Purity of blood, Geiger counter in my head, Footprint on the beach
I swear this isn't about the Jesus People's "Footprints in the Sand"+ Or, there go my likes, "Sex on the Beach" (~cocktail)++
Limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood.” Like the “one-drop” reductionism which persists (perhaps today arguably as an assertion rather than demotion of one’s social status?) in debates over who can claim which identity, here genetics bears much blame, as does genealogy. Added to what bemused experts of the latter pursuit label “non-paternal events” where each generation appears to have had 10% of births attributed to the mother’s (presumed at least the baby daddy, ok, or the live-in sugar pop) marital aide-de-camp rather than clandestine romp, to tuck away “it’s complicated” sub rosa.
This illustration merits a closer look. No source identified at the link, que lastima.
The prolific historical novelist Arturo Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste (hmm, suggestive Latin lover moniker) series’ second saga’s titled Limpieza de Sangre. Click above to find out about the term’s origin in Iberian inquisition (the Spanish and Portuguese as a necessary reminder from your friendly under-consulted medievalist with a real degree from, no boast, but one of the ten most prestigious universities in the world—depending on who’s counting, or at least tied-at-ten with its eternal ursine big brother in the bear market ratings rival up the California coast) of approved lineage, in that elevated rank of institutional approbation, aren’t synonymous with the Roman/ Vatican-directed Office. (A wink and a nod to a bilingual, very dear—and fully paid up—subscriber amongst you: How about Henry Kamen’s creative disruptor The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision [1965]? Seeing you borrowed it as our rugrats filled their diapers!) Catholic apologists snidely chide deluded masses on this erratum.
But you needn’t be a piggish crypto-marrano or a blackamoor to admit that, sirrah, in blunt impact, parsing this State vs Church separation nitpicks. Like Pilate washing his hands of Jesus, or the papists piously threading camels through needling eyes, it reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: the King grousing “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” wink-wink, nudge-nudge (had to sneak a Python aside in). Or the friars who want to know, ingeniously pausing their torture at the end at the seventh inning (heaven?) stretch rather than calling it ended at the ninth inning or hour, for in the latter case legally, then the accused had to be granted rest and recreation, and maybe redress. Also, that while theoretically no accused of heresy the first go-around, but only relapsed Judaizers or Albigensians, Bulgars or infidels technically qualified for scourge and rack, strappado and whacks, I doubt if this ever calmed any convicted or condemned. Sanctimonious casuistic dancing angels, Batman.
Henry Charles Lea, 1874’s seminal study. Of the ilk of Perry but on the opposing side as was Gaddis’ stock. HCL put his family’s money to where his smart mouth was, applying Harvard-Penn’s trivium + quadrivium at its/his prime. Activist for public health in the best sense, or scents, opposing a polluting slaughterhouse on the Schuykill River; teenaged mollusk discover of 30 species; ran interference to U.S. Grant’s third term run; child prodigy proto-Jim Lehrer song sass; avocational medievalist;, married his orphaned first cousin. Where’s his bio, let alone pic?
Note in William Gaddis’ A Frolic of His Own, (my review) doubtless the only echt-WASP satire of the blind Lady’s scales tipped, if far too sloppily for me, to snag its own National Book Award. Albeit by 1994, Percy and Gaddis’ demographic wouldn’t rule their critically acclaimed, you only find this on an Ivy syllabus, ivory tower roost, as the millennium thundered in a cabal as well-credentialed (not necessarily as what passed for well-educated among the Gentlemen with a “C” certainly a point taken, off) but ticking an updated slew of boxes on applications and CV’s. Gaddis’ opening, lifted from a riposte via our resident Boston Brahmin, Harvard’s inimitable master of quick wit and pithy rulings—as telling Lincoln when he came under fire while at what might have been a Matthew Brady-posed (I jest) photo-op mid-war at Ft. Stevens: “Get down, you fool!” Oliver Wendell Holmes, here attributed to a protagonist’s fictional forebear: "Justice?--You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law."
