Special offer.

 World Cup special offer. 

Kip’s, Berkeley, CA. One week ago.
     “As I understand it,” Confucius was saying to no one in particular, “M is the 13th letter of your Western alphabet. So, who am I going to root for going forward? Morocco is clearly out, Argentina is led Messi, France by Mbappé, and Croatia by Modrić.”
     “My good sir,” a man in a military jacket, having just stepped off the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, spoke over Confucius’ shoulder, “Pardon me for interrupting.”
     “No,” Confucius turned toward him, motioning to the empty stool beside him. “Sit.”
     “Allow me to introduce myself; I believe I can help you with your dilemma. Ljudevit Gaj,* modest,” swallowing the word with a modest cough but then repeating it for clarity, “modest creator of Ljudevit Gaj’s Latin alphabet. My card.”
     Confucius took it, odd proportions. There was only the name on the front and the dates 1809 - 1872. “Ah, turn it over,” Ljudevit Gaj said.

“I believe you'll find that in the alphabet my talented countryman Luka uses, M is the 18th letter.”

                                                                       12.19.22

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 * Don’t ignore the “1 minute read.” You know how much you use the site.

Special offer. This FIFA World Cup commemorative: Kǒng & Lju on a field of checks. (Actual size. Exclusive from The Ambiguities.)

Paronomasia

 continued from here

 Paronomasia 

Dramatis Personae: Axel and Nils Sundstrøm, Bel Monk, and Uncle Albert, wrapped up in a wool scarf and his full-length overcoat though its 40°F warmer inside Corner Coffee than outside on Division Street. And me.

Setting: Corner Coffee at the intersection of Division and Market. The smell of coffee, milk, and wet wool. Muted gabble. E.g.,

Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot
1845-1903

Nils: Blah, blah, blah. Politics. Blah. Kyrsten Sinema. Kari Lake. Now Arizona politics.
     Until he stops to take a swallow of his, and I push in as he raises mug to mouth. Wait until it touches his lips, and I’ll be too late: “What do Lutherans find funny?” I say. “What do they laugh at?”
     “Not much,” Bel says. “Mostly they twitter. Or they bark.”
     Nils is putting his mug down, but Axel says, “Wait!” the older brother.
     And Bel goes on: “They’re nervous, or they’re angry.” Nils has put his coffee down and has both hands around his mug. But Axel says again, “Wait!” “Because they’re caught off guard and they don’t know what to say,” Bel twitters nervously, demonstrating. “Or they can’t believe what they’re hearing,” — an angry bark. (Big dog!)
     Nils: “I . . . ,” but Uncle Albert doesn’t hear, or he doesn’t care: “You are still thinking about your de Maupassant story,” he says to me. “It’s ruin, as I said before. And requital.”
     Taking his wool-gloved hands from his lap and putting them on the table: “No one likes being laughed at, so they retaliate. Stand-up comics. They imagine that the audience is laughing with them, but as soon as they sense someone is not, someone becomes a heckler; and the comic will set out immediately to turn the laughter so it is directed at him.
     “Varajou’s brother-in-law and sister laugh at nothing, they are too serious — not only self-serious, too serious altogether. Or, they laugh aloud at nothing. Still, they are sniffing, snorting at Varajou’s improvidence and yobbery. Why shouldn’t he snort and sniff back? Except his snort and sniff will break out — not when he sees that he’s mistaken the mayor’s wife for a bawd and her daughters for chippies, but when he gets what that means for his self-righteous brother-in-law, who depends on the mayor, what it means for his smug sister, who depends on her husband — then he will  break out in raucous har-de-har-har-har that he upsets their pinched, prudish, grasping apple-cart?

     “Think about it.”

 

Nils gets up, “Head,” he coughs.

     Axel says, “It’s not just Lutherans, it’s the Presbyterians, too, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Norwegians, the Finns, and the Latts. Bel is right. Most laughter is nervous chirp, angry bark, or confused coughed — or menacing, the witch’s cackle, the villain’s bwahaha. It is almost anything but delighted. It may be the only pure laughter not of children is at puns. We groan but without bitterness or cynically; we’re not nervous or angry, or lost. We laugh at puns, but it is never laughter truly at but we’re laughing with thepunster. Poor guy. He can’t help it.”

 

“‘Bawd’?” I say to Uncle Albert. “‘Chippies’?”
     Axel because he can’t help it, turning also to Uncle Albert: “What do you think it was, the bawd rate?”
                                                                       12.12.22 

An officer but not a gentleman.

