It looks as if . . .

 It looks as if . . . 

 It looks as if there will be no more unless or until the Dead write,
or speak, or sing. But then... ?

  02.17.24 

A farable of Jesop

 The Fox’s Hump

A fox admired the camel’s hump so much he asked Deus if he could have one for himself. Deus agreed, and Homobonus made him one of fat and air and Tabitha sewed it under the skin of the fox’s back. But very soon the fox was back to see if the hump could be removed. It was not only that it prevented him from getting in and out of close places, but he dearly missed drinking from the stream each time he passed.
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The online reproduction of the original Jesop's Farables (1887), translated from the Latin and edited by G. F. Murray - and with my brief afterward - is now available. Here!

 

Jesop's Farables

  Jesop's Farables 

Perhaps the most enigmatic of the farables or, perhaps, a fragment, "The Lion and the Leopard":

The leopard replied to the lion, “What spots?”

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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!

  03.17.24 

Axel said.

 Axel said. 

I called Axel at church, where there is still a landline. He was there, on the land, in his office. I walked down and rang the bell. Lucy "Peter Frampton" Burke let me in. "He's waiting for you," she said.
     He was, behind his desk as always, the wall of books behind him. Leaning back in his chair, feet crossed at the ankles on his desk. He pulled them down and swiveled round to face me. "What's up?"
     "Pretty much what I told you on the phone. Uncle Albert and I were talking about Cora Tull, the character in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - and other Coras - and wondered what you thought."
     "Because As I Lay Dying is one of my favorite novels?"
     "Is it?"
     "No. I did take a Southern Lit course in college, but that was a Lutheran school in Minnesota."
     "But you remember the novel."
     "Sort of."
     "And you remember Cora Tull?"

Brother Jethro Tull

He had barely, but he'd looked her up while I was walking down. "She's one of these women, quite common really, that pride themselves in being good neighbors but especially to neighbors that they can look down on, neighbors that need good neighbors because they're always in trouble or they're sinners that need 'loving' correction.
     "But they're not always women. Many become Southern Baptist preachers, and none of them are women. But I don't want to pick on the Southern Baptists. They're not only preachers. Hardly. They're pundits, they're scientists, they work at NGOs. They're every self-righteous jack- or jillass with a golden corncob up their ass and a social media account.
     "They're me and you, though you may be the least of the thousands of problems.
     "It makes you wonder about the Prophets, doesn't it? Why people didn't listen to them. They, the prophets, know the truth that others ignore - and will continue to ignore - but they have to tell them. On the other hand, the others are thinking, 'These self-righteous jackasses think they know everything, and they just can't shut up about it.'
     "And they haven't shut up about it. Think about this: the ones that remain in the canon of Scripture do so because they turned out to be right." Axel took a breath. He scratched the sparse hair at the back of his head. He let the breath out with something between a raspberry and a sigh. "Have I gotten off the subject?"
     "Maybe not entirely," I said. Just above his hand, which was still attached to the back of his head, were two books on Luther, Bainton's Here I Stand and Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther. I pointed: "Have you read that?" He turned the chair, following my finger. "The Erikson," I said.
     "I have. But not long after I read Cora Tull. You?"
     "I tried," I said, "not too long ago. He spends the introduction and the first couple of chapters explaining how he can tell you things about Luther that you could never figure out, because you're not as smart as he is. No one could, before him."
     "I don't think Cora Tull thinks she's smarter. But Luther might have."
     "Yes," I said. "Calvin, too."

"When you are right and people don't listen to you . . . ?" Axel said.
     "I don't know. Not self-righteous. Or angry. A little irked maybe, but mostly sad. The last thing I feel is puffed-up."
     "But you're not one of those that thinks they know the mind of God."
     "Nor do I want to be," I said, meaning not one that thinks; I didn't ever want to know the mind of God. Or, at least, I haven't since I was fifteen. "That's too much for me," I said.
     "Psalm 139," Axel said.
     "Is it?"
     "Verse 6: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; I cannot attain it."
    "Exactly."
     "'Irked.' I like that," Axel said. "Not a word I hear every day."

