I used to think that modernity had an “obedience problem” and that everything would be solved by obedience. I think I was wrong, but I wasn’t far off because obedience is a symptom of humility, and humility is everything. Yet St. Faustina said that humility is equivalent to truth, nothing more, nothing less. Which means we really have a truth problem since humility is merely a symptom of truth.
I've always wondered why Russians are so prone to alcoholism. I came across an explanatory quote recently from Andrey Sinyavsky:
"Drunkenness is our basic national vice - more than this, our obsession. A simple Russian doesn't drink from wretchedness or to drown his cares, but because of his everlasting need for the miraculous, the extraordinary - he drinks mystically, if you like, in order to upset the earthly balance of his soul and restore it to its blissfully incorporeal state."That perhaps was part of the reason that pre-famine Ireland was given to the drink. The Irish always had that mystical sense about them, seeing spirits and faeries everywhere. Tis nice to let the dendrites out for a ride every now and then and write poetry while effusions of beer go off in my mind, like a splendid hops fireworks!
I recall the old days in my old house. How proud my builder was at the simple wood shelf, elbow-high, that circled the downstairs great room, elbow-high! He was a Baptist, and didn’t condone drinking, but it was built for that, in retrospect, built to hold drinks. I put the library in there, a little print-valley under the stairs. Ah bachelorhood, like war: it is well it is so terrible lest we grow too fond of it!
I've been taken surprise by eczema. I’m insulted by my body’s tendency towards allergic reactions such that I have to take Allegra and now Elidel. Runners take it for granted, even barely-runners like me, that all things under the sun are preventable by a good five-miler. Such was the enduring influence of James Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running which faultily left me with the impression that running could cure everything from diabetes to jock itch. Now I find myself reliant on that little tube of Elidel, that magical Elidel! Scores of mosquito bite-like itches are tamed by its powers such that I sing “Elidel” to tune of Tom Jones’ song: “Delilah!”: “My, my, my Elidel!”
Inspired by the come-from-nowhere Delilah! tune, I you-tubed for old Tom Jones videos and happened across a 1974 version of She’s a Lady. I was a young boy in ’74 and Jones was of my parents’ generation. But the overriding sense from watching the ’74 video of Jones and his backup singers is an odd thing: they are amateurs. Which comes from the Latin amator, lover. Amare, amas, amator. They love doing what they are doing. It takes a true professional to appear to be an amateur while doing something he gets paid for. Today our professionals look so professional! Of course, given the ‘70s, the enjoyment was lkely merely drug-induced. The backup singers don’t even to be that concerned when the camera is on them; today they'd be making love to the camera in order to get noticed by a talent scout and get their own gig.
Skip twenty years later: “Sex Bomb” is an unwatchable video in which Jones is so patently obviously trying to make money off the sex appeal of himself and his video babes. “She’s a Lady” is far sexier than “Sex Bomb” despite all the respiration and perspiration and skin of the latter. I’m stunned that even at the height of the sexual revolution, the mid ‘70s, there was more purity, for want of a better word, in sex songs than in most of the non-sex songs of the ‘90s and ‘00s.
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