Guy de Maupassant
1850 - 1893

 An officer but not a gentleman. 

There’s a story by de Maupassant, typical of him in that it is not a story but an anecdote, with too obvious a point: “The Noncommissioned Officer.”     The feckless officer has decided to spend his leave in a small, backwater town with his sister and her husband though they are his opposites, proper, pious, and provincial. The officer is, if not a man of the world, worldly — hard-charging, hard-drinking, and randy, one of those men “for whom life has no greater pleasures than those of the café and public women.” These do not come free: he has decided to visit his sister because there is no one else of his family and acquaintance he has not borrowed from. So perhaps she and her husband, a local official, will . . . .
     But he discovers what he should have known all along had he any insight: all he will receive for his “troubles” are a week’s worth of prim lectures and bad meals. The meals he must eat, but the lectures he will ignore because he is a lout. He is, de Maupassant informs the reader, in the phrase the whole story is worth reading for: “Boasting, blustering, full of disdain for everybody, he despised the whole universe from the height of his ignorance.”
     The story ends predictably when the officer, having drunken his fill at a local café, and, looking for other satisfactions (his other satisfaction), misunderstands the barman’s directions and stumbles into the house of his brother-in-law’s patron, there mistaking the patron’s wife for a madame and his daughters for whores. His poor brother-in-law is mortified! Har-de-har-har-har. The officer falls on the floor laughing. But what is so funny?

I think, “I’ll ask Uncle Albert.”
     He's asleep in front of the France-Poland match; or, he’s asleep at the half. He has turned off the sound because he finds the Fox commentary team’s analysis simultaneously vapid and irritating. (Before he goes to bed, he’ll catch up with James Richard’s “The Totally Football Show.”
     I nudge him. “What? Go away. What?”

     “de Maupassant. I have a question.”
     Again, “What?”
     “About a story: ‘The Noncommisioned Officer’ in English.”
     “I don’t know it.”
     “The main character’s name is Varajou.”
     “Varajou,” he corrects my pronunciation.
     “Maybe. I don’t know, however, if I can find it.” He pulls his right talon from underneath his throw, painted with penguins, and points at his brain.
     “Come on,” I say.
     “Likely it is in there,” Uncle Albert says, “but the index . . . .” He stops.
     “Can you read what I’ve written?” I’ve printed it out.
     He waves his hand. I put the copy in it.

 

“Vaguely,” he says, waving the paper but referring, I take it, to his memory of the story.
     “So?”
     “So, what?”
     “My question,” I say: “What’s so funny?”
     “Ruin,” Uncle Albert says and waves the page toward me until I take it back from him.
     “Ruin?”
     “Yes. Ruin and recompense.”
     “That’s it? Meaning?”
     “Think about it.”
                                                                       12.04.22
                                                                                                                                                      to be continued*

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* TA returns on a once-a-week schedule. Mondays. Sometimes Tuesdays. Maybe.

Le Petit Trottin

This morning, while I am waiting to see Dr. Feight, I find among his magazines an expensive-magazine-sized and -shaped book of Toulouse-Lautrec plates. It doesn’t include Le petit trottin, an illustration Toulouse-Lautrec made for the cover of some sheet music, and the subject of a long-ago poem by my friend Rick Dietrich, who, like every poet since Keats, has written a wan version of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

To listen to Rick read the poem, click here.

Le Petit Trottin

Tonight, I am the wicked gentleman
disappearing from Toulouse-Lautrec’s cover
for his cousin’s song: the crumpled top hat,
the cane over his shoulder, the down-turned moustaches
and drooping jowls, the dotted green ascot
and green checked trousers—one thick leg vanishing
into the space that marks the cover’s edge,
but one leg left behind solidly planted,
and one eye left behind, leering from behind
its monocle, glued to Le Petit Trottin—
the name of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cousin’s song,
“The Little Errand Girl”—though she is not
so little, the leering gentleman observes,
her blond hair upswept over sensual ear,
her pink mouth, the lilac ribbon around
her pretty throat.
                                 “What do you have in your
basket, ma chère?” he is—without thinking—
for ever thinking, while she keeps him
there, fixed in the corner of her eye,
till the other thick leg can take the next step,
and he can disappear for good.

H is for Hannah.

  annah, my sister, the youngest of us originally, is on the phone.

