Still Life

If you have lost loved ones, as most of us have, you might remember a certain moment in the aftermath. You return to their apartments or their homes to begin the clearing of the material of a life. You walk inside and everything is as if the person has just stepped out, and will be back again. But the excruciating reality in the midst of the space filled with things that once were indispensable is that the person who was here, the person who used the things maybe days or minutes before, will never be here again. 

I have rarely seen movies that capture that quiet, yet dramatic part of loss. Or the sense that so quickly can a space be empty of us, with only impressions of our former presence. 

And in the case of the movie I watched last night that did capture it, the even more dramatic reality of how anticlimatic that moment is to the world at large. 

The movie was one I had never heard of, and not likely one that anyone would rush to see, given its theme. Called "Still Life", it takes place in London and the actors are mostly none I have also never heard of, except Downton Abbey's Joanna Froggett. 

John May is a particular kind of bureaucrat, one who seeks the relatives, and friends, if any, of people who die, alone, at home. He works out of a long, one window, industrial room with boxes and files. He is quiet, and clearly a man himself alone in the world, with orderly, even obsessive, habits, and a determined focus  to find someone who might have cared about the deceased, and in the likely absence of anyone who cared, providing a dignified service. The service could be religious, or not, burial, or not. He takes small pieces of the person's life from the home or the apartment, and around those odds and ends, constructs a eulogy of someone he has never even met. Open a closet and see the suits, or the dresses, next to be in some thrift shop or a dumpster, the detritus of a once breathing human being. 

John has done many of these searches, and each time, he has kept a photograph of the deceased person, usually pictured in some hopeful pose at a time before life hammered them and cut them off from love, or they did it to themselves thinking that they had all the time in the world, and placed it in a huge album. He goes through them from time to time, he the only person to mark the life that is gone. 

Mr. May's plodding farewells to those alr eady forgotten or abandoned in life are his undoing after 22 years. There is a bureaucratic consolidation, and he is told that his newest case, of a hard drinking nearly homeless bearded man, Billy Stoke, a veteran of Grenada, who might have had a daughter, will be his last. "Wrap it up, quickly," he is told by the young manager who merely tolerates his underling bemused at efforts May has always taken, too slowly for government preferences. What makes this one poignant is that the man who died lived in John's building, just across across him, at a window John can see from his own. 

Slowly, John May uncovers a history, relationships, mostly broken.  Billy Stoke had two daughters. One from a relationship from which he abruptly left, without knowing he had been a father, and another, Kelly, that had begun hopefully but ended when that daughter was 18, by his own hand. He had saved one of his buddies in the war, and that man had fond feelings. Two homeless men knew him during his rough days, before the apartment, and remembered him, if not fondly, without rancor. 

None of these former acquaintances, at first, show any inclination to join John at the funeral to be held, and at the grave which John, who finds himself slightly more energized about engaging life now that he has been fired and this is his last memorial, donates to the man. His opening himself up a little to Kelly, Stokes' daughter, has the two of them, she also a lonely soul in animal services, in the first moments of a possible relationship. She decides to go to the service, and so meets up with him to discuss the final details, and is touched by his rigid, but definite tenderness toward her father. They agree to have "tea" after the service and they shyly wave goodbye as her train door closes. Things are looking up for John and Kelly.

As he comes out of a store having bought two mugs each with a picture of a dog, a homage to the young woman who seems perhaps interested in him, he crosses the street----and is hit and killed by a bus. Death can come at any time, and there is no human power to stop it. 

One can now imagine why this is not a very popular movie. There will be no happy ending. Well, there will be no happy ending of the sort that we are told to crave and for the lack of which we see our lives as failure.

On the day of her father's funeral, Mr. Stokes' daughter is at the grave of her father, along with the several people John May had located so that Mr. Stokes would not be another man whose was buried without mourners. Another service has just been held, with only a priest in uncomfortable attendance. A car takes the casket to the weedy part of the cemetery, passing those gathered at the grave of Mr. Stokes. His daughter sees it but she is looking for Mr. May who was supposed to be among them.  Of course he is. He is the one being buried up the hill. She has found a family and healing through a man who dies and is buried without fanfare. She will never likely know.

