Memory

My dad's first cousin once removed called and asked him: "Did you know that Henry has died?"

Strangely, my dad didn't; and he was the guy who would have known before anyone else - he is Henry.

(But then again, his first cousin once removed may have know what she was on about after all: her husband was Henry too and he had in fact died when she made that phone call; some 4 years earlier, to be precise). 



[a true story, i.e. as far as I can remember - I'm getting on too, you know...]

PS Memory scarcity may be as serious a problem as memory surplus. I've asked my dad (the living Henry) about his cousin once removed and I found out: she's not once removed, just a cousin; her family lost a comfy apartment when Nazis bloodily marched into Posen, Greater Poland (as the only family in the street, interestingly); they moved to a small village in General Government and the cousin's dad was a manager of a shop which used to belong to a Jewish family; he was later arrested by Gestapo (reason unknown) and murdered by them; the family returned to Posen and the cousin married ("she simply ran away with the man", another cousin related the story afterwards); the first husband died suffering from a nasty case of TB and died; she remarried; her second husband came from the eastern fringes of pre-war Poland (somewhere near Vilnius, apparently) and could spoke fluent Russian; at home, he had a very small room to himself, where - a rumour claims - he liked to drink on his own; at his funeral my dad learnt, with quite a shock, that Henry served in the Red Army - as an interpretor (my dad calmed down); their daughter got a job at a bank (name given) and ran a backwater branch which was doing very badly; within a couple of years she turned it around; which impressed impressed her bosses so much that they gave her a much bigger brunch to run, and so on; during the funeral my dad could see her bossy attitude, but, apparently, she wore it quite gracefully; anyway, in most recent conversation with my dad, the cousin complained of memory loss, but she still remembered Kornik, where she grew up (and nearly ended belly up, according to family legend, in a local pond into which her uncle, and my great uncle, jumped holding her, for the fun of it; the pond was extremely shallow, but joking aside, the uncle was drunk (which he often was); the same uncle, serving in the Polish volunteer army during one of the Greater Poland Uprisings, left his post, and his gun, and sneaked away from his post into the bed in which his newly-wed wife (and my favourite great aunt) was, no doubt, fantasising about him sneaking away...

Buffalmacco*? You must be joking

The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art** claims this of a certian Buffalmacco:

“Painter of the early Florentine school best know for his contemporary reputation as a practical joker. Vasari lists many paintings by him but none can now be attributed with certainty.”

I read this entry, smiled and put the dictionary away - only to burst out into laughter a minute later: clearly, this was a practical joke.

*Buonamico di Cristofano, called (13^th- 14^th c.)

**Good stuff, although not always on the serious side.

A Holy Entanglement

Nick* was asking Jesus to have mercy on me (and on the whole world); Simon of Cyrene was carrying Jesus' cross** (which was his, in fact); Barry was seconding Nick, having earlier shared his most precious life-reinforcing insights with both of us; I was feeling deeply connected with Nick after he had prayed for my ailing Mum, who feels deeply connected with me (and keeps supporting me spiritually, and financially); Mary locked eyes with her dying son, and then, after he died, became involved with us and started supporting us financially and otherwise; I was looking at the women of Jerusalem and was concerned whether they got it at last and were happy that their God was being crucified; Theresa, having suffered a lot, was sitting quietly at the back, just loving everyone and everything; Jesus was on the altar, in a Hostia, ready to be consumed by us; and the Father was re-creating, maintaining and anxiously wanting us all the tense while.

"O my God!" I suddenly felt, "What a holy entanglement!"




*in the Cathedral, the other day.
**a Station of the Cross above reminded us.

Via Satan or the f*****g medium*

Trying to get through to each other via Satan.


*or the Task at Hand

The depth is on the surface

(Not this one)

One recent evening, somewhere in Lower Silesia, I was following a quiet country road which lead past a simple village church with a medieval pedigree. I my eyes run up the spire and then into the sky. It was full of bright stars (I could swear I saw a woman's face somewhere out there too and a beautiful body in one of the constellations). And I also saw the depth of the project is visible on its surface - the skin-deep beauty of the world looks us in the eye and whispers about the infinitely profound glamour we are challenged to fathom.

Ambition to die

Just a coincidence, I guess, but I'm reading a novel* where I come across this passage:

'There are no youthful illusions in such a place. You do not mistake the world's character. By the age of seven we were all as cynical as abbots.'

Together they agree that the losing of illusions is an indispensable preparation for those who hope to rise in the world. On a third bottle, they confide to each other that they are ambitions, madly ambitious and that through luck and hard work they intend to  die famous men. 

What kind of ambition - unless mad, in the most negative sense of the word - is it to achieve whatever and DIE?  In my book, just as in The Book, to be ambitious is to achieve LIFE.

*Pure by Andrew Miller. Allegedly the winner of the 2011 Costa Novel Award, but so far (page 49) boring and disappointing. And starts with a ridiculous, unless sarcastic, quote from de Condorcet: The time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who have no master but their reason.

(Good luck!)

Vanity

By Harmen van Steenwyck (the National Gallery, London)

Footsteps on the stairs below alerted the playful boy* in me. I crouched by the door in the hallway in wait for my 40-something-year-old brother. In the few seconds  it took him to reach the first floor, I was making up my mind whether this time I would be the neighbour's dog** or a mad dwarf vampire. His hand reached for the handle, the door opened and I... well, I was just about to give out a mad bark (I can't remember what I eventually decided to be; I guess a dwarf vampire could also bark madly?) when my brother, who must have somehow caught a movement of my shadow when I was readjusting my position for the upcoming semi-leap, said in a frustratingly relaxed, matter-of-fact voice: 'All in vain.'


When I was getting up, I realised this flop had been predicted quite a way back, so I walked away murmuring: '... Vanity. All is vanity. What profit has a man of all his labour which he takes under the sun?'








*I realised the other day, that your spirituality is in many, perhaps even in the most crucial, respects proportionate to the degree to which you've cultivated, or re-awoken, the happy,
playful boy (girl) in you.

** you don't want to know it.

Be-sinned by Devil

'A city bedevilled by sin', said the priest in his sermon, referring to Nineveh.


Shouldn't it be 'A city be-sinned by the Devil'? I wondered.