Friday of the locusts

 Friday of the locusts 

First thing I woke up this morning, I checked my phone. In the middle of the night I’d sent myself a text, and I wanted to make sure I remembered correctly what I’d said: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow. Accept what Fortune brings; rest in God’s love.”

And “May God forgive you,” I found myself saying to the text, meaning (God forgive) its syncretism, its jab at Divine sovereignty: Fortune with Whim and Absurdity working both lackadaisically and diligently under her direction.

    “When there is time,” I thought instead of rolling over and swinging my feet to the floor, “you need to study the Thrones and the Dominions, the Principalities and the Powers of the air, who they are – by name, rank, and serial number – and what each can do.”

The upstairs hallway taken this morning. The bathroom door
is just out of the picture to the left. The back stairway to the
kitchen is somewhere ahead of me. (The cellphone camera is
balanced on the bookshelf invisible to my right.)

My own swarm of hissing wasps, humming hornets, buzzing, biting deerflies – I could hear them, the air outside the room dense with them even if invisible since the days of Brueghel and Bosch and x-ray glasses, the beelzebugs that ride and fill the air, reason enough to stay in bed, though not even in bed can one escape Fortune herself, who may not be omnipresent but is ubiquitous; she may not be everywhere always, but she is able and liable to be anywhere at any time.

     There’s nothing for it but get up, swat your way through the swarm in the hallway,  slam the bathroom door against them, brush the bugs out of your teeth, blow the gnats out of your nose, shower in insect-repellent, dress for work in beekeeper’s helmet, jumpsuit, gloves, and boots, and go out there.

     Thank God, it’s Friday.

09.30.16

The parable of the officials and the scribe

 The parable of the officials and the scribe 

Early in the summer, I wrote that I found myself reading Scripture more and more as parable. I was coming to a story, and I would preface it with the words Jesus uses to introduce many of his parables: “The kingdom of God is like . . . .” It didn't always work, but, I found, adjustments can be made. For instance,

This past week I was visiting an older friend in the hospital. This is not my favorite activity, because you never know what you are going to see in a hospital – or hear – and whatever it is it’s more likely to be unsavory than not.

     My friend was in some pain, but it was beginning to wear off as something that he had been given not long before I arrived was wearing on. Behind the colorful curtain that separated the beds, his roommate was being entertained by a deep-hollow-voiced sanctimonialis, who was reading him the last chapters of Ezra. Emphatically! Pointedly! Perhaps the poor man had married outside the faith; that was why he was sick; and if he wished to be well, he needed to put his heathen wife and their godless children away.

It almost beggars the imagination: How could Ezra 9 and 10 be read as a parable? The only way I can think of is to turn Jesus’ introduction into a question, “Is the kingdom of God like this? A group of officials came to the scribe Ezra . . . .”

And here it is: the Book of the Scribe Ezra, chapters 9 & 10, from the TRV (Ted Riich Version):

09.18.16

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Credo

 Credo 

I pick at the edges of things: scabs, fingernails, ears-nose-eyes; peeling paint, poems, passages of Scripture. I’m not likely to find my way into the middle of them – I don’t have a talent for it, I don’t want to learn it. I don’t like middles – the centers of rooms, of groups of people, of cities or towns. I confess I have no interest in penetrating to The Heart of the Matter or taking a journey into The Heart of Darkness. There is for me something more interesting than Truth or GOD: rain, for example, spattering the sidewalk; or the stuff that’s been accumulating in the junk drawer of my dresser.

09.15.16

This week's gospel lesson in 11 words.

Jesus talks to tax collectors about the advantages of rounding up.

The sounds of a serious silence

 The sounds of a serious silence 

One of my colleagues wondered if we could take a little extra time at break and get coffee at the place on the corner. He had something he wanted to talk to me about. I consented because he is a very kind man, though I hesitated, because he’s also a very serious man.

"The Arch" at BLU.

     It turned out he wanted to talk to me about silence. He’d just read a book. He mentioned the name of the author, who, if he knew, would certainly be more than a little surprised that I hadn’t heard of him, a public blabbintellectual, who holds The Somebody Rich and Dead Chair in a hyphenated discipline at a Big League University. If I hadn’t immediately resolved to forget the name, you’d likely remember when you heard him on NPR.

