz): Roz, that must have been before you came into the picture, so to speak.

             Roz: Yes. Must have been.

             Ted: So, it can’t mean as much to you.

             Roz: No.

04.24.20

Gobstopper.

 Gobstopper.  

The only one I interviewed that didn’t want to talk about the pain he was in, too,* was Bill Butler-Gates from SCPA, the Spottswood County Poets Association. Who didn’t want to talk about himself at all - or his organization - only about rhythm and rhyme. Particularly, he was wondering how far apart you could pull them before the rhythm fell down and couldn’t get up, before rhyme became no-rhyme-at-all.

More from the Ted Radio Quarter-Hour.
The views of our guests are strictly their own.

For example, I could hear dog/bog, right? I could hear fairly/barely. I could hear cynical/winnable, could I. In that case, surely I could also hear mystical/fisticuffs.

     I nodded, hesitantly. “What kind of rhyming would that be called?” I asked.

     He ignored the question: Wait! Then couldn’t I also hear hysterical/urinary,  larceny/Constable (the painter, not the office), resumption/plenary, fastidious/Bo-Peep, Wüstelei**/rainbow, graffiti/New Mexico, tinnitus/ramshackle? I could hear those? Right?

    I wasn’t so sure. “When do you come to,” I asked, “When do you come to the problem of your hearing what’s not really there?”

     “Almost immediately,” he said, “I mean barely/fairly - do they really rhyme? But
‘hearing-what’s-not-there’ is more the philosopher’s problem. Or the theologian's! It’s not the poet’s.”

“What’s the poet’s problem, then?”

     “None,” he said. The poet didn’t have a problem as long as philosophers and theologians left him alone - and linguists and grammarians and people who loved Billy Collins.

     “I thought everyone loved Billy Collins,” I said, “an American treasure.”

     “So was Eugene Fields.” And the red light came on.

There was only time to say, “We’ve been talking to Spottswood County Poetry Association vice-president, Bill Butler-Gates. Thank you, Bill. . . .”

04.20.19

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  * On the Ted Radio Quarter-Hour, see here.

** The German for desert/chaos I found out later.

Telling wit from whinola.

 Telling wit from whinola. 

The Ted Radio Quarter-Hour

Years ago for a year or so I was on the radio. Local. I interviewed do-gooders, people who were “making a difference in our town, our area, our state!” Preachers, school principals, members of town councils and county boards, and mostly heads of non-profits. All whining about how difficult it was for the people they served - and they didn’t need to add, but they did - how difficult it was to serve them.

     Doing good is its own reward, of course. But only if you get a chance now and then to bitch about it. Other people need to know how hard you work, especially if God doesn’t care because he saves by grace. This is especially the case in an area originally settled by Presbyterians.*

     We sounded like NPR: “Jesus, this is hard but watch us soldier on!” What actually raised us above NPR: we only sounded like NPR for 15 minutes a week.

Speaking of grace. You remember the parable of Jesus about the workers in the field. How they were hired in the morning, at noon, and fifteen minutes before closing; then they were paid fifteen-minutes, noon, and morning bright and early - all the same wage. How those that were paid last complained, “Didn’t you see how hard we worked?” To which the steward (in the version in the apocryphal gospel of Bartholomew) answers, “No, gosh, I didn’t.”

     Now that’s wit. In any version,** the parable is witty. And at the expense of the whiners.

Who, however, do work like mad and nobody sees.

     But everybody hears.

04.17.20

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  * By grace alone! Presbyterians succeeded by Mennonites and Brethren. The problem with them, as a wise man once told me: They believe Jesus meant what he said.
 ** You probably read it last in Matthew's version, 20:1-16. Find that here in J. B. Phillips’ translation.

Best Easter sermon ever.

 Best Easter sermon ever. 

As we have been these last few weeks, Uncle Albert and I went to Easter service in a different state according to a different polity.

     Roz said she would be happy - “I really mean it,” she said, “happy” - to fix Easter dinner instead of watching with us though I had volunteered to make spaghetti.