                                                                          02.17.24 

Coindreau

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Ted is always pretending . . . No, that's not fair: no one is always anything, neither always feigning nor always genuine, though perhaps almost always caught somewhere in between (playing a role and trying to be themselves). But Ted is often wondering aloud what motivates this person or that - he can't see. Indeed, like the poor poet in Emily Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz," he cannot "see to see"; the windows keep failing. So, he has to go looking for insight. He'll go to Axel, or he'll ask Roz; he'll come to me. Often, he'll interview all of us - and, I suspect, others as well. Then, I also suspect, at the end of it all, he'll be thinking we don't see any farther than he does; our blinds are no less opaque than his are.
        Yesterday, he came asking about Cora Tull in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. "I know there aren't really types," he said, "because everyone is different." But that said, it seemed to him that there were a number of women he had "run into here and there" who, like Cora Tull, did not doubt they knew the will of God, which tended to coincide with their own. They are often, in his experience (See how he qualifies everything!) . . . . They are often "fundamentalists," which he puts in air quotes because they don't all know the Bible that well. They may read it assiduously (from the Latin assido, assidere, assedi, assessus, meaning to sit by in a counsel or as an assessor; to watch over; to camp next to; to besiege. Assess comes from the same verb) . . . . They may read the Bible regularly, but they aren't paying attention. They don't have to: they've known from before they could read what it means to say.

M-E Coindreau by m ball

        So, it is not by the Scriptures that they know what they know - that is, the mind of God. It is not by Scriptures but because they have managed somehow to get to "the front of the line" (Ted's words), which they did, whatever Jesus said about the last being first, whatever Paul said about putting others before ourselves - they got there by pushing and shoving their way to the front because the Lord helps those that help themselves. And now they are there, in God's lap, the Coras know. What did I think? Ted wanted to know.
        Since I didn't know what I thought, not being quite sure what the question was, I told him I once taught the book in Maurice-Edgar Coindreau's excellent translation in an advanced French course: Sur mon lit mort. That wasn't true, but with Ted, it is a good idea to have some sort of arcane reason for what you are about to say or not say. But just because I said that I had taught it didn't mean that I remembered the novel well, I went on. Still, I thought I understood what he meant about Cora Tull and the other Coras. And yet "their motivations were in a bailiwick other than mine." (God forgive me, those were the words that came out of my mouth.) So, what did Axel say? Or if he hadn't said, why didn't he (Ted) ask him?
        "That's a good idea," he said. "I will."
                                                                                02/15/24

 

Transfigured

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

As readers of Ted's blog have seen, he receives letters from the dead, especially from his sister Moira but also from an old girlfriend, Trudy Monae. And from his mother, I believe, though he's never published one of those. And, Roz tells me when I ask her (just a few minutes ago), from a "heavenly" bureaucrat named Stephen, who advises and chastises; he would guide Ted in his "earthly walk," as if Ted were guidable.
        Moreover, Roz volunteers, he responds. He has notebooks full of these letters. Colorful notebooks because his correspondents write him in different colors of ink, one in blue, one in red, one in green, one in teal that she's seen. He not only receives, moreover; he responds, in black.
        I have encouraged him to talk to Dr. Feight about this. It's not as if any of these died yesterday, but twenty years ago and more. He says that he does talk to Dr. Feight, and Dr. Feight says it's okay, that he (Ted) can distinguish between fantasy and reality.
        I'm not so sure. Dr. Feight is a religious man. Would he say the same about John of Patmos, that he could distinguish between fantasy and reality? Would he be right about that?

Patmos John by Jacques Callot

The epistle lesson this morning, Transfiguration and Super Bowl Sunday, was from II Corinthians 4, in which Paul suggests that the gospel has somehow, or at least in some instances, become "veiled." "The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from its light." So, who is in charge here? God "Almighty" proposes, the god of this world disposes? And the result is that some are fornifreculated?
        Our rector, the former Miss Virginia, doesn't enter that fray. She does preach a creditable sermon on the gospel, the transfiguration story, pointing out that Peter, John, and James want to remain "on the mountaintop." Too bad they have to come down, she tuts. But the light will dim. Then, God will speak (not out of the light but the darkness). It's his beloved, not the mountaintop, they should listen to. He (the beloved) will say, "We can't stay here!" It's a rebuke, she suggests to the one in four of us that have mountaintop experiences and want to stay on high to lord it over the rest. To which,
        "Amen," I croaked out. I didn't mean it to be out loud.
                                                                                                         02/11/24

Watching the Super Bowl in "heaven."

