The Shadow Knows

Today is laundry day which, as those of you who know me can easily guess, is a sacred day.

My uncle and his friend are kindred spirits in this matter. Their washer and dryer are not so much appliances as altars to the laundry gods. Never have I looked upon such greatness as exists in their basement back room.

In the basement back room of my apartment complex there is another grouping of washers and dryers. Shortly after I moved in, I did my first load of laundry and was astonished to find a full half inch of lint in the dryer. This was noteworthy even after years of dorms and community laundry rooms. I cleaned it out and dried my clothes, which came out of the dryer smelling of nothing in particular. This is odd, since the whole point of doing laundry is to luxuriate in the warm fresh-smelling while folding or ironing. In fact, usually your whole room smells lovely, even if you didn’t use fabric softener.

I ironed my disappointing yet clean shirts and hung them up in the closet, but by the next day they smelled perfectly foul. A horrible stale smell, part boy’s-locker-room and part homeless-person (similar to the man who sat down on the crowded bus proclaiming, “Ah don’t know if yer wanna sit too close, cuz ah don’t know what ah got.”) Unfortunately, I didn’t have dryer sheets and really didn’t have enough money to go re-washing perfectly clean clothes that just ended up smelling funny. And I wasn’t certain of the source of the funk. I live in an older apartment building, and you know not what evil odors lurk in the shadows of this building’s heart. Eventually, though, I pointed to the dryer as the culprit.

So I bought the strongest smelling dryer sheets that I could find, used Oxy-clean in the wash cycle to remove the old smell, and went on my way eagerly anticipating the fresh clean smell, thinking how lovely it was going to be to be met by little wafts of “Meadows and Rain” instead of horrible nastiness. I cleaned out the lint again (again thick, but not quite as bad as before), loaded in the clothes with the dryer sheets—and was met by the exact same smell. I can’t tell you how horrible it is. I poured out quarters like water so that I could wash ALL of my clothes, and now this. The lint filter was caked after each load, leading me to believe that the entire dryer has been packed full of lint by month after month without cleaning the filter.

There is no escape. The slovenly habits of my fellow apartment-dwellers have destroyed a whole bank of shiny new dryers. The neighborhood is relatively affluent and quite free of Laundromats.

I face weeks of going about my tasks at work with a junior high wrestling team as my intimate companions.

Desperate Plea for Help

I am running dangerously low on reading material. I've tried Sir Walter Scott, since there is so much of him, but found that there is very little to love in all that bulk. The library has a pitifully small collection of Stevenson and Caroline Gordon, as well as most other classics. I tried branching out into more contemporary fiction with P.D. James, but the following sums up both why she had to be jettisoned and why I am leery of further contemporary fiction--yet that seems to be all the library stocks.

Studies of a Contemporary Author

She’s like an old bitch who, having lost the scent shortly after being let off the leash, blunders on unaware that her earnest snufflings among the leaves tell her nothing.

All the pretension, none of the substance.

Out of her depth in the shallow end.

I don't think I'm quite up for another Mark Helprin yet, and my current library list (Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Dickens, Willa Cather and G.K. Chesterton) will probably yield about six books, after the library's selection has gone head to head with the list of their books that I've already read.

So please help me. I just want something light to read when I'm tired, and don't want to come across things about fathers and adopted daughters having an interesting experience in bed and then returning to discovering their roles as father and daughter.

A Diminished Helprin

Some time ago I wrote a short post on reasons to love Mark Helprin. My opinion of him has not changed, but there are also reasons to mourn when reading him. He is so close to being great that the sense of loss at his failure often outweighs the admitted beauty of his writing.

There are two reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of form. Because his sentences are often beautiful and always literate, he seems to have exempted himself from the need to edit. At times he seems to believe that if 3 yards of brocade on a lovely woman make a gorgeous evening dress, 30 yards of brocade ought to be ten times more beautiful.

But the second reason is much more grievous. From the quality of the language to the preoccupation of the main characters, his books attempt to be an homage to beauty. And a person able to write so well clearly does have some understanding of beauty. Yet he explicitly divorces beauty and truth. The falling off here is tragic. He of anyone ought to know that beauty must be true. Beauty demands not just a response, but love. And love is a relationship, a calling forth of the self to the other, refreshing and ennobling the returning self. If beauty is not true, not real, it is not other, and cannot be loved. It is not beauty but merely a chimera of false self-love.

