Through glasses dimly

 Through glasses dimly* 

Uncle Albert on Axel’s dream.
    “You can’t become a mystic by wanting to,” Uncle Albert said when I told him of my conversation with Axel. “If you are a rational human being, you can’t become a mystic at all.” Later he said: “We’re all irrational from time to time, but after . . .” He hesitated. “After age 6, I’d say, it’s extremely difficult to be irrational all the time.” Later still he said: “Even reality-TV characters are at least cunning.”
     “Hokum,” Uncle Albert said. “I was wondering this morning where the word comes from. We made it up, didn’t we?” I looked it up. It appears we did, to describe nonsense spread about to the hokumista’s advantage. Hokum isn’t disinterested. On the other hand, it isn’t maleficent or even malevolent. At least, that’s what I gathered.

The parts of speech.
    Nouns are the names of persons, places or things. Teresa, Avila, cow. Verbs are what the things do or what is done to them. Give, eat. Which leaves adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and interjections. The last is easiest. It’s like saying “Ouch!” when someone steps on your toe. Prepositions link things, as do conjunctions. To, of. Which, and. Adjectives describe nouns. Mad, holy. And adverbs describe verbs. Voraciously. Or adverbs would describe verbs if you were allowed to use them. I asked Roz’s friend Blaine, who teaches writing, why you weren’t. She said, “The idea is that they’re like Jesus when Pilate first encounters him in Jesus Christ, Superstar; they clutter up the hallway. They break up verbs, then offer them crutches when they were strong enough to walk on their own; they were stronger on their own. Or so we say.” By we, she meant writing instructors. “You shouldn't use too many adjectives either,” she added. Pronouns are just nouns by another name. He (she, it). As articles are adjectives by another name. The (a, an).

Mysticism, that mad cow holy Teresa of Avila gave John of the cross, and he ate voraciously. Ouch!

“The idea,” Blaine said: “There must be a verb that in itself means ‘ate voraciously.’”
     “Hoovered?”
     “Doesn’t quite work, does it?”
     “Quite?”
                                                                              01.31.23

Axel's dream, part II

 Axel’s dream, part II 

I said to Axel [The conversation is continued from here, though there’s a delightful Confucian intermission; don’t skip it.] . . .
     I said to Axel, “There are a lot of people like your friend R. Aren’t there?”
     “I suppose.”
     “Who think they need to protect God from the world — there is no telling what he would do if he got loose in it with all his compassion. So they shut him up in the reserved sacrament box — what’s it called?”
     “The Tabernacle.”
     “Maybe. What’s an ambry?” Axel shrugged. “The tabernacle then,” I said. “They keep God in there. Or they zip him up in their Bibles. That’s why Bibles have zippers: if God is also spirit, he — she, it — might be able to escape from the open edges of the pages. Or they, like your friend R, warn their congregations in their sermons not to do what Jesus would do. ‘You’re not Jesus,’ they say. Besides, look what happened to him, they don’t say, but it’s implied.”
     Axel began to laugh but stifled it: it escaped from his throat to his mouth, but he closed his teeth on it — it made a half-growling, half-choking sound.
     “What?” I said.
     “I was thinking, ‘If God slipped out of a Bible from the edges of the pages — let’s say letter by letter then word by word then sentence by sentence — what would we find after we’d had the Bible for a week.’ Would the book of Nahum be missing, for example? After a month, would Revelation have followed it? And James, if Luther is sitting at God’s right ear. And all but a few letters of Leviticus. After a year, would there be any word left except fragments of sentences from the first letter of John. ‘God is love.’ Since he is, ‘we should love one another.’ ‘Anyone that claims to be in the light but hates his brother is . . . . love one another.’ The other 963 pages blank!”
     “A much shorter edition than Jefferson’s.”
     “And completely different. Jefferson didn’t think God needed protecting. The mechanic was far enough away from his machine to be safe from any sparks it might throw or the oil it might spew. God didn’t need protecting from us, we needed protecting from God. Or we might. If God cared.”
     I wondered — silently but then aloud — if we weren’t getting off the subject. “As usual,” Axel said. “But does it matter?” I shrugged: Did it?

You go down the stairs
to Dr. Feight’s office.

Later, I was telling Dr. Feight about the conversation and how it ended with a shrug; and he said “Hmmm,” meaning in this case why didn’t it matter?
     I said, “Because neither of us knew what he was talking about. And no one else was listening.”
     “God?” said Dr. Feight. I wanted to shrug, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to shrug. Instead,
     “If he was having a slow day,” I said. “Then, maybe.”

