The hedgehog and the hatchet

  The hedgehog and the hatchet 

Where I am in the book* is at the incident of the hedgehog and the hatchet – where Kolya brings the creature as a gift to the Prince from Aglaya. And he announces, Kolya does, “with impressive authority” that “The plain fact is that she's in love with you, Prince, and that's all there is to it!”
     with impressive authority, when he has in the matter no authority at all. No one does, not even the principles, the Prince or Aglaya, because no one has a clue. There is no predicting where their relationship is going, and there can be no authority where there is no predictability: there are no rules anyone can apply. Everyone is just guessing. Kolya may be guessing right, but that doesn't lend him any authority. A lucky guess is no more than a lucky guess; it doesn’t signal any sort of prescience or any competence at all in the matter.
     But we are all Kolya when we are certain about matters about which there can be no certainty. For instance, the future.

Fyodor’s in Cleveland, where
a post-Cleveland Browns game brawl
allegedly saved the world, 1956.

About the past we are all fabulists. We know that about ourselves, yet, for the most part, we take the stories other people tell us about themselves as the truth. We don’t even stop to think that at least they are abbreviating the truth – because we know that it would take more than a day to tell the whole truth about what happened in a quarter of an hour. We know that the promise to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is so much folderol if not bullshit. It doesn’t matter how intelligent and clever the oath-taker is or how dumb and sincere. Besides which the court specifically doesn’t want to hear the whole truth. Not only doesn’t it have time for it, it doesn’t allow it; the witness is not allowed to answer more than the question asked; he cannot say, “Yes, but ... ” “The answer to the question you are asking is ‘yes,’ but it’s not the right question, is it? – not if you’re trying to get to the truth, or even a reasonable approximation of it. But you’re not, are you?”
 

We are all fabulists, but we are also gullible. What we take to be the truth, not only in court but in conversation, is a tissue of lies of omission, at best! But also lies of exaggeration because we are always seeking to fill in what we have to leave out by making more vivid what little we can say.
     Exaggeration is actually the commonest form of lying. If you don't believe this, watch a football game with one eye and listen to the play-byplay and commentary with the other ear. What do you see? – a ruction of steroid-stuffed jacksanapes beetling about trying to start a bar fight; and what you hear is that the future of the planet is at stake, but these bravest of men have come out to save it; only these wondrous heroes can save us all.

Roz looks in and sees me at the keyboard. “Whatcha writing?” she says.
     “Lies,” I say. “Just more lies.”
                                                                                  03.22.22 
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* Dostoevsky's The Idiot.  Continued from here.

The pope that was greater than God

 The pope that was greater than God 
Or one of them (one of the popes that was greater than God).

Nils said, “Your pope must have been greater than God.”
     “What do you mean?” I asked. I was going to add, “My ... pope?” But Nils went on, “The Holy Father grander than the Holy Father.” At which point I did manage to squeak in, “My pope?”
     “‘Without knowing a woman, he fathered not one but sixteen,’” Nils said.
     “I hadn’t thought of that. You mean the pope in the farable.”
     “Yes, your pope” Nils said.
     I: “I don’t make this stuff up, you know.”
     Nils: “Of course not.”

He took a breath. He said, “Do you think I could come in?” It was another case where he had just come to the door, tried to open it, and, finding it locked, rung the bell. Then he starts the conversation at the door as if he has already been invited in. And I make a point not to.
     I know that is mean, both as in inhospitable and as in nasty, and I would help myself if I could, but I can’t seem to. I am always shocked: there are people that believe they are welcome anywhere at any time, when they aren’t. They come in when I am thinking how I can keep them on the front porch.
     I must have made the wrong move again; I had stepped back,before I finished my thought. And Nils was inside, taking off his pea coat, and saying, “Tell me what you think of this. I was talking to this guy, a non-believer, and ... ”
     “What does that mean? – sorry to interrupt,” I said.
     “What do you mean?”
     “Non-believer.”
     “Yes,” Nils said, “a good question. A non-believer as compared to what? you’re saying. Are there any believers really?” He didn’t believe it was a good question; he was just clearing his throat, because the next thing he said was “You don’t have any coffee do you?”

