It's Fantastic

In this time of fantastic news stories and press conferences, I often think about a joke I heard in Junior High.  It’s a useful joke.  Comes in handy on many occasions.  It’s a joke I’ve told my kids.  Over the years, it’s become a family inside-joke.  I now share it with you.

(Imagine, if you will, two little old ladies talking on a park bench.  For good measure, add in a bit of a Yiddish accent.}

B:  “So Myrtle, what’s new?”

M:  “Bessie, you just won’t believe it.  Remember my son Gerald?  He’s a genius.  Just got into an Ivy League school.  Someday he’ll win the Nobel Prize.”

B:  “That’s FAAN’-tastic.”

M:  “And my husband Lou, he loves me more and more each day.  Showers me with presents, furs and diamonds.  Wants to take me on a trip around the world.”

B:  “That’s FAAN’-tastic.”

M:  “As for me, I’ve lost twenty pounds and am going to have plastic surgery that will make me look thirty years younger.”

B:  “That’s FAAN’-tastic.”

M:  “So, nuh Bessie?  Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

B:  “Well Myrtle, I’ve been going to charm school.”

M:  “Really?  And what are you learning in charm school?”

B:  “I’m learning how to say FAAN’-tastic . . .  instead of bullshit.”

Kafkaesque

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”  (first line from The Trial, by Franz Kafka, 1883-1924) 

Kafkaesque.  It’s a wonderful adjective.  Kafkaesque connotes an absurd situation in which you find yourself trapped, powerless, and clueless.  You are controlled by a powerful, impersonal, and unapproachable bureaucracy.  A Kafkaesque scenario is nightmarish. You want to escape, and you can’t.
It’s a measure of Kafka’s literary stature that his name was turned into an adjective.

Franz Kafka was born into a middle class, unobservant Jewish family.  He lived his entire life in Prague.  During the day he worked as an official in an insurance office.  At night he wrote the novels and short stories that made him an icon of Western literature.

Much of Kafka’s writing is difficult to interpret, surreal, multi-layered, allegorical, written almost as-if in a bad dream.  Sometimes his stories feel grim, even ghoulish.  Simultaneously, many of his stories are laced with satire and ironic humor.  Some of his stories have been called prophetic, foreshadowing the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century.

Frequently his stories are deeply personal explorations into his tormented and neurotic psyche.  At yet another level, his stories are about unfulfilled religious yearnings.  He seems to search in vain for a distant, well-guarded, and unapproachable deity.  Some scholars detect in his writing similarities to the Jewish mystic writings of Kabbalah.

Kafka’s health was poor. For many years he suffered from, and eventually succumbed to, tuberculosis.  Tuberculosis was the great killer of its time, accounting for up to 1 in 7 deaths.  It was a respiratory illness spread by people working in close quarters to one another, affecting a disproportionate number of the poor. Kafka died in 1924.  It wasn’t until 1943, with the development of Streptomycin, that tuberculosis could be cured.  In the meantime, tuberculosis was contained by good hygiene and avoidance of overcrowded conditions.

Which brings me to another respiratory disease and the current pandemic.  It’s a situation in which I am trapped and powerless.  Decisions affecting tens-of-thousands of lives are being made daily by God knows who. It feels nightmarish.  I want to escape it, but I can’t.

 “It’s like the flu.”  “It’ll go away.”  “We’ve got it under perfect control.”   “It’ll all be beautiful.” Someone must have been telling lies about coronavirus for without having done anything wrong, the world changed, and one fine morning we were confined to our homes.   It feels Kafkaesque.

Dreams

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”  (from The Tempest, by William Shakespeare)

I had a vivid dream last night.  I was in an airplane, a passenger plane, and I was the only passenger on board.  There was a pilot, but he was asleep in the back of the plane and I didn’t wake him.  I assumed the plane was flying on autopilot.  Since no one else was on the plane, it occurred to me that I could move from coach to first class, and nobody would object.  It was a midnight flight and I was headed home to Denver.  I was going there to surprise my parents.

I was aware that there was nothing but air below me and only the thin skin of the plane shielding me from the void.  I was aware how quiet the plane was.  I could hear no sound from the engines, no creaking of the plane.  Just to hear something, I went over to a rack of music and picked out a George Strait CD.  If you’re wondering, George Strait is a well-known Country Western singer.  I occasionally enjoy country music, but I have no idea why I picked this music to play.  However, music, any music, was preferable to silence.

From biblical times to the present, much has been written about the meaning of dreams.  Some believe that dreams have prophetic meaning.  Some believe that dreams have deep psychological meaning.  Some dispute that dreams have any consistent meaning at all.  Whatever they may mean, during this Covid pandemic many people report having vivid and intense dreams.

I believe my dream was loaded with meaning and seasoned with a bit of existential angst. Travelling in a plane was symbolic of a new journey.  Being high above the ground, protected only by the thin skin of the plane, was symbolic of the fragility and contingency of life. The flight to Denver symbolized my mortality, an eventual reunion with my deceased parents.  The sleeping pilot . . . it symbolized the lack of leadership and guidance from a president who might as well be asleep at the helm.  As for the need to turn silence into music, I’m less sure what that symbolized.  Perhaps music was symbolic for hope and consolation.

Addendum:  A few nights before, I'd had another vivid dream.  I was fishing.  I could feel myself casting with my flyrod.  Twice I felt a fish take the lure.  Twice I felt the subsequent fight of the fish. Twice I reeled in a big fish, one a crappie and the other a bass.  Sigmund Freud wrote that dreams are the symbolic fulfillment of our unfulfilled wishes.  In this instance, I think he was right.

Jigsaw

Were it not for the coronavirus pandemic, my wife could have gone through life having never done a jigsaw puzzle.  But now she knows the immense satisfaction of watching a thousand small, random and misshapen pieces come together to make one coherent picture. One puzzle completed. She’s ready to start on our second.

It took the two of us five days, working four to five hours per day, to complete the puzzle.  Initially we completed 998-pieces of the puzzle.  When we got to the end, we discovered that two pieces were missing, but still we felt pretty good about what we had accomplished.  The picture was mostly complete, minus two small holes.

Two pieces missing out of a thousand, two pieces leaving two obvious holes in what otherwise would be a totally complete and perfect picture.  All that work and effort for a flawed picture?  Not content to leave the puzzle in that state, the carpet below the table was carefully searched.  And there in the shag of the carpet we found the missing pieces.  It’s hard to explain why a 1,000-piece totally complete picture feels infinitely more gratifying than a 998-piece picture.  But, it does.

My wife mused that I seemed more enthusiastic about completing the puzzle than I was when we had our children.  I responded that the very dumbest animals know how to reproduce, but it takes special skill to complete a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.  It takes organization.  It takes patience and perseverance.  It takes a keen eye for small detail.  And it takes time, something right now that my wife and I have plenty of.

After the puzzle was completed, my wife and I stared at our work for a very long time, recalling the joys we shared, adding this piece or that to the puzzle.  My wife put a layer of mod podge over the completed picture so that we could lift the puzzle intact and find a place of honor for it in our home.

By the way, this is the 80^th piece of my blog, a blog that has been an assortment of small, random and occasionally misshapen pieces.  My goal is to get to 100 pieces.  Who knows?  Maybe by then the pieces will fit into some sort of coherent picture.  But there will be some missing pieces.