 Not long into the conversation, she asks if I had ever been ambitious
  (past perfect tense). Her husband, Dwight, is retiring, and they are going
  to travel, first to Alaska, then to Costa Rica, then New Zealand, and
  maybe Scotland after that.
     “I don’t think I ever was,” I say. “I have no imagination when it comes
  to the future,” I add after a pause.

Hannah says that Dwight thinks I am the kind of person that goes into a field to gather stones, trips over one, then rolls over and lies down with his hands behind his head, staring into the clouds.
     “He said that?”
     “Maybe not in those exact words. But, yes.”
     I want to say that I’d always liked Dwight, but I never thought he understood other people very well. He understood what they were for, but he didn’t understand them.
     But I don’t say it.

R is for Roz

 oz says: 

“I was thinking before I went to sleep last night about the story in the Bible where there’s a funeral procession and Jesus runs into it somehow. The funeral is for a boy — or young man — the son of a widow. And Jesus raises him from the dead, he is the sole support of his mother. And that’s where the story ends; we never know what happens next.”

I say: “It’s ‘The Widow of Nain.’ In Luke.”
     “Right,” she says, remembering. “That’s right. But it’s sad — I was thinking this, too — that the story has to follow Jesus. I mean, I know it does. It’s heretical, probably, to think otherwise, but it’s also sad. Because his story ends, and the young man’s keeps going, and the young man’s mother’s, and we don’t know what happens to them.
     “I also know,” Roz goes on, “because I went to Sunday School; I know that Jesus’ story never ends. So, don’t say that. But I want to know what happens to the man and his mother.”
     “What do you think?” I say.
     “I don’t know. I have no gift for stories. What do you think?”
     “I don’t know either,” I say. “They live until they die, like we do.”
     “There’s a happy thought,” Roz says. “But then we live forever!” she says brightly though she doesn’t believe it.

A is for Albert.

A is for Albert.

Uncle Albert says he’s moving out if I don’t go back on my meds, but I don’t think he will. Roz says I need to though — go back — because he doesn’t have anywhere to go.
     I say, “What about where he was, with Maggie and Carl and them?” I still don’t believe he is going to go; he’s not going anywhere, regardless. But Roz shakes her head. “No,” she says, meaning he can’t go there.
     “It’s no different,” I say about whether I am on them or not. “He wouldn’t know if I hadn’t told him. He wouldn’t know the difference.”
     “But he does know, however he knows it,” she says. (This is not what I thought she’d say. I thought she’d say something about how everyone can tell the difference. But she is too kind to say that.)

Here’s why I don’t want to do it: I just don’t. Besides, they don’t help. I can’t tell the difference.
     “He’s 96 years old,” Roz says.
     “So?” I say. She looks at me. I say, “He’s been 96 for as long as I can remember.” She looks at me. “Maybe he’s only 86,” I say. “Or maybe he’s 106. Who knows?” Still looking at me. “I’m going upstairs,” I say.

“You can’t flush medicine down the toilet,” she says after me. “You have to take it to the box in the Sheriff’s Office.”
     “I know that,” I say because I’ve done it before. It doesn’t matter that I’d forgotten for the moment; I know it.

When I get upstairs, Uncle Albert wants to know if I can help him go down:
     He holds onto the banister with his right hand, and I go a half-step ahead and he holds onto my shoulder with his left. That’s going down. Going back up, he holds onto the banister with his left hand, and I go a half-step behind, and he holds onto my hand with his right elbow.
     This time he is coming down to watch the Premier League matches. Neither of us knows until I turn the TV on that they have been postponed because the Queen died and all the clubs are mourning.
     He met the Queen once, he says, Uncle Albert. They were born the same day, they discovered, Uncle Albert says. “The same year?” Roz asks.

S is for Sunday last.

Listen here.

 

 

unday last:

The guest priest struggled with a different “everything” passage, the one in which Jesus says if anyone comes to him not hating his own father, mother, wife and children, he cannot be his (Jesus’s) disciple. So, count the cost, Jesus says. Wouldn’t you do as much if you were going to build a house or if you were about to get into a fight? So, count the cost of following me; and this is it: “Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” 

So, we count? asked the priest in his collar (not bundled up in all the regalia), in just his collar and in short sleeves because of the heat. We count? asked the priest, pushing his spectacles up before they dripped off his nose. We count? he asked. And what if we find ourselves short?
     Then we know — What a relief! — we know there is coming something about grace, about how you can draw a camel through the eye of a needle if you slather him with enough of it. How we can sit here in our pews like on our couches at home and still follow Jesus, even after he is long gone. Because somehow with old God there is nothing impossible.
     That’s what’s coming, what the priest is going to say, what the priest has to say even if he knows that some thing are surely more possible than others. Aren’t they?

