On Being an Ass
On Being an Ass
Chesterton’s “The Donkey” and April Fools’ Day
It seems to me there are two different types of “practical jokes”. There’re the ones which show how we’re all fools (making someone fall into a trap the bystanders know they’d have fallen into) and those who make a fool of the target individually and particularly (the old ‘joke’ of putting a boy’s hand in warm water during a sleepover). The latter are often (always?) a little disgusting.
I hate the latter, but find the former hilarious with everyone else. On April Fools’ Day, we celebrate too often that targeted humor, and so I generally avoid anything to do with the day. Except, it’s one saving grace is that it’s my Grandmother’s birthday. I’ll be talking about that (and Holy Week, a bit) today. Hope you enjoy.
With Our Fathers
Today, my Grandmother is 86. Even many of us who were raised near her (on the East Coast) have moved away, either to the middle of the country or to another country altogether. So even though I will call her and talk, even though we’re sending her pictures of our girls (the eldest of whom is named for her), I won’t be able to spend her birthday with her as I’d like. I’m getting a bit nostalgic about it, honestly.
My grandmother (whom I call Mims) is a Southern Lady (from Richmond) who moved up to Quaker country for college and stayed there. She was a lawyer for many years and admitted to practice (and I think even went before, though she doesn’t actually talk about it much) the United States Supreme Court. She was also a museum tour guide and a realtor in her time.
I grew up a bit intimidated by her (not that she was intimidating), with her pearls and her always done hair and her fine clothes. It’s not like we were slobs, my parents and I, but we partook fully in the 90s dress-down culture. And Mims very, very much did not. By the time I was a teenager, though, it’s all we could do not to talk of history, literature, and archeology for hours every visit.
I still remember that liminal space, between me as an intimidated child and me as an ersatz friend. My mom and I were visiting Granddad and Mims, and they started talking about this topless party they’d gone to nearby. Now, as I’d become a teenager my parents had been increasingly open with me, so a startling revelation like this wasn’t new in terms of content (exactly), but it was certainly new in terms of intensity. Said another way: I knew they were liberal, but I hadn’t realized they were that liberal, to talk about a topless party before their grandson like it was nothing, like it was expected. They were talking about all the little dishes, how they’d even brought something, and they kept deploying ‘topless’ as if it were an adjective. There was all this topless about; ‘this toplessness?’ my brain kept rendering it as. I would have been more confused if I wasn’t quite so horrified.
I don’t know how many years it took me to realize they were talking about a “tapas” party the whole time.
Flowerbed
No comment, just art.
Hortus Proprius
The Donkey
G.K. Chesterton
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet. O Friends, that ending! Donkeys are such silly creatures, and one can just see Puzzle (from The Last Battle) walking cluelessly forward with God on his back and smiling at the noise his entrance into Jerusalem occasioned. I think often about children in this way; how so often what they do creates utter joy in the adults around them. They don’t know why the adults are delighted, but they delight in the delight. “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
The other association is with ‘the first will be last and the last will be first’. On the eve of his very Resurrection, on the eve of Jerusalem’s redemption, the donkey, the least of the barnyard animals, stumbles into Jerusalem itself before Christ Himself.
This makes me think of the other major depictions of donkeys, those we get with A. A. Milne’s Eeyore and Orwell’s Benjamin. They’re smart but a bit silly, a combination of dour intelligence of undisturbed pessimism (in Milne never warranted and in Orwell always). How does that sour persona fit with the more childlike Puzzle? I haven’t a clue, but it’ll be interesting contrast to contemplate.
The Shed
A reminder again that I’m off until the first full week of May. Until then, I’ll be posting old letters which haven’t had a Substack debut.
The Grotto
My grandmother is a fairly healthy for an 86-year-old, but still has many back and knee problems which cause her regular trouble. If you are the praying sort, please, in your charity, pray for her.
Reviso et Peroratio
If you don’t know, on Twitter you can “bookmark” a Tweet. It allows you to go back to it, save thoughts, links, charts, and ideas. Many people used to use ‘likes’ for that (and perhaps they still do), but since likes are public and bookmarks are private, likes seem to have increasingly become a tool of the approbation they’re named after and bookmarks have become the (my, at least) main attempt at saving information. Anyway, all that is prelude.
Every so often I hear a joke on Twitter about the bookmarks, and how we have all saved all of this stuff in a folder (that is, in ‘Bookmarks’) we never check. And I laugh right along with them, because I check my bookmarks maybe twice a year and get through about three months of them before I have to go and do something else. There are years of bookmarks waiting to be remembered. And of course, as always, I unclick half the bookmarks I saved because I haven’t an idea why I saved them in the first place.
The problem is, I do this not just with Twitter Bookmarks but with... everything. I have notebooks and notebooks, word documents beyond word documents. I have almost fifty Apple “Notes”, many of them pages long if I moved their content into Word. Just off the top of my head, I have a notebook in which I keep Bible notes, I have a journal, I have a notebook for my narrations of The Language of Creation, I have a “Quotations” Word document, a “Orphan Language” document, I have a “Writing” Scrivener file, and a “Politics” Scrivener file, I have a “Newsletter”, “Read”, “To Do List”, “Morning Prayer”, “Work Schedule”, “Figures”, “Girls’ Letters”, “Homeschool”, and “Quotations” list on Apple “Notes” — all of which I use about once a day. I’m sure I’m missing something. Do any of you all do this?
I also have a list of saved websites (articles, mostly, but some books and music and paintings, &c also) on Firefox, on Safari, and on my phone. I intend (I always do little more than ‘intend’) to re-visit them, re-read, re-listen (Oh! because I also have hours of podcasts saved!), and compress all this saved knowledge into a useful reference (what else) document. When does one have time for such things?
Did Sir Walter Scott or Shakespeare, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky have a whole drawer (or ten) of old papers, saved news clippings, re-written quotations from books that they intended to compress into useful material later on and just... fail? Or did they manage it, being less distracted by Twitter, by email, by our life and its blue-lighted avalanche of information? For surely it must be different to have only the several dozen books in your library and at best another library or two in easy travel distance. Meanwhile we now have our personal libraries of maybe a thousand books, plus dozens of libraries in easy travel, plus thousands of libraries right over the internet.
Avalanche indeed.
Thank you.
How do you all keep, record, and store stories, quotations, and other... stuff... you want to come back to? Please
Or if you don’t want to post publicly, you can
If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click
If you’ve found your way here but are not a Scriptor
And you’d be doing me a favor if you would, on any social media available to you,
Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,
Scriptor horti scriptorii, Judd Baroff