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
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 * 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.