The reviewers found the ending rather treacly. Me? It gave me hope. There does come a gathered crowd around May's mound, the people whom he tended to when no one else did, the spirits of men and women who know that John May's life was worthwhile, though not remembered by the world. 

I suppose, even if one doesn't believe in an afterlife, as so many of us do not, it still is hopeful, because lives in the here and now have been altered for the good, by this John May, an Everyman. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt9CsXrlO8Y

A New Entry, Related to a Prior Entry

My friends who with kind loyalty read this blog, and perhaps others of passing readers, might know that I began a podcast, called "Ordinary Old Catholic Me". I suppose it is something of an audio version of this blog but focused on my, and hopefully that of others, experience of being a Catholic in the 21st Century. Hopefully not just Catholics will find it interesting because after all as human beings we most all are searching for something meaningful, even Transcendent, to hang onto as we trudge the road from birth to death together. 

I have done five episodes so far, and I tend to record them, much as I tend to write here, when the mood or subject strikes. At some point I will no doubt try for a more regular time slot, like I post on Mondays at 10 (not yet), but for now I am learning and experimenting.

I have been waiting for the height of the pandemic to pass to invite folks from my parish, where I spend a lot of time with other Ordinary Old Catholic Mes, to come on and pick some aspect of their religious faith to dialogue with me, and share with you. Soon, I hope. Interaction is the spice of life! As a natural loner, I have to try to remember that!

Anyway, here is the link if you are so inclined. And if you think, "Hey, this isn't so bad," would you tell folks you know about it?

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-b6j6d-deb1c0?utm_campaign=w_share_ep&utm_medium=dlink&utm_source=w_share

Conversations with An Echo by Constantine Gochis

Here we all are in the middle of purported or real pandemics and the quiet and civilized outrage of people protesting real, and imagined, evils, both, and looters who likely claim no particular allegiance except themselves. It is all very discouraging, to be certain. And it might even engender considerations of the meaning of life, when meaning seems horribly elusive, as it does right now, as it has for eons before. My late father, gone from this earth over twelve years, would probably be locked and loaded in this very apartment, were he still here. And he might be writing another short story like this one as he tried to deal with another series of life's tragedies. I post this entry full of my own sense of despair at the actions of a depraved, probably sociopathic police officer, who was no doubt protected by his union, and watch the well prepared idle young breaking into stores and taking essential items like digital screens, and cool shoes, and sporting goods--all of this, in my unimportant opinion, orchestrated by those powerful people hiding in the shadows looking for complete and utter control over your life and mine. 

⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪



"Tell me a riddle," you said.

"Life's a riddle."

"That's a platitude. Life is predictable, repetitious. One has only to look backward to see the future.  How's that for an echo?"

"Those are words.  Give me evidence, from life, from literature, from anyplace.  Don't continue to be a redundant sound."

"To begin with, there are no insoluable riddles.  Oedipus did it in a trice.  'What is it,' she asked, as she straddled the road, 'that crawls on all fours in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?''

"Who said that and what is the answer? Before you reply, what's black and white and read all over?"
"Very funny. Laugh this off. The Sphinx, the 'throttler'--that is the meaning of her title, killed herself when the simplicity of her query was solved."

"It is the inevitability of every man.  He crawls in the morning of his birth, walks upright at noon, in the illusion that he has something to do, or say, then in the evening of his stay leans wearily on a cane.  Afterwards it is night, forever."

"It is more complex than that.  There is a spirit, a mind that can say no to Divinity, though many varieties of hell are threateed as consequence, or kneel in the simplicity of a need to believe."

"An ancient stole Fire from the gods.  Though chained to a rock for arrogance, he suffered an Eagle to gnaw at his entrails with great patience.  Such was his faith.  Such was the love of another, who allowed His eternal Substance to be nailed to a tree.  Bounce that off the cavern walls."

