Give ear!
From now on, when I address ye, O heavens, I want to do so clearly, with words that everyone can easily understand: in a straightforward manner; & to speak only about what is tangible, visible, provable: no evasive abstractions like soul or spirit – only HARD REALITY, like a rubber tire basking in the desert, or the beads of liquid that form on the outside of a can of diet soda.
“Take away this cup from me!”
—Jesus (Mark 14:36)
(Now the joke is that I immediately begin speaking about the soul.) My soul is not like the soul of a financier. A financier’s soul is fist-sized, and it can be hidden behind the stomach. My soul is too big for my body; and it’s like a solar jellyfish, in the sense that it’s translucent, by which I mean permeable not just to sights but to sounds and even moods: although it is potentially mightier than a giant monster from outer space and taller than a tower, if you were to give birth to two girls and they play tag in your apartment rambunctiously so that one of them bangs into our shared wall, and I’m sitting on the other side of that wall, I will flinch from the jolt: an electric ripple will disrupt the fabric of my soul and make it tremble like a planet-sized gong that’s been struck by Excalibur.
I’m very sensitive; that’s what I’m trying to say. I go from macro to micro in less than one moment. The paltriest encounter on the street can cause my normally boisterous spirit to cede and play dead. And when I arrive home after an evening with friends, my soul misses its comrades so much that it’s like a firmament that can’t stop flooding its innocent populace.
Why am I writing like this? Stick with me and I’ll try again...
Dear diary,
I wish that I lived in a place where, when you open my front door, you enter a hallway, and to your right you see a stairwell. No elevators, but maybe a ramp: I like ramps. When I am elected president, I will smooth out all the stairs and make everything mobile-throne accessible. But I’d mostly like a hallway outside my apartment, because currently, instead of even a stairwell, I have a concrete enclosure (my door opens out to ground level)—it’s not quite a patio or veranda, it’s not quite a dentist’s waiting room: it mostly resembles the place where the lions were kept before they were released into the colosseum to kill evil terrorists, during the time when Titus was emperor—and this outdoor stable separates my mansion’s foyer from its shed (pardon the overuse of parentheses but I must explain that, as a native Wisconsinite, I employ the word “shed” to denote the vaulted arena where the motor-coaches are parked: it’s the place where Max the butler is found lurking in that scene of the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard), so I must pass thru this ugly, unfurnished, empty area whenever I enter or leave my abode.
Now between this stable and my neighbors’ stable is a runway of sidewalk. You go to the end of the line and open the gate, then kick all the tricycles and plastic toys out of your way till you reach a metal door: that’s my neighbors’ entryway: you can knock on that and see if anyone answers, but I’d suggest barging right in—whether the lock is engaged or not, you can always easily enter, because you’re the devil. You don’t have to knock physically with your knuckles: just announce your presence verbally: open my neighbors’ front door & shout in a deep voice “Knock-knock, it’s the devil.” Then explain that you’re here because you felt a jolt on our shared partition, and you inferred that the children must be roughhousing again; so you thought it would be proper to pay them a visit: now you’re going to reward them with a reading of some passages from the epic by William Blake which their horseplay interrupted your study of. “Imagine that you are the poet Blake himself, dear children—this will help you understand how great this poem is—” you say, by way of introducing the text; “OK, now you, William Blake, decide to compose a scripture that shows how your hero John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and thus creator of the fallen angel Satan, took it upon himself to amend the wrongs of Eternity by becoming YOU.”
I love Blake for his audacity, but even more because he shows us how to live. There are as many churches as liquor stores in our city, and all of them claim to teach the sure way of salvation. But only Blake has the answers. (The liquor stores do come close, though.) He was on my mind because we’ve been re-reading all his works, and now we’re puzzling over the one titled Milton. Plus my neighbors’ kids were noisy today, so I added them into this entry. It’s just a blog—you can do with it what you like. And my sweetheart & I are still enthralled with ol’ Dosty’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, which we’re reading aloud every day, one chapter at a time; and the most recent section had the following passage (the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation I highly recommend, if you don’t speak Russian) – this is from Book XI; Chapter 9, which is called “The Devil”:
. . . Ivan Fyodorovich, having left the doctor, did not follow up this sensible advice, and treated the idea of treatment with disregard . . . so he was sitting there now, almost aware of being delirious, and, as I have already said, peering persistently at some object on the sofa against the opposite wall. Someone suddenly turned out to be sitting there, though God knows how he had got in, because he had not been in the room when Ivan Fyodorovich came back from seeing Smerdyakov. It was some gentleman, or, rather, a certain type of Russian gentleman, no longer young, qui frisait la cinquantaine [“who was pushing fifty”], as the French say, with not too much gray in his dark, rather long, and still thick hair, and with a pointed beard.
The description of this “gentleman” continues in ol’ Dosty’s magnum opus; but I stop here, because I like these details best: they bring to mind a passage from Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce – here I’ll list some facts, before copying the excerpt, to refresh my memory:
The year is 1918. Joyce is 36. He is still working on composing his famous novel Ulysses. He has recently moved from Trieste to Zurich with his sweetheart Nora and their children. The following snippet focuses on their son Giorgio, who is just 13 years old: the boy makes some friends at his new school and then invites them to his house. At the end of the passage, they run into Joyce the father, and baulk at his appearance – that’s the part that I like.
His schoolmates got on well with Giorgio. . . . He told them his father was a writer, and they asked what books he wrote. Giorgio answered that his father had been working on a book for five years and that it would take him another ten years or so to finish it. . . .
One day Giorgio invited these schoolmates to his home. They were eager to know what the habitation of a real writer looked like, but were disappointed, for it looked exactly like their own flats, and had neither rifles nor swords on the wall. It even smelled of cooking as their own homes did. Nora Joyce welcomed them kindly, and Giorgio played on the piano and sang to them. When they were going out they met what seemed to them ‘an entirely black man’ in the hall. He wore a black jacket, had a black goat’s beard and black, bristly hair on his head. He shook hands with them and looked at them with his dark eyes from behind very thick glasses. Unable to bear this concentrated gaze, they left as quickly as they decently could, agreeing as they went down the stairs that Giorgio’s father looked exactly like the devil. While the details of the picture were not accurate, the impression must have been genuine enough, for a landlady of the Joyces referred to him as ‘Herr Satan.’
I mentioned this passage about Joyce to my own Nora while we were reading ol’ Dosty’s novel, and I admitted that although I’ve never had facial hair (for I’ve preferred always to remain clean-shaven like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh), if the hour comes when I must join the fashion of our eon and grow a beard, I’ll make mine taper to a point like the devil from hell. Following Joyce, I’ll sport “a black goat’s beard” and have bristly hair on my head. (I already own a pair of “dark eyes” behind “very thick glasses.”) Also, if possible, I’ll have a hoof at the end of one leg – that’ll really impress the locals.
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