 Stupid Bowl LVIII 

My sister writes, Moira, the dead sister:

. . . I had oatmeal for breakfast this morning with the raisins cooked in and milk and brown sugar. I actually cooked the oatmeal - it didn't just appear. I stirred and stirred it into the boiling water. Doing something with my hands - cooking oatmeal, making a sandwich, writing a letter - reminds me of what it was like to be physically alive, walking on my own feet, talking and tasting with my own tongue, watching with my own eyes, having a cold in my own nose. Sadly, it's only a reminder. They are only reminders, I am not physically alive. (I've tried to explain this to you before, how it feels and how it doesn't feel, I think.)
     In any case, after breakfast - sweet and filling (if, yes, in a ghostly way) - I walked over to Lisa's; I hadn't seen her in a while. And we walked to the coffee on the corner place where we met Gretchen Moore and her John, and Phil that we went to high school with, and a girl named Jack, who was in college for a year with you and Lisa before she transferred to the University of North Carolina. And we all drank coffee and listened to Phil and this Jack talk about the Super Bowl. Apparently, that's soon. But here's a rub I think (hope, trust) you'll appreciate, no one here gives a damn about it - not even Phil, or Jack. Their conversation was a mock litany from the Church of Football Foolishness they belonged to while alive, though they agreed with none of its tenets even then. Who did truly? they wondered. Wasn't it all media hype and cultural pressure?
     Jack, who wrote sports for a paper in Carolina for a while, avowed when the litany was over that football was the stupidest game ever invented and the older it got, the stupider it became with coaches in the sky talking electronically through their helmets with players on the ground, with players on the ground growing ever larger so that more than a few weighed close to 400 pounds and none in good enough condition to run over 40 yards, but who had to be in better than that since the average play lasted about six seconds and substitutions were unlimited, whereas the time between plays averaged almost a minute when the clock was running? A game one hour long took three hours, at least, to complete. Doesn't that mean that the clock wasn't running for two hours!? In any case, of that one hour (played over three), only about twelve minutes were spent in actual play. Is this true, do you think? - I don't know, but Jack sounded like she knew what she was talking about.
     Then she asked if any one of us was having a Super Bowl party. She was willing to: beer and snacks, a TV the size of the side of a house; we could all get drunk and feel shitty the next day (shitty and triumphant if our team had won, I gather, just shitty if our team had lost). Apparently, there's a local exemption for former Foolish Church believers that covers both parties and hangovers, you just have to get a license. She would do that if enough of us wanted to, or were willing to, join in. What do you think of that? Should I? Phil said he'd take me - and Lisa - if one or both of us wanted to go. And Jack thought she could "scare up" some fools from her Carolina days.
      So, did we want to go? I asked Lisa on the way home. She said she'd rather go to the library and read Finnegan's Wake, but maybe we should. She was trying to remember Jack. "Melissa Drake?" she said. "I think." But she couldn't remember where she was from, or why she wanted to be called "Jack" and wanted to transfer. "Ask your brother," she said.
     Do you know?
                                 Love, Moira
                                                                           02.09.24 

Guess who?

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

We had company for dinner last night. There was Roz's friend Polly because her husband, Brainerd, left for Florida right after the first of the year and hasn't come back yet; nor is it clear when he will. True, he keeps inviting her to join him. Why she hasn't Roz isn't saying. And another friend I'd never heard of before Roz announced the guest list. And Tom Nashe.
        She brought us, Ted and me and her, around the kitchen table. We are going to have a dinner party, she announced, "a small one," she assures us, the three of us and three others in this case. (Sometimes "a small one" means the three of us and five others.) There is nothing for me to do. For Ted, there is vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning the downstairs bathroom, after which he nor I is to use it. She has the rest under control, the table and the wine and the menu: roasted salmon with yogurt and cucumber raita, wild rice and corn pudding, gingered green beans with almond butter, fruit salad, croissants; pecan pie for dessert.
        This other friend is Beatrice, not Bea! A painter and poet and painter-poet, who arrives wearing a tweed cloak with a matching flat cap. The cloak she surrenders to Ted, but not the cap, which she wears throughout the evening. Polly comes in jeans and a sweatshirt.
         A painter-poet; that is, she uses words in her paintings. She writes on the paintings with paint.
        She uses words a lot, it turns out. She likes to explain what she is working on. She has pictures on her phone; the explanations have illustrations. The pictures mingle interiors and exteriors, side by side a kitchen and a house, for example, with labels for some of the elements, "table" - "window" - "sink" - "door," and a fragment of verse, "The beginning of yesterday came . . . " She explains how the paintings with words "mean."
        But there are other things she can explain as well, tucking the food in her mouth into her cheek, so she can get the conversation back on task, directing it with impatient, extended sibilants.