"There are no 'Eternal substances'  Another literary fiction.  This is the arrogance of the species which cannot abide his non-meaning.  He did take the original Fire and used it to make tools.  Of course he was 'created' and by an Infinite Power, therefore he too is divine, uniq"ue, in a universe of lifeless masses and congealed atoms.  Even his God needs him.  Who else is there to gather in the holy edifices, the pantheons and bring him tribute and obeisance.  The temples of mutual adoration."

"Pure cynicism.  You know the origin of that word--dog like, contemptuous.  It is the dinner conversation of a deposed Lucifer, a Devil of make-believe urbanity, of denial of life. Man has made tools that can propel him into the beginning of time, and immortality, yes, perhaps to fifteen billion years ago, when it was, "In the beginning.'"

"And back into an eternity of nothingness.  He has thirty thousand tools each of which can obliterate a world.  Man has a flaw, a gene that bars his entry into the Eden of his creation.  He is not only a
creator but a destroyer."

"Yes, this is so. He has made and will again make pyres against his fellows.  He has been seared, consumed, in that stolen Promethean but it is out of the ashes that he is fated to arise a Phoenix."

"But the fire that burns in his soul is in the music of Bach, and the Pietas of Michaelangelo, of creations out of stone that cry out for just a little spark to make them animate, a life force inherent in that little blade of grass that seeks the sun out of that little crack in an unwary concrete sidewalk. 

And a gene is only a gene."

Grocery Bag Bingo in the Time of Corona Virus

Once upon a time, in the early part of the second decade of the 21st Century, a debate ensued among the Lords and Ladies of the local governments of California. Los Angeles County and the little kingdom of Weho were in the forefront of serious discussion about the hazards of plastic bags used provided by the grocery stores for the convenience of the serfs and their harmful impact on the oceans and sea life. Their concerns were truly laudable. I for one love all form of non-human creatures, including the ones of the deep.

The complexities were enormous.  Not only were plastic bags bad for the ocean, but other possibilities, like the paper bag, had their own deficiencies. Most ended up in landfills and failed to biodegrade for far too long a period. There being no perfection in human existence, a proclamation was made, although for the life of me, I still do not understand exactly what changed, except that bags were deemed "reusable", many were still plastic, only thicker than those that had previously been used, and all bags now came with a price tag of 10 cents, unless. . . .you brought your own tote, or bought for prices ranging from 99 cents to nearly 5 dollars, a tote with the logo of the stores of your choice. Since the dawn of the time of the reusable bag, I have bought them, like the lovely thick burlap-ish material of the Trader Joe bag (which I often use for laundry), and forgotten to bring them back down to my car for my next foray into the grocery aisles.  I thus have a collection hidden behind an easel in my living room. As I use the reusable plastic bags for disposing of trash and used cat litter, I conceded that I simply would be paying the extra 10 cents per bag for up to about 5 bags a shopping trip. How ocean life was preserved by the reusable plastic bag I could not fathom. But I didn't make these rules, and, like all of us in the land I made do with the reality--which seemed to me to be a highly questionable one, but questionable governmental decisions are the rule, and accepted that there was a new tax, though not called a tax, on plastic bags, denominated as reusable.  I could not figure how they would be better for the fish or the turtle, but that was beyond my pay grade. And while bags like the Trader Joe one above, variations to be had at every store, Gelson's, or Bristol Farms, or Ralphs, seemed to me to be fertile for all sorts of bacteria (as if people really would wash their bags), since I hardly ever used mine anyway, I just took the 10 cent plastic and accepted another aspect of my modern fate.

And then came the Coronavirus. It was decreed by the very same authorities who had created the grocery bag bingo through the second decade of the 2000's that the reusable non-plastic bags were no longer acceptable.  In fact, they appear to have become death traps along with other people and every physical item that a human being could possibly touch. In a moment of absent mindedness I actually took the Trader Joe bag above, which had somehow managed to escape from behind my easel barrier, to one of my grocery stores to contain my groceries. The horror! "No, we cannot use those!"
I breathed back my hot exhale trapped behind my cloth mask, and conceded my foolishness, although the incongruity of suddenly denominating something unsafe that was always unsafe, did cross my mind.