“Wait a minute,” Nils said as he followed me back to the kitchen. “You have a Keurig, right?
     “Anyway,” he said, “I get your point: I’m not a believer. Axel’s not though he tries to be. But checking off a list of approved dogma, saying at each check mark, ‘Yes, I subscribe to that one,’ doesn’t make for a believer, does it?” Sitting down at the table. “You – you’re not a believer even if you still insist that Jesus is your friend. Whatever that means. Right? That’s what you’re saying.”
     “Black, right?” I said. He took a sip, made a face, but then said, “Right. Good.” Then:

Dostoevsky
out of focus
as usual

“But let me go on, okay? – I'm telling a story.”
     “Okay,” I said. “But where did you meet this guy you were talking to?”
     “On an airplane.”
     “When?”
     “It doesn’t matter. Listen.”
     “Who? What? When? Where? How?” I said.
     “Not that kind of story,” Nils said. He took another sip of coffee, made another face. Looked at me, making a face. “No. Good,” he said. “You’ve read The Idiot, right? – Dostoevsky.”
     “I’m reading it now.”
     “So, I don’t know where you are – you may or may not have gotten to this and I may not remember it exactly right anyway – but Hippolite, who is dying of consumption reads this hugely long deathbed declaration to the Prince and a bunch of people assembled for his, the prince’s, birthday. I don’t know how they listen to it all, but Dostoevsky is full of these characters that can talk forty minutes at a time, and people seem to put up with it, I guess like we put up with an absurdly long movie.
     “Anyway, at one point, toward the end, I think, Hippolite starts railing about humility: Why should it be demanded of him? He will submit to the inevitable, to death, but why should he be humble about it even if religion tells him to.
     “So, I was trying to explain to this non-believer why the church wasn’t thriving at a time when, as he thought, people were longing to belong to something. That’s what he wanted to know. I wasn’t sure, I said, that this was such a time, especially if belonging required any inconvenience whatever, you couldn’t just zoom in whenever and for however long you desired. Then, I went on that the church, if it followed the movement Jesus began, was a particularly in-convenient something to belong to, because it existed, as a wise man once said, not for its members but for everyone that wasn’t one. If it stood for humility then ... Wait. Let me say it this way, I know you’ll agree: Following Jesus means giving up yourself for the sake actually of anyone else that happens to be passing by or fell off the side of the road.
     “I am utterly incapable of this, so I can't imagine anyone that is. I’d say actually that we end up with The Church, the institution, because the movement that demanded giving yourself up – or just asked for it, or asked that we at least try it – that movement failed. It had to fail, but typically, we couldn’t let it.”
     “We didn’t have the humility to admit we had failed,” I said.

Nils looked at me over the coffee cup he’d just put to his mouth. He tilted his head, meaning he couldn’t quite believe I’d gotten what he was saying, but yeah, that was it.
    “I haven’t gotten that far,” I said. Now he looked at me, meaning wait, what was I saying, now? “In the book,” I said. “I haven’t gotten that far in the book.”

                                                                          03.15.22  

a horse, a dog, a goat, and the pope

  a horse, a dog, a goat, and the pope* 

A horse, a dog, and a goat went from Bremen to see the pope at Rome, the one with sixteen children though he had never been with a woman. The horse had a religious question the dog had become interested in. The goat had reasons to be away from Bremen for a while. The question had to do with Peter’s dream in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.
     But the pope would not see the three friends, not the first day, not the second, not the third, or the tenth; so the eleventh day they began making their way without an answer back to Bremen.
     On their return, the three friends journeyed by night and slept by day, and as they neared their hometown, they decided among themselves to live out their lives as night creatures. They would hide during the day and come out after dark in disguise, the dog as a fox, the goat as a skunk, and the horse as a mouse-eared bat.
     And so they did.

