Jackson's Dilemma

  Jackson’s Dilemma  

One of you, dear readers, asked how I decide what to write about. “You’re all over the damn map,” you said. “Sometimes it’s interesting – like New Orleans or Helena, MT – but  sometimes it’s just . . . not: Think the middle of a field in the middle of Indiana.”
     Reply: It’s not rocket surgery. Since there’s neither middle nor bottom, I write about what’s at the top of my mind. The difficulty is not what to write about, it’s how to put my fingers on the keyboard and move them – right ring, left-middle, left-fore, left-fore, and so on.

Two days ago – or three, it’s easy to lose track of time – this came from Trudy Monae. Or four?

 

Dear Ted,
     Will you write back and forth with me sometime about Jackson’s Dilemma? That’s not too much to ask, is it? I really like the book for all the death and all the bungling in it. There’s a happy fairy-tale/comedy conclusion, isn’t there? Is it fair to say there’s redemption, or is that too much? Nur ein Gott kann uns retten. Is that Karl Barth? What is fair to say is that there are lots of doorbells and doors and standing just inside or just outside.
     Do you remember that tall, exceedingly narrow Englishman that was at school with us the year we were at school together – he stayed one more year, I think, and left as I did; in fact, he came to W&M as I did  – Leslie Becket (with one t)? I went out with him a few times before I met you. And I went out with him a few times after you and I went kaput. Then, he left W&M, too. Then, he went just about everywhere, dying in a place that doesn’t exist except in your imagination. I mentioned him a couple of months ago. You do remember?!
     We go for night-time walks from time to time, and he talks about Wittgenstein and George Eliot, and about Hobbes and Rousseau, and about spiders, what we used to call granddaddies-long-legs. He talks like Bertrand Russell writes: I can understand what he’s saying as long as he keeps talking. But then he’ll realize he’s gone on and on, and he’ll stop and look down at me from his great height and say, “What?” Meaning “do you have something to interject or add or . . . ,” and everything he’s said will go right out of my head in that moment when he pauses to say “What?” And I’ll shake my head, “Nothing.” And we’ll walk on. Every now and then he’ll ask about you. He’ll say, “I think he liked me,” as if that were an odd thing. “He was kind to me,” he’ll say. “We should have gotten to know each other better.” And I’ll tell him you liked him, too, and wished the same because I imagine that to be true.

     I have another friend, Gretchen Monet. We roomed together my first year at W&M: Monae and Monet. Then, she dropped out; and she and another girl, Beth Something, who was graduating, put on their best hippie regalia and left the morning after graduation and began hitchhiking west. They were lucky, Gretchen says, nothing bad happened. Except in a commune in Nebraska – could there have been a commune in Nebraska? this was 1977 – Beth decided she was going to fall in love with this guy Bill, and he was going to Montana for some reason. But there was this “sweet” gay guy there, and he was going west. So, she, Gretchen, and this guy, Sam – for Samantha, he said – got going again. And eventually, they made it to San Francisco. Where he disappeared. He died of AIDS, she thinks, but she’s not sure; she’s not sure why she thinks that, but she’s pretty sure she heard it somewhere. Meanwhile, she met a professor at the University of San Francisco, who was much older and divorced, and that was a mess. And LSD and other stuff, she waves her hands.
     But she had to find a job, and she ended up working in a head-shop. Then, quite a while later, her dad died, and she bought the shop. And when she died, of cancer, in her fifties, she was rich, though she didn’t know it until she found out she had money to pay all her medical bills and there was still quite a bit in the bank after she’d arranged her funeral.
     Why am I writing this? Because she, Gretchen, has read all of Iris Murdoch five or six times, and she thinks the mystical side of Jackson is really interesting and true to life. She says she has met a lot of people like that, that can fix almost anything but don’t know where they came from or where they are going, only “somewhere else” in both cases. I told her that I had not – met lots of people like that; in fact, I didn’t think I’d ever met anyone like that. And she said, “What about your friend Ted?” because she knew about you from when we were at W&M when you and I were still writing, and she also knew you were an Iris Murdoch fan because I told her when I was reading A Word Child with you.* So, what do you think? Have you met anyone like that? I told her I bet you hadn’t because neither of us had ever lived in San Francisco or India; rather we both went to school in Minnesota. She said, “Ask anyway.” So, I’m asking. Tell me.
     And tell me more about the book. I do like the ending where everybody gets married, even those that don’t.                                                       
          So? – Trudy
P.S. Gretchen also wants to meet Leslie. She bets he knew someone like that. He may even know someone like that, like Jackson.

                                                                         03.30.21 

_______________

 Graphic: That's J. J. Jackson! of J. J. Jackson’s Dilemma: “Who Knows?”
 * Starts here.

 

 

By the by . . .

  By the by . . . 

from E. A. Childress’ commentary on Amos (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, forthcoming, maybe, p. 38) —

II. 4 Doesn’t the Lord say? –  “The people of Judah – for their three sins and four, surely I will punish them. They have despised my teaching; they have rejected my commandments. They have been led astray by the same false gods their ancestors followed.” 5  So I will send fire upon Judah and burn down the houses of Jerusalem.

