See here.
Valentine’s bible
This is the family bible of my maternal great-great-grandfather Valentine Myers and his wife Viola. It was published in 1882. The title page reads, in part, “The Holy Bible: Containing the Authorized Edition of the New Testament and the Revised Version of A.D. 1881 Arranged in Parallel Columns; with Cruden’s Complete Concordance, Embracing Every Passage of Scripture in the Largest Editions. Comprehensive Bible Dictionary, In Which Every Important Scriptural Word is Fully Explained. A Complete History of Each Book of the Bible, Beautifully Illustrated. Cities of the Bible, With Descriptive Scenes and Events in Palestine. Jewish and Egyptian Antiquities; Biblical Scenery; Manners and Customs of the Ancients; Natural History; Bible Aids for Social Prayer; A History of the Jewish Worship; Biblical Antiquities; Recent Explorations in Bible Lands; History of Herod, King of the Jews, &c. Apocrypha and Psalms. A Concise History of All Religious Denominations, And Many Other Important and Useful Aids to the Study of the Holy Scriptures. All Written to Increase the Interest In and Simplify The Study of the Word of God.”
Two publishers are listed – Bradley, Garretson & Co. in Philadelphia and Wm. Garretson & Co. in Columbus, Ohio and other cities. Given its provenance – the hard coal country of eastern Pennsylvania – it’s safe to assume that this volume was printed in Philadelphia.
In the very center of the gold-embossed leather cover, the names of its original owners are printed: “MR. and MRS. V. MYERS.”
This is the portrait of Viola Myers that hangs in my parents’ living room, a formal photograph embellished with paint. Our only photograph of her husband is an informal, slightly blurry snapshot taken sometime in the 1930s. He appears as a white-haired and mustached man with the aquiline nose and large chin typical of Myers males, posing with his son Walter, daughter-in-law Georgina, and grandsons Harold – my grandfather, whom we called Pop-pop – and Walter.
The distinguishing feature of family bibles is of course the record of births and deaths, typically sandwiched, as here, between the Apocrypha and the New Testament. The “Births” column includes only the five children of Valentine and Viola: Claude, Walter, Calvin, Ethel and Harold. The “Deaths” page was filled out by three people: first Valentine, then an unknown hand, and then Pop-pop, who gained custody of the bible from a first cousin a few years before his own death in July 2003.
The two entries in Valentine’s hand are crucial to appreciating the rest of this post. The first was for his wife:
Viola Miller Myers. Was born at Lehigh Tannery. Pa. June 15th 1864. Died at Vulcan Pa. April 23rd 1894. Aged. 29. Years 10 Months and Eight Days.
Viola died giving birth to her fifth child. Valentine never remarried, raising the children himself and then joining the household of his son Walter, first in the little coal-company town of Vulcan, above Mahanoy City, then in Pottstown. He was probably the single biggest influence on my Pop-pop, who imbibed much of his strict Methodist religiosity, love of learning and conservative, success-oriented outlook from his grandfather.
The second death record, also in Valentine’s hand, is for that fifth child:
Harold Chester Myers. Died at Perkasie Pa. May 25th. 1908, Aged 15 yrs 5 months and nine days.
Thus we learn why it is that Walter’s first son – my Pop-pop, born in 1914 – bore the name Harold Chester Myers, and the name Walter was reserved for his second son.
The other four entries on the “Deaths” page are for Valentine, his son Calvin, and for Pop-pop’s parents Georgina Dresch and Walter D. Myers. Valentine Myers, we learn, “was born at Ashley, Pa., Nov. 27, 1857. Died at Pottstown, Pa. Sept. 27, 1940.”
In a taped interview conducted by my brother Steve – the oldest and most Myers-like in our generation – Pop-pop recalled how his grandfather Valentine read the Bible continuously, cover to cover, in the last couple decades of his life. “Eighteen times!” Pop-pop said, but my mother told me that that was probably an approximation: “Whenever he said ’18,’ he just meant ‘a lot.'”
I doubt that this was the copy of the scriptures Valentine used for his daily reading, though. For one thing, it’s massive, heavy and awkward, and the corners of the pages do not appear to have been thumbed. Instead, this bible seems to have served as a repository for memories, and probably a great deal more. I don’t know if any of us today, even the most devout Christians, can quite conceive of what it means to employ a sacred text in this manner. One of the first things I discovered in flipping through it was a yellowed newspaper clipping tucked between the pages of the book of Job. You can probably already guess its contents:
Harold Myers Buried.
The funeral of Harold, the 15-year old son of Valentine Myers, was held at the home of the bereaved father, at Vulcan, at 12 o’clock noon today, and was largely attended. The services were conducted by Rev. E. W. Burke, pastor of the Methodist Episcopal church of town, after which cortege proceeded by the 12.50 P. R. R. train to the German Protestant cemetery, where interment was made in the family burial plot.