I purchased the reusuable plastic bag.  Since then, the bags are no longer, well, at least until this first phase of shutdown is over (to be replaced I am personally certain by other shutdowns as viruses and stray diseases are the lot of humans), provided with a charge.

I am saving about 50 cents a shopping trip. I just don't know how this is helping the sea life.

They Shall Not Grow Old: Would We Be Capable of Their Sacrifices?

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F74h-o8dFU8E%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D74h-o8dFU8E&tbnid=kZ5zDjtXdQytyM&vet=12ahUKEwiHxtX-t7npAhVJOK0KHc0oBr0QMygXegQIARBZ..i&docid=kzqgM8BOsUdDAM&w=1280&h=720&q=they%20shall%20not%20grow%20old&ved=2ahUKEwiHxtX-t7npAhVJOK0KHc0oBr0QMygXegQIARBZ

In my quest to find interesting documentaries to watch to stimulate mind and soul, I ran across this memorial produced by Peter Jackson of Lord of The Rings fame, for the one hundredeth anniversary of the end of World War I. In some ways it is very basic, the recordings of now dead veterans previously preserved, over the film of boys as young as 16 in the British Services in the trenches, facing, quite frankly, a likely death as they "Fix Bayonets" and go "Over the Top" to be cut in half by all manner of artillery then available. In other ways, that I noticed were criticized some in the reviews of elite magazines, it was a bit of restorative magic. After a black and white introduction, the hue in which these recordings were made and are stored in the Imperial War Museum, the film becomes colorized (looking to me much like the tone and tenor of the movie "1917") and, at first surprisingly to me, the voices of officers and men from the screen spoke and seemed to match the movement before me.  It turns out that lip readers were used to match what was said by these long dead boys, where it was possible. Again, it seems that reviewers found this objectionable as somehow being misrepresenting of the truth of the time and place. For me, it was like seeing real ghosts and it penetrated my heart and mind in a way I could not have previously imagined.

The picture above which attends a You Tube Link I highly recommend was one that really affected me. Remember that cameras were still a new thing during the first part of the 20th Century.  These boys were having recorded their smiles of curiousity, but mostly, their bewilderment and fear and to me, in the case of the boy pictured here, their profound sadness. Not everyone who speaks in the voiceovers went because of a sense of mission; as was true of those days and days before, young men had a Romantic idea of war, for reasons that to my modern mind, seem irrationhal. It was true of Francis of Assisi when he went off to war against Perugia, only to be imprisioned for one year and to discover upon his return, the complete disorder of man and the need for God.

But some had a real sense that there was something to be defended, a way of life, perhaps, one where some men did not exert the authority of pure power and coercion against his fellow man.  The cost was 1 million British servicemen. Even then, some would say that it was a waste, as they might say World War II's fight against Hitlerian totalitarianism and the culling of those considered imperfect was a waste. But then, and probably up to these enlightened times, most would have agreed that there was a mission to preserve freedom.

There they are in the muck of the labyrinth of trenches, wearing the same uniform perhaps for the whole of their services. There they are propped up and lined on long logs over a ditch with their pants down. No porto potties in those days. It was not infrequent that one of them would fall off and into the excrement. Many the picture of the dead soldier on the battlefield in this documentary. They would not grow old because they were gutted bloody on the battlefield.

If they be called foolish automatons for the cause of freedom, what might we be called today? Freedom does not have quite the cache that once it did. One might even say that we are automatons for promised safety and security that no government run by human beings will ever provide as the nature of humanity is first to suggest, then to command, and finally to compel. You don't think so? That's ok. It doesn't matter what I think as I am in no position to influence the world. In time, as is true on social media platforms, any opinion found inconsistent with prevailing propaganda will be simply mocked, then dismissed, and finally, excised. As I said, freedom doesn't have the cache it once did.

