It has occurred to me that a document is easier to open on this weblog if a new document is started; thus this Genesis. It worked! As I went through the last entry and made some changes for clarification, as I finished, I remembered the first time I met Prufrock. I was a freshman at Heidelberg College and that year I had a friend whose name, I believe, was Kent Williams. All I remember about that meeting is that we were sitting on his bed in his dorm room, and he said something to the effect that he had a poem he wanted me to hear. We were both going to be English majors. He got out one of his texts, opened it to Prufrock and read it to me. I remember being a little puzzled and amazed, but what stuck was that he loved the poem. Now I understand why, or think I do at least. In my experience it is a powerful work of literature.
I also remember driving from Berea to Tiffin, Ohio up I-75 by myself to pick up my father and bring him back with me. I had the text of Prufrock open on the seat beside me so that I could glance at it and attempt to memorize the poem, as I drove. I never got the poem fully memorized, though I have good chunks of it in there, my mind, that is, along with some Shakespeare, Milton, and snatches of other works. Now I work on committing Psalms to memory though I find it more difficult to get them to stick. The only Psalm I have complete is the obvious one, the twenty-third Psalm, probably because I learned it when I was young. Now there is much of 130, which seems to come and go at its pleasure, much of 8, the opening verse of 90, all of 136, half of 63, chunks of 51, etc. What was it one of the saints said, that he wanted to die with a Psalm on his lips and Christ in his heart. To that I say, Amen.
C. S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, defines and discusses these four loves, using their Greek names: eros, romantic love; philia, friendship; storge, affection; and ágape, divine love. I haven't read Lewis's book in a while, but the terms stuck, and I even had the text of his book on tape. Lewis became one of my heroes when I became a Christian, in graduate school of all places. Lewis made the recording of his text, so at least I have heard his voice though he was dead by the time I became fully aware of his works. He died the same day J.F.K. was assinated, November 23, 1963, or was it the 22? Aldous Huxley also died on the same day; Peter Kreeft wrote a book wherein he imagines them meeting in some kind of supernatural ante room: Lewis the Christian, Kennedy the lapsed Catholic, and the pantheistic Huxley, at least I think he was. I may have misremembered the categories here, but I remember for certain that Kreeft was a Christian highly influenced by Lewis, as were any number of us at the time. The thing I admired about Lewis was his ability to bring his reason to the service of his faith. Unlike others, like Prufrock, Lewis had no dissociated sensibility, and I believe it was Eliot who used that term to define the split in the human psyche that took place during the seventeenth century in Western Civilization.
While Prufrock may be one instance of the split, an early example is Lemuel Gulliver where the split is objectified clearly in the fourth book of the Travels in the two races, the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, with the first being truly rational animals and the second being irrational creatures that bear the human shape but simply have passions divorced from any hint of rationality. That Swift used horses to identify the rational in our nature is highly ironic as the horse in Western Civilization had always been the image of the emotional aspect of our nature, the strong passions that needed the reigns of the intellect to control them. Gulliver of course identifies completely with the Houyhnhnms and rejects completely the image of the human body with its passions run amuck in the Yahoos, to the point that at the end of the novel Gulliver is sleeping in his stable with his own horses rather in bed with his loving wife.
Lewis explores this kind of split in the human psyche in his rather wonderful book called the Abolition of Man and the image of men without chests, the place where, after all, the heart resides.
Speaking somewhat of the body problem, I just took a bathroom break and happened to look at my hands as I was cleaning up. On the knuckle of my right hand thumb I discovered an enormous blister, at which point the memory came crashing back. I was reading the newspaper a while ago spread out over our range top in the kitchen, as I frequently do. While I was reading I felt something like a sharp bee sting in my right hand. I jerked it away from the paper and looked down. Nothing there. No sting, just a little pain and a little redness. I took hold of the paper again and put my hand back down. This time there was a very painful sting on the same hand, only on the thumb this time. I dropped the paper and looked at my thumb, no sting, but definitely broken skin. I moved the paper aside and saw that the first heating unit was on and that I had been burning myself. So much for the neuropathy. My hands are mostly numb, but on things like burns, it takes a few seconds for sharp pains like burns to register. I must say I have a rather magnificent blister now on my right hand thumb, but the pain is mostly gone. When I saw that I had burned myself, I immediately got a cold pack from the freezer and put it on both burns. After about ten minutes the pain subsided and I went about my business, which was reading the comics elsewhere. I suppose I accidentally moved the dial on the range top without being aware of it. I have lots of "interesting" accidents and situations that way, but none as painful as this one. I also can't button my shirts or easily work zippers, along with being unable to tie my shoes. Fortunately they make shoes with velcro straps. It is a fascinating blister. Wow!
Well, She-who-must-be-obeyed has summoned me outdoors to look at paint samples, and I must go!
I went. She took into account my opinion and then did what she decided anyway. She also had our lovely green house painted a kind of bright cream or yellow color. Since I seem to be impervious to these things that go on around me, i am sure I will stop seeing the change sooner or later. I told her the second day after she had gone somewhere and returned that the neighbors had stormed up our driveway with pitchforks and torches screaming that the house was alive! "It's alive," they shouted. That earned a small grin from her. Today we are taking the dogs for a walk, though the time is late. She just finished painting the lovely red tool house, cream or yellow or whatever, and is ready for the dogs. Ah, well.
The evening sky in the west has been lovely of late, with the dance taking place with Venus, Mars, and the Moon. Orion and Sirius still dominate the southern sky. Mostly southern sky, anyway. Wherever they are they are not hard to find on a clear night. So, now I am going to the dogs.