Below this clipping are the faint outlines of where another clipping had been tucked. It’s not hard to guess whose obituary that might have been. Between the pages immediately following are the pressed remnants of what appear to have been rosebuds, faded to a light brown.
A ringlet of hair resides between the pages of Jeremiah VI and VII. Jeremiah VII: 29, marked off with a paragraph sign in this edition, reads: “Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the Lord hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath.”
I knew that 19th-century Protestants sometimes used the Book of Ruth for divination regarding marriage, but found nothing pressed between its few pages. However, a full-page lithograph illustrating the meeting of Ruth and Boaz – a plate that happens to be located in I Kings – yielded another intriguing find: a ladyslipper orchid, probably a yellow ladyslipper, judging from the shape. I started to think that Pop-pop’s life-long love of wildflowers might have come from his grandfather, as well.
Of course, it’s possible that later owners of this bible might have been responsible for some of the inserts, though it’s hard to imagine someone else appropriating for their own prayerful use a book that has its original owners’ names engraved on the cover.
Most suggestive of all the inserts is this one: an ancient, very faded carnation tucked inside a scrap of paper and inserted next to the last chapter of The Song of Solomon.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
(Song VIII:6-7. See here for my own reactions to this most enigmatic of biblical texts.)
The Book of Numbers – specifically, Chapters VIII, IX and X – holds the mother lode: two more obituaries for Harold Myers (one with his last name misspelled), a newspaper subscription receipt for “Mrs. Myers,” and a local tax receipt for someone named Martin Robters (sp.?). The reasons for including these last two items are not immediately clear to me; I want to suggest some relationship to the practice of numbering or record-keeping, but I’m not sure. Chapter IX of Numbers contains the instructions for removing impurities conferred by contact with a corpse, and the way in which resident aliens – “strangers sojourning among you” – should keep Passover. Perhaps the tax receipt was for someone whom Valentine helped out, during the Depression or before? As a retired mine supervisor, he was always fairly well-off, and spent generously on acts of charity. His daughter-in-law Georgina had a similarly generous spirit: Pop-pop recalled in the interview that they fed every stranger who came to their door during the Great Depression.
A two-page spread on “Scripture Natural History – Zoology” contains some pressed tree leaves and another orchid blossom. Again, I’m not sure how to read this insertion. Perhaps some metaphorical meaning was intended – a reminder of the fragility and preciousness of life itself, say, or of this very bible, whose gilt-edged pages have grown almost as brown and brittle as the leaves and clippings it so lovingly enshrines.
Full (2)
My brother Steve and his family are moving in with me on Thursday. “We’d better get the septic tanks pumped,” my father said.
The man who operates the pumping truck was more than happy to come out. Troy is one of the best hunters in Plummer’s Hollow and spends as much time up here as he can. And he had time to stand around and shoot the you-know-what, too. “July is the slowest month of the year,” Troy said.
The sky was entirely clouded over – in fact, we had a brief rain just as Troy came up the driveway – but for some reason its reflection in the sewage appeared blue. The vacuum made short work of the liquid portion, but the solids at the bottom – which were not as high a proportion of the total as some of this blog’s readers might suspect – took a bit more time. Troy has been doing this work at least part-time for several years now. “This is the first time anyone’s taken pictures,” he said.
A series of very solid things made a rattling noise as they went up the hose. “Boy, I don’t remember passing those,” I said.
When it was done, we stood around the empty tank jawing for a few more minutes while the hose sucked on air. Troy told us he likes the job – it’s much less stressful and easier on his back than his previous job doing maintenance work on 18-wheelers. When the truck is full, he takes it to the Altoona Sewage Treatment Plant, where another one of our hunter friends works. Merely by taking a crap, it seems, I am contributing to the local economy and helping my friends put food on the table. There’s a certain rightness to that, even if we don’t do the ecologically correct thing and switch to composting toilets.
__________
See also my post from last February, also entitled Full.
Aftermath
Sometimes I feel nostalgia for the present moment, a fresh footprint filling with water, the huge black bear’s intelligent muzzle swinging left & right as he climbs out of the marsh beside the springhouse & ambles off down the driveway. His strength is in his loins, & his force is in the navel of his belly. When I was between the ages of nine and twelve I had a recurring dream about a pond dotted with lotuses in which the shadows of golden carp could sometimes be glimpsed, & if I raised one foot like a heron, my other foot would slowly leave the ground & I could float through the air a few feet above the surface of land or water with only my unvoiced intention to set my course. I would wake up convinced that such levitation lay within my abilities, if only I could find that pond and stand on its shore. This was, I realized later, a dream about the soul, the existence of which I did not then & do not now fully credit. But what I loved most about that dream was that the moment I took my right foot off the ground, a hush descended. All sounds turned distant & echoey like the song of a veery. It was as if the air had suddenly grown thick, or my ears had flooded with water in the aftermath of some great, improbable thing.
