Jonahwocky

Der Philosoph

January 25, 2015

Zirkus Schopenhauer

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes – and ships – and Cousin Jack”

My cousin Jack has appeared in these pixels before. (See here, here and here.) But I haven’t told his story, and it seemed right to tell some of it before outing him in what follows. Jack Cousins was born in the year of his birth and disappeared on the day of his disappearance. In between he was the sunniest child of us all and the most bitter young man, running smack dab from one into the other, straight from five before noon into one a.m., for no reason that anyone else could tell – no one pushed him that any of us knows of. No reason that anyone can tell, and he was never in the mood to explain.

     To call his black humor a “mood” is to trivialize it, which is exactly what he would wish, but his deep, deep pessimism – in the philosophical sense: his absolute certainty that we lived in the worst of all possible worlds – was real as well as philosophical: It was a habit of heart as much as head, in his spirit as in his blood as in his brain.

     So he left college when we all did, pre-medical degree in hand, took a year, as he said “to find myself, because I have quite clearly gone missing,” and entered seminary. A year later he dropped out. He dropped in and out and in and out again, graduated “with highest downers” (his words), and was ordained by the Presbyterian Church, which he served in “the smuggest and dowdiest, leanest and most crapulous parishes” in the Carolinas, three of them in eleven years until the day he served no longer, giving three weeks’ notice effective the end of his three weeks’ vacation. In short, he wouldn’t be back. Indeed, the notice indicated that I would come in and box up his things and collect whatever might be due him or nothing at all he didn’t care peace be with you and your legitimate and illegitimate children now and for ever and ever more amen.

     As far as any of his siblings, cousins, and friends could tell, Jack had withdrawn all he had invested anywhere, a tidy sum, especially given his dusty way of living. There were left for me to collect at his office a thousand books (close to five hundred commentaries) and two crammed file cabinets of papers and from his apartment four plates, four knives four forks, four spoons, a fry and a sauce pan, a wooden spoon and a spatula, a desk and chair, a mattress on the floor and two lamps, and, finally, a large assortment of mechanical pencils.

     This was eighteen years ago this week. I have not seen him since nor heard from – or even about – him except through Uncle Albert (who is not Jack’s uncle either; see here), who gets, he says, very occasional post cards from “an undisclosed province of our neighbor to the north.”  I once asked Uncle A if the post cards were in French, thinking to narrow the search if I ever decided to undertake it. “Yes,” he said, “and in English as well, with smatterings of Greek, Hebrew, and, I believe, Sanskrit – I can’t read it.” “Do you write him back?” “Didn’t I just say I don’t know Sanskrit?”

This could be a romantic tale of sorts were not Jack, as I said, the deepest, darkest pessimist I have ever known even if laughing all the way. “And if the laugh is bitter,” he said once, quoting Nathanael West if I’m not wrong: “If the laugh is bitter, I must laugh at the laugh.” I suspect it was West. Jack did love West. And Swift. And Juvenal. And Evelyn Waugh.

     I started rooting around in his papers three years ago – almost entirely sermons and pages and pages and pages of notes on the passages he preached from, all handwritten, both sides of the page but every other line: long quotations from commentaries, interspersed with observations, interpretations, and explanations of his own, some of which responded directly to the commentators, much of which veered off on tangents heading into the night.  For example . . . I pulled this out from the second of three folders on Jonah – because today’s Old Testament reading is Jonah 3:1-5.  It is, as much of Jack’s writing is, stitched together with “so,” because for him one damn thing does follow the other.

     One other thing to say about Jack’s writing: he doesn’t have, or he doesn’t often exercise, the gift for euphemism of Uncle Albert.

 

a

What I seed.

January 20, 2015 - Seed 

I had a note from Nashe: “Still reading, but . . .” (I hate “but” – it bodes no good.) “ . . . you’re not an essayist, explaining things you don’t quite understand yourself: elaboration. (Leave that to better egos.) Think describe, compress. Write a post – what it’s called, right? – sonnet-length, no more - 140 syllables. And get outside your head. Into the world of things.”

          Easier challenged than accomplished. This morning’s kitchen table, after last night’s cooking for sick friends: cookbook, candle, cumin, Kindle; notebook, newspaper; headphones, crossword; two lists, two pens, one pencil, one plate; one sunflower seed.

 j

Can't Trust That Day

January 19, 2015 - Monday, Monday 

i

Almost every morning – or every Monday morning: Roz is up and in the shower, and I’m lying on my back in bed, hands clasped behind my neck, trying to look through the ceiling (and the attic and the roof) to the sky - and I say (half-aloud!), “He walked away. Just . . . left!” And I am “he,” but I don’t. I go to the shower, and I get dressed and walk downtown to work.

          I don’t leave, because I don’t know – any more than a small boy running away from home does – where I could possibly be going. But where the boy might just wander – until he came to a street he wasn’t allowed to cross – I can’t; it’s no longer possible to go without going somewhere, without some sort of destination. Among the lessons I’ve learned: Life must lead toward something, dammit!

ii

How little we change, how little we learn, from sixteen to fifty-six. My mother was right: adulthood is a myth. We hunt and gather and pick and peck, then sit down at the kitchen table to put the pieces together – this way and that way and another, but there is always one, often more, that (no matter how much we squint it) doesn’t fit; so we have to start again. We’ll get it though. We will get it!

