Day by Day

 Day by Day.  

Not the devotional booklet. But Uncle Albert’s new old routine. Now that he’s staying with us. Part One: Breakfast.

Roz asks him, when she gets out of the shower, if he wants her to bring him a cup of coffee. She’s going down to get one - and a slice of toast - to bring up to her dressing table; she can nibble and sip while she dries her hair. Uncle Albert says, “No,” he’s getting up. He’s already up; he’s getting dressed. He’s almost dressed, he can go down to get his own coffee. “Ted will help me,” he says.

     He means I’ll help him get his slippers on. I’ll help him down the stairs. I’ll make sure he gets safely into the kitchen. I’ll pour his coffee, add his teaspoon of sugar and dollop-and-seven-eighths of cream. I’ll toast his English muffin. And I’ll concoct my coffee; I’ll toast my muffin; and we’ll sit down together. He’ll say,

     “How did you sleep?” I’ll say,

     “Fine. Or fine enough.” I’ll say, “How about you?” He’ll say,

     “Same.” I’ll say,

     “Have you written your morning sentence?” pronouncing it sawn-tawnce as in French (swallowing the n’s) because Uncle Albert isn’t writing sentences, he’s making sayings, like La Rochefoucauld. Sort of. That’s what he says,

     “Sort of.”

     “Lay it on me,” I say.

La Rochefoucauld
Somewhere in the south of France, 1992

“You won’t print this,” he says because he doesn’t want to offend anyone. He wants to say what he wants to say, but he doesn’t want one of his students to read what he wants to say and think less of him for it. He’s aware he isn’t always “politically correct”; it’s a category that he doesn’t quite understand. Or, he understands the category; only he’s not sure what goes under it and what falls out of it. I say,

     “No.” I won’t print it.

     “It’s nothing like the master this morning,” he says.

     I don’t say anything. I wait. At this point, he will take a bite of English muffin, and he’ll chew it until he can swallow it. Then, he’ll take a sip of coffee, and he’ll take his time swallowing that. Then he says,

     “What is this ‘objectivity’” - he makes air quotes: “What is this ‘objectivity’ you are always speaking of, kemo sabe?

     “There,” he says. “What do you think?”

     I nod.

     “You’re not going to print it, are you?”

     I nod.

06.30.20

Confusion

 Confusion 

From Moira on Stefan Zweig:

 Dear Ted,

I have been reading over your shoulder: you have been reading Stefan Zweig’s novella, Confusion - and without inviting me to tag along! What did you think of it? I went ahead and read it, too; I did tag along, invitation or none.

     At first, I thought it was overwrought; then, I thought how well the sixty-year-old narrator gets back into his twenty-year-old self - twenty, that peak of adolescence when everything matters more than it does really and one thing, love, matters more than everything itself. Love and sex. Love and sex in a situation in which betrayal is inevitable given who must love whom and how, which is in conflict with who can love whom how. (And, as always, there must be three.)

     I can think “how well sixty-year-old Roland puts himself back into his twenty-year-old self” (or puts his twenty-year-old self back on), and I can still see the problems that causes: what begins as a Berlin comedy will become a provincial tragedy. It’s like how Restoration comedy becomes 18th-century pathetics - how in three short years, The Way of the World becomes The Fair Penitent (and there is sillier stuff to follow). Does that make sense?

     On a story level - back to Zweig - I felt sorry for the Professor’s poor, brave, little wife, stuck out there in the middle of nowhere with all her sly energy - physical energy, sexual energy, even, I imagine, intellectual energy (if not quite the right sort) - all of that and no way to dissipate, much less use, it. Women aren’t always more practical than men. I know! I’m a case in point. Still, here is a practical woman caught between two extreme Romantics, two heady yet air-headed Romantics neither of whom is half as smart as he thinks he is.

     Finally - the last thing I’ll say about the novel: All the drama leads nowhere. It’s not exactly sound and fury signifying nothing, but there is sound and there’s more fury; then everyone scatters. Or, the hero runs away, leaving the stage behind. Imagine the Professor and his wife, frozen there, Didi and Gogo in Act II, waiting still for Godot though he has already come and now is gone for good.

     What are you going to write about this week? I confess I don’t get all of the biblical stuff, what the Rantrage books are parodying - cleverly, I’m sure. Still, I do like the way they often take on God. I’ll warn you, however: he’s not quite the petty, self-important old fool they (you?) sometimes make him out to be. Beware.

     One more thing, a question: Have you given up on your German? You could have read Zweig auf Deutsch, nicht wahr? Did I get that right? Warum didn’t you? Have you given up?

Love, Moira

06.24.20

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More about and letters from Moira, links here. The drawing of Stefan Zweig is by m ball.