Words on the street
Exclosure
Another thing about Abdul-goddamn-Walid
In his emails, there’s always a facetious quotation line running all the way down the left-hand margin, functioning a bit like the unpaired left parenthesis sometimes encountered in a modernist poem: it throws one a bit off-balance, waiting anxiously for the right parenthesis that never comes (in some of those self-consciously difficult poems I used to badger myself into reading, I remember finding multiple left parentheses (ironic little eyebrows raised at the reader’s increasing bafflement at one would-be parenthetical phrase after another (“oh poor thing, he’s searching for closure” (or at least for the proverbial other shoe to drop (and I was, too, because after reading a poem or email like that it’s hard to shake the impression that all the right-hand parentheses and close-quotes have decamped to some point beyond the horizon – that sliver of a new moon, say – and everything short of it has been rendered, well, parenthetical (not “wheels within wheels,” but the opposite: a feeling that no starting point can ever be returned to, as hard as we pedal this zero-cycle (there are no arrivals, only departures (what goes around disappears into a vortex.
Washing the lettuce
It is said that Plato once came upon Diogenes the Kynic washing wild lettuce for his supper. “If you had paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn’t be reduced to washing lettuce,” said the philosopher. “If you had learned to wash lettuce, you wouldn’t have had to pay court to Dionysius,” replied the Kynic.
*
Diogenes believed in direct, unconventional responses rather in the manner of a Tang Dynasty Zen master. Once, when someone tried to convince him of the merits of Plato’s philosophy of Ideas, he squatted down and took a shit.
*
Once, on a sea voyage, Diogenes was captured by pirates who took him to Crete and put him on sale at the slave market. The auctioneer asked him whether he had any marketable talents. “Yes,” he said, “I excel at giving orders. Sell me to someone who needs a master.” It is said that a man called Xeniades was so impressed by this, he purchased him to tutor his children. Diogenes was soon in control of the man’s entire household. Years later, living in his tub, he used to deride rulers as slaves to their people.
*
Someone once asked Diogenes why it is that people give alms to beggars, who do little to deserve it, and not to philosophers, who perform such valuable services for all humanity. “Everyone expects that they themselves might someday be reduced to beggary,” Diogenes observed, “but no one ever expects to be reduced to philosophizing.”
Words on the street
Abdul-Walid of Acerbia
“Amnesia is the soul of wit.” – Abdul-Walid
On the orders of its unelected leader, the beleaguered posts of Acerbia are about to undergo a Structural Adjustment Program. There is no Universal Declaration on Blogging Rights, no legal basis for charges of blogicide.
“I am the state,” Louis XIV famously declared. Abdul-Walid recently entertained a similar delusion, equating the contemplated termination of his blog and all its contents with suicide.
But at other times and in other contexts, the Acerbian dictator has been one of the blogosphere’s staunchest defenders of textual autonomy. He has been known to reprint other bloggers’ posts without their advance permission – tolerated under the lax laws that govern the blogosphere – and sometimes has gone so far as to change their shape, once even editing out lines he didn’t like and briefly withholding attribution. Soon thereafter, he quoted Pascal with favor:
Certain authors, speaking of their works, say, ‘My book,’ ‘My commentary,’ ‘My history,’ etc. They resemble middle-class people who have a house of their own, and always have ‘My house’ on their lips. They would do better to say, ‘Our book,’ ‘Our commentary,’ ‘Our history,’ etc., because there is in them usually more of other people’s than their own.
So is this the end for our beloved cities of the plain? Will their zealous ruler consign them to fire and brimstone, blind to the plight of the righteous few? You bet your booty.
Innominate. I play the tic-tac-toe with my tongue: I-No-Mi-Nate. It is one of those fabulous words, like “eponymous,” a word that testifies to itself, a word that hides behind itself. Or, like Lolita, or opolopo; words that entertain the mouth.The surface of Os innominatum wends deliriously: a gentle rise on a broad Iliac plain suddenly leads to a ridge which gives way to a volcanic crater, and a pair of mismatched wings surrounding a circular canal and subtending sheer cliffs. It is a prodigal shape, beaten every which way for pure functionality, bearing not a single wasted spur.
Word has it, however, that all the inhabitants have been airlifted out and have been granted refugee status elsewhere – most, in the shape-shifting way of web denizens, in multiple locations. Soon enough they will learn the bleak truth behind one of Abdul-Walid’s own apothegms, You have been sentenced to life outside prison, but this is harsher judgment than you think.
And Abdul-Walid himself?
As they pay their bill, and get up to leave, the older of the two is heard to say:”Insomnia. But I don’t count sheep when I can’t sleep. I count corpses.”
The critic
A small brown moth drawn in
by the glow of his laptop
clings to the flat screen
with wings outstretched.
A few pixels show
through the clear patches
in the center of each wing.
Does that feel good? he murmurs
when the blinking cursor passes
underneath it.
The bedsprings creak
in the other room.
Beyond the softly whirring fan
the famous skyline flickers
with heat lightning as
his fingers go on clattering
over the keys.