That Credo Thingy

March 4, 2015

Marcello, Martinis, and Madness

This afternoon I got this [See box.] from Tom Nashe.  He wanted to know if he could post it as a credo on “Go Around Back.”  I told him he could – the site was his now, as far as I was concerned; but if I were he, I’d wait to see if he felt the same way after Happy Hour – Tuesdays he meets a bunch of old hippie friends and 

they drink martinis, because “They’re as far from what we were imbibing in 1969 as any of us can imagine. A drink our fathers – no, our mothers – would have drunk, one just before we came home from school and one after they’d gotten us into bed. I feel like a girl in my thirties just ordering, ‘Martini – not too dry.’ Mar-tee-nee. Listen to the sound of it, and you can see your mother’s eyes as she turns away from tucking you in: she’s day . . . evening-dreaming: she’s Sophia Loren on the back of Marcello Mastroianni’s Vespa.” Pauses: “I’ve probably got the chronology wrong, but what the hell!”

 

I was talking on the phone to Gaspar Stephens a couple of days ago. He was remembering something he’d heard somewhere about something.  The something was – vaguely – this: he wasn’t entirely crisp with details, and I’ve forgotten half of what he said.  So, this may be ten/fifteen percent right.

          A neurologist or psychologist is explaining: We tend to think of other people, even ourselves, as all one thing – medievally: they’re sanguine or choleric or phlegmatic or full of melancholy. But we’re less like the humors, he was saying, than like a modern city; that was his metaphor. We’re streets and sidewalks – cars and people pushing and pulling at each other; but we’re also parks: there’s an old man in brown that comes to that particular bench everyday but Saturday to feed the pigeons.  There’s theater – sometimes we feel theatrical; and there’s music, even on the subway – sometimes we feel musical.  And there’s hockey . . .

          Also, it’s not so much that we feel now this way and now that; we are this way and that, all at the same time; dawn or dusk or midnight in the city, we're all the streets, sidewalks park benches, music halls, basement bars.  We’re “mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” and we’re hesitant to move from where we are.  We’re anxious to finish a task and we’re turning away from it, because we don’t want to be done.  You can multiply the examples at least as well as I can.  Here’s one of Gaspar’s (I’ll play like I really remember what he said and put quotes around it): “We might say, rightly, that New York City is politically Democratic, but we know that there is a substantial portion of the city that is Republican, and libertarian and progressive and . . .   It's not all one thing.  This guy says our brains are the same way. And we know this - most of the time: we have predominant opinions but we hold at the same time minority thoughts and sentiments.”

I called Tom after supper.  “How many martinis?”

          “The perfect number, one too many.”

          “And your credo thingy?”

          “I’m going to put it up, purposely misspell one word – at least – and drink to its health and short life.”

          “Amen.”

          “But tomorrow.”

JocuSecuHiLarity

March 2, 2015

Dateline: Pangloss, California

When I came in last night, Roz was on the landline: “Uh-huh,” she was saying, “Uh-huh. Yes. Uh-huh,” voice slurry, rolling eyeballs caught in her throat. “Yeah. I’ll try to do that.”

          “Meaning what?” I asked when she’d hung up. “Polly,” she said.

          “An article? book?” Polly, the epitome of kindness, always trying to improve her friends, to make them over in the image of their best selves. Eternal optimist. (Their best selves, as she understands them.)

          “Have you got this?” – Roz, because I usually “got this”: I read the article in question or skim the book and give her “talking points.” It’s like she’s Meryl Streep and I’m her personal assistant. Unpaid.

Polly has been, in her fifty-plus years, a Roman Catholic, an evangelical of the warm and fuzzy variety, a Buddhist, the follower of a guru from Brooklyn – well, he looked Indian and he did a good accent; and finally, now she’s a “secular humanist.” And suddenly, now she knows why; she found it in a book, Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions by a California “professor of sociology and secular studies” named Phil Zuckerman (no relation to Nathan).

          So I go looking for reviews – and I find Zuckerman has also been interviewed by Tom Ashcroft on the radio series, On Point.

And now for something completely different.

          I’m still and always trying to latch onto the nature of whimsy – what cast of mind and heart, what nurture and education, what circumstances of life make one, or allow one to be, whimsical?

Maybe not completely different; at least, not beside the point.

          Listening to Zuckerman – and the always perceptive Ashcroft – on the web this morning, I’m almost certain that religion must be some part of the whimsical-mix: one must have a heart for both faith and doubt, a religious upbringing, and at least an occasional need to squeak out a prayer whether it will be heard or ignored; one must have at least these

Tom Hulce playing Mozart. Listen!

things to have whimsy. One must have a sense of a transcendence that’s bigger than looking at a sunset, weeping after a life victory or defeat, listening to Mozart, or eating a peach. These are the kinds of things, besides playing on the beach at dawn, sledding in the dark, 

and dancing with your grandmother that provoke in Zuckerman what he calls “aweism.”

