A knock on the door.

  A knock on the door. 

I looked out the window. It was Axel. I thought, “Thank God, not Nils,” then felt bad for thinking that. But I was glad it was Axel, the older brother, that I saw at  the front door,
holding his hat like at the back door on one of those public television Brit soap operas that call themselves series.
     “Do you want to get a beer?” Axel asked.
     “It’s the middle of the afternoon. Not that! I just finished lunch.”
     “Pretend you're in Germany.”
     “I’d rather have a Guinness.”
     “Pretend you’re in Ireland.”
     “Let me check on Uncle Albert.”
     “He could come with,” Axel said. “Could he?”
     “Yes. We would have to drive. But let me check. I don’t think he’ll want to.”

He didn’t, he was on his phone. I signaled I was going out, did he want to come? He shook his head. I held up my phone, meaning call me if you need anything. He nodded.

The Gaza (from the archives). You can drink outside now.
The city changed the rules during the pandemic.

We drove anyway, to the Gaza. And dove in out of the dusty daylight. The light inside makes you feel as if you are underwater, and the air-conditioning makes you feel like it’s cold water you’re under. There are chairs out front, but they were right on the street.
     Axel wanted to tell me about a parishioner that had stopped by his office that morning.
     “I thought you took Mondays off,” I said.
     “No, Fridays.”
     “Oh.”

This parishioner had asked Axel, “Can you recover your faith after you’ve lost it?” And he  had answered, “Can you lose your faith after it has found you?”
     “I know, you were thinking about the perseverance of the saints,” I said. And Axel said, “Yes. But he wasn’t.” And he went on:

   ‘So,’ I said, ‘When did this start?’
   ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was the day before yesterday, but maybe when I was nine. Until then, I had no sense of myself, only that I was small and powerless, but that was okay. Dependent. Also okay. I didn’t wish, like Eve, to be more. Let God be God, and I could be me. It was good. Not that I would have used those words, those categories. But that was how I felt, I think. I did know about Eve.’ He paused.
     ‘So, say it started when I was nine; and pieces kept falling away, a small piece in high school, another piece in college, in graduate school another. And so on. Until now . . . .’ he paused again. ‘I’m 56 if you were going to ask. 9 + 47.’
   ‘And now it is gone?’
   ‘Yes, I think it is. It is,’ he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Axel said. Because he didn’t know what to say. And the 56-year-old man went on.

   ‘When I ask if it is possible, I mean without becoming tendentious.’
   ‘And that means what?’
   ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in my catechism, the question What is faith like? is answered in a paraphrase of First Corinthians whatever-it-is: Faith is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude; it is not irritable or resentful; it is forgiving. Of the faithful and the unfaithful alike. it doesn’t boast. It doesn’t wave its hand in the air, bursting with the answer. It waits until it is called on then says, quietly, what it knows and what it doesn’t know. For it doesn’t know all things, whatever some of the faithful claim for it.’ He paused. ‘The forgiven faithful, let it be said.’

 “He had been looking right at me,” Axel said. “Then, he looked away, at the books behind my head.”

   ‘Thirteen,’ I said. ‘First Corinthians 13.’
   ‘I don’t think Paul wrote it.’
   ‘No. I don’t think so either.’
   ‘Any more than he wrote Romans whatever-it-is, Nothing can separate us from the love of God, not this or that or sixteen other things. That sounds a little more like him, Paul, but I don’t think it is either.’
   ‘Maybe not.’

“Wait,” I said. “Two things. You were sitting behind your desk?”
     “Yes, why?”
     “And you said about Romans 8 ‘maybe not’?”
     “I did. But then he said   ‘Nothing, it says. Nothing in creation. Not even the loss of faith, maybe?’ And he started to laugh. But it wasn’t loss of faith, he said, that he had come to talk about. Recovery of faith. The faith of his catechism, he said,

   ‘That I might be able to recovery if God didn’t get too pushy about it. Or God’s minions. God wouldn’t get too pushy. Or God’s minions in me,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
   ‘I’m not one of God’s minions?’ I said.
   ‘Maybe. But not one of the pushy ones, I don’t think.’ But then he stood up. ‘So, good,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
   ‘Por nada,’ I said.