“I have a friend,” Axel had said another time, I am just remembering this, “a friend, a retired classics scholar, who wants desperately to be a mystic. But he can’t do it.” He paused. “I once had another friend, a Roman Catholic priest, who said he had known mystics and every day he thanked God he wasn’t one.
    “‘The mystic’s mistake,’ my friend said, ‘is that he thinks what he feels is God. Or if he can’t feel God, then what he doesn’t feel — that is God.’” But when he saw my Lutheran grin, he said: ‘Yes. But how is that different from the theologian’s mistake, when he thinks what he thinks about God is God?’”

I am looking out the window: The day is as gray as whites washed a hundred times without bleach. Only in one prickle of the NNW corner of the sky, just above the spine of the house kitty-corner across the street, is a switch of light fighting back. It has pushed Gray’s tongue back into its mouth, but it can’t push it any harder to make it vomit blue.
                                                                    01.18.23

Confucius returns to New Orleans.

 Confucius returns to New Orleans.* 

1964, four years before his previous visit in ’68. Above the streets named for
the muses, across St. Charles from Audubon Park, in the large second-floor
classroom of Gibson Hall, Tulane University’s front door.

He is lecturing about Joseph Smith and Baháʼu'lláh, how religion will fall from revelation to inspiration, from genius to ingenuity, from imagination to wit, a series of brief propositions.
     In answer to a question about Zen in the discussion that follows: “I cannot answer that, but it is not unanswerable because the practice is ineffable but because it is a tangle of pig- and bull- . . . One hand clapping?” He blew a raspberry,** and there the discussion ended.

                                                                                        01.22.23
_______________
 *His previous visit, see here. For all previous Confucius posts, here. **For why he blows a raspberry instead of using the sh-word, that is here.

Axel's dream

 Axel’s dream 

“To me this is like the days of Noah,
    when I swore that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth.
So now I have sworn not to be angry with you,
    never to rebuke you again.
Though the mountains be shaken
    and the hills be removed,
yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken
    nor my covenant of peace be removed,”
    says the Lord, who has compassion on you.         — Isaiah 54:9-10

Axel is telling me about two friends from his seminary class who remained friends “ever after” they met first year and even became brothers-in-law when the one’s daughter married the other’s son. The one was a big man, slow and calm, the other an waspish Rumpelstiltskin. D and R he calls them. Then he is telling me about their wives as well because they had to become friends, too, whether they wanted to or not: D’s tall and plain and beautiful nonetheless and R’s small and round with a flat, blonde, unblinking doll’s face, eyes painted a fierce blue. Axel said, “I know I am only telling you what they looked like, but they were what they looked like.” All of this he is telling me by way of introduction to a dream he thought I might be interested in.
     My first thought is contrary: How interested is any of us in anyone else’s dream? But then I thought: Maybe I am interested, a little, if only because I have never thought of Axel as one that has dreams.

Read Rumpelstiltskin’s true story here.

Axel says: I am flying from one place I never wanted to be to a destination I’m not certain of, and I am lost in this massive, labyrinthine airport until I stumble my way into one of those bus-station-like corners where the bus-sized planes fly from the city to smaller towns around. I’ve taken off my glasses so I won’t recognize anyone if there might be anyone in that drab grade-school-lunch-smelling room that I might recognize. But I can’t not recognize D, who even if I can’t see him is wearing that overconfident Christian armor he has over the years (sadly, unfortunately) taken piece by piece from R until almost all of D’s natural, big-man’s modesty has been squeezed out and R’s small-man’s over-compensatory self-confidence substituted until it is brimming over, smelling of engine oil. I say self-confidence (bustling, bristling), for it is not God that is R’s refuge and strength as he would have you believe. No, it is the other way around: R is God’s refuge and strength.
     When I put on my glasses and embarrassedly introduce myself, D doesn’t seem to recognize me. But it is only for the moment — D is too kind naturally — he cannot be completely taken over by his brother-in-law’s mean spirit. I mean “mean” more in the sense of little and shrunken than nasty or spiteful, though there are times one must be nasty if God, who is much too kind, too open, too forgiving in Jesus Christ — one must be nasty if such a God is to be protected. But D is not thinking how he must defend the faith against me but wondering WWJD, and he blinks and says, “Oh, hi.” And he asks where I am going.
     But I don’t know. I’ll need to check my ticket if I can find it. I begin patting my pockets from coat to shirt to pants, and I wake up.

“I didn't know you wore glasses,” I say.
     “I don’t.”
     “Oh,” I say and after a pause, “What happened with the daughter and the son?”
     “I don’t know,” Axel says. “It was a dream — I said that, didn’t I?”
     I nod. “But the daughter and the son were real, right?” I want to add. But I don’t.

                                                                       01.18.23

A bit of everything

 A bit of everything 

December 23, at home, continued from here.
     Her new husband, Brainerd, comes, bringing mostly silence and an eight-pack of Guinness Stout Draft.
     Everyone brings something to drink or for dessert. For the rest, Roz orders Chinese.