          Whimsy requires the additional sense that this isn’t just about you looking at something; there could also be something looking at you, peering over your shoulder when you’re trying – unsuccessfully, and you know it – to shake that last yellow drop from the end of your member before you fold it back into your pants.

Speaking of which.

          Here’s an almost perfect example of Divine whimsy – Genesis 17. Abram is ninety-nine years old. The Transcendent One becomes immanent and says, “I’m going to make a covenant between me and you.” Abram falls down – on purpose: this is more than a sunset or a bunch of grapes or the music of the movies of 1200 bc sifting through the background. Abram falls to his knees; and he gets up with a new name, Abraham, and not only a covenant between God and him but between God and all his descendants – and Sarai’s. She also has a new name, Sarah.

          God is going to do this, and that, and the other thing – there’s a land deal, among other things, many other things: the scope of the contract is amazing. God will be Abraham’s God. But what can Abraham and all his house, present and future, do in return? – because God has everything; there’s nothing God needs from him.

          “What? Please?” Abraham prays. And God replies, after just the right hesitation – God has impeccable timing: “How about your foreskins?”

God is impeccable. But we are not.

          We are, in both Abraham’s world and mine, fallen. And that means not only that we sin, but, more important, that we are limited. Without help we don’t see past the ends of our noses. (With help we see a two inches past.) Sociologists are, in my limited experience but not-so-humble opinion, help-less. It’s not that they leave out transcendence – they have to do that, because they’re social scientists, for God’s sake. It’s that they leave out science; they don’t proceed by proven method or reason.

What that means here.

          That Zuckerman has discovered in his study of secularists in America precisely what he’d hoped to – that they are in general a mirror of his best self, his best self.

          So, they have not fallen farther than a few skinned knees. Here is where “secular humanists” go awry, if Zuckerman’s supporters that phoned into On Point and Roz’s friend Polly are an indication. They lack any notion that we are truly fallen – our brains are as banged up as our knees – our hearts, too, and our souls if we have them. They have arrived at the optimism of the nineteenth-century liberal theologians, and they’ve remained there, as if neither the Great War nor the Holocaust has happened. They are like Pangloss, unfazed by the Lisbon earthquake.

          They have the moral resources to do good – they have helped any number of little old ladies across any number of busy streets – but do they have the moral vision to recognize – and so combat – evil?

          I am doubtful.

Though I could be wrong. I often am. (And those not so far fallen could be right.)

          Still, Roz, these are your notes. Tell Polly you’re happy if she’s happy, but you prefer to be sad, because the world’s still a mess however happy she is. And if – by chance - she asks what good God is if “he” doesn’t pull us out of the mess, tell her God makes it possible for us to recognize the mess we’re in.

At it again . . .

February 26, 2015

WWWJBP

It’s been awhile, but when someone asked me the other day what The Ambiguities “was supposed to be about,” I found myself saying WWWJBP – What Whimsy Would Jesus Be Percolating? - if Jesus whimsy percolating were.

Here’s some, then, from when he were – not so much the cleansing of the temple but his suggestion he could rebuild it in three days.  The “temple guards” couldn’t believe he meant it, but then he didn’t have to mean it, did he?

 i

Fin

February 22, 2015

Parliamentary Re-cedure

His motion failed for want of a second.

w

omne trium perfectum

February 21, 2015
Two

Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else so that a butterfly* flutters its wings in Fiji and a dog in Brooklyn^† gets diarrhea.

Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish it were so.

List the Second:

i. The man stands at the flushless urinal – the one in the corner – at the rest stop at mile marker 129 on I-81 north (Virginia) just south of the Dixie Caverns exit. He is recently widowed; he has no children. He is just driving, a 1997 Honda Accord with 262,000 miles on it.

     He grew up in Salem - he went to Andrew Lewis High School – but he left the area long, long ago; he doesn’t know anyone. He is thinking of the old joke – not from high school but elementary school days. It’s visual. A boy with a claw for a hand holds it in front of him, praying, “God make both my hands the same.” He opens his eyes: still a claw. He raises the other, “good” hand: he now has two claws.

ii. The rule of three “suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things.” There is created “a progression in which the tension is created, built up, and finally released,” a beginning, a middle, and an end.*

iii.

  

___________________

      * Badamia atrox subflava

      ^† New York

      ** Source: Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

A Theory of Nearly Everything and Next to Nothing at All

February 20, 2015

List the First

Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else so that a butterfly* flutters its wings in Fiji and a dog in Brooklyn^† gets diarrhea.

Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish that were so.

So, a week of lists.  List the First:

i

Our Lord is not remote
He is even nearer than the jugular vein

- Hamzah Fansuri (d. c. 1590), Malay poet

ii

Summer 1959. Rocco Domenico “Rocky” Colavito, a graduate of Teddy Roosevelt High School in New York City hit 42 home runs and drove in 111 runs for the Cleveland Indians.

iii

 

Over on our political (and dark) side, “Go Around Back,” I get tired of being Mr. Nice Guy. It’s only my misguided opinion anyway. See here.

_______________________

* Badamia atrox subflava

 ^† a dachshund - springer spaniel mix