from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Ted has a (another) letter from his sister, Moira. The dead sister. He gets these from time to time—he doesn’t explain how. He doesn’t show them to me, or to anyone else, that I am aware of. We are to take them at his word.
          In this one, she describes even heaven as not ideal because “like earth, it is a creation of God and man between them and neither knows exactly what he wants. Moreover, they can’t agree. Moreover moreover, among men it seems to be theologians that will have the greatest say, and they are the least practical of all men—look how they struggle with Jesus’ parables, with paperclips, and with women, none of them as complicated as they would wish.”

Ted says to me, “What do you think?” “About?” “Who creates heaven and earth—let’s start there.”
          “It depends on which has the greater imagination,” I say (or should have, I forget which), “who is imagining whom.”
                                                                  12/09/23

And Kamala.

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

I had coffee with Nils Sundstrøm this morning. He comes to pick me up in his brother’s car—he doesn’t have one, he gets around town on an electric bike. How he gets out of town, I don’t know.
          He was telling me that Biden said sometime earlier this week something to the effect that he might not be running again if it were not for Trump, but Trump had to be defeated! “And no one said to Biden?—‘But you—and Hillary—are the only ones that can’t defeat him. Don’t you see that?’” This is Nils speaking.
          “To which he could have replied, I suppose,” Nils went on, “‘Well, and Kamala.’”
                                               12/07/23

Speaking of prophets.

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

“The sun will be darkened and the moon will not show its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be  shaken in those days.” (Mark 13:24b-25).
          Soon after, the world and all that is in it will cease to be. And no one will care because there will be no one left to care — did you think of that, Doomsday God (and your prophets)? The effect of all the fireworks of destruction will be no effect at all?

Speaking of the prophets and their “righteous zeal”: as if “righteousness” existed out there somewhere, ideal, unattached, not belonging to a self, as if there were any zeal that wasn’t self-righteous.
                                                                  12/05/23

On leave, continued

  On leave, continued 

So many writers and so few readers. - André Gide, The Vatican Cellars

I tried to write this, about the Western Christian Church, in capital letters, but they were too big for me. When you are ill — then continue to be ill after everyone thinks you should be better (because the doctor assures them you are; she assures them that she has assured you that you are) —  it is a time to think about matters of religion. But not in caps. You are not a bishop, a doctor of theology, or a popular philosopher or historian; you don’t belong to any of the public intellectual or opinion-making classes.
     You can think that the church is in its last days, even here in one of its last strongholds. But it’s hardly an original thought, it’s not your thought, you know that. But, you can see with your own eyes that if it is declining, it is still a place for funerals, actually more and more of them as those that came of age or into their thirties in the church’s 1950s heyday succumb. Its bells are tolling, you can hear with your own ears.
     It is decreasingly a place for baptisms, even with grandparents wanting to insist — they find they cannot. Then, do they look into their hearts and ask themselves how important it is, baptism, and do they ask themselves then, “What do I believe finally?”

One of the bells tolling

To that question, my friend, John Woodstain, says that he doesn’t know anymore. There was a time he could say; but that time has passed: he’s become both more addled and less certain. Still, he’s in his damn (his word) — his damn — Presbyterian church practically every Sunday.
     He says “damn,” but he doesn’t regret going — or if he sometimes regrets the going, he doesn’t, he insists, regret the having gone. He leaves with a “satisfied” sense of having been part of the church in its last days, part of a story that, after a long and adventurous life, is coming to a relatively peaceable end. Someone has to enjoy, even treasure, the old as it’s being run over by the new. At least, the old knows what it is, John believes,  even if he can no longer say. The new, whatever it believes, is only becoming.

                                                                          10.29.23

On leave

‘ankles crossed’
phone drawing by m ball

 On leave 

Yes. I have been absent, but not without leave, which I granted myself after plans gang agley.
     The surgery, I was assured, was minor: that which was to be removed was small — a toenail, a tooth, a testicular something-or-other — it doesn’t matter which. Fade to dusk under light anesthesia and swim back into the light of day soon enough, though: “You’ll need someone to drive you home.”
     Be driven home. Take your antibiotics (amoxicillin — pot clavul 875) until you run out and your small oxy (oxycodone hcl 5 mg) until it does. Rest, but don’t skip any meals. Plenty of liquids. And: All will be well, and all manner of thing will be soon well. Come back in two weeks; you can drive yourself.
     Nothing can go agley but what will: We live in the air, not in a lab; we live through unrecoverable time, not in repeatable experiments.
     Still, that we can measure them (the air and time) does not mean they can’t expand and contract — and multiply and divide — and, even asleep, blow raspberries at our barometers, and our clocks and calendars.
     “Selah,” Roz says. “Yes,” I agree.
                                                                           10.29.23