And he left. He looked like he was going to sit down again after I had said por nada instead of you’re welcome. It did slow him down, and I waited for him to sit. But he didn’t. He left.
     “And that’s the way it ended? I said.
     “Yes. I guess it is.”
                                                                       06.06.22
_______________

 * The brothers Sundstrøm. See here and here. About my reaction: Nils always has to be in the center of things. Axel is standing along the wall. With me.
     For another post about loss of faith (and Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter). see here.

Critique of Reason

  Critique of Reason 

Roz was out front, watering some plants she’d recently put in, “because it’s going to get hot, and it’s not going to rain.” Then, I could hear her talking to someone over the stone retaining wall, standing below her on the sidewalk, maybe Hill, our next door neighbor — I couldn’t see. But then I thought I heard her ask, “Are you a geologist?” So it wasn’t Hill.
     “Who was that?” I asked when she came in.
     “I don’t know. He was looking at our wall.”
     “But not a geologist.”
     “No. A mason, actually.”
     “What did he think of the wall?”
     “It’s good,” she said. “He says it’s good. We don’t need to do anything about it.” She sounded disappointed; she likes to worry about the wall. “He was nice,” she said, “though he was also lost — on the wrong street!
     “It was all I could do not to turn the hose on him.”

Then, as she was going back out to go to work, she asked me to begin picking up my books. “Just begin,” she said. “Don’t make a big production of it,” because I have books everywhere. I get them from the library or I buy them from online or I get them down from one of sixteen shelves of books in every room, books I've read, some three and four times, and books I haven’t read once, even the first page of. I get them out for one reason or another, to see if I can find something I am pretty sure is in there or, mostly, because I haven’t read them and it suddenly occurs to me ought to. Then, when I turn to the first page, I begin to remember why I didn’t.
     On the coffee table in the den were Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason in a massive orange (orange! like a college football jersey) paperback and on top of it a collection of Socrates’ gassing about this and that, including how it is beyond doubt, we must concede! that our souls pre-existed our bodies. Otherwise, how could we know anything at all? The Socrates stories are in  a series from the Classics Club, hardbacks the color of wet straw with the titles on the bindings in red and gold of which I have also the volume, Aristotle, On Man in the Universe but none of the others.
     I’ve read the first half of Sloterdijk twice; but there, halfway through, I get stuck. We are reading The Symposium in my book group, so I had been reading the other of Plato’s stories in the book, leading up to it, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. And I was stuck halfway through that.

I separated the two books, laid them side by side on the dark table, steaming like clods of horse manure in the road, I thought.
     Because philosophers must steam, mustn’t they? because they can’t shut up because, if they did, how could anyone else know they are the smartest kid in class? That includes the teacher: Why does he keep trying to prove he’s the smartest kid: he’s not a kid for one thing, but he’s not the smartest for another. Meanwhile, the second smartest kid is wishing both would shut up and he could get a word. It would be one that would absolutely stump them, if he could think of it. The trouble is he can’t, and he is burning because he knows he will later when he’s walking home, or he will at his desk when he’s looking over his notes studying for finals.

So it wasn't the manure but the steaming that I was getting at. Don't, please, see it the other way around.
     Outside, the sun was hardening in the sky, and hardening the sky itself to better trap the heat below. Roz was right: it was going to be warm, even warmer than the thermometer would say.

06.03.22

Morning star

   Morning star  

Roz took Uncle Albert to church this morning because our rector, Susan, the former Miss Virginia, had called asking about him and me.
     Last night: “I told her you had the bug, but I would bring Albert.” Roz slumped her shoulders. “Why did I say that?” I shrugged mine. “Because I’m an idiot,” she said. “Though I do think Albert wants to go,” she said.

