No rest for the active

 No rest for the active 

I was in Axel’s odd study with its huge desk, huge high-backed, leather desk chair - furniture more for an executive suite than a pastor’s study; but there is nothing of the executive about Axel’s desk, covered with loose papers, stacks of paper, stacks of books, books splayed open. And the shelves, behind the cherry desk and all along one wall, beautiful built-in shelves but chock-a-block with beaten-up books, not frames for tasteful bric-a-brac. I was in Axel’s office; we were in a pause in our conversation, when Nils burst in. “You,” he barks at me. He’s always barking. He bursts in, barking.

     “This poem you read in your blog last week - guy lying in a hammock, looking around, listening around, nosing around, some farm in Minnesota. What’s that all about?”

     He’s red as if he’d been running or as if my reading the poem* had been a personal insult. He crashes into the seat beside me across from Axel, who takes his feet off his grand desk and stands up, slowly as an old man. Nils is a foot away from me, no more, but I can feel his heat. “Does he have a fever?” I’m wondering. I lean a bit away.

     Axel is getting a book off his “poetry” shelf, the VINTAGE BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY (sixty-five outstanding poets including Sylvia Plath  Robert Lowell  James Merrill  Louise Glück . . .). I watch him, absorbed. He’s looking at the Table of Contents. He sits down; he reads, slowly:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

     by James Wright

Over my head, I see a bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

“Boy, that is a pisser,” he says to his brother.

     Though he can’t quite sit still, Nils has cooled down. He has stopped running; he is sitting. Still:

     “Okay, smartass,” he growls at Axel. “Either of you smartasses,” he looks at me. “He has wasted his life, the guy in the hammock. I don’t get it. Why write about it?”

     Axel looks at me. I shrug. Axel looks at his brother. He (Axel) shrugs. “What’s the problem?” he asks Nils.

     “Of course, he’s wasting his time. That’s the purpose, isn’t it? - lying in a hammock, doing nothing.”

     “But he doesn’t say ‘I’m wasting my time,’” Axels says. “He says, ‘I’ve wasted my life’ - by not wasting enough time, I gather.”

     “By spending too much of it not lying in a hammock on William Duffy’s farm,” I say. Then I get hoity for some reason, maybe too warmed by Nils’ heat. “It’s a kind of carpe diem poem,” I say.** “Seize the day by leaving the day - or the world - behind.”

“What’s he got against it, the world?” Nils is barking again.

     Axel looks up from the book. He looks at his brother and shakes his head. “If you don’t get that, you’re not going to get the poem,” he says. He starts to say something else, but

     “Wait a minute,” Nils pushes in. “This isn’t any kind of that mindfulness shit, is it?”

     I assure him it is not.

     Nils says, “Good.” And he leaves.

“No?” Axel asks.

     “No.” I look at him. “Nothing to do with mindfulness,” I say. “Nothing to do with that shit at all.

     Axel says, “Good.” And he sits down.

10.14.19

_______________

  * James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Click here.

 ** In the dark of December 2014, I spent several posts trying to explain carpe diem to myself and twelve others (the readership at the time, before it declined). That begins here and goes on a ways, soliciting the help of Horace, Abraham Cowley, Ernest Dowson, Jean Garrigue, Dave Brubeck, and The Chiffons, among others. To hear two carpe diem poems from that series, Abraham Cowley’s sweet and gentle “The Epicure” and Tom Nashe’s (since revised) rendering of Horace’s tu ne quaesieris, click here.

 *** Who is Axel? Here. Who is Nils? Here.

Supererogation

 Supererogation 

I’m taking these walks. Practically every day. It gets to nine o’clock in the morning, and I don’t know what to do. Even now, it’s often hot already, but if I cleave to the shadows of the buildings - and they are getting longer - I can at least walk downtown and back.

So, today. I walk down to Crowder Street, then down Crowder to Division, down Division to Levy. I am waiting on the corner of Levy to cross Johnson. I’m on the northeast corner at the crosswalk. The light turns green, and I step into the crosswalk. I hesitate to make sure the transit bus is stopping before it turns left. It starts forward, but then it stops. I continue walking. The bus turns and roars away; and a man in a pickup truck behind it, yells at my back: “Asshole!”

