Thoughts

Thinking out Loud & Making Comments

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George

Again with our love for George Eliot.

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

“George Eliot, orig. Mary Ann Evans later Marian Evans, (born Nov. 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, Eng.—died Dec. 22, 1880, London), British novelist. Eliot was raised with a strong evangelical piety but broke with religious orthodoxy in her 20s. She worked as a translator, a critic, and a subeditor of the Westminster Review (1851–54). Later she turned to fiction. Adopting a masculine pseudonym to evade prejudice against women novelists, she first brought out Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). This was followed by such classic works as Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), provides a thorough study of every class of provincial society. The method of psychological analysis she developed would become characteristic of modern fiction. With the journalist, philosopher, and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78), a married man, she enjoyed a long and happy, though scandalous, liaison; their Sunday-afternoon salons were a brilliant feature of Victorian life.”

Impressions of Theophrastus Such/Chapter IV chapter 4 (1879)

Posted by AsAboveSoBelow.

They still taught her books when I was in highschool. And about her name, or the changing of it anyway. I always thought my true name was George and would have changed it to that were it not for both my brother and father named George. I felt rather cheated. It’s not too late now and I could embrace that much easier than as a child, but it would be worse than changing your phone number. Just consider the number of contacts involved. To say nothing of the explanations.

The subject of “Naming Things” itself would be several posts. There’s the biblical “As a man is called, so is he.” Or something like that. And children! The children who want to change their names. Do they all? Do they still? My brother wanted to be called Jim. Just because he liked it. Were I his mother I would have called him Jim. Not a sight or sound for my mother of course.

And this is, too, The Way Things Are. At least for today.

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Prattling

There are times I like to Prattle. As in “she prattled on and on and never said anything.” You know, like “Now I’d like to prattle and so nothing counts and nothing is for keeps.” [As of right now nothing counts.] See, there are rules for everything, even prattling. You know I never learned what horror would befall us if we broke neighborhood-gaming rules. Because I never broke them. No one did.

This painting below looks like a Basquiat to me but apparently it isn’t. Maybe it just looks like a Basquiat to me as that’s the only one I know who does this.

retroavangarda

On the other hand, I could firmly embrace the truth of the things here and now as they are here and now and maybe that’s how it is. Now. Here.

So I’m going to go and prattle on elsewhere as if I weren’t leaving the prattling behind.

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2024

I had written a poem. It took a long time. And it never took form, never got real. Just a word or two of truth and then some junk. I asked him once. I said, how do you know when to write a poem. He said when you don’t want to use any commas.

January 1, 2024
Soon there will be no one left to forgive me
Your voice tumbling out violets
grown wild in streams where fish jumped
You were never tomorrow
The moon glinted moving the peace
so I wouldn’t stumble

The rounds made your laughter mean
Sunlight kill ing behind the trees
when I couldn’t see you move the branches back
Too loud too late…limb and leaf
blinded by boots slick from remembering
one last line missing

Where your smile was as bright as the sun light where the fish jumped.

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Sorting

Eventually it comes to this. Someone dies and you must go through their items. Otherwise known as going through their junk. Then later, much later you’ll need to go through the leftovers and sort again, the things you kept and never used. You still can’t bear to do away with the treasures that are nothing but things.

Her plates. The ones she had to have to go with the fancy silverware. The silverware itself. Never used, never polished. Your own unused too. “No one entertains like that today.” That’s what we say, we hippies returned to hippy life.

Today we share gummies and play games or talk of Ethics or Morals or The Reality of God. Better yet, Who is God? Certainly no longer the “Father in Heaven” of our youth. What an answer to tide us over. An answer that doesn’t help with the sorting.

The holding onto is clearly an attempt to hold onto our youth. The memories of certain dinners. The memories of Safety that can no longer be replicated. Just as my son’s blanket won’t make me safe. My daughter once said, “Mom, Joel is not in that blanket.” And yet sometimes I found him there, sometimes as I cried and hung onto it, I saw him as a child, I heard his voice.

So now I wonder what I should do with those plates I’ve never used in all the time since she has been gone. Now here it is. The move to end all moves. The final move, out of the country yet. The move where only essentials are taken. Preparing for that is going to take a while. It’s a good thing I won’t be embarking until next year. But the plates are going to be long gone before then.

Joe Bentley Wisconsin post and photo. From the memory palace, if I were taking the back roads.

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Thoughts on My Daughter’s Birthday

These are actually thoughts I’m having on the date of her birthday, not thoughts about her birthday. Sometimes too many words are involved in order to make something clear. Especially in a header. And more than once I have thought that the preposition carries a boat load on its little shoulders.

• The daughter was sitting on the floor in front of the TV, eating a toasted-cheese sandwich. This means that it is a Friday and the rules are set aside for “Wild Wild West.” Her hair is shimmering and shining its thousand shades of brown in the sunlight that streams though the window. The boy is sent to his room for some childhood offense and loses out on the broken rules and favored TV show. Just as he walks by, without turning around or looking,

This from the girl: “He’ll never learn.”

• Another TV night, this time on the front porch. The girl is sitting in a chair, not eating, and watching a show. It’s another shoot-em-up but not a western. At some point a man rushes into his bedroom and lands on his bed. As he does so, the bed explodes.

This from the girl: “Oh boy! Is he ever in trouble!”

• The girl and boy are sitting on the sofa. They are watching a TV show. I walk into the room and ask them what they are watching.

The girl answers: “I don’t know but it must be ‘Mission Impossible’ because I don’t know what’s going on.

• Baby Z and I just got our noses slammed by a door. It was the cat’s fault. Her last words were “CAT! NO! No cat.” Followed by a slam. I was stunned. So was baby Z. We just looked at each other.

• The point of it is that a true novel would never end. We are living it after all.

• What is the need to be doing two things at once? Or is it something else making a distraction or a comfort in the background? Nope. It’s about having something to distract the part of the person who becomes aware.

• When the boy was very young he came into the bedroom to tell me that he had a stomach ache in his head. And he came laughing into the kitchen the first time he got the hiccups. He’d hiccup and giggle, hiccup and giggle. Big brown eyes wide and grin the whole of his face.

• Religion and Sex are the same things…sooner or later someone is going to end up on their knees.

• Hey, if we start every new sentence or break with a capital letter why do we need periods at all? Aren’t they redundant?

• Slowly you fall back in love with the things that mattered to you.

• “Permission to leave the battle, sir? God? God, sir? Permission to leave sir?”

• Household rooms need to be renamed: living = group therapy; kitchen=anorexia /bulimia /gluttony, talk therapy; and so on.

• Fear is the dog that’s lapping at the heels same as the voice that calls you back to awareness…

This is a photo from the candlelight chamber-music concert that we went to when we celebrated my birthday here in Cleveland. It was so beautiful. Then the daughter went to Portugal to lease an apartment and celebrate her birthday which is on the 28th.