Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

The Trump Bible: perspectives from The New Yorker

Dear readers of Reckonings (https://www.reckonings.net),

Many of you will know that Donald Trump is selling a "God Bless the USA Bible" for $60. I did not and shall not purchase one, so I have some questions about the project. It's not entirely clear what cause the proceeds will serve, but you can imagine, as have I.

As to the Trump Bible's contents, we know there are two Testaments, both bearing a distinctive resemblance to their creator or one of his minions, with a little biblical know-how and a sense of humor for which he is, to my knowledge, wholly lacking. So I offer you the challenge of resolving my quandary, and would be grateful to hear from you. 

Bruce Headlam and Stephen Sherrill, who offer that sense of humor Trump lacks, provide their own best guesses in The New Yorker's current issue. Judge for yourselves, as always, and if there are any of you who forked over the $60, please let me know what you received for your hard-earned cash.

I want to make clear that the following text is from the pages of The New Yorker. If any of you are not familiar with the real Bible and its contents, Old Testament and/or New Testament, and take umbrage or worse at making fun of it, please do not read on. If there are any of you who truly accept that advice, please proceed at your own risk. Here is the word for which I'd been seeking: Godspeed. 

 

The Great Flood

Now, Noah was very faithful, so God commanded him to build a mighty ark, telling him, “Take your family and two of every living thing.” But there was one animal that Noah couldn’t catch, and that was the beautiful unicorn, a white horse with a horn on its head. They’re very tricky, those unicorns. They hid from Noah and perished in the flood.

Noah became very sad and spoke to God: “Lord, why have you forsaken the unicorn? Especially when you have other creatures here I don’t care for, frankly.”

After forty days, God kept his promise and the rain stopped. Noah and his family stepped out of the ark and into a new world. But he couldn’t stop thinking about unicorns.

Imagine if we had unicorns today. Wouldn’t that be something?

 

The Testing of Abraham

“Abraham!” God commanded. “Take your son to the mountain and make of him a sacrifice to me.”

But Abraham had a multitude of sons by many wives. That’s how they did it back then. Many wives. Some say it was better that way.

“Lord,” Abraham replied, “can you tell me which son? I have so many.”

“Your firstborn.”

“Just the one, Lord? Really, there are so many I don’t remember all their names.”

“Just the one. It’s not a big deal.”

“Are you sure? Honestly, Lord, I can’t find them all jobs as it is.”

“O.K., fine. Take a couple.”

“The firstborn and one other?”

“It doesn’t matter. You choose.”

Then Abraham was seized by fear and beseeched the Lord: “Please spare my daughter. For I say unto you, she’s quite a looker.”

And God replied, “Let’s just forget I said anything.”

 

The Feeding of the Multitude

After Jesus finished preaching, a great multitude of people came to him with tears in their eyes, because it had been such a beautiful speech. But it was also very long, and they were hungry.

The apostles had only seven loaves of bread and a few fish. Jesus told them, “Collect money from the multitude for food. Then bring it to me and I’ll show you a miracle.” And because he liked to test his followers he added, “The apostle who brings the most money can ride with me on my donkey into Jerusalem.”

When the apostles had done what he asked, Jesus broke the loaves and fish and put them into baskets. When the apostles saw what he had done, they cried, “Lord, there are still only seven loaves and a few fish. They’re just in smaller baskets. That won’t fool anybody.”

Jesus put the money in his robe and said, “Tell the multitude if they go home now we’ve got something much better than loaves and fish for them. They’re going to be very happy, trust me.”

The apostles told the five thousand what Jesus had said and, lo, they were satisfied and left without eating. The apostles threw themselves on the ground and praised Jesus, for they had witnessed a miracle.

Afterward, Jesus didn’t mention the donkey ride again, and nobody asked.

 

The Resurrection

After Jesus was arrested, the crowd brought him before Pontius Pilate.

“Tell me, Jesus Christ,” Pilate said. “Are you King of the Jews?” Which wasn’t that strange a question, because even today a lot of people don’t know that Jesus was actually Jewish.

“You say that I am,” Jesus replied, but, again, you couldn’t tell just by looking at him. “This trial is very unfair. You are a corrupt judge, and your wife is a very nasty woman.”

“What does my wife have to do with anything?” Pilate asked.

“I don’t want to say,” Jesus replied. “But I’ve heard some rumors.”

The crowd dragged Jesus away, while Pilate pondered the comment about his wife. Jesus was crucified and left to die.

Overcome by grief, the apostles left for Galilee, where to their amazement they found Jesus in splendid white robes waiting for them.

“Lord!” they cried. “You have fulfilled the prophecies and risen from the dead.”

“What prophecies?” Jesus replied. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

The apostles didn’t understand.

“While I was carrying the Cross, someone stopped to help,” Jesus said. “Simon. Shimon, maybe. Sounded foreign. The next thing I knew, the crowd had crucified him instead, so I just left.”

The apostles exulted, and the sky opened up. “I am ascending to Heaven now to sit at the right hand of the Father,” Jesus told them. “And when I return I’m not going to be in such a forgiving mood. Judas, the Pharisees, Pilate—they will feel my wrath on Day One. I’m not so happy with Thomas, either, who I heard said some very bad things about me. And this will be a sign unto you: the lamb will lie down with the lion. And you’re not going to want to be the lamb, believe me.”