If beauty is not true, we are trapped:

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

- I Wake and Feel, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Highlights from Ratzinger

Today was so lovely that the only suffering was finding that someone had marked up my library book with a highlighter. This has always distressed me, even in these memory-challenged days of occasionally highlighting texts myself. The difference is that those books belong to me, and my choice of emphasis will not necessarily be annoying others. I have even refrained from highlighting books that I own if I considered the book very likely to be borrowed.

But the previous borrower of this book, Salt of the Earth by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was not so inhibited. Although the book is a delightful piece of light theology—and has already made me love the Pope more—I find myself distracted by the erratic yellow marks. Sets of words have been chosen, so it is unlikely that the marks were made by a monkey or a two-year-old child. But the choices—what is the system of thought behind them? Is there a system? The choice of phrases which are coherent within themselves—“right path” rather than “man on”—argues that thought was involved. Occasionally a new vocabulary word was highlighted (sclerotic), but that was fairly rare.

The following are taken from the page I was trying to read when I paused to write this rant (p. 24). Highlighted words are in bold.

This [a pagan religion leading someone to God] is not at all excluded by what I said; on the contrary, this undoubtedly happens on a large scale. It is just that it would be misguided to deduce from this fact that the religions themselves all stand in simple equality to one another, as in one big concert, one big symphony in which ultimately all mean the same thing.

…in the figure of Christ the truly purifying power has appeared out of the Word of God. Christians do not necessarily always live this power well and as they should, but it furnishes the criterion and the orientation for the purifications that are indispensable for keeping religion from becoming a system of oppression and alienation, so that it may really become a way for man to God and to himself.

Now the reader was obviously not simpatico with the Pope, but he also does not seem to have been deliberately perverse in his markings. These are also not the markings that one would make in order to refute the book. The first example does give the opposite impression from the text, but the second seems to be a highly conventional but pious resonation with the idea of coming to God.

Then the light dawned. The reader had chosen the exact phrases which, if focused on, would keep him firmly in the world of clichés, safe from encountering the author’s thought.

The other words may seem to have fallen dead while all the while they have been germinating, ready to bring forth their shocking fruit at the chosen time.

Spare Change

A panhandler was working the crowd at the bus stop. "Sp'change, man? Sp'ch'nge, man?"

A voice muttered, "Get a job." The bum continued on his way, and the mutter became a shouted, "Get a f---ing job!"

I have a job. I just don't have spare change.

In Fear and Trembling *Updated*

I went to the happiest place in the world again yesterday. I was extremely indecisive, limited by some budget problems and by the lack of kitchen appliances (though I do have a can opener now), so I spent a fair amount of time going to the opposite side of the store to return the can of hot cocoa that I really could live without, etc. The market was crowded to overflowing and its narrow, fascinating aisles were full of people, guiltily blocking the flow of traffic while they darted at the desired objects.

But there was one old lady who was entirely unaware of her hovering fellows. She would park her large basket firmly in front of a shelf, then spend a very long time pondering over each item on it. The ancient hand would creep towards the Chevre, then remove itself, then return, as if carrying on an internal dialog on how salutary the cheese would prove, entirely separate from the animating consciousness. She was parked there for two separate trips to return items that had been judged (after reaching the opposite side of the store) as unnecessary. The atmosphere of "Do you mind?"s and "Could I just reach here?"s was troubling her as little as it had when I dove after the feta.

I told myself to be charitable, that she probably would have liked to be aware of the people around her, but was simply too fuzzy to do so. God knows how often I've been in the same spot. But then her very nice old husband came over and she hit him between the eyes with a fishwife tirade. The subject that really brought the poison out was how he was standing in the way of the other shoppers. She told him in minute detail (but not very coherently) where he ought to be, and as far as I could tell, she'd lit on the worst place. I suppose that just went to show that he was so inept that he could stand in the perfect spot and still get in the way.

So at some level she had known. But the possibility of the weakness finding its source within her own self had been too painful to be supported. I walked away wondering how much my own darting about had inconvenienced the other shoppers.