Even I, as I watched the documentary said to myself, "Why would anyone ever fight for his country?" And given the mere lip service we give to the people who lie under white crosses and
Jewish Stars in lonely fields, that boy above seems a bit of a fool to have believed that his sacrifice would matter 102 years later. But he was just a boy.  He probably wasn't thinking that far ahead. He just wanted to go home to his mother, or to his girl.

Anyway, the peoples of nations say they will never forget the sacrifices of these kids, not only the ones who died, but the ones who return with their minds and souls in shreds from what they have seen.  Christians say, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Church and Country seem to me, as I look around and compare this time of my little life to other times of my little life, pale versions of what they were even 60 years ago. I know, many think that because it was imperfect back "in the day" it has no merit ab initio. That is what comes of man thinking he can create a Utopia, or build a Tower to Heaven all by his lonesome. Here we are, modern men and women, knowing so much more than Socrates, or Pericles, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Augustine, or Jerome, or Thomas More, or Bonhoeffer, or Stein, or well, anyone who had anything to do with the Declaration of Independence. 

I think I need to find a more cheery documentary. Let me go and look right now.  But first, I probably should say a prayer to the God so thoroughly pushed out of the public square that we don't know up from down.

If I Had More Time. . . . By Constantine Gochis

It is time for another Constantine story. As I go through them, always a bit of delightful discovery of a person I knew, but didn't. Isn't that always the case with those closest to us? This particular entry somehow also seems apropos to the period through which we are living. And so, I leave my father to posit the question

IF I HAD MORE TIME?

There is no shortage of attributions, and a multiplicity of aphorisms on the subject of Time. It stands still.  It flies. It waits for no man.  It inspires the musing of poets.  It is like an ominous weather system that hovers in the sky above your town.  It waxes and wanes.  It is of the essence. Witness:

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

Until the last syllable of recorded time. . ."

It is precious for some and a matter of indifference to others.  The former have reason to mistrust the idiosyncrasies of Time.  Who knew this better than Napoleon who addressed his conquering soldiers in Egypt in the beginning days of his glory with this epiphany:

"Go sir, gallop, and don't forget that the world

was made in six days.  You can ask me for anything

you like, except time."

Besides, he said to his assembled horde:

"Soldiers, from the summit of yonder pyramids

forty centuries look down upon you."

That's a lot of yesterdays.

And you ask me, "What if you had more time?"

If this is a genuine offer, and indeed you are the One who can shape the infinite, I beseech you listen to my confession.

I look with sadness in the "recycle bin" of my life.  Do not judge quickly.  It is no better nor worse than the lot of most of us.  Perhaps it is a little less worthy, somewhat short of the "Image" in which we are made.

And in the matter of Time, great gaps of nothing done, little of any marked consequence.  The great challenges that have crossed my path are still undone.  It is the nature of Time to expand to meet the needs of one's procrastination.  Nevertheless, I beseech all who are wont to judge.  We are cast into this infinity of candy stores, like children with varying amounts of small change.  The things you want to buy are always just a little more than the coins you have to offer.

Still there is some sweetness in whatever we choose so a little more of the same cannot hurt.  It is definitely in order to tarry a little longer.  Hence, if I had more time. . ..

I am prone, for better of for worse, to persist in the ruts I have made already in the road of life--essentially, whatever I have done before.  I am a fallible, weak vessel.  Time is precious even if one does nothing with it except loll in the glory of Creation and reflect on the celestial brightness of the sun caught in a dew drop on a leaf.  The poet T.S. Eliot, however, laments:

"Where is the life we have lost in living?

Were is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust."

Lighten up, Thomas.  Omar the tent maker said it best. "Take the cash and let the credit go."