With that, Jesus ascended to Heaven, speaking his final words: “I’ll ask one more time about the unicorns. But I’m pretty sure the answer is still no.” ♦

 

 

 

 

 

Novel Overtures to the More-Than-Human World

"Novel Overtures to the More-Than-Human World" is not only focused on climate change and its implications. It does raise compelling issues that may intrigue readers of Reckonings as they have me. 

Climate change affects not only humans like us, but the overwhelming number of species that are not human: yet they are our kin; thus "the More-Than-Human World." It's an awkward construction, yes, but it should be clear to us all that the well-being of our own species, homo sapiens, is intimately, consequentially interwoven with the quality of non-human life with which (with whom?) we share this planet. 

"Nature," we are accustomed to say, or "the natural world," as if it's ours to enjoy, despoil, care for or not, alarm, be alarmed by, admire or ignore. At the bottom of this message is an alternative construction in the essay by David Bollier (http://www.bollier.org/ and https://centerforneweconomics.org/people/david-bollier/). 

Readers may also enjoy Robin Wall Kimmerer's related essay in The Ecologist magazine, "Living beings are our kith and kin."

In Kimmerer's essay and in her altogether admirable book cited below, Kimmerer suggests we need a new pronoun in order to avoid objectifying the world of nature. Her choice, with good reason, is the word kin. I admire that suggestion.  Living together as we do, we are all kin. So why not use as well the words us, our and we? We are one with the forest, the tree, the field, the marsh. Especially when I am quiet, I love our gathering, the soft breeze in our leaves and branches, our face and hair. 

Although the phrase "kith and kin" has become archaic (at least the kith part), originally it meant one's relations. The word kith is Old English, and the original senses were ‘knowledge,’ ‘one's native land,' and ‘friends and neighbors.’ The phrase kith and kin originally denoted one's country and relatives; later one's friends and relatives. (See the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.)

Please read Kimmerer's moving and deeply informed book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013). In its preface she writes:

"I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother's back. But
it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other."

Here is David Bollier's essay:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-03-10/novel-overtures-to-the-more-than-human-world/

 

Robin Wall Zimmerer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mirror Lake, Milford Sound, New Zealand

David Whyte on Vulnerability

Vulnerability

David Whyte

December 12, 2016

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

---

Excerpted with permission from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.

From Krista Tippett's "On Being":

Before he was known as a poet and philosopher, David Whyte lived another life as a naturalist. After getting his degree in marine zoology he spent almost two years living in the Galapagos Islands observing animals, birds, and landscapes. He says in this week’s On Being that this extended period of deep and attentive observation opened him to a new way of understanding the act of paying attention.

“I began to realize that my identity depended not upon any beliefs I had … but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself,” he says. “And as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and

deepen your own sense of presence."

 

Everything Is Waiting for You

David Whyte

Listen

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

 

Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet"

I read Neruda's "Keeping Quiet" to our meditation group this past Saturday morning.

It is a beautiful reflection on the deeply engaging practice of stillness.

I've been reflecting lately on a collection of related issues, including the differences and similarities of meditating alone and meditating with a group of friends; the contrasting experiences of speaking and listening to another person, in a dyad and in a group; between moving and stillness, walking and running, doing and being, indifference and engagement, coming and going, happiness* and sadness, happiness and joy**; the mysteries of living, dying and death. There is, of course, diversity in each of those variables (the last none of us know), even moment-by-moment changes in short time spans. To string such qualities of experience together as I have done here is bewildering. Counting to twelve helps, as in meditation we may count our breaths, usually one to ten—then we start over again.

 

* See Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)

** See David Brooks, "The Difference Between Happiness and Joy," The New York Times, May 7, 2019.

 

 

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

 

                        — Pablo Neruda

 

Audacious

Audacious is one of those words whose splendor consists, at least in part, of its representation of two diametrically opposed meanings. Most of the information herein is from the incomparable Oxford English Dictionary; Merriam-Webster is a useful adjunct to the OED, not a substitute. It may be characterized (as it is audaciously on its website) as "America's most trusted online dictionary;" the OED is English.

On the one hand, daring, bold, confident, intrepid, as in T. Nicolls' translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War ii. cvi. 67: "More bolde and audacious in this thing, wherein we have much experyence."

On the other, unrestrained by or expressing defiance of the principles of decorum and morality; presumptuously wicked, impudent, shameless, rash, insolent, as in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), 323: "I grew more hardn'd and audacious than ever."

Merriam-Webster has a helpful descriptive paragraph:

"Audacious first appeared in English in the mid-1500s. It was borrowed from the Middle French adjective audacieux, which was derived from the noun audace ('boldness, audacity'). Audace came from the Latin audacia, a derivative of the Latin root audac- ('bold'). Audac- is also the source of audacity, which appeared in Middle English (as audacite) in the 1400s. Audac- can be traced, by way of the Latin verb audēre ('to dare'), to the Latin adjective avidus ('eager' or 'greedy'), which was also borrowed by English, either directly from Latin or via the French avide, to give us our adjective avid. Among the early adopters of audacious was William Shakespeare, who used the word seven times in his plays, as in Henry VI, Part 2, where Somerset addresses York with the lines, 'I arrest thee, York, / Of capital treason 'gainst the King and crown. / Obey, audacious traitor, kneel for grace."