Shaggy-dog story

 Shaggy-dog story 

My brother-in-law, Ike, declares there is no such thing as bad pizza. There is great pizza, very good pizza, good pizza; there can be mediocre pizza. But there is no bad pizza. My sister, Hannah, adheres to a similar stance with regard to costume melodramas: the worst are not bad at all if they have the primary ingredients, their crust and toppings: that is, a plot of some sort though it may meander (crust), and costumes and sizzle; villains, rogues, and heroines that overcome, cinderellas, or at least younger sisters, that emerge from the ashes, or the embers, to wear the best dresses of all the dresses and off camera, and sometimes even on, will pee in the pure-goldest of golden pots (toppings). In her most recent, set in 18th-century Spain, the King is going mad and the Queen is going mad and everyone is sleeping with everyone else except for the chaste wife of Don Diego. In bedrooms the size of the Great Salt Lake in castles the size of Utah with grounds swallowing up Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, everyone, everyone is sleeping with and blackmailing everyone else, upstairs and downstairs, male and female, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the field and the forest. This is the way she talks about her shows, like an Evangelical priest on color TV; it always amazes me. But ...

Melodrama Pizza, delivery

Since they live in a small town on the Upper Peninsula, where the truly poor get enough casino money to live in houses with modern appliances, maybe even pizza ovens, with security cameras, and with flat-screens the size of one wall — at least so Ike and Hannah see it — they think, “Such is life.” It can be anywhere from grand to mediocre, but if you don’t eff up, it will never be bad. Even if you do eff up, county and/or tribal mental health will catch you, and the one or the other will wrap you in a blanket until you are ready to come home again.
     It may not be a sophisticated social philosophy, but it arises the way social philosophies arise even for the “more sophisticated,” out of observation and temperament. It doesn’t matter how widely you read, Uncle Albert says, it doesn’t whether you graduated from Harvard or Muskrat High, you end up thinking what you think based on what you think you see and what you think you are feeling. And you are also likely to think that whoever disagrees with you is either an uninformed cretin or an ivory-tower snob.
     “Who said this,” Uncle Albert says, “because I don’t remember: ‘Everyone has his prejudices, but thanks be to God, mine are the right ones’?”
     “Or hers,” Roz adds, “her prejudices.”
     “I don’t know,” I say.
     Roz: “You don’t know what?”
     “Who said it,” I say.
                                                                           10.14.23

VA-effin'-R

 VA-effin’-R 

“Are you still writing about forgiveness?” Nils asked me from the other end of the phone. “I read what you wrote about the parable.”
     “Yes, I am,” I said. “Even today when I am writing about Premier League soccer.”
     “Well, that should be good!” Nils said.

“If it is, it’s because I am getting help.”
     “From?”
     “Rory Smith.”*
     “I’m impressed,” Nils said. I could have said, “Don’t be,” but I didn’t. But it’s not as if Rory called me, or I could call him. But he was writing about soccer as “entertainment.” And I was reading it, with interest. He was saying that it’s “an existential tension within soccer — in all sports — . . . . Is it, primarily, a form of entertainment? Or is that more accurately depicted as a byproduct of the activity? Is its actual aim to establish which team is better and which worse, and the fact that people seem to find it compelling just a happy accident?” I can answer that, “It’s entertainment. Not only primarily but secondarily as well. All of it: soccer, tennis, basketball, water polo, beach volleyball. Especially beach volleyball.” Or, it’s all entertainment except baseball.

     But Rory goes on to frame it in what he calls “less theoretical terms. This season, the all-knowing, all-seeing referees of the Premier League have decided that there is no greater threat to the well-being of the most popular leisure pastime the world has ever known than time-wasting.” So, “referees have shown a blizzard of yellow cards to players deemed guilty of time-wasting.” They agree with me that “players are entertainers, and therefore have a duty to provide as much entertainment as possible . . . . [And not] being sufficiently entertaining has now been turned into an offense.”
     What they haven’t cottoned onto: that they and their use of effing VAR are the guiltiest of all time-wasters; by far the least entertaining moments in any match are when it is stopped to consult someone watching a bank of cameras miles away from where anything we are interested in is happening. We can’t get rid of the referees — I don’t want to — but can’t we show the all-time red card to the damnedest time-waster of all-time time-wasting time? VA-effin’ R, if that wasn’t clear! Please.
     It’s a game. It’s imperfect. Don’t waste my time with a pursuit of perfection, when it can’t take you any closer to it than 15 to 18 takes you closer to infinity. *#//@&%*! I’d say if I said that sort of thing.
                                                                           10.05.23

_______________
* Tomorrow, Rory will write more cogently if less pungently about VAR here.