 

* * * *

Aside

Do you ever get the sense, dear reader, as I do, that these verses are interpolated, or a “later fabrication,” as McKeating puts it? (“The middle of the oracle, specifying Judah’s crimes, is not at all characteristic of Amos, either in what it says or the language in which it says it.” Nowhere else does he show “interest in irregularities of worship.”) Moreover, this is the only reference to Judah in Amos except for in 1:1, which sets the time of the prophecy from when Uzziah was Judah’s king (and Amos came up from Tekoa), and in 7:12, when Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, becomes fed up and tells the prophet to go back to Judah where he came from. Let him prophesy there. Prophesy against that court and that priesthood, that people. Amaziah throws down the gauntlet. Tell them the day of the Lord is for effing everyone. It’s not a challenge Amos takes up, as far as we can tell. He will journey from Montgomery to New York City to tell Wall Street the bottom is about to fall out of the market. He will float down the Ohio and Mississippi from Steubenville to New Orleans to tell Bourbon Street it will be swamped. But he won’t go home to preach in his hometown.

     He is not quite “the triumph of universalism in the history of ethics . . . the beginning of revelation in the history of religion” that Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2, ch. 1) needs to think he is. IMHO.

    03.22.21

_______________
Links to selections from other Rantrage Press commentaries.

Disconnecting from Jung

​ Disconnecting from Jung   

 

 “What’s this mean?” I asked Uncle Albert, whose Latin is much better than mine.

     “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s gibberish. Why are you reading Jung? He’s gibberish.”
     “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll stop maybe.”
     “Good,” Uncle Albert said.

This was a week ago, maybe more. I keep losing track of the time. I still talk to Dr. Feight on either Mondays and Thursdays or Tuesdays and Fridays, I’m not sure which. And without church to go to on Sundays, I lose all track of the days.
     “Did you quit Jung like you said?” Uncle Albert asked this morning, a Wednesday it says on my phone. “St. Patrick’s Day,” I remember Roz saying as she left for work this morning dressed in green. “Don’t forget you are cooking.”

 

So, I got up, but I didn’t shower because I needed to start the corned beef and cabbage. I just threw a sweatshirt and my green corduroys over my pj’s, pulled on socks, stepped into my slippers, and came downstairs. I’ll probably not shower now: it’s too much work to undress and dress again. It’s too much work to make the bed properly. I can get downstairs only with the help of gravity.
     But I do manage to fill the slow-cooker with a layer of potatoes, carrots, onions, and a stalk of celery, on top of which I put the brisket with its spices and several shakes of caraway seeds. I wedge the cabbage all around the meat, putting a few leaves on top to cover it. I start the pot on high to get it going. I’ll turn it to low in half-hour’s time. I’ve got cabbage left over, but I can add it to the mess later when it cooks down a bit.

Uncle Albert comes as I’m ready to go into the front room and flop down on the couch to rest.
     “You came down the stairs by yourself!?”
     “Only because I knew where that damn cat was, it wasn’t going to hurtle by and trip me up,” he says. Then, “Did you quit Jung like you said?”
     “No,” I admit.
     “I remembered the Latin, what it ought to have said,” Uncle Albert said. He has a prodigious memory for things like this. He knows half the psalms by heart.
     “It’s from the cathedral on via Rossini in Pesaro,” Uncle Albert says. “When I remembered that I got Roz to find a picture for me.” He hands it to me. “What it means is ‘est homo non totus medius sed piscis ab imo.’ He is not completely man but half fish from below or underneath. Below can mean the depths, as ocean depths, or below the waist. The figure in the mosaic is a triton, a merman, but it’s also, I think it must be, a type of Christ in his two natures.”
     “But Christ is fully man and fully God, not half and half,” I say.
     “Yeah, well draw that,” Uncle Albert says.

I help him into the living room though who is the one needing help I’m not sure. He sits down in his chair, picks up the book beside it, puts on his readers, and waves bye-bye to me as I fall onto the couch.
     “Wait,” I say, “before you go: What made you think of that? It had to be one of Jung’s ‘mysterious connections.’”
     “It’s ‘the mystery of connection,’ the Latin: mysterium conjunctionis. And it’s no mystery, just gibberish. No connection, I just thought of it.”
                                                                          03.17.21

Babel once more.

​ Babel once more.*  

Uncle Albert has given up writing maximes. He no longer has the brain for it, he says. But this morning he brought me this one:

 

     There are any number of things we think we understand but do not: each other, for example.
Addendum: That’s my opinion, of course, and I could be wrong. But if I am right, wives understand their husbands no better than husbands understand their wives; voters understand politicians no better than politicians understand voters; the oppressed understand their oppressors no better than their oppressors understand them. Moreover, they are all making the same kinds of mistakes. Mistakes, plural – only one of the mistakes is hubris.

 

“What do you think?” he said.
     “I don’t think it errs on the side of political correctness,” I said.
     “Oh,” he said. He sounded like he wasn’t sure what I was saying.

 

“Well, I’m not planning to publish it,” he said later.
     “Good,” I said. Then, “I’m not saying you’re wrong.”
     “No,” Uncle Albert said.