Roz smiles, asks questions. Polly is mesmerized. And confused. And asks questions. Ted says nothing. I am not hearing as well as I would like, so I may have some of this wrong. When I looked more than usually confused, Tom tried to fill me in, but in a whisper, which I couldn't hear either.

As I said, he was our sixth, Tom Nashe. He drove down from Lexingford, presumably for balance, so we would be three girls and three boys. An added benefit: he doesn't drive after dark, so he spent the night. That meant that while Ted helped Roz clean up after, he and I could explain to each other how Roz collects her friends, how she can like - how she can genuinely like - such unlikely people. "Including us," Tom had to say.
        He is, I think it is fair to say, smitten with her, with Roz. You can hear it, his smittenness, when after going through the menu, the fish, the pudding, the beans, all of it near perfection, the pie a dream, he adds, "And she doesn't dislike anyone!" She doesn't only suffer fools gladly; she delights in them; she loves them. "Including us." You can hear it, his smittenness, when after an outburst like that, Saint Roz, who likes us all and can cook . . . He stops and says nothing for several seconds as if breathless. So, you feel as if you need to jump in: "How 'bout those Niners!?" Or, "How 'bout that Pascal? Did you see that he edged Montaigne and will meet Descartes in the finals?"
        When you do, jump in, changing the subject, he gets it. "I was going on again, wasn't I? Oh well," he admits. "Good thing I'm past it," he says, though he's not. But it's a crush anyway, nothing to do or to be done either with or about it. That's what he means when he calls himself past it. He is only wishing he could be more like her, though he is as tolerant of individuals, however wrongheaded and however bombastic about it, as any man I have ever known, I think. He hates their wrongheadedness, he despises their bombast; but, after all, they can't help it. Even the hypocrites - they can't help it. Look at their families of origin, look where they grew up, where they went to college; look at who they hang out with. It's no wonder they have dug a moat and built a fortress around their brains long since.
        Tom has a lot to say after having spent the last two hours listening to Beatrice. But he doesn't say a word about her.

Ted and Roz come in from the kitchen. "What are you guys up to?" she asks.
        "We are up to our waists, our paps, our necks, our ears with encomia for our hostess!" Tom says.
        "Encomia, is it?" Roz asks.
        "From the Greek meaning 'celebrations,'" Tom answers.
                                                                                                           02/04/24

 Check out the correction
on the previous post.

Musical Interlude - Annihilation

Corrected. See the asterisks and footnotes.

 Musical Interlude 

Two days ago I started Erik Erickson's Young Man Luther. I've only managed 21 pages. Two days later I'm not even through the first chapter, dedicated to telling the reader in clumsy, jargon-filled prose what wonders the author's historico-psychological method is about to reveal. So maybe in chapter two he'll pull the dusty curtain aside, he will step aside, and a wonder will be revealed: he'll start a story uncluttered by jargon.

That's McCoy Tyner by m ball.***

Yesterday I read in various online dictionaries about "annihilationism," a Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine that, despite the frightening implications of the word, graciously allows that the condemned do not burn forever in the unquenchable fires of Hell but are consumed by them. They don't continue forever to burn; they are burned up. And that is the blessed end of us. Our pain is great but soon ended. Our cries become air, our tears become ashes. We are dust. Eventually, the winds will come; the lake of fire will be dry up like the Aral Sea, and we will be scattered wherever is left for our scattering. Or so I understand the doctrine.
     For Jehovah's Witnesses, also annihilationists as I understand it, 144,000 will remain. God will have to content himself with an army about the size of Spain's. Of course, the army will be angelic, it will be armed with the power of the angels. On the other hand, it will have no one left to fight. Instead, there will be intramural battles of the bands. May the best trumpet, harp, percussion combo prevail.

