My Virtuous Vice: Anger (from The
Forked River Anthology,
unpublished)
I see-saw between two moral extremes: anger (‘The vice of the virtuous’, General Drummond), and tolerance (‘The virtue of hypocrites’, Balthasar Gracian). If interrupted while working, anger is on the up. I only answer the door when in writerly despair any outside help is welcome.
While struggling to understand Delmore Schwartz’s poem ‘I am the octopus in love with God’, I open the door to a white-haired Rasta, who blesses me with a wooden cross. ‘My Word is Omega and the Devil’s Zero…’. I slam the door in his face, and take the batteries out of my doorbell.
Schwartz’s poem ends with, ‘O God of my perfect ignorance’, and so tolerance returns. Maybe the white-haired Rasta had something to tell me after all by giving God a letter and the devil a number. And so, I reconnect my doorbell.
If it rings twice at thirty second intervals, I’ll know it’s the Jehovah Witnesses. They target lone ‘strangers sojourning in a foreign land’ (betrayed by names on letter-boxes). The presumption that living alone means lonely, and the lonely are more open to higher things, makes me angry, and I never answer the door. They are frequent callers because before visiting Jehovah’s leave a leaflet in the letter-box, and I automatically tear it up, not realising, by doing so, I’m indicating that I’m in residence.
When I was a child Jehovah Witnesses were driven from Limerick. Local traders thought they wanted to rival their businesses. Wrong from the start. They were merely offering a safe haven for the sons of Abel, while waiting for Armageddon. Historical guilt makes me feel that I should be more tolerant. And one morning, after I translated a letter from Rilke to his future wife Clara, ‘I hold that the highest task for a union of two people is that one guarantees the other’s solitude. The only real communions are those that do not interrupt rhythmically profound solitude’, I weakened.
Jehovah’s tend to come in pairs. Mine were a youngish man and woman of a certain age, dressed, respectively, in business and twin suits. She introduces herself in English and he in French. French-Canadian, I suppose, and immediately regret opening the door. I blurt out, ‘I’m Catholic and didn’t need another religion, but I wish you well with pagans. They merely smile. ‘You can be a Jehovah Witness no matter what denomination you profess’. I slam the door, and watch them leaving the building. The man looks defeated and the woman takes him by the arm.
I feel bad about the door slam, and the next time their leaflet appears in my letter box I remove it, and wait for their ding-dong. This time the pair are accompanied by a pretty girl in a tartan skirt, introduced as Ruth. I smile wanly at her. I’m sorry for a Jehovah trainee. A lifetime ahead making unsolicited visits to people who want to be left alone. Before I know it, I had let them into the house.
The youngish man seems perked up by Ruth’s presence. He pertly asks the question that in national censuses most people answer in the affirmative in case of a thunder-bolt. ‘Do you believe in God’ (in English)?’ This works my annoyance, and not because he’d forgotten our previous conversation.
‘Parlez française, SVP.’
‘You’re English?’
‘No, Irish. My father killed Englishmen.’
‘Vous été en croyant ?’ The woman interjected.
‘De quoi ?’
‘Dieu’.
I resist the temptation to be flippant (‘Which God?’). Instead, I roll off Thomas Aquinas’s five proofs of God’s existence, which I learnt from Professor Mach in my student days. And borrowed his conclusion. That is, it’s four too many. Thomas lacked faith in his own reasoning. One proof should have been enough.’
I could see they are patiently guessing from the odd familiar word in my makeshift French, but they soon run out of guesses, and Ruth is close to tears. Then I remember the passage I had just transcribed from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and I address her directly:
‘You are young. And it’s all before you. Be patient with the unresolved questions in your heart. Learn to love the questions for themselves. If you force the answers, you’ll get them wrong. Live, loving the questions, and the answers will come to you in their own good time. The big questions in life are heavy. Don’t fight them and they’ll lighten up. But above all, don’t lose the idea of yourself, and live it to the full.’
‘Je suis désolé. Je ne comprends pas’. Her French is school. And so
I put her out of her misery by speaking English.
‘It’s Rilke. He had been reading Kierkegaard and wanted to help a young poet free himself from the dutiful life proscribed by his upbringing. Living an idea is the opposite to living by chapter and verse in the Scriptures. You make it up as you go along from an idea of how you wanted your life to be before parents and teachers-imposed strictures ‘to save you from yourself’. They want to give you a future ‘for your own good’, but one that is always ahead of you. You spend your life waiting for it instead of living the life you dreamed….’
We are all still standing. I hadn’t offered them seats. Ruth’s delicate foot is scratching a calf. The others are looking embarrassed. My tolerances wanes with my evident failure to communicate the rudiments of existentialism, and I ask the older woman briskly, ‘if one could have pleasure and be a Jehovah too? Or do they cancel one another out?’ The younger man looks anxiously at Ruth, who wants me to continue as she’s sorry for me. Ed Dorn says, ‘Humanity divides neatly into two categories. Those who want to go and those who want to stay’. And I can see from their shuffle that the pair are in the former group. A true terrorist of politeness, I kiss Ruth’s hand and bow them out with a ‘Día duit (God-be-with-you in Gaelic). I think I have frightened them off for good.
Now alone with my moral extremes, I can’t work, furious with myself at my barely suppressed anger on behalf of poor Ruth. It is intolerable. I don’t know where to lay the blame, the ignorant octopus or Rilke’s distortion of Kierkegaard or, indeed, the Doleful Dane himself. I search out in his Journal the entry that I had simplified into incoherence. But my eye catches what follows it. ‘I was the life and soul of the party. Twaddle, twaddle, twaddle, that’s what people want… A man walked along contemplating suicide and a slate fell on his head and killed him and his last words were ‘God be praised’.