A pedant as am I need (or at least until the past liberated-from-the-trivium of liberal arts and all-out for STEM quadrivium Sputnik-launched generations now two or three, o tempora, o mores) explain that the semitic-sniffing and Mata-moros “moral panic” and payback after Grenada fell revolved around, in the ethnically cleansed realms for Christian nationalism of this prickly peninsula, whether or not said Spaniard or slightly-oddly accented bordering converso of swarth, sun, smirk, had a touch of if not a tar brush of Othello’s Mohammadan-tainted touch libelled to have besmirched Desdemona, then, an iota less intolerable, a hot-topic, fire-kindling degree of a “new Christian” treyf-”allergic”, Friday Night Lights oral not aural candling, gibberish (cantorish?) muttering, hand-washing before meals spy from Torah-true observance. In absence of the Rhenish yellow pinpricks, usual suspects.
On my wish list, I added after drafting this piece ― Antonio Muñoz Molina’s 2001 intellectual assemblage of related fictions on real exile, inspired by the expulsion of many and the hunkering down of some when 1492’s loot financed Columbus, while its owners fled across to North Africa, into Europe, or, logically soon, to the New World. When looking it up on Goodreads, this quote merited pasting. Not original entirely, but nevertheless a poignant expression of why I will follow with Binx Bolling’s reverie.
“You can’t fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they’ve become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of.”
What’s blood got to do with it, this blog, that is? The guy typing this preens he’s a Celt and a pre-one to boot. Maybe blend bubbles beneath. Galicia’s shorthand for Gael/Gaul after all. But what if סאהר/ ساهر jotted suggests slyly, nestled as a mere flicker of regeneration amidst red blood and green chaos, another perch in Hispania’s branches, if but a twig grafted or bent a thousand years ago? A series of unexpected—in hindsight I hazard fortunate—events, stirred me in—as my wife (adding the z'“l itself marks a step in my lifelong learning, role model as I strive for past students and present readership, future archivists in the year 2525 if man is still alive…smarmy pop song pops in mind from circa the Aquarian Age c/o 93 KHJ on my kid red-Japan transistor…designated me my clan’s religious dilettante—fine-tuned reception with...
Library of America edition (see my Goodreads entry)
This fresh anthology, at number #380, attests either to how long delayed is the canonization process for writers from the South of a particular patrimony, or how far below #39 Flannery O’Connor, Percy’s contemporary, has fallen in acclaim by contrast. Whatever reason, it’s great to have them both in handsome, durable volumes.
National Book Award’s 1962 prize. Don’t get hopes up. Few Bourbon Street hijinks careen through this terse but packed verbal crowd. “The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the ‘treasurable moments’ absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.”
You can find Goodreads reviews, including mine, galore. I spare you a plot summary other than the come-ons from its publicists. Even though it earns its plaudits in (pre-October) ‘62, no mention by that peanut gallery of the Cold War shadow, the sword swaying by a thread over men good (as with Damocles) and bad (Dr Strangelove and dramatis personae “inspired by true events”) alike, under which I was born and whom Percy scorned. As to spectators casting shade, I must applaud Percy’s nimble elision for he never mentions the Platonic allusion. In my natal year I guess the ilk of my postwar parenting public knew what was Greek to them. As you scroll down, look at the various covers, and note the evolution of images, associations, and expectations.
Words to man, ticket to ride into the last slide. Phallocentric Major Kong with cowboy hat awhirl as Big Brother to Little Boy and Fat Man drops. Where I can’t for the life of me make out the current version’s depiction, the one I navigated, the last one down this cavalcade. Is it a film canister? A drive-in mic and a windshield? Is a bottle of Jacks reflected? A valise with leather-stitched trim strap? Ockham’s razor hones down to persistent presumed cinematic connection. Any help, you smart set?
In blocks I quote relevant passages from part two, just before section 6, through to its end. In a piece to come, I will delve into the swirl a few days after. Isn’t always the last thing that snagged your attention that which bobs up, resurfacing as if by kismet? Serendipity isn’t a river in Egypt, but no denying it’s not only the isle off fka Ceylon.
