Mistill*

 Mistill*

Monday through Friday, I mistill* the wisdom of the ancients.

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01.22.18

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 * as opposed to distill (in the sense of “purify of extraneous matter”) - i.e., to garble by extraneous thoughts

Yesterday once more

 Yesterday once more 

Yesterday is Thursday. (Note tense.)

Uncle Albert, asleep after lunch.

I pick up Uncle Albert; we go together to see Dr. Feight. I talk to the doctor, Uncle Albert reads his magazines. We get lunch.

     Or, this Thursday we get lunch. Usually, I make lunch - soup and sandwiches, and often I drink a Pepsi and forego my afternoon cup of coffee. On my current medication, I can drink one cup of coffee in the morning and one in the afternoon. I take the medication at night before I go to bed.

     Usually, I make lunch, but today we get lunch. We meet Axel Sundstrøm and his brother Nils. We have agreed in advance that we’re not going to talk about politics so I can eat with the rest of them; I don’t have to move to another table. [See here.]

Then, damn it all, we talk about religion. I don’t move, but I try not to listen. So, only this much filters through:

     The question seems to be whether religion will survive this century. It’s an “anthropological” question, Axel says. He means that it has to do with whether we anthr­ōpoi need to have a god, or we don’t. “It’s Tillich, isn’t it?” he asks, “that maintains we have in us a ‘god-shaped void’ that is waiting for something to revere, to worship and adore, to rush in to fill it, the void.” Whatever is most important to us at any given time will come in, it will fill us; we will give ourselves to it, we will be guided by it, it will become our god.

     Nils is nodding his big hairy head. I think: Axel is bald because Nils has appropriated his share of hair as well as his own. Uncle Albert appears to be dozing, his eyes are closed. Then, he wakes up, they open. “You said ‘Tillich,’” he looks at Axel. Axel nods his head. Uncle Albert closes his eyes again.

     We wait.

“Two problems,” he says, coming to.

     We wait some more.

     “One, the shit that others fill us with.” He looks at Axel, then at Nils. “I mean you guys,” he says. (I know what he means. As soon as we start talking about what’s important to us, there will be someone that will want to explain to us what we mean. “Yes, I know what you’re saying,” they’ll say. “Let me explain it to you.” Preachers. Teachers. Others that think they’re the “adults in the room.”)

     “Thus,” Uncle Albert goes on, “God becomes religion.” He closes his eyes.

Kent Tekulve pitching in the fog
to no one, Pittsburgh, 1977.

Nils holds up his hand to interrupt. It’s an odd thing to watch: Nils holds up his hand, and, though Uncle Albert can't see it, his eyes remain closed, Axel reaches over, takes hold of the hand, and puts it back down on the table, then leaves his own hand on top of it.

     “Two,” Uncle Albert says, eyes blinking open. “And this would be no end of frustrating for the explainers if you were self-aware enough to see it: We’re all polytheists. What is more important than anything else, what we give ourselves over to this morning, is different from what was most important, what we gave ourselves to last night. We rolled over. We went to sleep. We bumbled through our dreams like bees from flower to flower, and we woke up coated with a different pollen.

     “Add to that, when we get out of bed to write down our dreams, we change them. We add a mountain here and there to make them more solid, though then we color the sea orange, forests yellow, the grass teal.” He stops. “Serial polytheists,” he says then.

Axel lets go of Nils’ hand, and Nils says - his hand loosed, he thinks he has to say something - he swallows and says, “What?”

     Uncle Albert shakes his head. His eyes close again.

01.18.18

The epilogist's colophon - Ecclesiastes 12:9-14

 The epilogist’s colophon 

from Ezra Nehemiah’s commentary on Ecclesiastes (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2009, p. n - 4) —

 

He (the “Epilogist”) is just walking it back.

XII. 9 Besides being a wise man, Qoheleth was also a teacher and an editor of note.  10 He was good with words, especially at making them say what he wanted them to.  11 Truly wise men’s words are like goads or like nails—the wounds are worth collecting.  12 But of any more than that, watch out, my son. More and more books are coming out, don’t wear yourself out paying attention to any of them.  13 Instead [of reading]—or listening [to writers], fear God and keep his commandments. Forget the rest:   14 God is the one that judges—everything seen and unseen, everything good or evil. [Don’t judge yourself—Numbers 15:39!]

Notes

xii. 9.  The reader will have noted that חקר and תקר  are united asyndetically unless they’re not.

     10.  The MT vocalizes  מאזנים as a passive participle, better to read it (revocalize it) as an infinitive absolute.

     11.   דרבנות is a hapax legomenon, as is  אספה also in v 11 and  להג in v 12. Jerome translates the first of these as  stimuli and the last as meditation.

     13.  Fabianski’s essay on preference for the niphil perfect participle over the plural cohortative to translate נשׄמע is well worth reading again.

     14.  Note the absence of the definite article before  מעשה . There are lots of ways to massage the Hebrew to make a translation say what we want.

Commentary

The Epilogist—as scholars like to call him—is no fan of the Writer—Qoheleth (or Koheleth or the Preacher or the Teacher or the Sarcast, the Crab, or the Foghorn, let me remind you, before we part, dear reader, of some of the possibilities). Underlying every word of these last five verses (the 218th through 222nd) of the book is the notion that if you have read this far, you’ve wasted your time; don’t waste more by going back and reading again, forget as quickly as you can as much as you can of what you have read. In fact, God himself is It, only God himself is It and that’s the end of it (period); best quit reading altogether. Starting now.