                                                                                        03.12.22
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 * A farable of of Jesop. An online reproduction of the 1887 edition of Jesop’s Farables (with an afterword by me, Ted Riich) is available here.

Adam and Eve and Willa

 Adam and Eve and Willa 

                                                                                                                        several days ago
Dear Moira,
     I’m reading Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! You’ve read it, I’m sure, probably in high school. What did you, or do you, think about it? Talk it over with your peeps, Lisa, Gretchen, Trudy if you are still friends, Bucket, your cat, and tell me. I'm about halfway through and feel disaster impending. The Eden that Alexandra has built cannot endure, not with two “strangers come to town”: Marie and Carl (who has come back actually) … No, there are three, the third the strangest of all, Marie’s Frank Shabata.  I’ve read the novel before, maybe in college, but I don’t remember the plot, at least not consciously.
     Strangers mean confusion. Non sequitur I begin wondering as I write that, “confusion,” if that isn’t Eve’s problem. Adam doesn’t mind it, not understanding the order of things, but it truly bothers her. Walking around half-blind bumping into things, hearing as from a distance what is almost in her ear, smelling with only half a nose, tasting with only half a tongue, touching with illiterate fingers – unlearned and to be taught only a sliver of what could be known. Then, here’s the solution: there is a tree and on the tree ...
     Alexandra is both God and Adam. She builds the garden, and she fits into it: she lives content in it. She knows what she needs to know; she’s not tempted to know more. What more is there to know? It is her garden. The others are imported into it, Marie from Omaha, Frank from the Old Country. And Carl and Emil leave it; then can they come back? Can they belong?
     I don’t know and I don’t know. Talk about it with your well-read coffee house friends. Tell me what to think.
                                Your ignorant brother, Ted

                                                                                                                        several days after that
Dear Ted,
     I should have written sooner. Likely you have finished O Pioneers and you were going on to My Antonia – you’ve probably finished that as well; you are no longer looking for opinions or guidance. But if by chance you haven’t finished, you might want to before you go on. [link to plot summary]
     We all like O Pioneers! if for different reasons and some more than others. Les says he could read it again and (maybe) again for the descriptions of the seasons and of the land, and of the land in its seasons, slumbering and awakening. He thinks Cather is much better with things than with people. “The land has character, and they’re all caricatures,  aren’t they? – serious, upright Alexandra, her swinish brothers, weak Carl – and weak Emil, for that matter – easy, generous Marie and angry, unbalanced, mad Frank. That she gives reasons for Alexandra’s uprightness and Frank’s loss of balance, for example, doesn't make Alexandra or Frank any less one-dimensional.” Then, it’s that – the one-dimensionality of the characters – that runs the plot. Marie can't not be easy; Emil can't be strong enough to stay away; Frank must go off half-cocked. Alexandra will marry, and subsume, Carl whatever her selfish siblings think. So says Les, and so agree we all, more or less.
     I am more forgiving of Emil and Marie than Les seems to be. I am willing to give them more of my sympathy and understanding; and when I do that, I make them more real, more human, less one-dimensional. Alexandra and Carl, too. Even poor Frank, though I find it difficult to be as forgiving as either Alexandra or Cather. None can escape being playthings of their circumstances, the land and the weather, the seasons, the time and the place. That place, which Alexandra tries to overcome and succeeds in some measure but which Carl tries to escape, which Emil tries to escape, which Frank can only escape in drink! But all are stuck now, even if they think they can get away. I think: If only Frank had stayed in the old country. If Marie had stayed in Omaha. If Emil had stayed in Mexico. But then Cather wouldn't have had a story, trite as it is. And it comes to me (almost as it came to you: Adam and Eve). Marie is the apple Emil will pick because she looks and will taste so delicious; and she is so easy-of-heart she cannot cling to the tree but must fall into his hand. Then, the seed of tragedy is sown. Only in this case the couple cannot be driven from the garden, they must remain in it.
     Who said there are only two stories in all the world, “boy meets girl” and “stranger comes to town”? I think there is a third, “what we want we cannot have.” But why can’t we have it?
     Is this another way to read the Bible story? Eve is tempted by beauty her generous, joyful, wonder-filled heart can’t resist? It’s not something just pretty (like shoes) because she can and will share it with Adam, who can’t resist because she, more lovely to look on and more delicious than the apple, gives it to him? I know you love this story. Tell me what you think. Isn’t it finally about desire? If it is, or only if it is a little bit about that, I’ll add that Who is God that gives us eyes and noses and hearts to desire – Who is He to put the apple in our way and expect, much less demand, anything but that we will take it?
     Well, that’s it for right now. I was going to write you more about your friends and acquaintances here, but I’ve run out of both concentration and wrist, for the moment anyway.
                                Love, Moira.
                                                                          02.25.22      
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  Don’t expect book criticism here. (Why?) Likely this means nothing to you if you haven’t read O Pioneers! or Genesis 2-3. A fair summary of the first is here. If you haven’t, you really should read the second. You can find it here. Line of Willa Cathers by m ball .