I promise to toast here in Reckonings any reader who persuasively reveals any other word in English that similarly conveys two such opposing meanings.

Unfamiliar words: fugacious

Likely more than you want to know:

fugacious: according to Merriam-Webster, lasting a short time, evanescent.

"Fugacious is often used to describe immaterial things like emotions, but not always. Botanists, for example, use it to describe plant parts that wither or fall off before the usual time. Things that are fugacious are fleeting, and etymologically they can also be said to be fleeing. Fugacious derives from the Latin verb fugere, which means "to flee." Other descendants of fugere include fugitive, refuge, and subterfuge."

Examples of fugacious:

The rock band's rise in popularity turned out to be fugacious, and within two years its members had moved on to other careers.

"The maple leaves are a yellow light signaling me to slow down and take in the last pulse of color of a fugacious fall."
— David Johnson, The Daily News of Newburyport (Massachusetts), 26 Nov. 2013

 

If one turns to the OED, fugacious is defined as "apt to flee away or flit," and then breaks the definition down into its uses in different contexts:

a. Of immaterial things: Tending to disappear, of short duration; evanescent, fleeting, transient, fugitive.

b. Of persons: †Ready to run away. Also humorously (of persons), fleeing; (of things) slippery. rare.

c. Of a material substance: Volatile.

d. Botany and Zoology. Falling or fading early; soon cast off. Cf. caducous adj.

 

Brouhaha (and the OED)

One of the pleasures of being a writer—or a reader for that matter—is an affection for words and their meanings. The finest and most well known English dictionary, far and away, is, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary, largely because of its inclusion of the historical evolution of each word's usage. The OED is published in several volumes, and in two volumes requiring a magnifying glass to read, but in this digital age, it is far more easily accessed online, with its own website. The OED, even on its website, is not inexpensive to use. An annual subscription to the online version now normally costs $295/year, but now, in celebration of its 90th year of publication, the OED is available for $90/year in the U.S. and £90 in the U.K. Most public libraries subscribe to the OED, and the library subscription can be used for free from one's home.

Obviously, there are other reputable dictionaries, of which one, Merriam-Webster, has a "Word of the Day" email newsletter, with definition, usage, pronunciation, and commentary about word origins. 

The occasion for these notes is that today's Word of the Day is one of my favorite words which I have too little occasion to use. The word is "brouhaha," meaning "a state of commotion or excitement: hubbub, uproar." 

Merriam-Webster continues its Word of the Day message: "Some etymologists think brouhaha is onomatopoeic in origin, but others believe it comes from the Classical Hebrew phrase barukh habba', meaning 'blessed be he who arrives' (Psalms 118:26). Although we borrowed brouhaha directly from French in the late 18th century, etymologists have connected the French derivation to that frequently recited Hebrew phrase, distorted to something like brouhaha by worshippers whose knowledge of Hebrew was limited. The word eventually came to be used in a sense similar to 'applause' and in the sense of 'a noisy confusion of sound'—the latter being the sense that was later extended in English to refer to any tumultuous and confused situation."

Examples of brouhaha (again, from Merriam-Webster):

There was much brouhaha in the tabloids over the young actor's sudden marriage to the woman who had been his high school sweetheart.

 

But where do you go, when the temperatures are soaring and you want to cool off but without all of the brouhaha that comes along with a trip to one of our more popular, crowded city beaches?

Unfamiliar words (3): puissant

Here is a word whose meaning and pronunciation both eluded me. It means "of great force or vigor: strong, powerful. and it is pronounced PUISSant.

Merriam-Webster's description:

Puissant has some powerful ties to some more commonplace English words. Although puissant has a considerably fancier feel than power and potent, all three words share the same Latin ancestor: posse, a verb meaning "to be able." (English posse, meaning "a group of people sharing some common interest," is also related to the Latin verb but came into the language via the Medieval Latin phrase posse comitatus, literally "power of the county.") Potent came from potent-, potens, a present participle of posse. Power came to us by way of Anglo-French poer, which itself comes from a Vulgar Latin alteration of posse. From poer also came the Anglo-French adjective pussant, meaning "able" or "powerful," and English speakers borrowed that to form puissant in the 15th century.

 

Unfamiliar words (2): congener

congener. (OED)

A member of the same kind or class with another, or nearly allied to another in character. Of the same kind or nature; akin.

Unfamiliar words (1): sequacious

I am going to add an occasional category to entries in Reckonings: words I encounter which intrigue me and whose meaning is unfamiliar to me. I shall generally not include words that are synonymous with those that are merely synonyms for others more commonly used; that feels unfair.

Readers interested in the dictionaries I use: the far superior but occasionally overwhelming Oxford English Dictionary, and the more pedestrian but still useful Merriam-Webster (which has a "word of the day" service that appears primarily to prove how much it knows). Both are available online. The OED subscription is expensive, so I'm happy to report that I have access from home (i.e., via the internet) gratis through membership in the Mill Valley Public Library.

Here is an example drawn from an article about Donald Trump in The Washington Post. Its identity below is, yes, from that Merriam-Webster "word of the day," written before I realized what M-W was doing with its word-of-the-day...