     I keep walking, but I’m starting to stew. Anger begets anger in my experience. I try not to think about it - being yelled at, called an asshole; at the same time I’m trying to think of all the things I might have yelled back, but I only get to two: I might have flipped him the bird over my shoulder; or I might have shouted: “Takes one to know one.” Or here’s a third: “God bless you, sir.”

     Instead, I keep walking though I find myself taking a more roundabout way than normal. I don’t want someone so angry because he had to wait a few seconds for a man in a crosswalk to chase me down to yell some more or challenge me to a duel. Or beat me up, which didn’t sound as if it would be hard for him to do. The voice belonged to a young man; I am not a young man.

     At the same time - this is the nature of my stewing - I want to have a rational argument with this irrational jerk. Who has the right of way - the pedestrian in the crosswalk or the driver turning left from Levy onto Johnson? If a car had been coming up Levy from the south, would he have yelled at the driver because he would have had to wait for it to clear the intersection before he turned left? Clearly, he would not have.

On the way home, I circle by Grace, the Lutheran church where Axel is.* The side of the church is bright with the sun but not white with it, and I can see the fluorescent lights on in Axel’s study. I ring the bell and look up. His face is at the window. He extends his palm, “Wait!”

     I wait. He opens the door. “Sorry,” he says, “Frampton’s off today.” That’s what he calls his secretary, a thin woman about my age named Lucy Burke, “Frampton” because she looks like Peter Frampton - of the farewell tour.  I always wonder then if she was as beautiful as he was when both were young. Usually, if you ring the bell, she just buzzes you in. She’s a trusting sort; no one calls her “asshole.” But Axel someone must have - someones, many times - because he always checks to see who is there. He peers out his window; then, he comes down to let you in.

“What?” he says.

     “A theological question,” I say. “Do you have time?”

     “Why not ask Miss Virginia?” he asks, turning in a way that invites me to follow him up the stairs to his study. He means the priest at St. Jude’s, where I take Uncle Albert to church. She was Miss Virginia - in 2004, I think.**

     “A theological question,” I say.

     “And?”

     “I want a Lutheran answer.”

     He goes behind his desk, sits down. I sit down across from him. He puts his feet up and looks across his knees at me.

     “I don’t want to get into a conversation about how I feel about the matter,” I say.

     “And centering prayer is not the answer,” he says. “Mindfulness is not the answer.” I can see he’s thinking. “Imagining yourself on the beach in the Caribbean: Feel the prick of the sun on your skin, hear the waves bumping against the shore, smell the salt and sand. Not the answer,” he says.

     “Rule of three,” he says. “Spiritual practices division.”

Thomas Aquinas by m ball

I tell him about my walk.

     “You should ask a priest,” Axel says.

     “Why?”

     “I don’t think you’re in Luther territory.”

     I shrug. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

     “More in Aquinas territory,” he says. “But,” he says. “I’ll take a stab at it.”

“Before I get to the Dumb Ox, however . . . I won’t ask you how you felt about it, but I’ll opine that it is best to walk away from people yelling ‘Asshole!’ at you. They’re not inviting you into a conversation.

     “But you asked me what you should have done. Point,” he raises his right index finger. “Point: It was not wrong of you to cross the street when the light turned green, but you might have waited for the bus and the pickup to turn before you did.

     “Why?” he raises his index and middle finger: point two: “Consider ‘The Good Samaritan.’ The question that prompts Jesus to tell the story is . . . ?”

     “Who is my neighbor?”

     “But the answer isn’t what most think it is. Look again at the logic of the parable - when you get home,” Axel says. “Your neighbor is the one you go out of your way to help; and if he is your neighbor, then you are also his.

     “It is from this parable that the term supererogatory or supererogation comes. From Jerome’s translation of the Greek into Latin. Here it is, just a minute.” He drops his feet off his desk, swivels around in his chair, and returns with a coffee-table-size book, which he puts in front of him and leafs through until he finds the page he wants. “Curam illius habe,” he reads with surprising facility. “et quodcumque supererogaveris, ego cum rediero reddam tibi. ‘Take care of him and whatever you expend beyond’ - meaning the more than enough I estimate I’ve already given you - ‘I will certainly pay you back.’