Sleepless in the Land of Nod.

 Sleepless in the Land of Nod.

from Adam Manasseh-Machir’s new commentary on Genesis (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2020, p. 38) —

 IV. 1 In due course, the man began to understand his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, saying, “I have gained a man with Yahweh’s help.  2 Later she gave birth to Abel, his brother. Abel became a shepherd, Cain cultivated the ground.

      3 Quite some time later, Cain brought an offering to Yahweh from the fruit of the ground;  4 and Abel, for his part, brought the fattest of the firstlings of his flock. Yahweh approved Abel and his offering.  5 But to Cain and his offering he paid no attention at all. Cain was upset, and it showed.

      6 So Yahweh said to Cain, “Why so upset?—I can see that you are.  7 “Do what is right, and surely all will be well. But don’t do what is right, and sin is lurking at your door, desiring to take you. You must take control of it.”

      8 Cain said to Abel, his brother . . . . and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.  9 Yahweh said to Cain, “Hey, where’s Abel? Your brother?” And he [Cain] said, “Am I my brother’s keeper.”   10 He [Yahweh] replied, “What have you done? Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.  11 So, the ground shall be even more cursed, since it opened its mouth to drink your brother’s blood from your hand.  12 You can till the ground, but it will no longer yield for you. And you shall become an everlasting wanderer on the earth.”

Notes

    iv. 1.  Cain . . . gain. The true housewives of Genesis are notorious punsters; here Eve puns קין [qain] and קנה [qanah] though Cain doesn’t have anything to do with gaining anything. The name suggests something to stab with, a spear or a javelin.

       2.  Abel is הבל, fog or mist or vanity (as in Ecclesiastes 1:2 - Abel, Abel, all is Abel.)

       4.  fattest of the firstlings of his flock. Translators are no better than Eve and her ilk, always playing with language to make it sound the way they want it to. In Eve’s fall, we fell all.

       7. all will be well. Literally, there will be uplift, perhaps from distress, perhaps from descending into revenge. It’s not clear. The translator is guessing, but so are his fellows.

       8. . . . . The Masoretic Text doesn’t say what Cain said. The LXX does: “Come, let us go out into the field.”

      10. !!! Almost every translation fills this verse with exclamation marks though there are none in the original. See note on verse 4.

      12.  an everlasting wanderer. Cain may later found a city, but it must be in the land of Nod, the restlessness that lies somewhere east of Eden [vss.16-17].

Commentary

It’s possible to overanalyze this story. See Fabiansky for one example, Mainbridge for another even more extreme. It is a rich story, but it is a story, not Finnegan’s Wake (which is not a story but a puzzle). It is moreover, the story of “Cain and Abel” —as we rightly call it; that is, it is primarily the older son’s, as opposed to the younger son’s story, as in “Isaac and Ishmael” or “Jacob and Esau.”

    Abel is negligible; he is “fog,” the vanity of Ecclesiastes [See the note to v. 2.], he signifies nothing in himself. In the story, he is a ficelle character, whose only purpose is to advance the plot far enough that God and Cain can have their conversation. Still, it is Abel’s God that Cain must deal with—as he is well aware.

     But let’s go back to the beginning: Adam finally begins to figure out Eve ­­— my translation of ידע—at least so far that he can impregnate her; and she gives birth to Cain, whom, she says, she has got from God. [See note to v. 1. Never ones to resist a pun, these mothers of Genesis.]

     The grandfather of metalworkers [vs. 22], Cain makes himself a plow, and he takes up the family business, the work his father was condemned to, cultivating the ground, hoping to harvest wheat from the midst of darnel. [See 3:18.] But long before this, as if to prove it wasn’t a lucky guess, Adam figures Eve out again. And she gives birth to Abel, who starts his own business, sheep.

     The time of year comes round that God expects his sacrifice, and Cain obliges, he does his duty; but his brother does more; he seems to know exactly what God wants. And God does take up Abel’s sacrifice; he also disdains Cain’s. He is God and can do exactly as he likes. Cain can cry out “unfair,” but he is God: “F*** fair.”

     Do I overstep here—do I fall into the erroneous ways of Fabiansky and Mainbridge—that is, do I overstep if I suggest that in his frustration Cain is us. Things ought to be fair, should they not? This is how ethics works, and ethically God should be better than us, not worse, fairer rather than inexplicably unfair.

     So Cain believes. “What the hell?” he asks Abel’s God, who doesn’t answer. Rather God passes the blame—as this God will do throughout the story. If Cain wants to know why, God will instead offer advice—like a middle school teacher that doesn’t know the answer to a question that she decides must, therefore, be impertinent. “Watch yourself,” she says to her overly inquisitive student. “Watch yourself,” God says [vs. 6] to Cain. “Don’t let the demon get hold of you.