The Time of Man

 Listen here.

t’s unknowen.

“It’s pretty stuff, clover a-growen. And in myself I know I’m lovely. It’s unknowen how beautiful I am.” — Ellen Chesser in Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Time of Man.
     But how beautiful is she if in the next paragraph Joe Turner driving by with Emphira Bodine doesn’t turn his head to look?

From my sister, Moira: I see you are reading The Time of Man. I read it . . . when? I’m not sure, but it was in a group reading Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewitt. And how did Woolf get in there? Either we weren’t paying a lot of attention to what we were doing — though we were serious about it. Or, more likely because there wasn’t then a group of women readers of four or more that there wasn’t one in it but insisted on reading Virginia Woolf as if she was the Bible and anyone else was a sermon typescript or a poorly printed in red-and-black tract
     But as I remember, I liked the Roberts novel as much or more than anything else we read: there was an honesty about it that Woolf lacked because for her it was more important to be fine than to be honest and that Cather aspired to but managed only by dint of hard work, and the hard work showed.
     At least, that's the way I remember it. But I’m remembering only my feelings. The critics likely prove me wrong though for me that is
                                                                              still unknowen. There are clouds of unknowen.

Brought to you by the letter L.

Listen here.

uke 4:                                                                                                 

It’s confusing how he gets his start, Jesus. He’s in Nazareth talking about what he did in Capernaum — the Nazarenes will be expecting the same. This is in vv. 16-23. Only he hasn’t yet been to Capernaum. He doesn’t get there until verse 31. There he does do what they, the Nazarenes, were expecting or will be expecting when he gets there because I think Luke has got his paragraphs out of order. Or the printers didn’t set it up right.

But whatever the order in time, Jesus just keeps going. He casts out demons, he rebukes fevers, he lays on hands and heals and heals and heals. He fills Peter’s nets with fish, for all the good it will do him, for the moment he, Peter, gets his boat to land and climbs out he follows, leaving everything behind. John and James, too: they leave all the fish everything behind and follow.
     They’re all leaving everything behind. Levi is next — though Luke gets his paragraphs out of order again: first, Levi leaves and follows; then, he gives a big banquet at the house he’s already (though just) left.
     But my point is, that was what they were doing then, leaving everything behind. Nobody does that anymore.

CHAPTER II

Listen here.

hen September’s slippery showers . . . . (It’s already cold in Finland.)

When Villa come back to draw with City and United run over Arsenal 3-1, the world must be turning back to itself. It would seem. IF the world could turn back.
    Nor am I going back to my meds. So I say. [Let the reader beware.]

Outside a clamor of grackles bicker-talk-sing: squeaky wheels and hoarse, rusty gates.

Third person.

 Third person. 

He walked down Bishop, down Crowder, down Division. The rain dripped down, the color of the leaves on the sidewalk. Corner Coffee: Axel and Nils were there ahead of him.
     And two women two tables over. The talking one kept pulling her hands toward her chest and pushing them out again as if to convince the other she was speaking from her heart. The sharp-faced other was dressed entirely in black. She was nodding.
     “What do you think they are talking about?” he asked Axel.
     “Luther,” he said. “The women come and go, talking of Luther.” he laughed at the back of his tongue, not quite into his throat.

“They’re talking about husbands,” Nils said, “how husbands continue to mislead wives.”
     “I don’t imagine the thin one is married,” he said, “the one in black.” She was making a gesture with her hand, as if she wanted to say something; then she stopped. The other kept talking.
     “They’re talking about a story they heard this morning on NPR,” Nils said, “not about their husbands but about husbands in general. About men: they continue to mislead women. It’s as inevitable as it is unfortunate. Some woman sociologist said so.”
     “What makes you think that?” Axel said.
     “What?”
     “That she’s not married?”
     “I don’t know,” he said — I said as Nils was saying something else. But I didn’t hear. I was listening to the espresso machine choke and cough and sputter. It gagged and stopped. His last word ended in “-er.”

                                                                      08.17.22
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Graphic: Corner Coffee in the rain, crabbed together on my box.

 Manchester United 1 - 2 Brighton & Hove Albion 
This was Tuesday.