New Place

Stovetop Fantasy

It was a wondrous feast. After five weeks of being in Seattle, I finally was able to go to Trader Joe’s. I used to shop at Trader Joe’s when I lived in California. After I moved away I would dream of wandering through those enchanted aisles. This dream was not the all time number one flashback to California—that was of the spot on the highway where one had gotten just far enough out of the hill country to be met by the beguiling sea breezes. But that was also the route which one would take to get to Trader Joe’s, so you can make of that what you will. These dreams of Trader Joe’s differed from other dreams of grocery stores. After I moved to California, grocery stores would figure as part of generally nostalgic dreams of my old neighborhood. And while I lived in that neighborhood I would have two-nights-before payday dreams which involved carefully investing $25 in the maximum amount of ramen, frozen veggies, and pasta possible, allowing for one long-term treat of pepperjack cheese and one short-term treat of licorice lozenges. No, Trader Joe’s is more a place of fantasy than utility—fantasy being a combination of delight, function and thrift while utility is summed up by a 50 pound bag of oatmeal.

The menu was of a peculiar character. There’s no point in routing the manager out of his den Monday morning to show me how to light a stove that would be replaced on Monday afternoon. Now it’s possible that he wouldn’t have minded showing me Saturday afternoon, but this is a gas stove which does not automatically light—and even worse, lighting it involves removing bits and igniting something called the pilot light (all attempts at envisioning what this means have been spookily similar to the final scene in “Time Bandits”). And since I have to drive myself to even self-lighting gas stoves with cries of encouragement, and usually greet the flame with a hop and a screech, I figured that lighting this stove would end up involving everyone in the building in a scene that I could never live down. So instead I simply looked for food items which required no heat (I am blissfully free of microwaves—you know that The Man uses them to maintain control over Americans hearts and wills). Further, the items needed to be easily removed from their packages and served, since I also have no can openers, bottle openers, or sharp knives. I do have plates (two sizes), bowls, glasses, silverware and a cheese grater.

Garlic-stuffed green olives, baby carrots, naan (one regular, one whole wheat), feta cheese, hummus, and jalapeno-artichoke dip ended up being the carte du jour. Delicious, nutritious, and breath-freshening. Dessert was chocolate orange candies and dried cherries, and a later snack to calm a querulous tummy was cold cereal—Quaker’s Corn Bran (also known as my favorite cereal for the past twenty years), which disappeared from the Texas markets years ago. It was only at the very end that I could get through the cereal aisle without tearing up.

Since I also have a job, I can proclaim that all good things have been restored.

Get Naked!

When I first got to Seattle, my uncle and his friend arranged for me to housesit for some friends. It would give me a chance to feel useful while looking for an apartment of my own. The soon-to-be vacationers invited us to get acquainted over dinner. They had a lovely house, surrounded by trees. The interior was pleasantly decorated with books and camping mementos. The wife was a gardener and the husband a philosopher, but he had intended to be a marine biologist before he discovered philosophy, so they were going to Central America to do a little scuba diving and underwater photography. In the summer, they hoped to go on a swimming tour of the islands off Croatia. The husband also loved cooking, and had prepared a hearty feast, homemade from organic ingredients. All in all, they were delightful people.

They decided that I was an acceptable housesitter, so the wife showed me around the house, pointing out the electrical box, water shut-off, and so on. As we went through the basement, I noticed a number of outdoor sports watercolors featuring mixed nudes. Then we got to the den, where there were stacks of signs begging us to protect nudist beaches. I started laughing because it fit so perfectly—the love of the natural life leads pretty easily into nudism in the Northwest (slogan “You can’t be too natural.”) The gradual dawning of the situation, beginning with subtle clues, made it all perfect.

While I was housesitting, I went downstairs to do laundry. There at the immediate right of the foot of the stairs and at eye level was a large, colorful painting of two very happy nude surfers. Across the top was the vivid legend “Get Naked!” Nothing could be less subtle, yet it had entirely escaped my notice. I looked around, trying to figure out if there had been a breach in the space-time continuum. There to the right of the painting was a short bookcase, overflowing with some of my favorite books. The Iliad, Emma, The Brothers Karamazov—it all came back to me. My gaze, originally bent on finding extra steps, had been attracted and held irresistibly by these gems in a suburban basement.