The music here, in the house, is John Coltrane, "Naima," written in 1959 for his first wife, Juanita Austin. That's McCoy Tyner on piano.* Coltrane left Nita not long after he wrote the piece.
     That doesn't matter in the long run, neither are among the 144,000. But we don't live in the long run; most of us, almost all of us, are pitched into the lake of fire. We die in the long run. We live, though, in the short run. So that's what matters to us.
     That's McCoy Tyner on the piano.* And that's Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.**

                                                                           01.31.24 
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   * No it's not.
 ** And no it's not. As a keen-eyed, keen-eared reader pointed out: On the original recording of "Naima," it was "Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. the rhythm section of Miles [Davis]’s band at the time.  McCoy hadn’t showed up yet, nor Elvin.  And even after they were there Steve Davis was on bass for the next several albums before the switch was finally made to Garrison. . . . Certainly McCoy, Elvin and Garrison played that tune plenty of times, but not until ’61 at least." And not on the recording that was the music in the house on January 31.
*** Yes, it is. Got that right.

451

  451  

The phone chirps. Yes, the house phone. Yes, we still have one. Yes, it's because it's easier to keep than to try to renegotiate our cable and internet package. And yes, it's Axel, one of the three actual people, meaning not robots, scammers, doctor's offices, or the red cross, that use the number.

"Do you want to come to lunch and help me calm Nils down?" he says wearily.
     I didn't really and the weariness in Axel's voice was not a draw, but I was curious about the circumstances. "What has riled him up?" I asked.
     "You won't believe this . . ." He paused for effect: "The Council of Chalcedon."*
     "I do believe it," thinking, It is Nils. "But explain."
     "Why don't you come to lunch? Let him explain."
     "Because I don't want to come to lunch," I thought but didn't say. I don't want to un-rile anyone. "No, but prepare me," I did say.

"I don't know if I can," Axel said. "Something, something, something leading to something about how the church is stuck in the weeds of Chalcedon, even if it doesn't know it. Trying to reconcile fully God and fully man, when God is omnipotent and man is too feeble to walk to the grocery store, where God is omniscient and man gets lost on his way home. But if Jesus of Nazareth is God's revelation of God's self, then he is no longer defined by power and knowing. He acknowledges in his death that he is weak - men can capture him, beat him, and hang on a tree until he dies. He demonstrates, when he teaches in parables, for example, that wisdom has nothing to do with knowing but with realizing that life in the world is a confusing thing in a perplexing place. And if he comes out on the other side, if he is raised from the dead, he demonstrates that love and hope and healing are the essence of God, not power and not knowing.
     "This is still Nils," Axel says: "The Definition [of Chalcedon] has no interest in Jesus of Nazareth; there is no sense in it that here in him, Jesus, is the revelation of God. The council is, like Paul, completely disinterested in his ministry. But where Paul at least wonders about what his death and revelation might signify, Chalcedon is only interested in his birth or becoming, how he could come to be both God and man at the same damn time in the same damn being. No one at Chalcedon is asking, "What is God trying to say to us here?" Instead, the Council wants to say to God. It wants to explain how it must have been if the son of man was also the Son of God, truly God and truly man, 'one person in two natures, divine and human, which cannot be confused, changed, separated, or divided,' or whatever it says. It's theology without kerygma.** It's proposition without story. All I'm saying here is all Nils.     "And the ghost of the writer of Mark's gospel was there, at Chalcedon, also according to Nils, screaming but unheard, 'You shits. You stupid shits. You stupid pharisaical shits!'

"So?" Axel asks.
     "Do I want to go to lunch?" I answer. "No, I don't think I do. Can't you let him be riled up?"
     "I suppose so. I mean, how can I stop him? But we're still having lunch."
     "Cancel," I say.
     "He's my brother."

"Cain-cel," I didn't say, because I didn't think of it at the time, only later. And I was glad of that. It was a stupid pun. Whatever we like to think, wit is almost never wisdom. It's seldom kind. Mostly, it isn't even funny.
                                                                           01.18.24
______________
 * The briefest of histories, a slightly longer (but not too long) explanation, and "the definition."
** The word means "teaching the story of salvation." Interestingly, if I click it with my spellchecker, it gives "merrymaker."