     “It’s up to you,” God adds.

     “How is it up to me?” Cain must be thinking.

Then he kills Abel. It happens in a field God seems to have difficulty finding the way to. He arrives too late for Abel though he is Abel’s God. And when he arrives he is still the middle-school teacher, now in her role of asking the question she already knows the answer to: “Where is your brother?” (Or the the question she knows there’s no satisfactory answer to: “What did you think you were doing?”)

     “How should I know?” is Cain’s response in either case. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “I mean,” Cain is suggesting, “where the hell were you?” It’s not a question God is even going to listen to, much less answer. Still like our hypothetical teacher: “This is not about me,” he argues. “Don’t you question me.”

     And God sends Cain to the principal’s office. Detention. A life-time’s worth.

    

06.21.20

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More from Rantrage Press, especially the Incoherent Commentary Series, click here.

Von Bismarck Cottage Cheese

 Von Bismarck Cottage Cheese. 

An introduction to the story of “Spear” and “Fog.” That’s in Genesis 4, the subject for tomorrow (or the day after), when I’ll have my copy of Adam Manasseh-Machir’s Rantrage Press commentary on Genesis - that’s supposed to come tonight, according to Amazon.

     This comes to me from Otto Friedrich.* How it came to him I do not know:

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. And he founded a city . . . . It was then that men began to call on YHWH by name.†

Goebbels was not “the only prophet haranguing the people of Berlin” in 1926, Friedrich says; there was the even stranger case of Weissenberg.

A short, fat figure with a white beard, who regularly wore a blue suit and a peaked cap, [he] had been a shepherd, a coach drive, and an innkeeper, [undertaking] the last of these professions, he said, “because Jesus Christ ordered it.” No he set up headquarters on the Gleimstrasse in the slums of northern Berlin and established what he called “The Evangelical Church of the Manifestation of St. John.” He held meetings in a rented hall near the Hallesche Market, and there a series of marvels occurred.

     The meetings began quietly enough, with Weissenberg preaching from the podium, while two women sat at a nearby table. In due time, the elder of the two, a heavy-set matron who called herself Sister Grete Müller, would suddenly fall into a trance. From her lips, strange voices spoke, most notably that of the late Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Weissenberg then proceeded into the audience, where a number of the devout were also crying out and falling into trances. After a laying on of hands, Weissenberg and the second woman led selected parishioners to the podium to join the séance. Through their lips, too, came the voices of historical personages, mainly those from the period of Kaiser Wilhelm I - Prince Friedrich Karl or General Moltke and Roon. The voices expressed various patriotic sentiments to the audience, but they also urged everyone to donate money to Weissenberg’s building fund.

     With the money he raised, Weissenberg proceeded to develop a commune he had founded in some hills about an hour’s drive south of Berlin. It was a huge establishment, laid out on sixteen hundred acres that Weissenberg had bought as early as 1919. He called it variously, “Peace City” or “The New Jerusalem Living Community,” or taking the name of a little group he had organized back in 1900, “The Union of Investigators from here to the Beyond. By this time, Weissenberg had already lured four hundred people to the commune, which included two rows of houses, an administration building, a garage, a laundry, and a large Hall of Devotion. His hope was to increase the population to about fifteen hundred.

     For a time, the Berlin authorities looked benignly at Weissenberg’s operation, since there was no law against evoking the spirit of Bismarck or persuading people to more to an exurban housing development. They were less indulgent, however, toward Weissenberg’s claims of being able to heal the sick, and even, so he said, to raise the dead. Weissenberg’s only cure, apart from prayer, was to prescribe cottage cheese. In one case, a child with an inflammation of the eyes, treated with prayer and cheese, went blind; a druggist with diabetes received the same treatment and died. The police arrested the bearded old prophet on a charge of medical malpractice, and a court sentenced him to six months in prison. Weissenberg’s followers did not desert him; they considered him a martyr. The court of appeals reversed the conviction, and then there was a new trial.

von Bismarck Cottage Cheese

     “Where did you receive your medical training?” the judge asked.

     “I work only according to the direction of the Holy Scriptures,” said the prophet.

     “But there’s nothing about cottage cheese in the Bible,” said the judge.

     “Even I,” said the prophet, “cannot help a man who has no faith.”

     The judge gave up. Weissenberg was set free. And only his death ended the construction of the community of the New Jerusalem.

06.18.19

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 * Before the Deluge: A portrait of Berlin in the 1920s.

 † The epigraph is mine. Genesis 4:17a, 26b.