 

---

Sequacious ("intellectually servile") wheedled its way into our top lookups on August 6th, 2018, through its appearance in an article in The Washington Post.

There, he [Donald Trump] decided to unfurl an inventory of the “the guys that we love” — that is, Fox News stars who support his cause, whatever that cause is. After plowing through some names — including Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, “the great Lou Dobbs” and the incomparably sequacious Steve Doocy of “Fox & Friends — Trump caught himself: “I’m in trouble, ’cause I know I left out probably 10,” he said.
—Erik Wemple, The Washington Post, 6 Aug. 2018

Sequacious (which, in case you were wondering, is never used as a compliment), may be traced back to the Latin sequax (which means "inclined to follow"). The word dates to the first half of the 17th century; our earliest citation is from Edward Reynold's 1640 beach-read A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man With the Severall Dignities and Corruptions Thereunto Belonging. In addition to "intellectually servile," sequacious has a secondary meaning, which is "subservient." This sense is now considered archaic, and little used.

Remove the Occasions of it, withdraw Fuell from so catching a Flame. They say of Turpentine, and some other like things. That they will draw and sucke Fire unto them. Certainely of all Fire there is none so ductile, so sequacious and obsequious, as this of Wrath.
—Edward Reynolds A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man With the Severall Dignities and Corruptions Thereunto Belonging, 1640.

Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley

An appreciation of Charles Addams on Halloween

One of my treasured and almost lifelong gifts from my family has been an appreciation of and (coming a little later) subscription to The New Yorker. In my childhood - and truthfully, well after - I turned primarily to the cartoons, and came to look forward particularly to those drawn by the inimitable Charles Addams. Robert Mankoff, who came to The New Yorker as a cartoonist in Addams's later years, spoke recently with an interviewer about the influence of Addam's work:

 

What influence has Charles Addams’s work had on cartooning and American humor?

I think his influence is, like the man, largish. He tapped into that vein of American gothic that has a touch of paranoia about it, seeing behind every comforting façade the uncomfortable truth about the duality of human nature. But where Gothic literature usually combined these themes with romance, Addams made the horror hilarious: disturbing, but at the same time friendly, identifiable, and acceptable. In cartooning, you can see the direct influence of his work in someone like Gahan Wilson, and in many other cartoonists. Horror films that combine humor with horror, such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” with its wise-cracking Freddy Krueger, are also in his debt. And, of course, Addams’s humor was “black” and “sick” before those terms applied.

But I think his influence extends beyond the horror genre, to humor not as a comforting “laughter is the best medicine” anodyne but as something deeply skeptical of the purported values of middle-class American life. By making us laugh at, and with, his fiendish protagonists, he makes us temporarily share their values, and doubt our own.

 

 Those with an interest in the private and professional life of the man Charles Addams should turn to Linda H. Davis's biography, Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life (Unabridged), published by Random House in 2006, now also available as an audio book wonderfully read by Don Hagen. Addams's widow gave the biography her blessing, and it's said to pull out all the stops.

 

 Charles Addams

 

But for this particular Halloween occasion, I want simply to offer to readers of Reckonings a small selection; one of Addams's many covers for The New Yorker, and two of his cartoons.

The first is a cover for the issue of July 8, 1961, depicting ghosts from an upland cemetery watching an outdoor drive-in movie - a Western with a particularly appropriate scene - in the valley below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second cartoon below is a Halloween occasion, the lady of the house kindly apologizing to a small alien creature (see space ships and companions in background) she plausibly assumes is a boy in costume.

 

"I'm sorry, sonny. We've run out of candy."

 

Reprobates and Curmudgeons: A brief essay

I had the great privilege, for several years around the recent turn of the century, of editing an online journal, The Daily Reprobate, that in its original print version was founded by Mark Twain in 1866. There is, I admit, some scholarly controversy about the details, even the veracity, of that founding legend, but such controversy in general can be safely ignored.

Some articles and snippits from The Reprobate inevitably find their way into Reckonings, if only to lend a much-needed antidote to its insufferable seriousness. Most of those posts are lodged in the category I've called  “Words and Whimsey.”

Here is a brief description of The Daily Reprobate, a reasonable definition of its operative word, and a similarly felicitous description of its close sibling, curmudgeon.

__________________

 

The Reprobate's founder, Mark Twain, once remarked aptly, “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” Edward Abbey, a modern inheritor of Twain's spirit, added a companion truth, “The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.” The Daily Reprobate honored that wisdom since its founding 140 years ago as a congenial companion for the intelligent and irascible reader gifted with a sense of humor and a love of language.

The word “reprobate” has a distinguished pedigree, having risen over the last 3000 years or so from its wretched beginnings when reprobates were lost souls rejected by God, wicked Sabbath-breaking sons of Belial, fallen angels, Israelites in the desert when Moses was absent. A small residue of that early meaning is preserved in the forbidding language of Calvinism, and in that of evangelical Christians intent upon their own virtue and others' salvation.

More currently, and for the journal’s guidance over its many years of publication, reprobates are shameless rascals. Often reproved as unrepentant scalawags by the Authorities (the bearers of cultural, moral and political orthodoxy) they in fact stand as bastions, fonts of discriminating disapproval. Sometimes they are wily and subtle, coyote shape-shifters resorting to irony and satire, at others straightforward firebrands. In whatever guise, they are pungent critics of deceit and abuse in the established order.