     “What will you be cooking then?” Uncle Albert asked, pretending not to be pleased. He says he likes my spaghetti, but he always adds “okay.” “I like your spaghetti okay,” he says.

     “I don’t know,” Roz said. “I’ll have to look around. We’ll see.”

     “It’ll be something with chicken,” I said. I hadn’t thought about Easter dinner when I went shopping, but I knew we had chicken.

     “We’ll see,” Roz said. And she disappeared.

“There was a mad preacher from Ai . . .”
Not Edward Lear
For genuine Lear, click here.

And Uncle Albert and I went to church on Facebook Watch. We had to wait a while for it to load. Then, it finished, and we watched. Because the church is in another state in a town we’ve never been to, we watched a bunch of people we didn’t know participate from home, reading Scripture, leading prayers; children sang from different living rooms in different keys. We also sang - hymns we didn’t know because the church was in a different denomination.

     The sermon wandered a bit - and a bit more - but it always came back to what Easter sermons almost always come back to: “Christ is risen!” so rejoice!!

‘almost always’ because

     When we were done and had turned it off, Roz came in and said, sounding like the mom: “Wash your hand, boys. Time to eat.”

     And at the table Uncle Albert said he remembered, he thought, every word of the best Easter sermon he’d ever heard.

     “Yeah?” I said. I didn’t believe it.

     “It was less than a minute long,” he said, “maybe even less than half a minute.”

The preacher had read the lesson from Mark. It told how early on the first day of the week the women come to the tomb, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome, with spices to anoint the body. They are wondering who is going to roll the stone away for them. But it is rolled away. And the tomb is empty. Or except for a young man in white who tells them Jesus isn’t there because he’s risen. They may see him in Galilee if they went there. And they run out astonished. They don’t know what to say, so they don’t say anything. At all.

     “And the preacher said,” Uncle Albert said: “‘Every Easter we talk, talk, talk. We talk the resurrection to death because we think we have to say something about it. But, the truth? - what can we say that makes sense out of what doesn’t make sense? Look at it through Mary, Mary, and Salome’s eyes. Don’t think. Look. The tomb is empty. Or there’s a strange man inside who says, “Go to Galilee.” Go where? What? Gob-stopped, that’s the word. The women are choked with amazement; they have nothing to say. But, what can anyone say really?’ And he, the preacher, shook his head and sat down.

     “And he sat then for the length of a regular sermon. There was one whisper after about two or three minutes. And he said, ‘Shhhhh,’ so everyone could hear it.

     “That was it,” Uncle Albert said.

     “Who was he?” I asked.

     “Nobody,” Uncle Albert said. “Nobody you’d know.” And I thought later, “Right. Nobody at all,” because can you imagine any preacher you’d know shutting up after a minute anytime, much less on Easter?

We had African peanut stew.**

04.13.20

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 * 16:1-8. See here.

 **The recipe, from the cookbook, Savory Stews (1969, by Mary Savage), is here.

1.285906053177918e-5

 1.285906053177918e-5. 

“This I can tell you,” Uncle Albert was saying at lunch today. I had made tuna-salad sandwiches on toast and heated up a can of tomato soup. We were drinking lactose-free milk. Roz wasn’t eating with us. Roz doesn’t eat with us, not lunch. But that’s another story for another time.

     “This I can tell you,” he said a second time after a spoonful of soup: “I am not going to write you after I die.” He stopped, took a bite of his sandwich, said, “Not bad,” took a spoonful of soup, swallowed, and pointed his spoon at me: “So, if you get anything from me,” he said, “you’ll know it’s a forgery.”

     I nodded.

     “Yes?” he said.

     “Yes,” I said.

     “So, I’m on record.”

     “Yes,” I said again.

The phone rang. It was Nils.

     “What are you guys doing?” Nils’ voice on the phone said.

     “Eating lunch.”

     “Right. Sorry.” Pause. “What are you eating?”

