Welter & waste

The thirteenth periodic Tropical Depression digest post

Feb 21, 2024

Here’s your thirteenth periodic digest post reviewing the last few entries and tossing in some recommendations, tidbits, etc.

Samia Halaby, Speeding by, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 96.5 x 182 cm — “Speeding By,” Samia Halaby. A planned retrospective of her work was abruptly canceled by the University of Indiana in December.

The theology, after the fact, is rich. But as a narrative matter, I wish the tempter had more tricks and rigor and pathos during the forty days in the wilderness. There’s a spectacular aphorism that’s implied: that absence can be an act of rebirth. A quiet act of re-creation, in opposition to the busybody flurry of creation. But the gospels seem to hurry past it. Wordplay with the advocate is a strangely legalistic turn in the story. Hunger and temptation are sharp and physical, alive in the body. But that’s mostly missing in the text, as if the old gods are squabbling, neglecting the strangeness of the divine presence in the human vessel.

I’m giving up alcohol until Easter, not for spiritual reasons, exactly, or for any particular need. I don’t drink all that often at this stage of my life. Still, in the coming weeks, I will want something in reach, and I will not have it. A good practice, from time to time.

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn1

We recently passed the year mark for Tropical Depression. One thing that means is that it’s renewal time for a good number of yearlong subscriptions. And what that means is I’ve started getting notices about subscriptions ending because credit cards have expired. This is apparently a pretty common part of a subscription business. It’s a bummer! If you would like to continue subscribing and supporting Tropical Depression, I think it’s pretty easy to update payment (holler if there are any hiccups). Or if the credit card expiration amounted to a reminder that you don’t want to keep paying, that’s okay, too! And as ever, if you know someone who might enjoy reading Tropical Depression, please let them know about it. Thanks, y’all.

“My Lord God,” Thomas Merton wrote, “I have no idea where I’m going.”

I am a multi-tasker by nature and typically listen to podcasts while doing housecleaning tasks. Here’s a good podcast episode about Peter the Great, if that’s your thing. But lately I’ve switched things up—been listening to heroic soundtrack music or not listening to anything at all but trying to think heroic thoughts. I find that I clean better and faster if I trick my brain into thinking that I am engaging in a heroic quest I’ve promised to fulfill, rather than just trying to get something done within a given time slot. This may be a dad thing or a dude thing or a mid-life crisis thing. But there is something in me—a zest for the quest. And actually it’s genuinely hard to keep the house clean. It requires some very minor heroism. So I think what you want to do is imbue the mundane with a sense of mission. A good practice, from time to time.

In a recent interview, the psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist said this: “Truth…comes out of an encounter… What we experience is always something that is partly given to us and partly us giving to it. In this encounter, there is always a two-way process that alters both us and what it is we’re encountering.” This seemed relevant to a conversation I was having recently with a dear friend, so I stopped and took note of it.

By the King James translation, when the Lord began to create heaven and earth, “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Robert Alter’s translation instead has “the earth was welter and waste and darkness over the deep.” Alter explains:

The Hebrew tohu wabohu occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Tohu by itself means emptiness or futility, and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other2

A reader who knows my wife kindly pointed out that I left out a key detail in my Valentine’s note for her. I said that she loved the part in Willy Wonka when the kids lick the wallpaper: “You left out the part that she hopes people lick her paintings3 just like the kids licked the wallpaper! An inspiration always, Grace.”

"The Game", oil on canvas, 48"x36", 2015 — “The Game,” Grace Mikell Ramsey

“The rational soul is of its nature immortal, and therefore death is not natural to man in so far as man has a soul,” Thomas Aquinas wrote. “It is natural to his body, for the body, since it is formed of things contrary to each other in nature, is necessarily liable to corruption, and it is in this respect that death is natural to man.”

Not sure about that. I go back and forth. It’s hard to sort it all out.

One thing that seems to recur when comparing translations of the Hebrew Bible is that metaphors regarding breath get over-explained in a way that winds up losing some of the metaphor’s explanatory power, turning vapors (or mere breath) into vanities. The next line in Genesis after the portion quoted above, by the King James translation, is the famous line: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” I love the language in the King James renderings, and it’s hard to improve upon the cadence and force there. But to turn to Alter’s translation again, we see that something profound may be missing in the precise abstraction of Spirit: “and God’s breath hovering over the waters.” This hovering breath seems to me inclusive of Spirit but suggestive of something misty and material about reality—a kind of transient incarnation that puts the stuffing in stuff, a nurturing that is elemental.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.4

Refer a friend

From the archives

I mentioned reading Yayoi Kusama’s autobiography last month; as lagniappe, here’s a post from last April, a favorite of mine: on smells and flowers and other such things, featuring Kusama.

The Yellow Glitter of Themselves

David Ramsey

April 14, 2023

Read full story

Strange Vibrations from behind the Iron Curtain

Groovy and haunting 1971 (or maybe 1968-1969?) gem from Noroc, a popular Moldovan band. The word “noroc” means “good luck” in Romanian, Wikipedia informs me, and is also said as a toast. Very pleasing track.

IMHO

Infinity Net

Okay, and just a little more from Yayoi, from her autobiography (this passage, on the culture of the United States, was probably written in the early to mid 1970s):

Whatever people may say, I believe that the present situation, with sex pulled from its pedestal and looked down upon while all the males jerk off, is contrary to the wise providence of Heaven. We must have a sexual revolution, at all costs. In order to accomplish this I felt I would have to work like mad, and so that is just what I did.