     “So, as you know, . . . Nod your head,” Axel says, and I do. “As you know, both Luther and your Calvin reprehended supererogation because of the use the Roman church put it to, selling the merit accumulated by those that went beyond the call of duty to those that didn’t wish to rise to it, assuming they had the means to pay: The slackers could reimburse the saints by contributions to the pope’s treasury. But that wasn’t the only reason the Reformers thought it, supererogation, was so much pigswill: There was also the matter that not even the most saintly could earn more in good than they spent in evil. All depended on God’s liberal grace. If there could be anything supererogatory it would be that, God’s grace.

     “On the other hand, I can’t believe either Calvin or - even - Luther could have objected to Aquinas’ notion that it was good to aim at going beyond the fulfilling - or letter - of the law, assuming our reach could exceed our grasp. Or yours. Your doing that, going beyond the letter of the law, humbly waiting for the bus and truck, might in this case have forestalled the anger of your pickup driver. Certainly, it would have checked his calling you ‘Asshole’; and you would not have stewed the rest of your walk. So your act of, we’ll call it ‘supererogation’ even if supererogation is not really possible, could have had two benefits.

     “But,” Axel looks up from the book finally and raises his first, middle, and now ring finger, “you would not have waited for the second purpose of avoiding stewing about being called an asshole because to perform an act for one’s own reward would not be humble or unselfish.” And he closes the book, swivels around in his chair, and puts it back.

* * * * *

I am always amazed at the shit that Axel knows. When he turned around again, I said so: “It’s amazing the shit you know,” I said. He shrugged as if (unfortunately) he couldn’t help it. Likely he can’t.

10.10.19

_______________

 * Axel’s story is here.

** More on Miss Virginia here.

Interlude (2)

 Interlude (2)  

It’s been awhile since . . . last March - Anne Bradstreet’s “In Memory of My Dear

Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet” - and the October before - Three by by Su Tung P'o from Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese.

It’s been awhile, but once again, and briefly:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm 

in Pine Island, Minnesota

by James Wright

10.08.19

Interlude

Pumpkin Spice

 Interlude 

Dear Newspaper of Record,

     I have died and gone to hell. I am content here. Please, cancel my online subscription; I do not wish to know any more of what is going on there. I am no longer

               Sincerely yours,

           E.T. Riich

10.07.19

Bible Friday comes on a Monday.

 Stomp and Circumstance 

from Glorianna Gruntman’s commentary on 2 Kings (in the Incoherent Series, forthcoming from Rantrage Press) —

Because ain’t we who we are? –

V. 1 Naaman, who commanded the army of the king of Syria, was in high favor with him; the king thought he was a “great man,” because God had made him victorious over Israel. A “mighty man of valor,” then, was Naaman, but he was also a leper.

     2 Now on one of their raids, the Syrians had captured and kidnapped a little maid of Israel; she served on Naaman’s wife.   3  One day she said to her, the little maid to Naaman’s wife, “You know, there is a prophet in Samaria that could cure your husband.” 

     4 When Naaman heard that, he went to the king and told him what his wife’s maid had told her.  5 And the king of Syria said, “Then, go there. I’ll send a letter to the king of Israel.” So Naaman went, after gathering together ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten festal garments to take with him.

      6 And he brought the letter of the king of Syria to the king of Israel, which read, “You know my commander, Naaman. I am sending him to you to have his leprosy cleansed.” 7 But when the king of Israel read the letter, he went on a tear, yelling at anyone that would listen: “Am I God that I can cure a man of leprosy?” On a tear: “This is just another way for the king of Syria to start something with me.” 

     8 Somehow Elisha the prophet heard about all of this, how the king of Israel had gone on a tear. And Elisha sent his own note to the king, suggesting that he was throwing a fit over nothing because wasn’t he (Elisha) a prophet of God? “Send the leper to me,” the note concluded.

     9 So with the king of Israel’s directions, Naaman came with all the pomp and circumstance and circumstance and pomp he had brought with him, and he stopped at the house of Elisha and waited for the prophet to come out. Only the prophet did not come out. 10 He sent his man with a note, “Do this. Go to the Jordan River and wash in it seven times, and you shall be clean.” 

     11 But Naaman yelled at the man, “Is this it? Surely he is coming out, the prophet. Surely he is going to call out to his God, he’s going to wave his hand over me; he’s going to cure me! 12 We have rivers in Damascus, the Abana and Pharpar, better than all the waters of Israel. I could have washed in them.” And Naaman stomped away, and his pomp and his circumstance, his circumstance and his pomp, stomped away with him. 