     “Tuna-salad sandwiches and soup,” I said. “Tomato.”

     “Let me talk to Albert.” I waited. “Okay?”

     “He wants to talk to you.” I handed the phone to Uncle Albert.

     Buzz, buzz, buzz. Albert says “Okay.” A couple of times. He hands the phone back to me and goes back to his soup and sandwich.

     “Ask him if he talked to me,” Nils said.

     “He can hear you,” I said. “He says he did.”

“How’s he doing?” Nils asked.

     “Fine, I think.” Uncle Albert nods. “He’s nodding,” I said.

     “Good. I worry about him, but . . . .” Nils stopped. He started again: “Though get this!” He had stopped, I realized, to climb up on his soap box. I interrupted.

     “Wait. Do you want me to put you on speaker?
     There was a pause. “No.” Another pause. “So,” Nils said.

     “So we’re approaching 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 I hear this morning. It sounds like a lot until you begin calculating. Right?” He goes right on. “It’s between twelve-and-a-half and thirteen ten-thousandths of one percent of the world’s people.

     “Of course, everyone that has the virus, some 1.6 million - one-fiftieth of one percent (Is that right? Never mind.) - will infect 2.4 other people, who will infect 2.4 others until, if Zeno’s paradox doesn’t intervene, we’ll all be either dead or (relatively) immune.

     “All this is God’s fault since he sends these things either to chastise us or because he’s too lazy to prevent them, in which case he’s not the one that’s been finding you your damn parking place. But we know he is. So almost certainly to chastise, right?”

     It was a rhetorical question - no time to answer before he plunged on. “Still, it’s better to be living now that in Noah’s time when comorbidity factors weren’t small matters like difficulty in breathing but one large one, the inability to breathe underwater.” He stopped. I waited.

     “Sorry,” he said.

“What did he want?” Uncle Albert asked. “Your soup’s cold.”

     “I know,” I said. “He said he was sorry.”

04.10.20

Billy Liar

 Billy Liar. 

I’m still talking to Dr. Feight,* only by phone. Once a week. On Tuesdays at four in the afternoon. He calls me.

     “Okay,” he says. And I begin. Or if I don’t right away, he says, “What do you want to talk about today?” We’ve met this way five times, beginning the 10th of March. Today:

“Okay,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”

     “I have letters from Moira,” I said.** I waited. Then I said:

     “I wrote to her that I was bored. I may have said ‘disaffected’ though I’m not sure exactly what that means. And she wrote back that she was, too. Bored.” I stopped. After a minute,

     “Okay,” Dr. Feight said. “Go ahead.”

“She asked if I’d ever seen the movie Billy Liar. She and her friend Lisa, a girl I’d known in college who died about the same time Moira did - she and Lisa had watched it again, they’d both seen it before. She didn’t say how.”

     “How they watched it,” Dr. Feight said.

     “Yes.”

     “I see,” Dr. Feight said.

     “So I watched it.” After a minute:

     “And?”

     I said, “I asked her what she thought about it. Do you know it? It has Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in it.”

     “Yes.”

     “She wrote that she found the characters oddly sympathetic. Oddly because none of them were real to her, the Peter Pan boy, the impossibly beautiful girl, the patronizing pater, the sympathetic mater, the potty grandmater, the rest: the strict boss, the mocking friends. And she wrote that she thought it was about freedom, how we want it, but on our own terms.

     “So, Billy could run away to London with Liz, but he won’t. He might have to give up his fantasies. He doesn’t want to wake up with her next to him in bed. ‘A real woman with a real body.’ That’s what Moira wrote: ‘Think back to the beginning of the movie. He wants to wake up in his single bed with his toy soldiers made of air marching across the inside of his eyelids and the band playing the Ambrosian national anthem inside his ears. That’s what he’s going back to at the end. Liz is made out to be so desirable, isn’t she? - an adolescent male fantasy, except that she’s real. Fantasy doesn’t want real.’” I stopped.