     (The “Don’t judge yourself—Numbers 15:39!” added at the end in some manuscripts is the rough equivalent of Rockin’ Rollen Stewart’s holding up at the 1980 Masters a “Jesus Saves” placard with John 3:16 on his T-shirt. “Don’t judge yourself” means for the sign-waving Epilogist both “Don’t judge your own actions” and “Don’t judge for yourself.”(See 11:9 and comment.) “God will judge (period).”

     Qoheleth would surely add, “unless He decided not to.”

01.18.18

Shaggy dog story

 Shaggy dog story 

Sundstrøm’s brother has written a letter to the editor. In it he catalogs the epithets members of his own party, allies, have used to label the president - “bloviating ignoramus” (George Will), “moron” (Rex Tillerson), “[engaging in intercourse] idiot” (Rupert Murdoch), “pathological liar” (Ted Cruz), “dumb as [excrement]” (Gary Cohn), a “cancer on conservatism” (Rick Perry). Then he suggests that name-calling is both juvenile and unhelpful, even when it is accurate.

     And there the letter ends.

Uncle Albert pointed it out to me - on his phone. “The rare man that knows where to stop,” he said: “in mediis rebus.

     “Unlike yesterday’s guest preacher,” he said.

     I said, “I thought you said of him he never should have started.”

01.15.18

Fogbound

 Fogbound 

from Ezra Nehemiah’s commentary on Ecclesiastes (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2009, p. 1) –

INTRODUCTION

A commentary on Ecclesiastes is a commentary on a commentary - for there is nothing new under the sun - a commentary on a commentary on an imaginary “Dear John” letter from God. The earlier commentary was written by an aging man, who still sought to enjoy his breakfast before going off to teach, who took a nap in his office after lunch, and who came home to a sherry before dinner, a grandfather who relished helping his grandchildren with their homework, even if he sent them out afterward to chase after the wind. He was a widower, who went to bed not longer after they did, read briefly, and turned out the light knowing that it was only in his imagination that he heard the footsteps of Abishag the Shunemite coming to climb into bed with him and warm him up.

     The present commentary is written by another teacher for students as maddeningly religious as the first teacher’s, students who, instead of looking into commentaries, should be eating too much, drinking too much, falling in love, staying up too late chasing the wind toward the dawn. But they would rather, it seems, read books by the light of fog. What can you do?

01.12.18

Golden Globules

 Golden Globules 

Nils Sundstrøm is Axel’s brother, younger by a year. (There were five of them, Axel,* Nils, April, Mai, and Sigirid. There still are - five of them.)

     The brothers both became Lutheran pastors, but Nils has left his church. Whether he has demitted or left the church I don’t know. But he’s left his church and come to live with his brother. Neither is married. Neither has ever been married as far as I can tell. They’re both fusspots.

Corner Coffee

Or, Axel is; and Nils may be. He seems to be, but I have just met him - I shouldn’t rush to judgment.

     I met both of them for coffee this morning. Axel was surprisingly light-hearted and therefore said little. Nils was anxious and angry. He lit on the Golden Globe awards as the reason; but it was not the cause, I am almost certain.

He said, chirping between coughs:

     “I don’t watch award shows, so why do I read about them? I don’t watch, I can’t see why anyone would. And I wish no one did, then I wouldn’t have anything to read - about them and the vain, vaporous snark that passes in the coverage for middlebrow wisdom. Deeper than a puddle but not as deep as a well. Drainage-ditch deep. Wise-dom.

     “Read the speeches out of the splash of the context: one emotional cliché (emocli - how’s that for a word? Write it down, trademark it for me.), one emocli gurgling after another. A high school reunion only the cool kids get to go to. (Maybe the AV Club, so they can have it on the record.) The cool kids. The cool, cruel kids.

     “Headline this morning: Hollywood Does What Washington Can’t (to Frank Bruni’s piece in the New York Times). (Note that I don’t say The Times. That's Easternnese; I limped here - to impose myself on my poor brother - from west of the divide.) Hollywood Does What Washington Can’t - because in Hollywood there are no consequences. They don’t have to do anything about what they say. Should read Hollywood Says What Washington Doesn't.

     “Again, the cool-kids-only reunion. They can say about the warm anything they want; there are none of us - the not-so-damn-cool - none of them [He made a face as if he'd bitten into raw rhubarb.] none of the deplorably great unwashed there to invite them (the oh-so-cool) outside and, if they dismiss the invitation with the wave of a hand [He gestured with the back of his, a graceful whine, “Please. Please, fuck-off.”], to punch them in the nose right then and there.

     “Self-satisfaction: it’s not a trait you’d think people would want to put on display.”

He held his fuck-off index finger up, took a sip of coffee: “What do interpretive artists - actors, especially - have to be self-satisfied about anyway? It escapes me completely. They are all prostitutes to creative artists first and to their drooling public foremost.”

     He paused: “And don’t suggest I don’t know what I’m talking about either. I was a preacher, remember.”

01.08.18

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 * For the full Axel story, click here and follow the links.

Cold

 Cold 

My cold. I wake up with it, having slept on my right side, with my right eye slipping backward out of the socket and slithering both oily and gritty down my right nostril to drip out of my nose, eventually onto my shirt-front, already damp with blood from the gash in my throat, tiny woodsmen having stood on my shoulders all night, sawing back and forth, back and forth with a dull blade.

     I asked mel ball to draw it for me, but he said he couldn’t do the woodmen. They would lend too comic a note; by my own description, the cold was tragic. Besides, he didn’t believe them.

     01.04.18