Notes

v. 1.  leper. Hebrew מְצֹרָע-חַיִל, LXX λελεπρωμένος, being a leper. The Greek can be almost anything as long as it’s on something, so molds and fungus on clothes or athlete’s foot, boils, scabies, psoriasis, eczema, vitiligo on a person. It doesn’t mean Hansen’s disease, which wasn’t known at the time. Moreover, Naaman’s case couldn’t have been a severe one as he has access to the courts of the king of Syria and the king of Israel. So, it’s probably not even leprē but what Herodotus called leukē, the same malady that Miriam is struck with in Numbers 12, whiteness! For a full discussion, see Alphorn (1948).

     11.   Elisha the prophet. םהָאֱלֹהִי-ישׁאִ. So, literally, “man of God”; this is how Elisha thinks of himself. But except for the poor king of Israel, everyone in this story thinks highly of himself.

Commentary

The affable Sw­ēdëistic version of what in it is called, “Fourth Kingdoms” ends the Naaman story with verse 12 as the Miles Gloriosus Naaman goes stomp, stomp, stomping away, livid with rage - as if he could get any whiter. We probably don’t like that ending as instead of extolling God’s healing power (in the version of the story where he washes in the Jordan as Elisha recommends and becomes clean), it reminds us of what snotty-smug shits most of us are. Take in your imagination the role of each of the major characters: Naaman the general that can’t stand the boil on the back of his neck. His king that can’t wait to send a note to the king of Israel that will surely make him tremble. (It does!) Elisha, twice as good as that milksop Elijah - just ask him! (See 2 Kings 2 (especially vv. 23-24. where he proves what a tough guy he is). Only the servants have any humility at all. (We have to include King Joram in this category; he is a servant of the king of Syria as much as “the little maid” is a servant of Naaman’s wife.)

      Other than the servants, then, these are men that float above life; their God forbid they live in it as the rest of us do. (“their God,” because God must be on their side. How could HE not be?) They fly in private jets. They’re whisked from the airport to their suites in cavalcades of black Hummers with black windows. They eat in restaurants closed to cater to their parties. They move and they shake the world.      

      So, let the world shake with their stomping. They have every right to stomp away, like Naaman, whiter than white. If there are conditions on their being cured, they don’t need to be, dammit!

09.30.19

________________

** Note: Glorianna Gruntman grew up in the Sw­ēdëistic Episcopalian tradition. Her mother was suffragan bishop of the Synod of Oregon. She is the twin sister of Gregorius Gruntman, whose commentary on Judges is also available from Rantrage Press. Links to passages from other Rantrage commentaries may be found here.

The fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Part II)

continued from here

 The fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Part II) 

Uncle Albert’s surprise for me - I should say his self-serving surprise: He has subscribed to the NBC Sports Gold Premier League Pass and, with Roz’s connivance* - Can you tell I’m unhappy with this? - arranged for one of his friend Maggie’s friends to install it on our TV. That way he’ll never miss an Arsenal game though I’ll miss today’s much-looked-forward-to Chelsea-Liverpool match while he and I are watching Arsenal-Aston Villa because no more than you can serve both God and Mammon can you watch two matches at the same time. (There are laws of physics as well as truths of religion.)

I admit that the Arsenal match is worth watching.

Uncle Albert and a happy Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang
(drawing - and sunglasses - by m ball)

     Aston Villa gets a shot on goal on its first attack of the game in the fourth minute - Trézeguét to McGinn, who looks dangerous throughout the first third of the first half, getting a second good shot on goal in the eleventh minute before scoring easily in the twentieth - the Villa midfielder is all alone after running straight through Arsenal’s absent defense for across from El Ghazi. In the meantime (in the eleventh minute) Arsenal’s Ainsley Maitland-Niles has gotten his first^† yellow card for tripping El Ghazi from behind.

     Less than twenty minutes (after McGinn’s goal), Maitland-Niles gets his second yellow card and (injury added to insult) hops off the field, assisted by a “physio.” Arsenal will play the remaining 50-plus minutes down a man. Still, the Gunners manage to score, finally! on a penalty kick after defender Björn Engels pulls Guendouzi down inside the penalty area. It’s Nicolas Pépé’s first Premier League goal, cracked straight down the middle as Villa keeper Tom Heaton dives to his left.

     McGinn almost scores again two minutes after that and less than a minute later the whiffle-ball Arsenal defense simply let Jack Grealish go until at the end he skips around Sokratis and slides the ball into Wesley for a tap-in. 2-1.