     “No?” Dr. Feight said.

     I didn’t say anything for a minute because I wasn’t sure what this “No?” meant. Then I said, “She also wrote that it was a ‘coming-of-age movie.’ ‘Isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘The characters should already be of age. They’re in their twenties, I think. But they’re still “coming-of,” too. Aren’t they? Or, aren’t we all? We mature, we continue to mature, we revert, we get back on the right path - or another wrong one - we die. We fall off a cliff, our heart explodes - or our brain does; we step in front of a car or a roof tile falls on our head. Imagine a long list here: we go to war, we fight cancer but lose . . . we drink ourselves to death. So we die, however old or young, mid-career. (I mean ‘career’ in the sense of the verb, mid-hurtling-from-here-to-there-and-bouncing-off-and-back-again: The car careered off the road and into Farmer Brown’s unsuspecting Guernsey asleep on her feet; the impact turned it on its side, and it rolled slowly onto its roof.)’

     “She goes on: ‘It’s Sunday where you are, I think. I’m also thinking, hoping, that you are safe, for the moment anyway, maybe in your bed with your soldiers. It is Sunday here, too. Always. And never. The churches are always open, and there are no churches. (See the end of Revelation somewhere.)

     “‘Here is what I am sorry about,’” she writes. “‘Your friend’s brother, Hamlin’s, tries to kill himself, and you think of me. Axel and Nils’ sister, the middle one, May, right? succeeds - I know that was some time ago, but you thought of me. Every time something like this happens, you think of me. And I’m sorry you think of me that way. I know you can’t help it. I know you try very hard to keep me alive so you don’t have to. I am grateful. And I am sorry.

     “‘Lisa says, “Hi!”’

     “There’s where it ends,” I said. “Except for the closing, as she often does, ‘The end. Love, Moira.’”

     “I see,” Dr. Feight said.

04.07.20

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 * See here (about and links). **My dead sister, Moira. See here.

April fools.

 April fools.

Roz has the habit of chewing on things before asking about them, sometimes for quite a while, even a day or more. Then, we’re sitting at dinner - Roz, Uncle Albert, and I - and without preamble:

     “What was that all about?” To me and I’m supposed to know what “that” refers to? I have a strategy. I say:

     “I’m not sure.” And it’s as much the truth as a strategy because I’m not sure about much of anything. But it does sometimes bring her to say what “that” is.

     “Nils,” she says. And I’m pretty sure she is talking about his phone call. (See here.) But I shrug and say,

     “Nils.” - in a “What are you going to do?” tone of voice.

cell phone drawing (crayolized)

     “You do know what I’m talking about,” she says.

     “I do,” I say, “I think. But I don’t know what to say. He thinks I’m lying about everything, so I must be lying about him, and he doesn’t like it.”

     “I see,” she says. And likely she does. Likely she sees all the way to the end of what I can say. But she says it in a way that means also “Go on.” “I see” meaning “Go on.”

     “I am lying about him, but I lie about everything. As soon as I type a word onto a screen, I begin lying because words in a row can’t describe sixteen things happening at once, the phone’s ringing, your saying ‘It’s Nils,’ what your saying (as opposed to Uncle Albert’s) - what your saying ‘It’s Nils’ means, what could he be calling about? I could go on, but . . . .”

     “But we’d get no closer to the truth,” Roz says.

     “Right.”

     “Because we’d be talking in words in a row.”

     “Right.”

     “Lies.”

     “Right.”

     “Then no one tells the truth.”

     “No.”

     “Ever.”

     “Some try harder than others,” I said.

     “The f,” Uncle Albert said from his chair, “in fib is a fricative, if I remember correctly. The b is plosive. Should I go on?” he asked. “Both are labials, for example.”

     “No,” Roz said. “We get your point.”

     I didn’t, but I nodded.

04.01.20

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Exercise: Describe getting an injection. Tell the truth, the whole truth. Use as many words as you want. Read what you have written. Is it the truth?