Hobson's choice

 Hobson’s choice 

Roz said, “You write your sister to ask how your mother is, but you never write about her in your thing.”
     “My mother.” “Yes.” “In the blog.” “Yes. You never talk about her, except maybe in your sleep.”

“She went off the rails,” Uncle Albert said.
     “No,” I said. “I don’t think she did. She disappeared for a week or two, a while – when Moira ... ”
     “Snuffed herself,” Uncle Albert said, and Roz said, “Albert!” But he kept going. “And where were you?” he said. The $64 question everyone was asking at the time.

I was in Switzerland then, unless I’d already left. I had taken three months off to study at what Uncle Albert always mockingly calls “the cheese place,” la Brie.* I stayed a day and a half. The air was so diminished I couldn’t breathe, though the oxygen was not thinned out by the altitude, which is, at around 1600 feet, not much higher than where we live now; it was crowded out by a combination of fey joy, brittle self-satisfaction, and words, words, words: evidentialism, presuppositionalism, dooyeweerd, rushdoony, the last two Dutch, I think. To me incomprehensible, all of them.

So I went to Bern to see the bear pits, and then I went to Nice to see the sea and, as I had time, to move it ashore with a teaspoon.
     The rest of the time, most of it, I sat on my balcony, big enough for one wooden chair, and leaning back on two legs of it, I smoked Gauloises, and tried to read Sartre in French. Not any of the philosophy – I knew I couldn’t do that – just La Nausée. After three weeks of that, leaving the book on the balcony, I took the train to Paris and flew home.
     To find Moira was dead. Mom was still in a state of shock, and Hannah and Aunt Martha were hopping mad at all of us, at Moira, at Mom, and, especially, at me. 

And none of us ever recovered. Because you don’t.
     One day you may wake up realizing that sadness can be as foolish and shallow as happiness. But just as soon you realize the reverse is as true. What depth is there in happiness, or wisdom for that matter?
     “It’s not a Hobson’s choice though,” Roz contends, “if there is something – if there are some things – in between.” It isn’t either the unbreathable, thin air of smug I’m-in-the-stratosphere-of-salvation bliss or the choking swamp gas stench of the no-I’m-stuck-in the slough of despond.
     Or so Roz says.
                                                                          02.21.22  

_______________
* The reference is to the region the cheese comes from. The cheese itself, Uncle Albert always hastens to correct me when I get it wrong, is masculine, le Brie.

On pins and needles

 On pins and needles 

I said to Uncle Albert, “Roz says she’s done. She’s not writing any more posts for me.”
     He said, “Aren’t you well enough now?”
     “Not quite. My sense of smell: It’s as if the coffee’s brewing but can’t wake me up yet.”
     “Why don’t you get your dead sister to send you a letter? You could run that.”
     “Hah!” I said.
     “Hah, what?”
     “As if it were as easy as that. I’d have to write to her, and I can’t, right?”
     “Phone her,” he said, obviously a great joke: he raised his eyebrows and laughed.