The same day: Gossip

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

"What does Roz want to know about Kristi for? For that matter," Ted was asking me after she'd left and he'd put his coat and scarf away -  he'd come back to sit on the coffee table again, head in his hands, looking up at me: "For that matter," he was asking me, "what is my interest in the Sundstrøm sisters as I am unlikely to meet any of them. I'm not taking the train to Cincinnati; I don't know where in 'the territory' to look for April. True, I might someday get to Froyd County, or Sigrid might leave her hermitage and come up here, though doubtful. But . . . ." He stopped.
        "I have a theory about gossip. Do you want to hear it?" I did, I said. "'Theory,'" he qualified, "in the common, not scientific, sense, meaning 'hypothesis' or 'wild guess' but I believe it." I nodded.
        "I've been reading John O'Hara, you know." I didn't, but I nodded again. I refrained from asking why. He gets on these kicks. How he comes to them or they come to him I don't know. But he'll fasten on a writer, and he'll read everything he can get his hands on in any used book store in town. He's a bulldozer in a vacant lot. "Quite a number of the stories," he'd read so far. Plus, "Sermons and Soda-Water, which is three long stories. I'm halfway through Butterfield 8.
        "O'Hara has a code, incidentally, most obvious in the little story, 'The Moccasins.' Generally, the big stories are better than the little ones, but 'Moccasins' is good for this. O'Hara's code of honor, if I understand it correctly, his ethic. Above all, be true to yourself. It may take a while to discern what that means - both what it means to be true and who you are to be true to. In the meantime, however, don't let anyone seduce you, don't let anything seduce you. It's okay to get sidetracked, but seduction - you know this - is something quite different: it doesn't just get you going the wrong way for a while, it does something to you inside. By the same token, it's wrong to seduce anyone else. It's okay to sidetrack them, but it's wrong, wrong, wrong to try to make them untrue to or keep them from being true to themselves."
        "Gossip," I said, meaning "get back to the topic at hand. If you can."
       "Right."

Patience, dear reader: Ted is more disposed to sipping soda-water than giving sermons. It had been ages since I'd heard him string as many sentences together as he had already. But . . . on gossip:
        "O'Hara's characters, especially the newspapermen, the Jim Malloy characters, are curious about everyone. They want to know where they came from, where they're going, what crowd or crowds they belong to, what crowd or crowds would exclude them if they could, what makes them tick and what makes them ache - with longing or confusion or fear. In sum, where to slot them.
     "We do that, too. Or the people we meet for coffee or lunch or at the two Christmas parties we go to. What of the conversation that isn't nostalgia is gossip - it's more gossip than nostalgia, who knows who and how and why. I can't keep up. I have a hard enough keeping up with the people in the room. So - is this wrong? - I find myself uninterested in the possible motives of strangers. True, what are only names to me aren't necessarily strangers to others. But they can't all be friends, can they? Most must be acquaintances at best. Yet, we spend however long it takes locating them, meaning these 'friends' - who were their friends, and who were their friends to the end of six lists of begats?
        "With Malloy in the O'Hara stories, I get it, I think. It's the way in a fractured world he gets ahead. Or when he's left behind, it's how he keeps his head above water, by knowing even people he doesn't know and where to slot them. But what's the advantage to Axel or Nils or Roz's Polly, or Roz, for that matter? Aren't they pretty much settled? They're not falling behind or getting ahead, either one. They're not going anywhere. They're here." He stops to catch his breath.
        "I suppose they want to stay settled," I say. "Here."
        "Yes. I suppose that's it. That's what I'm getting to. Gossip is a way of putting the world in order. Which - maybe this is why it goes right by me - I'm pretty sure can't be done.
        "Especially if you start with people and society. You can put rocks in order; at least, geologists can. Birds, for example, are harder: there are more of them and they move faster; and now the climate is chasing them around, they are flying from it and toward it and turning up in places they weren't before. Still, there's an explanation, and you can keep track; or ornithologists can. Birds aren't as dumb as rocks, but they don't operate out of hidden motives.
        "But people do, motives they hide from others and motives hidden from themselves. So, when we gossip, I take it, or when people do, we/they are most often talking about why so-and-so and her brother and his fraternity brother from forty years ago must have done what they did. Yet even if we agree on that - and that's the purpose, isn't it? - to come to some sort of agreement about that. Even if we do, we're likely wrong, I'm saying. But then, we do have agreement; it's a comfort. We comfort one another. It may have been as costly, but it's not as confusing, or as messy, as we thought.
        "Or not as confusing or messy as we thought . . . until we think of it again, a particular person or group. They come up in another context. Then we have to gossip to straighten it out  for the third time, to remember how we'd settled it last time and how this fits in. That's why we tell the same stories about the same people over and over again, or why people do while I sit dumb and still uncomprehending.
        "Because it's all speculation, isn't it? Still, people put 'money on it.' 'Yes, that is it,' they say, confidently it sounds like, when they come to an agreement about a story. 'Yes!'