In my defense, I believe that I would have noticed a real live nekkid person, even if he were brightly painted and crouching on a ledge four feet from the floor. But to be on the safe side, if you need my undivided attention, get The Iliad, don’t get naked.

Clean Kitchen Clean

I spent the evening at Starbucks, playing on the web and having furtive conversations on my cell phone. When I returned to my uncle’s house, I ate some leftovers, then turned my attention to the other remains of the feast. Acting on the principle that nothing says “I love you” like a clean kitchen, I rolled up my sleeves and sent the dirty dishes scattering in panic before me. It was only after I had reached the point of no return that I remembered that occasionally a homeowner, confronted with a kitchen which ought to have been full of the signs of reveling, hears “You filthy filthy pig-slob!” rather than the intended message. I mused on this for a while, until I found that in addition to musing, I had cleaned the microwave and taken apart the gas grill for that extra touch that means so much. I finished as quickly as I could, refused to look for SOS pads, and ran to my bedroom to fret.

Go Greyhound

“I just got out of Walla Walla.” A deep voice began. “I thought I had another couple of months, but they just came in this morning and said, ‘Get your stuff.’”

“Man, I still feel like I’m in prison.” He was really looking forward to hugging his two children. At first I wondered why his wife didn’t figure in the picture, but after awhile he explained that while he was being processed by the criminal justice system, his wife was keeping company with another man.

The Yakima police were not highly esteemed by the bus riders. Their zealousness in pursuit of their duties was considered suspect. The deep voice mused that he hadn’t had any drugs in two years.

At a later stop, when the bus was fairly crowded, a newlywed couple entered. The bride entered first, calling out that they had just gotten married that day and would really appreciate a seat together. The groom followed, looking authentically bashful and proud and carrying all the luggage. The ex-con volunteered his seat, and once they were seated and reseated they introduced themselves.

On hearing of her traveling companion’s starting point, the bride—like a Victorian spinster who suspects a distant cousinship—started an interrogation to discover mutual acquaintances. “Do you know Larry Smith? He was serving on a weapons charge—they did something with the rape-type charge.” If I heard correctly, her own wedding date was set by the court, being the day she was released from serving 62 days at the city jail.

The ex-con returned to the subject that was troubling him. “Well, my wife’s really burned me out on marriage.”
“Yeah, don’t I know what you mean!” Heartfelt from the groom.
“Hey!” Outrage and the sound of a groom getting punched in the fleshy part of the arm. “Whadderya sayin’?!”
“Oh, not you, honey!” Genuinely distressed at this misconstrual. “I meant my first two wives.”
“Oh, yeah,” completely appeased, “My first two husbands were the same.”
Spirited and good-humored variations on two themes followed: Third time’s the charm and Three strikes you’re out.

The conversation drifted to a comparison of homeless shelters in the region. One received fairly high reviews because of all the classes offered (anger management, basic math skills, etc.), although the shelter showed too little respect for the basic humanity of the sheltees. It was a co-ed facility, which led to meeting interesting people of the opposite sex. And spending time with interesting people of the opposite sex led to wanting to spend more time with them—a natural feeling that the unnatural shelter did its utmost to squelch. One voice called for tolerance, since the shelter was a church facility, and although the others acknowledged the validity of the opinion, they felt that their grievance outweighed this consideration.

The conversation drifted to God. The groom explained that he had been raised Baptist, but as he read the Bible more he discovered that there were only two authentic churches: “the Hebrew Church and the Catholic Church.” So he converted to Catholicism. When he met his bride, she had never read any of the Bible.
“When I heard that, I sat her down and read her Revelations.”
“Yeah, I’d been consecrated to the black arts at age three—you know, the way some people are consecrated to the church. I was the seventh child of the seventh generation, so I was supposed to be the most powerful of all.”
“But after she’d heard the Bible, she didn’t want that anymore.”
“He made me give up my books, my wand, everything. I can’t see my family anymore because I was the seventh child of the seventh generation, and was supposed to be the most powerful.”

The groom and ex-con were smoking together and talking about the Church as I passed them with my luggage.