Now, take a moment's opportunity to enjoy a word lover's delight (and no doubt someone else's sheer boredom): contemplation of the relationship between reprobates and curmudgeons. Editors and authors who wrote for The Daily Reprobate were, by blood, title and persuasion, the former. But we offered a congenial home to curmudgeons, who are, in a roundabout way, the closest of kin. On a good day, we can find the two spirits commingling in our hearts.

Purely as a pedigreed word, curmudgeon is a poor relative. No one appears to know where it came from. There's been speculation about its connection to Middle English and Old French words relating to stealing and hoarding; and it is said that a correspondent of Dr. Johnson attempted to assign to it an etymology based on the fusion of coeur (heart) and méchant (malicious, spiteful).

Curmudgeon seems, vexedly, just to appear sometime in the latter half of the 16th century, a nonce-word, made up. There is little doubt that a curmudgeon is a churlish fellow of independent mind, and tolerates neither fools nor those who provoke others' suffering for their own advantage. His critics call him greedy, a muckworm and pinchgut, a lickpenny.

In truth he is none of those. Like Robin of the Hood, he steals and hoards only in the interest of equity, and knows more than most that gifts remain gifts only by passing them on. (See Lewis Hyde’s classic book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.*) The reprobate is typically more consistent; his reprobation is likely to be a matter of character. The curmudgeon's totem animals are the chameleon and the lion. He pads irregularly among soberly collected wisdom, fulmination, frothing outrage, depression, and sleepy abandonment to the muse.

Both reprobates and curmudgeons can be formidable critics. Both are shape-shifters.

It is intriguing that reprobates and curmudgeons are typically identified as men rather than women. Current explanations are unsatisfactory, and the truth belies the myth. A plausible but untested hypothesis rests upon a curious transposition of subject and object. It is not that there are fewer female than male reprobates and curmudgeons. The people whose lives and works they deflate and disarm, however, are far more often men than women, for a simple reason: men have thus far been the world's destroyers.

Edward Abbey's reflections in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989) are fitting here:

“I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as 'a surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow.' ...But through frequent recent usage, the term is acquiring a broader meaning, which our dictionaries have not yet caught up to. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”

The last word should be given, in justice, to an inspired taxonomist. John Winokur, in his introduction to The Portable Curmudgeon Redux (a successor to The Portable Curmudgeon, and predecessor of A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love and Return of the Portable Curmudgeon), writes:

 “I remain convinced that there is no hope for the human race and that we are in the terminal stages of Life As We Know It. This book is an attempt to amuse myself and others while we're waiting for the last lug nut to fly off the last wheel of civilization.”

 

* I confess that I liked better the original subtitle, "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property"

 

 

Eustace Tilley at The New Yorker

For ninety years Eustace Tilley has been the iconic face of The New Yorker, and we readers see him, or some of his many variants, on every anniversary cover, most recently on the magazine's 90th birthday last month. To be more accurate, I should say Eustace Tilley and the butterfly that hovers in front of his face and is examined through the lens of his monocle.  

As Louis Menand wrote on an earlier anniversary ten years ago, 

After the manner of contemporary art (also of contemporary advertising), the iconography has been parodied, inverted, subverted, and perverted. The man-butterfly binary has been deconstructed, producing a butterfly staring at a man. Species-centrism has been attacked by dressing a dog in the top hat and collar. There has been a female Tilley, an African-American Tilley, and a punk Tilley…. He’s the enigma who came to stay. 

Related articles

Cover Story: Nine Eustaces

The New Yorker's 90-Year-Old Mascot Updated 9 Different Ways

Pi Day

Just to convey what an enlightened community I live in, at 9:26:53 this morning a group of us, led by our resident mathematician, gathered in the library to celebrate Pi Day, that singular moment in historical time, recurring every 100 years, at which the time-and-date corresponds exactly to the first 10 digits of Pi, or π —

π = 3.141592653.... *

3/14/15 9:26:53

There were, of course, celebrations of Pi Day all over the world; I know at many universities and scientific organizations, as noted by the NY Times and surely other publications. I trust most of them, like ours, consumed pies as well. 

* Pi, I'd forgotten and relearned this morning, is the number derived by dividing the length of the circumference of a circle by the length of its diameter, so π = C/D. 

Sigaldry in the OED

Occasionally a word will come to our consciousness from some unremembered depth and for no apparent reason. Today I was sitting at my desk, pleased to have found access, through the local public library, to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. For the moment I had nothing I wanted to look up, but I suppose, having the world's finest English dictionary more or less in hand, words began to stir, move toward consciousness. The one that came first to mind was a thoroughgoing surprise: sigaldry. 

I couldn't recall what it meant nor where I had encountered it, so naturally I typed it into the OED's search box. Here is what I found:

Forms:  Also ME sigaldrie, ME sygaldrye.

Etymology:  < sigalder n. + -y suffix1.

Obs. rare.

 

 Enchantment, sorcery.

 

?c1225  (▸?a1200)    Ancrene Riwle (Cleo. C.vi) (1972) 155   Sigaldrie [c1230 Corpus sygaldren]. false tollunges leuunge o nore on swefne & alle wiche-creftes.