Occasionally, I try to listen to one of the soccer podcasts; “Gab & Jules” it was this morning. But they are all too damn serious. And for all the podcasters know about the game, infinitely more than I do, they seem to me untethered to reality.
     This morning, Gab and Jules were talking about Man United’s loss to Brighton & Hove Albion. Completely unacceptable(!!), as if BHA were no opponents at all, as if there had been no players in blue and white on the pitch, as if Pascal Gross, in particular, had stayed home. So even if Man U was without a true number 9 . . .
     In which case — how could Manchester United be without? — they should just go out and get one. Better than, a damn sight better than, Marko Arnautović, never mind that he might be the best available — he is older than Jesus! Availability be damned — this is Manchester United: they should be able to get whoever/ whatever they want whenever/however they want it. Never mind how shitty they’ve been the last several seasons. (Proving they can't get whatever whenever, doesn’t it). But reality be damned.
     Renounce the laws of gravity, say you are above them, and they don’t apply to you.

Diogenes of Sinope was right, at least this far: you can only free yourself from the rules of the marketplace by absenting yourself from it. He meant by that that you cannot buy a center forward other than in the mall where you can buy a center forward. You can’t conjure one out of the air; you can’t conjure a God to conjure one out of clay, pace Gab and Jules. And, sadly, even if you are Manchester United, you can no longer go marauding and rape one as the Romans did the Sabine women.
    But, no! You can! There is a God, Sir Alex Ferguson, right? Reality be damned.

                                                                      08.11.22
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Graphic: Erik Ten Hag by m ball.

"mouse and cat," a farable of Jesop

 
  A farable of Jesop 

“mouse and cat”

 A lion and a mouse went on a journey. They had become friends and were friends until they argued along the way and decided to part company. The lion went home. The mouse went on but soon was lost and soon after baked into a pie.
     “I blame myself,” the cat said when she heard. Only she did not. 
                                   08.05.22  

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An online reproduction of the 1887 edition Jesop's Farables, translated from the Latin and edited by G. F. Murray - and with my brief afterward - is available here!

Interpolations

  Interpolations   

 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. 233) –

 

Jesus talks a lot in the canonical Gospel of John, but he says little. There are, however, sayings of Jesus interpolated into the gospel in several Latin fragments from the fourth century (now in the Blifil collection). The Latin is clearly a translation from an earlier, since lost, manuscript. Even the most knowledgeable scholars (Jones, Allworthy, et al.) aren’t certain of the original language, but they believe Old Tamil or another Dravidian dialect. This would place the original ms. in one of the Thomas communities of India, and indeed Thomas plays an important role in a number of these fragments, as in the following addition to chapter 17. In the canonical gospel, Jesus begins talking to his disciples, the so-called “last discourses,”  at 14:1, but he has long since left off (17:1) and is addressing “the Father.” This fragment begins at 17:25 to which it adds the verses I have numbered 27 and 28.

 

xvii.  ​25 “O righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you; and these know that you sent me,  26 for I have made your name known to them – I will continue to make it known,  so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” 

     27 Thomas said to him, “Lord, what do we know?” And Jesus told this parable, “A man was given a pearl that made him extremely wealthy, and by night he buried it in another man’s field. Who have ears let them hear.”  28 And he told another like it, “A man had a servant, whom he loved, but the servant ran away. When the master found him, . . .” Here the manuscript breaks off.

 

Commentary

Our concern is with Thomas, who, as depicted here, tries to bring Johannine Jesus back to earth, to rescue the incarnation from muddle-headed mysticism. He succeeds insofar as after he interrupts Jesus tells two parables, neither of which we know from other sources. [Note there are no parables in the canonical gospel of John.]
    In the first, Jesus considers a pearl of great price. What should one do with it — keep it or give it away secretly? In the second, as it stands, we don’t know the effect the love of the master that seeks out his beloved servant has.

                                                                       08.03.21

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For links to other biblical commentary from Rantrage, click here.

Just one question, or four

 Just one question, or four 

Matthew, chapter 11, beginning at verse 2:

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” (ESV)

In some manuscripts, this follows:

 “I am not offended,” John returns, “but please, tell me: What do the blind see and where do the lame go? What do the deaf hear, and when the dumb speak, what do they say? The raised up, are they truly alive? And the poor, do they believe it?”

Yes, what does anyone hear? And when the dumb speak, what will they say?