Bel brings a nice Pinot Grigio and Nils a Sauvignon Blanc. Axel brings two bottles of Malbec, one quite nice unopened, the other in which he has been stewing fruit and fruit juice to make Sangria because “What goes better with Chinese?”

Ramos Gin Fizz.
Click here for a recipe.

Giggly Polly brought all the ingredients to make loopy Ramos Gin Fizzes for before dinner. Uncle Albert had ordered a case of Perrier. There were no deserts except I had laid in three cartons of ice cream, one vanilla, one chocolate, and one butter pecan, just in case. And not everyone wants dessert anyway, or more than dessert than their fortune cookies (smelling of sesame and vanilla. Axel’s fortune is, "You haven’t come this far to come only this far.” “But where would I be going?” he asks. Bel’s is, “Sometimes silver exceeds gold.” And Brainerd’s is, “There is travel in your future, but you will go nowhere.”
     I can’t drink with my meds, so usually I don’t and never at these parties. Instead, I drive everyone home that isn’t walking. They make their own way back usually to get their cars the next day. Or the day after. I say “usually” because once I had to pick up Maggie after she had called Roz to say her car had been stolen.

“Why do you do this?” I asked Roz. This was the morning after. She uses the good china and the good glassware and the real silverware, all of which we have to wash by hand.
     “For you, of course,” she said. “I know how Christmas gets to you.”
     “No,” I said, “I’m okay. Really.”
     “Yes, I know you are. You are okay. But not really.” She takes the plate I’ve pulled out of the suds, runs it under the hot water and puts it in the drainer. When the drainer is full, we dry and put away; and we start again. “Actually, it was Dwight’s idea.” Dwight is my sister Hannah’s I-always-thought-humorless, consumerist husband. Double major in Economics and Philosophy, or so she claims, but then on to dental school and getting rich by taking over his father’s highly successful practice. Really, he had to have majored in Business, I think. He can’t have majored in Philosophy, or Economics — much less both. He had to have majored in Business.
     I winced. “No!” I thought — not Dwight.
     “Yes. It makes sense what he said, even if I can’t explain it very well,” Roz said. “Something about your benefiting from embracing the absurd, then you would come out on the other side. A philosopher named Grand, Joseph.” She gave both names a French pronunciation. So she was kidding, I was almost sure.
     “Wait,” I said, handing her the last plate and draining the suds from the sink. “He’s not real. He’s a character in The Plague.” “Is he?” “You know he is, the one that can’t finish even the first sentence of his novel.” “No,” she laughed.
    “Yes,” I said. “Does he survive, do you remember?”
     “He does,” Roz said, reaching across and handing me the sink drainer basket to carry to the garbage because the disposal is making a funny noise again.

                                                                       01.09.23

The Friday before

  The Friday before 

December 23, at home.
     Uncle Albert says he wishes English had more letters though he doubts we could master them as we haven’t mastered the 26 we have.
     “I don't know, ” Axel says, “Are the letters ours to master any more than the words are Humpty Dumpty’s?” The conversation is taking place at Roz’s Friday-before-Christmas dinner, which she holds those years that neither Christmas Eve nor Day falls on a Friday. Axel has been coming since 2014, and his brother Nils since 2018; this is Bel Monk’s second year, I think. Longer than any of them, Roz’s best friend Maggie (See also here.) and her well-meaning but irritating friend Polly have been coming, as was Polly’s former husband Chris, who said in three years only two words, “Fuck” and, immediately after,  “Sorry.” Now her new husband, Brainerd, comes, bringing an only slightly less measured silence and an eight-pack of Guinness Stout Draft.
     Everyone brings something to drink or for dessert. For the rest, Roz orders Chinese.

Davor Šuker with Arsenal

Uncle Albert claims to have met “Lju” Gaj, as he calls him, though that would make him (Albert) 196 instead of 96, I say. But no, don’t be ridiculous! He met him at the 1998 World Cup in France,* when Croatia finished third as they did this year, in ’98 beating the Dutch 2-1 in the third-place match. That was at the Parc des Princes in Paris.
     “He was wearing the same military coat as in your fake picture of him with Confucius. I didn’t meet him at the match but in the afternoon before it. Kundera introduced us.”
     “The Czech writer?” Nils asks. He is shaking his head and is about to say that this is all bullshit, it has to be, when Axel jumps in to ask who scored the winning goal.
     “Yes,  Šuker,” Uncle Albert says. “He won the Golden Boot with it. That’s a letter we could use, one for the sh sound. Then we would know whether it should be shedule or skedule.”
     Polly turns to Roz and giggles, “Is this the way it is every night here?” as Uncle Albert continues: “He played a season with Arsenal, though not much of one.”
     “No,” Roz says to Polly. “Most nights Ted cooks.”

                                                                       01.02.23                                                 continued here
_______________
 * So when Gaj was 189.