 

a1400   K. Alis. (W.) 7015   Quede and harme he wil me spye,..Gef he wot of this sygaldrye [Laud trigoldrye] That this trowes [= trees] kan lye.

 

?a1500   Chester Pl., Crucifixion (Shaks. Soc.) II. 69   Burye hym wher thy wil be, But look thou make no sigaldry To raise him up agayne.

 

What a compound pleasure: to see the OED at its splendid work, attending to etymology, origin and meaning, and offering examples of the word's use, in this instance, given "Obs. rare," that is, obsolete and rarely employed, examples drawn from long ago—the 13th, 15th and 16th centuries, thus middle or old English.  

 

Enchantment, sorcery. Burye hym wher thy wil be, But look thou make no sigaldry To raise him up agayne. Bury the crucified one near you, but employ no sorcery to resurrect him.

 

Who speaks, and to whom? And who was the one crucified? We are only offered a source of the quotation: Chester Pl., Crucifixion (Shaks. Soc.) II. 69. Chester Pl. refers to the ancient city of Chester in the northwest of England and the production of a cycle of mystery plays produced and performed in Chester, a cycle dating back at least to the early part of the 15th century. 

 

How that word came swimming out of my unconscious I have no idea. Maybe it was inspired by the OED itself, a profound product of English scholarship. Perhaps I encountered the word in reading of Merlin, the only practitioner of sigaldry (that is to say, a sigalder) with whom I am more than passingly familiar. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monet's wheatstacks and his private journal: an irreverent whimsey

 

 

 

Let's imagine, just imagine mind you, that the evidence of Monet's wheatstacks drama began here, very early in the morning light, before sunrise:

Then, if you like, listen to an audio commentary about a later wheatstack painting now in the J. Paul Getty Museum's collection: Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, Morning (Meules, Effet de Neige, Le Matin), Claude Monet, 1891, oil on canvas. 

One might ask: Did Monet become preoccupied, even obsessed, by particular objects or scenes that came to his painterly eye? Consider his work on wheatstacks, and recall that he didn't sleep a lot. A Wikipedia entry is helpful, even telling:

"Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, Monet focused on Haystacks and a number of other subjects... In order to work on many paintings virtually simultaneously, he would awake before dawn so as to begin at the earliest time of day..., sometimes working on as many as ten or twelve paintings a day, each one depicting a slightly different aspect of light. The process would be repeated over the course of days, weeks, or months, depending on the weather and the progress of the paintings, until they were completed. As the seasons changed the process was renewed... At differing times of day and in various seasons haystacks absorb the light from diverse parts of the color spectrum. As a result, the residual light that is reflected off of the haystacks is seen as ever-changing, and manifests in distinctive coloring."

Wild.

One can imagine psychic and physical stress, even zaniness, accompanying such painting, perhaps captured candidly in Monet's journal, as revealed by Seth Reiss, who recently gathered and loosely translated passages from the journal for The New Yorker:

 

May 14, 1890

Saw giant stacks of wheat today. I think I am going to start painting those.

June 8, 1890

Having a tough time painting these giant stacks of wheat. I guess I assumed I’d blow through them no problem because they’re just giant stacks of wheat and I’m a professional painter, but getting all the wheat to look good is tough.

June 30, 1890

Painted a decent stack of wheat today. Going to call it, “Wheatstack in the Sunlight, Morning Effect.” Something like that.

Confession: I hated literally everything about painting that stack of wheat, especially how the light bounced off it. But here’s the thing: I have to paint the light right. People go apeshit about the light and how accurate the light is. They ask annoying questions like, “Are the shadows accurate based on the light?” And I always think to myself, “Who gives a fuck? It’s a painting of a red boat and it looks like a million bucks.” 

July 9, 1890

Got a little cocky today and tried to put two stacks of wheat in one painting. Total train wreck. The light was going this way and that and—you know what? I don’t even want to talk about it.

September 21, 1890

I was going to take the day off, but then I looked at the calendar and flipped out because I had wanted to paint what a stack of wheat looks like at the end of summer in afternoon light. I must have completely blanked on what day it was, so I had to book it down to the farm. Got that wheatstack on the canvas toot sweet. But now that I’ve painted what a stack of wheat looks like at the end of summer, I guess I have to paint what a stack of wheat looks like at the end of fall. And if I do fall, I have to do end of winter. And then the end of spring. Crap.

December 2, 1890

If I can’t paint these things with snow on the tops of them, I’ll have failed as an artist and as a man. What does a stack of wheat look like with snow on it in the morning? In the afternoon? At dusk? What does a stack of wheat look like with frost on it? What does a stack of wheat look like when the sun is not setting, but almost setting? What does a stack of wheat look like at 2:43 P.M. on a Monday, 2:43 P.M. on Tuesday, 2:43 P.M. on a Wednesday, 2: 43 P.M. on a—you get the idea.

Jan 1, 1891

Happy New Year! Painted seven hundred and fifty-five stacks of wheat today.

Feb 18, 1891

Hey, look, if there are fourteen hundred and forty minutes in a day, I am going to paint fourteen hundred and forty stacks of wheat. End of story. I told my wife that yesterday and she threw a goddam fit. She said, “So if there are eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds in a day, Claude, are you going to paint eighty-six thousand four hundred stacks of wheat?” I responded, “Welcome to the wheat-painting project, Camille!”