This morning: We talk across the room. We live now — we have lived for three weeks — across rooms behind masks when we aren’t in different parts of the house. It has worked, I guess you could say: I haven’t infected either Roz our Uncle Albert. I have kept my dis-ease to myself. Which may be why it has hung on so long. It has settled in where if not loved, it feels it has been accepted, made welcome.
     “I had forgotten how pretty she was. More than pretty really.” She was talking about Susan.
     “Yes. She was Miss Virginia.”
     “Did I know that? If I did, I’d forgotten. Which is not likely. When?”
     “2001, I think.”
     “Hmmm.”

St. Jude the Apostle
beach towel.

“What was the sermon about?” I ask.
     “That was an odd thing. It seemed to be on the  back of an envelope.”
     “It often is,” I say. “But what was it about?”
     “Something about the bright morning star and guns, about how far earth can get from heaven so only heaven can bring it nearer again.”
     Now I said, “Hmmm.”
     “That’s what I thought,” Roz says. “But you know me, unreliable witness. Never really sure. You should ask Albert.”
     “No,” I say, “that’s ... ” I start to say, “that’s good enough” or “close enough.” Instead I say, “I like that” though it doesn’t sound like Susan.
     “Oh,” Roz says. “Good.”

She is looking down, picking at the back of the blue arm chair. I am looking at the top of her head, how her hair can both stay in place and look as if it is about to spring off in every different direction. She looks up,
     “On the way home, I asked Albert why she became a priest, did he think?”
     “What did he say?”
     “He said, ‘Why does anyone do anything?’”    

 05.29.22 

Tuesday on the couch with George

  Tuesday on the couch with George  
Or, Apolgia pro ueblogia sua

My friend Rick Dietrich, whom, though he lives less than a block away, I never see unless I walk by his house and he’s looking out the window — he sent this to me. That is, he put it in my mailbox.
     It is an essay by the Hungarian philosopher/literary critic, George Lucács. Why he passed it along to me, marked up as you can see in the picture of one of the pages, I don’t know. But I read it through, not just the underlines and the marks in the margin. I read all of it. 
     It is one of those arguments that you can follow as you read it, but you might not be able to recapitulate it. But I think that the main argument goes something like this: Modern literature, particularly modern fiction, doesn’t work because it doesn’t engage the world. Instead of launching its characters into a changing world, it takes the world as already done (to a crisp). Its characters, for that matter, they are also already done. Everything is fixed, and nothing will change it. The story cannot move from beginning to insight to dénouement. It just sits on the page, though of course, for several pages. Static. The characters are static, and the story is static because the world isn’t evolving but given.
     This doesn’t mean that Musil or Kafka or James Joyce aren’t wonderful writers that can write wonderful descriptions, but it does mean that they do no more than that. The novels and stories are not narratives; they are pictures. Pretty, pretty pictures. They won’t last, Lucács thinks. Or, at least, that’s what I think Lucács thinks. The novels and stories won’t last in the sense that they cannot endure. Lovely as they may be, they don’t tell us anything we don’t already know. (They are about what we already know.)
     When I finish reading the essay, I suppose that my friend is trying to say something to me about The Ambiguities. His putting this in my mailbox suggests he might think that I am making the same mistake that Joyce did in Ulysses, that Musil did in The Man Without Qualities, or that Kafka did in The Castle or “The Metamorphosis.” Would that I was making a mistake as grand as those! But it’s only the same mistake, not nearly as grand. Joyce, Musil, and Kafka do accomplish what they set out to accomplish. I do not. But ...

Friend Rick: Here is my response, such as it is. I write — as weren’t we all instructed? — about what I know. I know my little life in which very little happens, though something does! And I know a little about the little lives around me. I know what we are up to in a world that is changing. I don’t know where we are going, but we are going somewhere, I think. In the meantime, we soldier on. Emphasis on “on.”