"What do you think?" Ted says to me.
      "I try not to," I said.
     "Yes. That's wise. I should do that, too - try not to think about it."
                                                                                                                          01/07/24

The Sunday train from New York City

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

The Sunday train from New York City (the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station) comes right into town. If it's on time, Roz and Ted will walk in the front door - they'll walk, or Roz will walk and Ted will wander, from the station, it's only six or seven blocks (depending on how you count them) - still, they'll walk in the front door together a little after three. Nils will be on his way out. They'll ask him how I am, and I will interrupt and say I am fine.
        And Ted will come over as Roz sees Nils out. Still in his long, black, wool overcoat but unbuttoned, in his bright plaid scarf. He'll sit down on the coffee table in front of me, lean over put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, look up.

"What did you guys talk about while we were gone," he'll ask me. And I'll say, "Women."
        Meaning Kristi.* And Nils's sisters, April, May, and Sigrid, who lives somewhere south and west from Roanoke on an alpaca and one-time emu farm and talks to the "Spirits of the Air," various angels, arch angels, thrones, and dominions "'of her own making,' Nils says, 'or, at least, her own naming: Gamaliel, Fothering-El, Hermeneia, Mariela.'"

April married a Lutheran minister, divorced him, married another and left him. "And 'lit out for the territory,' Nils said." "Huckleberry Finn," Ted says. "Yes," I say. I glance down at him; he is still sitting, elbows on knees, face in hands, looking up at me. "Yes, very good," making him wonder why he piped in.
        May is "Nils says, ' the only normal one, if not only of the sisters but probably of all five of Karl and Sonja (Pastor and Fru Pastor) Sundstrøm's children - the only one not bedeviled by God or the Holy Spirits.' She went to medical school, became a dermatologist, married a secular Jew high school teacher, and is living 'happily ever after' in a suburb of Cincinnati. But 'he's something of a health-food nut,' Nils says. 'So how happy can she be truly.'

"May," Ted says to get it straight.
        "Yes, if you had stayed on the train you could have visited her. From here it goes south and west - Clifton Forge, White Sulfur Springs, Hinton, then north again to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago."
        "But we didn't," Ted says. "Stay on the train."
        "Because you didn't know," I say.
        "Yes, because we didn't . . ." he stops.

Roz has come over. She's put her coat and scarf away in the closet. "Uncle Albert was telling me about Nils and Axel's sisters," Ted tells her.
        "So, what about Kristi?" she asks.
                                                                        01/07/24
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* See here and here.

If God so loved the world.

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

 New Year's Day.
        Nils knocked. It felt early. The light in the room looked early. "What?" I said. "What?" he said. I said louder, "Open the door." "Yes, what?" he said after he'd opened the door and stuck his shaggy head in.
        "You knocked," I said. "What do you want?"
        "Do you want to get up now?"
        "I don't know. What about what's-her-name?"
        "Kristi," he said. "We're going to make pancakes, then she's going home. Do you want pancakes?"
        "Yes," I said. "But it takes a while, you know."
        "What?"
        "For me to get up, for me to get dressed, for me to get down the stairs."
        "I'll help you down the stairs, Ted explained that," he said. "But how long, do you think?"
        "Maybe half an hour."
        "I'll come back up in twenty-five minutes," he said.

The pancakes were good. (They were pancakes: Pancakes are good.) And after they scrambled all the dishes into the dishwasher, Kristi left. I was in the kitchen. She went to the front of the house. She came back in her coat, which was long and black with a hood (but not up). She said, "Nice to meet you, Albert." She reached out her right again. I took it. I said, "Yes."

Nils came back into the kitchen and sat down with me at the table. "What?" he said.
        I looked across the table. I looked down at my hands on the table, veins sticking out of the loose, freckled skin. I looked across the table. "What can I tell you?" he said.
        "What day is it?" I said.
        "Monday."
        "Did we go to church yesterday?"
        "I did," he said. "You did not - unless you drove yourself while I was gone."
        "I didn't know it was Sunday. I don't know that it's Sunday always if Ted doesn't tell me."
        "Sorry."
        I looked down at my hands again. They are a mess: the fingers are still straight, but there's too much skin, too spotted and the veins running through; they look like old washing, they look like witch's hands. "Where did you go?"
        "I went to Axel's."
        "Why?"
        He shrugged.