          How little we learn and how much much we unlearn – particularly how to be idle, “the delicious sensation of lying on thick grass, far away from everyone, alone” filling up with the sun. That’s Turgenev (First Love). Here’s a less likely source, Evelyn Waugh (from Brideshead Revisited):

The languor of Youth – how unique, and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things are part of life itself; but languor – the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, . . . the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse – that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

We unlearn ease. We come to believe, “Life is hard, y’know.” Because however many times you take the pieces apart and put them back together, there’s always that one left over, and there’s the damned adult necessity of getting it all to fit. 

          Plus, there’s death – and taxes. And death.

          But there is a meanwhile; so why not time (come summer!) to lie in the grass again and fill up with sun? And even in winter, to lie in bed or on the couch to wonder and to whimsy? - because it’s not just death you can’t escape (because, rich enough, you can escape taxes); it’s the absurd: From the first staggering step out of bed in the morning, you are veering into nonsense. What can you do but wonder?

iii

Here’s a word we need, butso. Not but – meaning “however.” Or so – “ it follows that.” Butso – indicating what one doesn’t want will follow . . .

iv

. . . disasters “choreographed by Ignorance, as though it were some god from a tragedy” (Lucian, Slander), uncaring, because no god worth his salt, her pepper, or its cumin can really be bothered by what happens among us absurd beings.

v

It’s difficult to overestimate the value of distance, a cynic’s eye view, a calm, deliberate standing-aside, though let it be well-addled with irony and thank god for it.

vi

To be left behind when “he” does walk away: envy of, anger at, frustration with; expectations or fear of; great hopes for; deep trust in. No one can leave everything, however, so let’s be reasonable: he can keep the shirt on his back and what he can fit loosely into his Gladstone bag. (I suggest a clean white shirt, a good pair of khakis, a change of underwear and socks, a sturdy jacket, and a paperback good enough you can swap it for another.)

          But then . . . here’s the inevitable rub. He will stop to pick up something, some gewgaw he thinks he might need sometime.

  lucky

vii

“What are you doing?” Roz asks, though she can see, as I can when I look: I’m still on my back in bed, staring for the sky through the roof, the attic, the ceiling, and before she interrupted, my eyelids. “Oh,” I say, “I’m getting up. I think . . . ” I pretend to be making the effort. “Am I getting up?” I ask. She pretends to look closely, shakes her head as if astonished: such effort to no avail. Feigning pity, she turns to go.

          “Well, wish me luck.”

          She looks back at poor me, trying hard not to mope, not to whine, not to crab, not to obsess, to let things go, really trying. She smiles with a shrug, “Good luck.”

           The shrug. That’s it! “Shrug it off.” What’s the origin of the phrase? I imagine a king shrugging off the robe of state and taking to the streets. Turning away again, she smiles innocently as if she didn’t know that (just as Ignorance loves the ignorant) Luck favors the lucky.

 

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat

January 17, 2015

Semi-automatic Pens

Voltaire (below, photo taken on the day he received tenure)

                                  on tolerance (from Dictionnaire philosophique):

                                       “We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each 

                                         other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.”*

Given the human condition, pardoning each other’s folly (or follies) that is "the first law of nature," not adherence to the truth damn-all. As if we had the truth, not some ridiculous, half-assed version of it! That is the human condition: we don’t have the, only the half-assed. (In a previous entry, on “Testicles,” Voltaire has allowed: “I affirm nothing: God keep me from doing so. I only doubt.”)

Here (on “Tolerance”) Voltaire goes on: “It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”  That goes without saying, but it doesn’t prevent its happening. For there are such monsters, “men whom centuries of bigotry have made powerful” and who “have other powerful men beneath them, and these have still others,” and they “hire fanatics to cry at the top of their voices, ‘Respect my master’s absurdities, tremble . . . and keep your mouth shut.’”

Zipping my lip!

___________________

          *for the French, click on Voltaire

              for the English for the Arabic, click here

Bed Head

Lucian of Samosata

January 9, 2015

You have to caw before you can auk. 

Another every-winter-weekday morning: coming to in the dark, crick in neck, colon full of gas, and in my left ear the cultured rasp of public radio– yesterday’s bumbling, bombast, and bombings no different from the day-before’s.  Talk remains cheap; life is two-for-a-penny.

     Roz rolls over, pulls at my ear as if to say, “Are you listening?”  She will, but only for a minute or two, before she decides – as she does every-winter-weekday morning - that her listening can really make no damn difference, and she’ll get up to begin her morning.  And I’ll fall blessedly out of earshot into a humming, colorless doze.

     “If you want to eat breakfast with me?” is the next I hear; and I ooze out of half-life, tumble out of bed, spill shivering down the stairs.