The last time Moira wrote, she wrote about our mom, who died in 2007:

You asked about Mom. I never see her except from a distance. And I’ll wave my arms over my head, and she’ll wave back but with just her hand and she keeps going. Though he didn’t know her growing up, Bucket does see her, quite often, and they talk. He says she likes to talk, or more to listen, though she does seem confused about many things. She admits it. “This,” she gestures “is bigger than the world,” which, apparently, was confusing enough. This is what Les says. But it is and was also delightful enough, heaven and earth. Les says it doesn’t seem to matter to her whether she understands particularly what is going on or not. Not understanding something doesn’t mean that it isn’t interesting as far as it can be understood and it isn’t worth being curious about even beyond that. He says,“I wouldn’t say she doesn’t put experiences into categories, but the categories are pretty broad, and there is one large, general one, ‘odds and ends,’ I might call it.”
     Does this make sense to you? Is this the way you remember her? I ask because I find I can’t trust my memory.

As if I could trust mine!

Uncle Albert wants to know how Moira writes if she doesn’t have real hands.
     “What makes you think she doesn’t?” And I told him about the letter about Mom. “She’s waving her arms, isn’t she? And what would be on the end of them?” A blue jay flies from somewhere high across the window on his way to the seed the cardinals have spilled from the feeder to the ground.
     “But what does your friend Jesus say in the one bride for seven brothers story? In the resurrection, there will be no marriage or being given in marriage.”
     “Yes, I know it: ‘For they shall be like angels in heaven.’ But what’s your point? Angels don't have hands?”
     “I wouldn’t think real ones.”
     “What do you always say, ‘Well, that’s what thinking does for you.’ Who writes the names in the book of life?”
     “Well, that’s what thinking does for you. Aren’t they written ‘before the foundation of the world’?”
     “Still, by who?” Then, “whom,” I amended.
     “You know ‘before the foundation’ means before there were angels.”
     “So God has hands.”
     Uncle Albert shrugs. The jay starts singing. “Without feet,” I say, “how do they dance on the head of a pin?”
                                                                          02.18.22 

Roz again

 Roz again 

“Why?” It’s a fair question dear reader. It’s the question I asked in response to his question when Ted asked me, “Would you write something more maybe?” “Why?” because wasn't the purpose of what I wrote five days ago to excuse his not writing both before and after? Besides, what would I write about?
     “What about that book you just finished, the one you were telling me about?” The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot by Angus Wilson, which my mother had given me. “This is supposed to be really good,” she said. She learned that no doubt from the blurbs on the cover.

 But: “I’m not a critic,” I said to Ted. “I don’t know who to write about books.”
     “Who does? Certainly not those that think they do, the ones that spend most of their word allotment trying to prove if they’re not smartest in the room, at least they’re the cleverest. Just say what you told me.”

That was this (after I tell you that there will be no plot summary because there was no plot and there is nothing else much either because I don’t know how to write about books). I said this:

What Mrs Eliot needs to learn, she thinks, is how to care and not to care at the same time. Or she would think that if she didn’t think she already knew it because she has a sense of humor and that is what a sense of humor teaches: nothing, not even the most serious of matters, can be taken completely seriously. Underneath the seriousness, we are always having a bit of a chuckle. But underneath the chuckle, there is also always selfishness. None of the characters of the novel are other than selfish, and Mrs Eliot, though it took me forever to figure out because I just couldn’t imagine it, is the most selfish of all. So, the book is all about selfishness, the hundreds of forms it can take and thousands of nuances each form has, its immense, irresistible power to delude even the cleverest among us. Our selfishness is always cleverer than we are.

That doesn’t tell you much about the book, I can see, but it’s what I said to Ted that he told me to write, and it’s all I’ve got. Happy Valentine’s Day.
                                                                  Roz Randall

                                                                         02.14.22