Paul Elie’s 2019 essay on Percy’s debut—the year before this joint biographer of him, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Flannery O’Connor calling out (as that summer’s “urban unrest” aka “uprising” aligned either eerily or cannily) the last named for her let’s say “unreconstructed fables” (REM shout-out for #3 LP that gets little love either}—notes the relevance of this novel. I’d’ve been assigned it about two decades after it appeared forty days before my birth. I didn’t recall much when rereading it a few weeks after finding in the Show Me State’s capital on my conference (see below) the
Good Things Out of Nazareth (my review) collection of letters between Percy, O’Connor (who alone gets star billing as she’s the heliocentric force for fellow aspiring Southern fiction fashioner new convert Percy; another new to Rome, editor Caroline Gordon; her one-time spouse Allen Tate whose “Ode to the Confederate Dead” who must get serious cancellation nowadays by those who never get past the title; our man in the monastery Merton (priceless vignette of Kentucky holler’d Trappist silence=mirth monk howling to tears at proto-Goth post-Miss Havarsham (Just got the pun in that surname) straight outta promiscious-prepunk-prole-posturing Boos-bury Edith Sitwell recording of la grande dame’s poetic effusions live as memorx’d); clerical and lay sharp if fleeting satellites in the publishing and literary system: all tried to make the leap from the minor to the major galaxy that is, was, and will be Manhattan without end. The NBA and National Book Awards change lineups but not their lineage when kicking upstairs each generation’s hustling glad-handers.
I must reply to Harold, but it is almost more than I can do to write two sentences in a row. The words are without grace.
Dear Harold: Thank you for asking me to be godfather to your baby. Since, however, I am not a practical Catholic, I doubt if I could. But I certainly appreciate—Certainly appreciate. Tear it up.
[Part 2. 6] An odd thing. Ever since Wednesday I have become acutely aware of Jews. There is a clue here, but of what I cannot say. How do I know? Because whenever I approach a Jew, the Geiger counter in my head starts rattling away like a machine gun; and as I go past with the utmost circumspection and with every sense alert—the Geiger counter subsides.There is nothing new in my Jewish vibrations. During the years when I had friends my Aunt Edna, who is a theosophist, noticed that all my friends were Jews. She knew why moreover: I had been a Jew in a previous incarnation. Perhaps that is it. Anyhow it is true that I am Jewish by instinct. We share the same exile. The fact is, however, I am more Jewish than the Jews I know. They are more at home than I am. I accept my exile.
Another evidence of my Jewishness: the other day a sociologist reported that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews. Jews are my first real clue. When a man is in despair and does not in his heart of hearts allow that a search is possible and when such a man passes a Jew in the street, he notices nothing. When a man becomes a scientist or an artist, he is open to a different kind of despair. When such a man passes a Jew in the street, he may notice something but it is not a remarkable encounter. To him the Jew can only appear as a scientist or artist like himself or as a specimen to be studied.
But when a man awakes to the possibility of a search and when such a man passes a Jew in the street for the first time, he is like Robinson Crusoe seeing the footprint on the beach.
+Sign of the times. Percy’s semiotic as well as semitic-minded self [d. 1990] would’ve wryly expounded on this generation gap, as of progenitors and the offspring they and we keep multiplying, as language, fads, memes, beverages, and beliefs stir, as shaken…here’s what graced many a hall corridor in a split-level Daytona, about a decade later, its grateful demographic surviving Beats and hippies but still denim-clad for the Godspell-Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber extravagances rousing Binx’s well-named Gentilly ‘burb to a multiplex, or maybe single; in such I watched former flick ca. 1972
++I just realized the pun about the triple-base ingredient in “Sex on the Beach.” In turn the getting to first, second, third, home plate metaphor, common to us as teens of a certain age. Not sure if said phrase perpetuates among the hook-ups and Tinder-ers who’ve inherited the freedoms of a far more liberated era than the (no “little”) death rattle of which I was last gasp as to “strict Catholic upbringing”…where my largely Chicano (back then) LMU posse, from watchful hom[i]es. remained nearly through my matriculation saving themselves, holding out, not giving in, formidably stolid re: “country matters” as Hamlet puns to Ophelia. Modesty draws her curtain upon this mind’s eye. (One of many phrases Shakespeare Himself invented, until they cliche’d.)
Part two tk: In search of a 'one-drop' sap(ling) up family tree; Kabbalah, Kaddish, medieval Irish mercenaries, fruitless online forays feed a sleepless, speculative appetite. Wherein Binx’ musings float into my insomniac streams of semi-consciousness into From a Basement on a Hill, a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.