     Then, Aston Villa seem to go into defensive mode. It works for a while, but Calum Chambers (substituted for Saka on the left at the half) scores in the eightieth minute. Guendouzi hits a well-placed cross into the box at the six-yard line only half-cleared by Villa. Of all the bodies in the box Chambers gets to the loose ball first, poking it into the top corner of the net with the outside of his right boot.

     The final goal comes when Engels makes a second costly error, pulling Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang down just outside the penalty area. And Aubameyang scores, pushing more than pulling the free-kick around the Villa wall and past Heaton who seems never to have seen it.

     And there’s enough noise to wake Uncle Albert, asleep since before Wesley’s goal for Villa. So, he sees the replay. His eyes open with an audible click like a ventriloquiest dummy's. It occurs to me that his boxy tweed jacket, his vest and his tie, look like something Jerry Mahoney might wear. And the 96-year-old's creases that fall from the corners of his mouth toward his chin, they look like Jerry Mahoney, too. His eyes pop open.

     But he’s heard the whole thing. He was never sleeping, not at all, only resting his eyes.

In other news, Liverpool beats Chelsea 2-1, and Greta Thunberg reveals that Arnold Schwarzenegger offered to lend her an electric car.

09.26.19

 _______________

 * Collusion might be a better word. Connivance - which my dictionary defines as “willingness to secretly allow or be involved in wrongdoing” comes ultimately from the Latin conniventia, from connivere ‘shut the eyes (to).’ Everyone’s eyes but mine, I would contend,** were wide open.

  ^† Foreshadowing!

** The better word might be whine, Roz says.

The fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 The fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Part I) 

The evening before, Uncle Albert calls. He apologizes: he needs a ride to church. There’s something in it for me if I will take him, and I don’t have to come forward for the Eucharist - he can get there without my help. The lessons are, he tells me, as follows: Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; and Luke 16:1-13 - in case I want to read ahead.

I don’t want to read ahead, but I do anyway - in my battered Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha that “Sam” Samuelson left behind brand new when he dropped out of school halfway through freshman year. It has his bookplate in it: a candle with a steady flame, Ex Libris above, his name below: Lemuel R. Samuelson.

     In Sam’s Bible, the Psalmist is praising God from the rising of the sun to its setting because He “raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” The Prophet is yelling at the rich because they’re keeping the Lord from doing that. The Apostle is urging prayers for kings. And in the Gospel, Jesus tells a parable that in itself makes a certain amount of sense; then he elaborates in a way that makes no sense at all.

* * * * *

  

Picking up Uncle Albert is no simple matter these days. But that’s not to say that it’s onerous. It’s only a matter of getting him down the steps from his rooming house, steadying him as he gets into the car, pulling him out of the car, and getting him up the stairs into the church. And listening to him on the ride! He’s excited about the sermon he is certain our rector, the former Miss Virginia,* will preach on the Gospel lesson. 

     Particularly, what’s she going to say about Jesus’ saying that God could hardly entrust “true riches” to those that can’t manage their money? What does he mean by that, “managing their money,” if they’re supposed to despise it? For, he quotes, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.”

     “Mammon,” he starts in as I am trying to decide whether or not to run the light at the corner of Division and Crowder, so that I lose track of what he’s saying, but as we’re sliding through the intersection between yellow and red, there’s something about Milton, “the least elected Spirit that fell,” or something like that, “bent down,” something, something.**

     I nod, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

Then, Susan chooses not to preach from the Gospel but from Timothy because (she says anyway) “kings and those in high places” need our prayers if we are going to live quietly and peaceably, able to search for the truth, which we shall surely find if we give ourselves to the mediator that gave himself as a ransom for us all.

     “What a bunch of pious nonsense!” Uncle Albert says. “I thought better of her.”

     I ask him if that means that he no longer does.

     “We can get to your place in time for the kick-off of the West Ham - Man United match,” he says, “if you don’t dawdle.”

     “Then,” he says, “I have a surprise for you.”

     And I say, “Yes. You said. I remember.”

09.24.19

_______________

 * Our rector, Susan, the former Miss Virginia appears in these posts.

** The illustration by Louis Le Breton from Colin de Plancy’s Dictonnaire Infernal. (Click on the image to see the page.) The image is in the public domain.