                                                                      07.18.22

 Farrago  

What to say about Menippus but that without leaving a word he left a genre?
What to say about Meleager but that he wrote of love?
What to say about poor Whigham, who admired Ezra Pound and wrote for Diana Mosley and died too
     soon in a car crash in California, but . . . What does the ambassador Chapuys say to Cromwell of
     King Henry: “a man of great endowments, lacking only consistency, reason and sense”?

                                                                      07.26.22

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Menippus of Gadara. His Complete Epigrams may be found here.
Meleager, also of Gadara, who wrote Menippean satire, and edited The Greek Anthology, from which the poems in the YouTube link come.
Peter Whigham. It is his translations, or, more accurately renditions, of Meleager I read.

Axel's Kittel

 Axel’s Kittel 

Late in our session, I found myself telling Dr. Feight: “The story of the Gadarene swine, you know it?” Of course he did — hadn’t he also played Bible baseball in Sunday School? But I told it again anyway:

The kingdom of God is like this: There were two Cynics from Gadara, Menippus and Meleager, the first a slave that became rich by begging 300 years before Jesus, the second a poet that went from Tyre to Cos 100 years before. There was also a madman, who lived while Jesus was alive.
     After the Storm, which Jesus has stilled, he and the disciples come to the other side of the sea, to the land of the Gadarenes — or Gerasenes, as Mark has it. There is the man, with an unclean spirit, or hundreds of unclean spirits. The boat has, it seems, cast up on the edge of a graveyard because that’s where he lives, in the graveyard, where he has been chained to one of the tombs, but he has broken free, screaming and shouting and tearing at himself. But when he sees Jesus, he runs to him, though he is shouting still, “What have you to do with me, Jesus of Nazareth?” Or the demons inside of him shout it because Jesus has been speaking to them. It is they that answer, when Jesus asks the man his name. Their name is Legion, meaning 5200 soldiers and 300 horses. Yet they are afraid. They say to Jesus, don’t just throw us out into the air. Throw us somewhere, into those pigs over there, they say. Jesus does. He throws them into the passel and the passel throws itself, or the pigs in the passel throw themselves, over the cliff and into the sea. It makes quite a splash and people come out from town. They find the man sitting up, clothed, and in his right mind. This is dangerous, they decide, and they ask Jesus to leave. He does. The man wishes to go with him, but Jesus says, “No. Stay here.”

     “What do you think?” I said.
     Dr. Feight didn’t say anything. His pen was scratching notes into his pad; then it too was silent.
     “I looked up ‘in his right mind,’” I said. “I wrote it down, the Greek.” I wrestled it out of my pocket and handed it over my head to him. “Axel helped me find it in his Kittel.

“What do you think?” The chorus repeats: the scratching, then it stops.

     “It is the present participle of sophrouneo.” The word sounds like a flag wobbling in the wind. And I rattle on with what I’ve found, that it goes back to classic Greek — to myth, to the tragedians, to Plato. It is hard to define. It is the opposite of mania, of hubris, of foolish immaturity, of crying like a baby. It isn’t exactly but it has to do with circumspection, modesty, proper respect, also with purpose, with knowing what we are to do, with knowing ourselves.
     “Not to disbelieve,” I say, “but it’s a lot to accomplish in one miracle, a lot to accomplish just by rustling some demons out of a man and pitching them into a passel of pigs, even if after you find him a place to sit and a suit of clothes.
     “It's more, I think, than I can do.” Meaning for myself. More scratching.

“I got a letter from my sister.” I stop as if I don’t remember exactly when I received the letter though I do. “From Moira.* The day before yesterday. She said something about how I am always wondering if I am going to get through to the other side. Then I wonder if there is an other side. She can’t be sure, but every time she thought she had gotten there, or even somewhere near, she found she hadn’t.
     “She goes on though, hoping this new medicine I am on will have some effect and suggesting that I keep moving even if I’m going nowhere, I keep puttering about ‘like old men do, vacuuming, working in the yard, washing their cars, sweeping their front porches and their sidewalks, and the like. These are good for you, I have been told, and it was when I quit them all, stopped cleaning my apartment, washing my hair, brushing my teeth, etc. that I was ‘done for.’”

The scratching stops as, with a period. “And, that’s our time,” I said, “isn’t it?”
     “Yes, I am afraid so.”
                                                          07.22.22

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 *  Moira is my dead sister. Hannah is the living one. The graphic is sophrounta on Axel’s Kittel.