Feb 24, 1891

Confession: I ate a little piece of wheat this morning because I was wondering if I ate enough wheat, would a wheatstack form in my stomach? And, if so, would I be able to paint it? What if I opened my mouth and let some light in? What would a stack of wheat look like inside my stomach with, say, 10:45 A.M.winter light shining in on it?

March 15, 1891

Starting to wish stacks of wheat didn’t exist and light didn’t exist.

April 23, 1891

Got into a huge shouting match with the wheat today. I know one of those assholes took my painting supplies, but when I confronted the wheatstacks, they flat out denied it. I said, “Hey, dipshits, where’s my paint?” No response. So I went over to one that I’ve been sort of hanging out with and getting to know pretty well and guess what I got? Nothing. Silence.

April, 30, 1891

I painted a stack of wheat with blood gushing out of it, showed it to the wheat, and said, “This is gonna be you.” Then I took a scythe and went to town on those bastards. I’m calling that painting, “Stacks of Wheat Getting Fucked Up by Claude Monet in Spring.”

May 10, 1891

Proud to report that I am done painting stacks of wheat—NOT because I am no longer allowed to, according to the Giverny Police Department, but because I have fulfilled my artistic mission vis-à-vis stacks of wheat. Anyway, I’m glad that’s over.

May 14, 1891

Saw some pretty cool water lilies today.

 

 

"The Blue," by Billy Collins

 

The Blue

 

You can have Egypt and Nantucket.

The only place I want to visit is The Blue,

not the Wild Blue Yonder that seduces pilots,

but that zone where the unexpected dwells,

waiting to come out of it in the shape of bolts.

 

I want to walk its azure perimeter

where the unanticipated is coiled, on the mark,

ready to spring into the predictable homes of earth.

 

I want to stroll through the pale indigo light

examining all the accidents about to rocket into time,

all the forgotten names about to fly from tongues.

 

I will scrutinize all the surprises of the future

and watch the brainstorms gathering darkly,

ready to hit the heads of inventors

laboring in their crackpot shacks.

 

A jaded traveler with an invisible passport,

I am at home with this heaven of the unforeseen,

waiting for the next whoosh of sudden departure

when, with no advance warning, to tiny augury,

the unpredictable plummets into our lives

from somewhere that looks like sky.

 

~ Billy Collins ~

 

The legacy of Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum

 

Here is another legacy contribution from the early days of Reckonings (roughly 2003).

 

Pogo Possum

Pogo and the other inhabitants of the Okefenokee Swamp* disappeared from newspapers' comic strip pages shortly after their maker, Walt Kelly, died in 1973. I grew up with his world in the 1950s and 1960s.

I still tune in to Doonesbury now and then. I have been devoted to Calvin and Hobbes, Opus, and Gary Larson's wonderful upside down and sideways view of the world. For a time, as a child, the thoroughgoing loving kindness of Al Capp's shmoos captivated me. But Kelly's way with character, setting and especially language were satisfying as no other comic strip. As Brad Leithauser writes, "Pogo was different. It had depth, a madcap unpredictability, and a restive verbal playfulness; it was, in short, the only comic strip spun through the mind of a poet."

The denizens of the Swamp—Pogo, Albert the alligator, Beauregard the hound, Owl, Porky Pine, the ominous wildcat Simple J. Malarkey (modeled on the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy), the blowhard bear P.T. Bridgeport, Miz Beaver and the fetching French skunk, Ma'm'selle Hepzibah, with whom Pogo is shyly enchanted—lent the strip a wonderful range of linguistic warp and woof, lyricism, affection and (mostly) friendly dissension the likes of which we have not seen since.

The pace of life in the Swamp is... well, like a swamp should be: comfortable, slow, yet with rich, unpredictable depth and color.

 

There are some genuine bad guys among the residents of the swamp—Mole with his omnipresent shades, and his sidekick The Deacon, for example—but they are more like literate rednecks than real evil. The only source of threatened (never realized) violence is the manifestly malignant Malarkey.

 

Some of Kelly's lines remain with me well over a quarter century after they were uttered. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Whenever I hear "Deck the Halls" at Christmas time, I find myself quietly singing, "Deck us all with Boston Charlie, tra la la la la, la la de da" And when I tend to go on longer than I should--a common professorial malady--I recall one of Pogo's rhymes:

Riddle you the little dew
And little do you do?
Little did is little done,
Tho' little did'll do.

I plan to weave into these pages at least a little did'll of Pogo's gentleness, kindness, exuberance and nonsense, without which this battered world would be much the poorer.

For those interested in a contemporary tribute to Kelly and his creation, and a sample of some of his characters' antics, I recommend Brad Leithauser's essay, "Lyrics in the Swamp," in the April 25, 2002 issue of The New York Review of Books. There are several collections of Pogo still available in paperback.

* The real Okefenokee Swamp, thankfully, is still with us, and is a heartening story of environmental intelligence at work.  Covering approximately 700 square miles of South Georgia and North Florida, it is a primitive wetland which harbors thousands of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, many of which are endangered or threatened. The north end of the swamp is bordered by pine forests and thick tangles of vegetation. Small water trails lead south to the open prairies and west to the Suwannee River. Nearly 400,000 acres of the Okefenokee were designated as the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in 1937 (by none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt), protecting the headwaters of the Suwannee and St. Marys Rivers from further development and depredation. For that, Pogo would be pleased and proud.