    

According to my very serious friend, the book says we have to win silence: we must wrench it from everything in this raucous world trying to defeat us – billboards and bullfights, football matches, marching bands, mambo bands, and motorcades, and most philosophy and religion. Altogether it’s a noisy cauldron, a gurgly clamor flavored with words, words, words – gossip, alibis, false promises, the blues. The steam from the stew pot rises, it stings our noses, but the smells don’t only prick, they entice us to eat, eat, eat, to gorge ourselves to the point of drowning in the mess.

     I listened. He talked. He talked. I listened. I didn’t hear anything about music or poetry – or about how without words we were to come to the positions we hold on silence.

     Nor did he say anything about laughter. This is not surprising for such a serious fellow, reading such serious stuff. Advocates of silence tend to be serious, serious fellows.

09.07.16

Dawn Powell and David Hume, or philosophy honestly misunderestimated

Hume on his own string
& not very happy about it.

 Dawn Powell and David Hume 

: or philosophy honestly misunderestimated.

Here’s Powell from The Locusts Have No King: “Nobody ever decided anything. Situations were solved only by other situations.” Which is to say they are not solved at all. We are the effect, but we don’t cause. The locusts have no king; but David Hume is pulling their strings: So, it’s just one damn thing after another for us acrididae. (And we’re all acrididae. Even Hume.)

09.01.16

According to an unreliable source

 According to an unreliable source 

A letter from Uncle Albert arrived in this morning’s mail. The reader may recall that while he writes emails to everyone else, his cretin congressman, his stabenovic senior senator, the whiners at CNN, and the blowhards at Fox (his terms), he writes only letters to me.

     This begins as usual, “Ah, my favorite nephew!” then launches directly into the matter at hand.

I was thinking last night when I went to bed about my old friend and mentor, Giancarlo Fellini, no relation to the filmmaker but a childhood friend of Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. Or so he claimed, because my Fellini could hardly have been old enough. He certainly wasn’t in his eighties when I studied with him in Paris during my sabbatical in the fall of 1958 – when the pope died.

Pius XII by m ball

But Fellini claimed to have been such a close friend that he often visited Genio, as he called him, at various papal residences. “I told him in 1954,” Fellini told me once: “I told him: ‘You’re a sick man. And it’s your own damn fault. But you need to resign. You need to leave Italy. You need to leave Europe. I see two good choices for you: Go to Mexico and crawl on your knees from Ameca to meet the Virgin at Talpa de Allende. Or, retire to Polynesia, take a mistress, father many children, and die of the clap.’ You can see he didn’t take my advice, and you can see what happened as a result.”

The result was that the pope didn’t die of the clap – at least not clap that he picked up in Polynesia; rather he did die “in a huge stink and bother” and only “after years of stink and bother already," or so Fellini.

     “He got sicker and sicker under the care of that minuscule quack Galazzi-Lisi and the other one, the German, whose ‘rejuvenation treatment’ only revived Genio’s childhood nightmares, full of demons so chilling that not even the ‘maid,’ Josefina, could keep him warm at night, not that she was any Abishag the Shunemite, by then almost as withered an old crone as he was a matusa.

     “But il qua qua Galazzi-Lisi wasn’t done. Assisted by that matto Nuzzi from Naples, he had poor, already-rotting Genio, embalmed three times – for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one must suppose – each time with an oil more putrid than the last until the oil of the Spirit, thinking itself gas, exploded, and the bits and pieces of the body of his holiness had to be gathered, separated – poorly no, doubt – from the sick of the Swiss Guards attending him and the whole mélange ladled into first of the three matryoshka boxes – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – popes are buried in, gathered and three-times encased so they could parade ‘him’ through the streets of Rome before burying his mess as deep as they dared in St. Peter’s bowels.”

There it ends, Uncle Albert's letter, as abruptly as it began, though with the usual closing: “Your poor dead mother’s ancient friend . . .” and his signature, Albert.

Apparently, no lessons are to be drawn. Good!

08.29.16