 05.24.22 

Getting well again

 Getting well again 

Dear Ted,
     I am sorry to hear (from Moira) that you have contracted the virus. Get well soon! (All may never be well, but some things do get better. It is true that some things also get worse, for the sake of balance, but let’s hope it will be worse for someone else. Yes, forget charity. Let’s hope that.)
     Leslie* came by last night to take me for a walk. We went through the oval of the park alongside which I sometimes sit [link to Marksman?], down to the pond-called-a-lake and back. We left at twilight and came back in the dark. A warm night, just enough damp in the air to stick pleasantly to your skin and make your lips taste like salt.
     He likes to keep track of “earthly matters,” Les does, the rise and fall of the pandemic and the dollar, the weapons of the wars between liberals and libertarians, between conservatives and crazies, between Slavs — cold wars and hot wars, wars with lives at stake and only reputations, prejudiced masked as ideas. He mutters about this battle and that, then suggests that humans would be better off if there were regular days of worldwide fasting, if all went out into the streets or the fields and lashed themselves and wept, “however crocodile the tears,” he said. Better to feign repentance than not to repent at all.
     I don’t as what has brought this particular jeremiad on. It's better to enjoy the distinctly British rhythm of the muttering, matching my steps to its.
     When he stops (muttering) — when we arrive at the lake and pause to look over the water — I mention, because he’s mentioned the pandemic, that you have been sick with it. “Oh?” he says. “Not seriously, I hope.” “I don't think so.” “Well, I wish him well.” “Yes.” “Tell him so,” he said. So I have.
     Few of us, in my (admittedly little) experience, are as fragile as we think we are; all of us are prone to melodrama. Then, few of us are as resilient as we think we are; we fail to see how this scratch and that dent and this bit of gravel in that quart of fluid have weakened the structure. Finally, like an old car, we will fall apart. Overnight! We’ll be driven home from a till-the-wee-hours-party; and the next morning, we won’t start to go to work. And I am not sure, whatever the manuals say, that how well we have been maintained makes a great difference.
     But what do I know, compared with Les, or you, a girl who read poems and plays and ignored philosophy and religion?
     Again I say, Get well soon!
                                              Trudy

 Dear Trudy,
     Thanks for your letter and your get-well wishes. I’m looking at a cardinal on the window sill: he is only himself, red and lovely. As a bird of the air, he is guarded by God, and so he lets the minute’s own troubles be sufficient for the minute. He drops to the ground. And out of sight.
     One of the values of good social satire is that it lets us see self-righteousness for the pious fraud that it is. Even the enormously intelligent characters Aldous Huxley invents — I am reading Time Must Have a Stop — are only batting empty words around; that the words are bigger — and the rallies longer — doesn’t mean that more than hot air is being moved from place to place, just more of it. No-place is being moved from place to place, portentously.
     Long ago, I learned at meetings that whatever I said was “wise” only as far as it furthered another’s cause. All this is to say that when, as in sickness, one begins to take oneself seriously . . . well, don’t.
     I would be comforted if I still believed that the Apocalyticist was right and this is a comedy. But I am afraid that he is as big a blowhard as your friend Dame Julian. Thumb your nose at them if you see them. Blow them from me a long, juicy raspberry.
                                                                   Please, Ted
_______________
 * Leslie Becket, one T as in Thomas, not two as in Sam. See here, here, and here. Also here.

 05.19.22 

Omicron

  Closed for COVID 

It happens: things just don’t go on. Blog does have a stop. At least, a hiatus:

 05.06.22 

Third Thursday after Easter

 Third Thursday after Easter 

It happens: things just don’t go on. Time does have a stop. The second hand that ticks forward then hesitates before it ticks forward again does hesitate. It is as if you have nodded off, then you wake again, but, however long you were “out,” nothing has changed. The cat in the window hasn’t twitched. The murmur of the conversation on the sidewalk you can hear through the window hums in the same register; it is on the same line, it is in the same measure. The same plane is droning overhead. It is stuck in the sky like a fly in ointment, struggling but not moving.
     Then, it lurches forward, the hand, and time, which heals some things but hardly all, resumes.

 05.05.22