Coronavirus California: Monday during Phase Two

I have to say that Phase Two looked pretty much like Phase One as I did some errands in my West Hollywood area.  Well, it looked the same outside. As for me, I have made a change. I was finding it really hard to breathe in any of the usual masks folks are wearing. Taking back in my old air really unnerved me, who knows why. A while back I had ordered an alternative on line, but it took forever to receive it. Until this past weekend. My new face shield. It may not look any better, and in fact, when I see this picture, I think it looks worse, but it surely feels better. And it is easily cleaned.

Thus, newly, though ghastly attired, with my eye makeup smearing by virtue of sweat, off I went to get quarters for the washing machine I use in my building. (Yes, I do disinfect it before I drop in the clothes.) In ordinary times to which we may never return, change appears as I go about purchasing lunch or sundries in restaurants or retail stores, but in the last two months I haven't used any cash, or rarely used it, and so no quarters have accumulated. The last time I had to go to the bank, there was no wait, but this time, there was a line as is customary for the grocery store, though there were maybe a total of less than 10 people inside the bank.

It was the kind of day that has kept me in California despite its near destruction by our one party system, blue skied sunny with just the right level of wafting breeze. I noticed a pet store across the street, pretty new, it seemed to me, though how long it will last during this economic downturn I couldn't say. But its signage was certainly of the kind that one has come to expect from our society unencumbered by basic beauty and civility.  Billboards and store fronts are now the sites of ugly announcements of the entertainment or accessories enticing the 21st Century generation.

Technically, indeed, a female dog is properly categorized as on the window here. But for me, raised in unenlightened times when propriety ruled, the no doubt intended to be cute advertisement, was just another example of an oppressive period in human history. There was another humane pet store down on Fairfax for a while. I only went into it once or twice, it's signage, "Barks n 'B--ches" having always put me off. And humane as it was, it smelled like a zoo. But they went out of business before the current crisis. Lucky for this new place that the word was available for creative use.

Waiting my turn to go into the bank I considered how my father had often predicted apocalyptic events that would occur in my lifetime, after his passing. Somehow, it is still a surprise that I am among a masked population standing on blue or green tape to assure that I my fellow citizens and I are safely separated from each other. At some points, walking on the street, or looking out my bedroom window, the streets eerily empty and some leaflet attached to a pole flapping the only sound, I have thought I was in the opening of an episode of one of those prophetic, black and white television science fiction shows. People have mentioned the "Twilight Zone" as one. And that surely is regrettably applicable. I try not to think that our permanent future will feature variations of this current crisis. A man in a mask comes by to ask a question of the guard. I can't understand what he is saying because his mask muffles the sound.

I receive my dispensation to enter the bank, and the teller is wonderfully accommodating. Then off to Bristol Farms to see what I can buy. Here there is no line and I get right in with my newly sanitized shopping cart. I buy stuff I probably would not ordinarily, just in case. This is a very small grocery store and for all the "wait here" signs on the floor, you pass well less than within six feet of the person in the same aisle as you.

Fortified by my purchases, I begin my walk back to my apartment. I noted that the Griddle Cafe, a usually highly frequented and celebrated spot for young people, weekends with long lines of waiting customers, hasn't been open even for take out for over a couple of weeks. Then on the corner, the Indian Restaurant that also had been open for take-out is closed. They had been starting to pick up before the shutdown.  I wish them well, but my sense is that time has run out for them. Does a livelihood have anything to do with life? Facebook discussions would indicate that the answers are very different and highly charged.

As I hit my block, I walked past a building--the place where Sheila Graham used to live in Old Hollywood Days, and where her boyfriend, who actually lived on Laurel Avenue, the world renowned writer F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940, eighty years ago. There was a mother on the grounds, her Gerber like baby crawling excitedly on a patch of grass. She didn't have a mask on. In that small picture, life looked entirely normal. I stopped to watch the baby. For a moment, all the stresses of the last two plus months dissipated for a moment. I tried to say something to the mother in praise of her beautiful child. She didn't hear me. She pulled out her ear buds. She picked the child up until I passed on. The child shrieked with the plea to be put back onto the grass.