I said after a minute: "Do you believe that stuff?"
        "You go to church, do you?"
        I spread my gray hands out on the table, a way of shrugging.
        He said, "I don't know if believe is the right word. I rely on it. That stuff." He stopped. He went on:
        "I didn't go to a Lutheran but to a Presbyterian seminary, don't ask me why, I can't say exactly, but I'd already followed Axel at St. Olaf, I certainly didn't want to follow him at Luther. Anyway, it was the kind of seminary you couldn't leave not believing in the importance - even the supreme importance - of Reformed theology.  There was nothing in the world - in the underworld or the overworld or the ether the worlds floated in; nothing in the microscopic or the macroscopic, or the cosmoscopic world, nothing in the physical world or the spiritual world, ; nothing enacted by human beings, animals, thrones, dominions, or God God's self - that it couldn't examine and, at least theoretically, explain.

Saul

"The explanation might be lame sometimes, even laughable. But then, there was/is a good explanation for that. We, the explainers, are lame (like Jacob) and laughable (like Saul taking a piss and David taking a picture of it); we are lame and laughable, having fallen naked from great heights and bounced off the ground (like a trampoline) in ill-fitting clothes God had sewn for us.
        "I seem to be stuck with that. It doesn't matter that the world may have moved on, or bumbled on or away - though what does the world know? The world may have moved on, but this is still the way I make sense of it."

 "Why then did you leave the church?"
        "I don't know that I have left the church. Ask Axel: Sunday was no oddity. I'm there almost every Sunday. But I left the church I was serving when I found out - when I was told - I knew only one sermon. Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, I preached the same thing, ending with the same question.
        "The body was simple: Jesus loves you. You know that, don't you? The conclusion: 'What are you going to do about it?' That was up to them; I didn't know. What I was going to about it, apparently, was this: The next Sunday I was going to preach the same sermon, tell the congregation that Jesus loved them, try to show them somehow that Jesus loved them. And ask the same question: 'What are you going to do about it?'
        "Nils One-Note."
                                         01/02/24

Kristi

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

New Year's Eve!

"Will you stay up till midnight?" Nils asked."
        "UTC," I said.
        "Then you'll be in bed by seven?"
        "I may stay up until two, even three. . . . UTC."

A little before nine, the door bell rings, then knocking.
        "She's eager to get in," I said.
        "She is not one that believes that 'patience is a virtue,'" Nils said, already on his way to the door.
        A bustle over my left shoulder - I can't turn far enough to see. Then they are in front of me.
        "Uncle Albert," Nils said though I am not (his uncle). "This is Kristi. Kristi, this is Albert." We said hello. A tall, angular woman in faded jeans and colorless sweater; blond hair going gray, blue eyes also going gray. She could be Swedish. She tries to smile, but she is nonplussed because she doesn't know what to do with her hands. She says hello again and reaches out with her right.

"Let's get some snacks," Nils says and heads her toward the kitchen. At the dining room door, he turns. "Be right back," he says.

She's not Swedish but Swiss. Her family name is Zoss. And what does she do?
        She's a teacher, she says. 

Later Nils will explain: of Western Religions at the University across the mountain in Seeville. But she lives most of the time in a homeless camp on this side in Wayside. None of this makes sense to me, given her impatience, so I find myself wondering how much is true. 

I think that most of it must be, but all of it can't be, because that is the usual state of affairs.
        One of the questions that haunts me in my advancing age has to do with how much truth has to do with what is and how much with what we want to believe. Then, how much can "fact" argue with belief? Beyond that, how is belief established (in us)? And who decides what is fact and on what basis? (Usually on the basis of what who believes in my experience.)
        "Haunt" is the wrong verb. It's closer to "niggles at." The question flew over after I got into bed last night, I could hear it. But it was well above the house, it soon passed over. It didn't keep me awake.
                                           01/01/24
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Addendum: The difference between hypothesis and theory is the first requires testing, the second has been tested and generally approved. But that doesn't mean that it can't still be tested, does it? When it enters the realm of no longer to be tested, it becomes myth.