Spirits of the Age

When I was staying with my aunt and uncle in what is now called the Columbia valley, I rarely accepted their generous offers of wine. Partially I felt that their very fine wine would have been wasted on me—or when it ceased being wasted, I would be ruined for my happy-go-lucky impoverished lifestyle.

Now I find myself surrounded by inveterate wine-tasters, who are always looking to corner one with stories of something rather interesting that they found on their holiday wine tour. I listen with diminishing hope for a natural segue into dachshunds or the Iliad.

There is something essentially ridiculous in the proper appreciation of wine, such that the only right way to acquire it is as an undergraduate, floating in blissful inebriated companionship through an empty summer, entirely unaware of alcoholics on the banks and only too pleased to be foolish.

But as I am, having had no space for youthful foolishness, driving weary hours to spend money I can ill afford on too many liquids to keep separate in my mind, labeling “fun” according to others’ usage rather than my own experience—nothing could be further from a true enjoyment of wine.

Oh to be Free of Student Loans

This morning the bus passed a small sign which read, “Enjoy Saving Money.” “I do,” I thought. “Oh, I do.” I sat in satisfied communion with this kindred spirit for a few ticks of the clock until reality shifted, and the sign, standing in front of a furniture store, pointed out that it meant “Enjoy Spending Less Money than You Otherwise Would Have.”

Stranger in a Strange Land

One of my later (and therefore wetter) errands this Monday had been to drop off an application at a parish. The secretary met me at the door.

“Yucky day, huh?” she said, nervously eyeing the rivers of water escaping from my person.

“Oh, sure,” I said, thinking “‘Yucky’? It’s just fine clean water.” “I’ve come to apply for the office position.” The bulletin had read “Come by, tell us about yourself, and learn more about the position!”

“Oh, heh, heh, heh,” she responded, gingerly taking my resume while carefully blocking me from completely entering the door. She obviously needed to protect the vinyl chairs and wall-to-wall indoor/outdoor carpeting.

Then the door shut and I turned from my nascent dreams of getting half way thawed out and started hiking back to the bus stop.

The Return

I sat staring at the rain through the window of my ninth bus that day. A ten-foot-tall purple neon elephant was happily spraying neon water over itself, humming about nature’s drenching not being thorough enough. The rain which would have been sufficient to drench three states had been stopped over one greedy coastal city and most of that water had soaked its way into my jeans, where it evidently felt welcome and whistled for friends. The idea of resurrecting my blog popped into my mind. There I was, a single girl trying to make it in the big city, all the elements needed for a hit TV show. All that was needed was a slight wardrobe shift from “Wish I Were Warm and Dry” to “Miniskirt Grunge.” The moment seemed more dreary than dramatic, but the seed was planted, and we shall see how it flourishes in the Emerald City.

How to remain proud of your culinary achievements even after removing the lid from the pot.

Some humanitarian has been sending me spam whose subject lines urge me to investigate a new healthy way not to cover with shame.

I keep picturing a junior-higher at a party who accidentally continued talk/shouting at one of those random moments when everyone in the room (including the music) happened to be taking a breath. "And he turned his face to the wall, covered with shame."

But that's silly. Obviously, this is an affair of the stomach.

They probably want you to pay $19.95 for the secret (order now and get bonus "No Shame: Housecleaning Edition"! $6.95 value), but I will give them both to you for free:

What they can't see can't hurt them: always eat in romantic candlelight.

Bonus Housecleaning Edition:
What they can't see can't hurt them: only use environmentally-friendly 40 watt bulbs.

Novena Time

Just a reminder that today is the first day of the novena to St. John Marie Vianney (the Cure d'Ars).

There is another prayer request as well: a friend has discovered that she has a molar pregnancy, meaning that instead of a baby developing there is a possibly cancerous tumor. She is having surgery tomorrow, and has requested prayers. This is a very rare and serious illness but hardly ever fatal and there is hope for them being able to have children again after a year has passed. This was discovered today, and it seems like the obvious response is to say the novena to the Cure d'Ars for her and her husband as well.

Thoughts on opening Solzhenitsyn's "November 1916"

Truly, this is a book to beat off assailants with.

Has anyone else wondered if they would be charged with “assault with a deadly weapon” if they hit an assailant with their backpack? Really, the whole trial would swing on proving whether I remembered the hardbound German-English dictionary and Norton Anthology of Poetry as I was making my counter-attack.