 

Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence - Tom Engelhardt

 

Tom Engelhardt writes today:

"Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough.  It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America’s spymasters had made just that mistake.  If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks -- which began in May and clearly won’t stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence.  At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other.  In fact, at the moment Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be....

"Conceptually speaking, we’ve never seen anything like the National Security Agency’s urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet -- to keep track of humanity, all of humanity, from its major leaders to obscure figures in the backlands of the planet.  And the fact is that, within the scope of what might be technologically feasible in our era, they seem not to have missed an opportunity.

"[T]he NSA has at least 35,000 employees, possibly as many as 55,000, and an almost $11 billion budget....

"Along with the giant Internet corporations, they have been involved in a process aimed at taking away the very notion of a right to privacy in our world; yet they utterly failed to grasp the basic lesson they have taught the rest of us.  If we live in an era of no privacy, there are no exemptions; if, that is, it’s an age of no-privacy for us, then it’s an age of no-privacy for them, too.

"The word 'conspiracy' is an interesting one in this context.  It comes from the Latin conspirare for 'breathe the same air.'  In order to do that, you need to be a small group in a small room.  Make yourself the largest surveillance outfit on the planet, hire tens of thousands of private contractors — young computer geeks plunged into a situation that would have boggled the mind of George Orwell — and organize a system of storage and electronic retrieval that puts much at an insider’s fingertips, and you’ve just kissed secrecy goodnight and put it to bed for the duration.

"[I]t’s reasonable to assume that, while U.S. spymasters and operators were working at the technological frontiers of surveillance and cryptography, their model for success was distinctly antiquated.  However unconsciously, they were still living with a World War II-style mindset.  Back then, in an all-out military conflict between two sides, listening in on enemy communications had been at least one key to winning the war.  Breaking the German Enigma codes meant knowing precisely where the enemy’s U-boats were, just as breaking Japan’s naval codes ensured victory in the Battle of Midway and elsewhere.

"Unfortunately for the NSA and two administrations in Washington, our world isn’t so clear-cut any more.  Breaking the codes, whatever codes, isn’t going to do the trick.  You may be able to pick up every kind of communication in Pakistan or Egypt, but even if you could listen to or read them all (and the NSA doesn’t have the linguists or the time to do so), instead of simply drowning in useless data, what good would it do you? 

"What’s perhaps most striking ... is the inability of the Obama administration and its intelligence bureaucrats to grasp the nature of what’s happening to them.  For that, they would need to skip those daily briefs from an intelligence community which, on the subject, seems blind, deaf, and dumb, and instead take a clear look at the world.

"In short, if the NSA’s surveillance lineup was classic New York Yankees, their season is shaping up as a last-place finish.

"Here, then, is the bottom line of the scorecard for twenty-first century Washington: omniscience, maybe; omnipotence, forget it; intelligence, not a bit of it; and no end in sight.

"[Note: A small bow of thanks to Adam Hochschild and John Cobb for helping spark this piece into existence.]"

 

Reckonings Editor's note: Tom Engelhardt is rarely responsible for slipping up, and this one is a minor, puzzling and forgivable overstatement —not omnipotence and not omniscience either, unless one counts sheer dead weight as the sum of knowledge. Also, it can and should be clear from reading Tom's account that intelligence is not intrinsically intelligent. This is downright Orwellian. More is less. Strength is weakness. So perhaps less Orwell's 1984, more Alice in Wonderland. No wonder (he said) I spent only one summer in Washington. It was not the heat or humidity that drove me out, not even the weighty responsibility of being the State Department's desk officer for Outer Space. In fact, that was not my title. I was a desk officer in the State Department, but even the State Department was not so crazy as to imagine the US owned outer space. My responsibility was to know the Communications Satellite Corporation, then a plublic-private enterprise. The best part was flying weekly to the United Nations to brief our ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, one of my heros. He was a fine man, if not a successful candidate for president, having the misfortune to be running against Dwight D. Eisenhower (not one of my heros, but a decent man, a good president, a fine general. I think my grandmother was in love with Adlai Stevenson, and he with her. He inscribed a biography about his life, Stuart Brown's Adlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics, "To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience."

Another small bow of thanks to Tom Engelhardt for his astute analysis. Interested readers should go to www.tomdispatch.com, for diverse and consistently intelligent voices on public affairs from foreign and military policy to environmental issues, including Rebecca Solnit, Adam Hochschild, Ann Jones, Peter Van Buren, Jeremy Scahill, Bill McKibben, Andrew Bacevich, and in the old days, Chalmers Johnson. TomDispatch is invaluable. So is Tom.

 

Rebecca Solnit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 jrb

Related articles

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Surveillance State Scorecard

Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence - Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt: Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence

Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence by Tom Engelhardt

Global warming: increasingly critical yet still hard to fathom

Mistaking omniscience for omnipotence

The NSA might know everything but it is not all powerful

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Surveillance State Scorecard

Mistaking Omniscience For Omnipotence

Report: NSA can access most smartphone data