 

I’m not saying he is wrong because I think he is right. Of course, this is my opinion and I could be wrong, or it is my experience, which is limited:
     I had a dream two nights ago. My dead sister Moira was in it, but she may or may not have recognized me; she was madder than Ophelia. My sister Hannah’s husband Ike was there, too, in a house and on grounds whose architecture and plan kept changing. Now he was leaving Moira and me alone; now he was telling us we needed to come in so we cold take our medicines. And Roz, it felt like – and Hannah and Uncle Albert – were hovering invisibly and what they were thinking was invisible, too. Everyone in the dream was impenetrable. There were no clues I could discern to what any of them was thinking. I was utterly confused from one fey minute to the next.
     Like in real life.
     I have just as much trouble reading clues awake as asleep. Maybe I’m not paying good enough attention, but I don’t think that’s it. I find others impenetrable in either state. At least in the present I do. I may look back and think, “Oh that’s what he was thinking, that’s what she meant?” But then I think: “Or was it?” In the now I don’t know what to respond from one mad, elusive moment to the next. I live from one to the other by simultaneously waiting and making wild guesses.

 

“Are you better at understanding me than I am at understanding you?” I am asking Dr. Feight.
     “Well,” he said, “I have more information.”

 

03.10.21

_______________
 * See here.
Dramatis personae: Uncle Albert, who is everywhere. Click links to learn more about Moira, Hannah (and Ike), Roz, Dr. Feight.
Illustration: Ausonius at the Jellyfish Bar, June, somewhere between 335 and 2035. You know what he is thinking. Of course, you do.

Running around in circles

  Running around in circles*  

The last time I saw Bob,** the amateur cognitive-behavioral therapist guy (because anybody can do this, right?) : “Don’t brood,” he said.

 

But brooding, it occurs to me four-and-a-half years later, doesn’t have to be grave and serious and sad as Bob seemed to think it must. Brooding can be a neutral term as much as thinking is. In this way of thinking, thinking would be clear, and if thinking need not be linear, it would always be able to retrace its steps. Brooding, however, is never linear; it cannot walk a straight line. It is drunk, staggering, wandering, it is soon lost if not lost to begin with.
     These are its advantages. It doesn’t look where it’s going, keeping in its head always

a map of where it’s been. It wanders about where it is. And confused, it stops and looks around and wonders, “Wait a minute. How did I get here?” Not that that will ever be clear. Nor will “And where am I going?” Even if the answer is as definite as “Home. To bed,” how to find the way there is extremely unlikely to be certain. Which home? Whose bed?
     Now, there are grave drunks, there are sad drunks, there are sentimental drunks. There are also light-hearted drunks, there are smiling, unsentimental drunks. There are those that cry in their beer, and there are those that laugh when they slip and pratfall in their own vomit. There are careful-with-what-they-say drunks — “Sshhh!” —  and there are Irish drunks, whose tongues are loosed to babble beyond understanding.
     This is all to say that there are different ways of brooding. We should cultivate them. And distractedness — we should cultivate that, too. Sometimes it is the only way forward. Or sideward.
     Time wants us to think it is linear. But it ain’t necessarily. Thought may be linear, but not every good way of mushing things around in your brain is.

 03.08.21

_______________
   * like a chicken with its head cut off, a Rhode Island Red. ***Or a spoonbill, maybe a spoonbill, a roseate spoonbill.

 ** That was right after this.

Self-reliance

 ​ The Sin of Self-reliance  

“How reliable a narrator do you think you are?” Uncle Albert asked.

     “I don’t pretend to be reliable,” I said.

     “You pretend to be honest,” he said.

     “I suppose. I try to be. And I don’t think I claim any more than that, that I try to be honest.”

     “Hmmm,” Uncle Albert said.

     “Unlike your guy Rousseau, who tried to pawn the Confessions off as a completely true account, candor being the ‘prime directive.’”

     “Why is Rousseau my guy?”

     “French,” I said.”

     “What about your guy, Augustine, then?”

     “Same question: Why is Augustine my guy? – Don’t say, ‘Latin,’” I said just as he said, “Latin.” “Anyway,” I went on, “he doesn’t pretend he isn’t, well, fallen. He might contend, as I do – this is what I’m saying – that he is trying to tell the truth, but he is a sinner. He knows that better than anyone; he knows he cannot. He can’t tell the truth. He can only try.”

     “Hmmm,” said Uncle Albert.

Here’s the thing about original sin, what makes it still a useful concept, whether you like it or not, dear reader. It acknowledges that we only ever see – as long as we can hold a pen or tap on a keyboard – we only ever see in a glass darkly. Even when we are being honest as we can be we – in Rousseau’s case from what I know, not very honest at all – he was a noted liar, not to mention a self-promoting jackass. In my case, a “convicted” and “incarcerated” lunatic as well as a former presbyterian so a self-righteous jackass by training, still I’m not trying to deceive.

     But I do, I know it. Selah.

 

03.01.21

_______________
  * Illustration “Through Dark Glasses” (Il giovane Alberto ed Eva) by Masolino da Panicale. Original on Wikimedia, see here.