I have a Ukrainian student with an interest in history, so I asked him about Solzhenitsyn. He said that Solzhenitsyn was famous but not popular: everyone agreed that what he said was true, but they were sick of him constantly talking about it. No one likes to be reminded of what they have done badly. Also, it is thought that Solzhenitsyn took the easy way out—yes, he only left Russia because he was exiled, but he forced the government to exile him.

His One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is read in schools (because it is history), and First Circle is well known. The young man asked whether Solzhenitsyn had written anything lately, and I replied that he had a new book, Russia in Collapse, but that I hadn’t been able to get a copy. “Russia in collapse! Very interesting! But why would he say that? Putin is so strong. I mean, Russia compared to the Ukraine or Georgia—Russia is very strong, not in collapse.” I don’t know much about Putin, but the little I do know (a quote from an article he wrote shortly after becoming prime minister) is not auspicious: in regards to Chechnyan rebels: "we will piss on them!” Ask not what your country can do for you…

Then again, the reincarnated KGB carried out a successful assassination attempt on anti-Russian Yukrainian politician Viktor Yushchenko—meaning by successful that they got him to ingest so many times more than the lethal amount without facing any serious retribution. ("Oh my gosh! I thought that was only poisonous to guinea pigs! I could just kick myself for having made such a mistake.") Not successful insofar as the politician has remained just barely this side of paradise (to be fair, he does look like he’s crossed over).

The student strongly recommended Suvorov (Viktor?), a historian of the second World War who was also exiled by the Soviets. I must look him up.

Prayer and Fasting

The son of some family friends was murdered a few days ago. A girl was also murdered at the same time, another boy was stabbed but not killed, and then the murderer killed himself.

The horribly public nature of the tragedy can be turned to good if all of us who hear about it pray and fast for the victims, murderer/suicide, and families of the dead.

The widow of a suicide was praying in the Cure d'Ars's church one day, and the Cure d'Ars (St. John Mary Vianney) came to her and said, "Be comforted. Your husband repented before he hit the water. Remember the altar to Mary that you had in your bedroom? Although your husband was a scoffer, he would sometimes join sincerely in your prayer. Because of this, he was saved." (This is a very loose paraphrase from memory). The man had killed himself by jumping off a bridge. The amount of time required for repentance is smaller than any measurable period, so there is hope even for the murderer/suicide who shot himself in the head.

St. John Mary Vianney's feast day is August 4th, so it would be very nice if we could fast and say a novena to him, starting July 27th and ending August 4th.

Link to a long novena, with a different prayer for each day:
http://www.ewtn.com/devotionals/novena/Vianney.htm

I have been completely unable to find a short novena. If anyone knows of one, please let me know! Other possibilities for novenas are: a novena of Masses, Divine Mercy chaplets, or rosaries.

Below is an unapproved novena prayer of my own composition. I will try to find out if it is an appropriate or acceptable prayer before July 27th, and will delete it if it is not.
Our Father. Hail Mary. Glory Be. "O St. John Marie Vianney, please intercede for the souls of the victims, the families of the dead, and especially for the murderer. Please obtain for them the grace of eternal salvation from the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. May we all grow in love and trust for our dear Lord, who turns all evil to good, even the unimaginable evil of his own crucifixion and death. May the families of the dead take comfort in his cross. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen."

R and L

Today one of my Japanese students replied, "Oh Leerry?" to a comment. I understood immediately (hooray for one year's practice!), then mused over the girl's courage in attempting such a difficult word and the way that sometimes stereotypes are remarkably apt.

I shouldn't really find it so funny, having been rrr-deprived as a child. Even now I can hardly roll my rs, which was a great handicap a couple of weeks ago when I visited some llamas, who are irresistibly drawn to r-rolling (especially if one blows softly on their noses at the same time). But would Sam have been happy had I returned covered in llama-kisses? Hard to say.

But what has puzzled me is the fact that my students can make both sounds, but switch them. Recently I discovered that the sounds are switched when they hear them as well. I asked for written movie requests, and had several for "Gradiator". I don't know why it wasn't "Gradiatol". I have a theory (of course), but something tells me that it would be beaten by the result of some "Elvis Code" numerology.