     And I will eat breakfast with her; then she’ll leave to walk the dog, who looks at me askance before trundling after her.   I climb the stairs, stop by the bathroom, and roll back into . . .  Ah, bed! I won’t get up today; I won’t get up again.  I’ll wallow in the sheets until they disintegrate or kingdom come, like Proust. 

     “I’m leaving,” she calls when they’re back from their walk.

     I come back out of my fog.  “Yeah.  Okay.” 

     “Are you getting up?”

     “Not today.”  And, as long as I can I’ll keep pushing today away; and it will keep leaning back in, annoyingly light-hearted given the wars and rumors of war: talk is cheap; life is cheap.  Leaning in:

     “Just swing your feet over the edge, drop down.  See? – gravity.  Next, you know, you’ll be walking on the damn ground.  No putting on airs like you’re Proust.

     “In short, get out of bed, you lazy shiftless, pseudo-intellectual, slug.”  And shit! – I do.  Outside, the wind.

r

I should have mentioned before now that Jack Lo was out of the hospital almost before I got there, home the evening of the same day.  I talked to him the day after.  He was sore and logy but full of misinformation.  “It's an ill wind that blows nobody good,” he said.  “The doctors got to test out some new equipment on me.  And, simple enough: they put this shotgun loaded with gold pellets loaded with radioactivity - with a digital sight  - right up my ass and pulled the trigger.  That was it.  Reeled the target in, took a look at it, and sent me off to recovery.  As soon as I could stand up and move my legs, they sent me home.  You didn’t need to come out.” 

Time melts.

January 5, 2015

New Year's Resolution: Patience 

Walter de la Mare’s not-so-simple little poem, “Away,” is on the healing power of time, how much it lets us forget. 

               Away  

          There is no sorrow 

           Time heals never;                              
           No loss, betrayal, 
           Beyond repair. 
5         Balm for the soul, then,
           Though grave shall sever
           Lover from loved
           And all they share;
           See the sweet sun shines, 

10        The shower is over,
           Flowers preen their beauty,
           The day how fair!
           Brood not too closely
           On love, or duty; 
15        Friends long forgotten
           May wait you where
           Life with death
           Brings all to an issue;
           None will long mourn for you,                                               
20        Pray for you, miss you,
           Your place left vacant,
           You not there.

Time, like an ever-melting cheese, bears all its sons away.

“Brood not too closely / on love, or duty . . .”

     Turn the poem over, and it is on the persistence of memory: it does not persist; it is too distractible. A memory does not continue; it returns. That means it has gone away, and we’re not sure where - into the next room? the next town? the next state? the other side of the world? It may come back when we invite it, but it may just as well send regrets - it’s indisposed or unavoidably detained; there’s too far to come; or, it doesn’t want to just now. Yet, it may drop by unannounced, as if it were always welcome. When it comes, we may recognize it immediately; or we may be completely confounded, it is so altered - or we are.

     Dali’s famous painting The Persistence of Memory with its image of the melting pocket watches, suggests that time itself is soft, not solid and certain so that it cannot change shape. It hardens and melts – like Dali’s inspiration, or so he said, a Camembert cheese turning to paste in the sun.

p

Waiting for Jack Lo

January 3, 2015
New Year’s Resolutions: Punctuality

Our county hospital was built fifteen years ago – “state of the art,” meaning bright, shiny; new car smell. Now the upholstery is worn; the car smells of dust, dog, and spilt coffee.

     “T’s shit,” the guy behind me is “jes’ sayin.’” The guy he’s sayin’ it to hawks up an interrogatory hunk of phlegm. “Yer rite,” he says. It’s because “you cain’t trust nothin’ from nobody”.

     He doesn’t mean that even honest people can have wrong information. Or that our ears aren’t what they were when we were hunter-gatherers: they’ve become duller, and the interfering distance from earhole to brainpan is greater.

     So, Jack Lo’s surgery was at eight-thirty, not ten, and I’ve missed out if I wanted to see him beforehand, which I did.

     “Fitty-cents for a damn stick of bacon” in the cafeteria; “near nine damn dollars for breakfast.” And now, in the surgery waiting room coffee is free (while “Shit!” he paid for his: “Nobody tole me.”).

Guide me, O thou great iHova

We are a noisy, rank, ugly species, mottled angry-pink and saggy-gray; leaking blood, shit, pus, piss, tears, sweat, air - stink. As Martial knew, and Juvenal knew better; as Swift knew, and Hogarth, Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, Aristophanes, George Grosz. My heroes. Did these misanthropes necessarily hate themselves as much as they hate others? Not necessarily – it wasn’t a requirement that they did; but it had to help.

Leaking air constantly: not just breathing; farting, belching, hacking, whining and whistling through our noses; talking! Yet only these two in the crumbling surgery waiting room talk with each other; most are on their shiny new-car-smelling phones talking or tweeting about: health insurance, hair products, rain, skin rashes, weight, rot, death.

     We’re increasingly trapped in these ever-thinner digital brains. So, we are no longer able to hear the sky, see the colors of a G-minor seventh, lick words off a page, touch anything outside of ourselves.

So modern-day misanthropists? - They have to hate themselves, right? Because for most, there is no one else.

k