Poem About Meeting Walker Percy

Korrektiv in the New York Times

I once heard a rumor that suffering gives authority.

Go ahead and call it an attempted comeback. Here’s where we’ve got to get back to if we’re going to get back at all: Friend of Korrektiv Bishop Daniel Flores (pictured above) telling the Times that he follows “The Korrektiv blog, which is by a number of different writers who look up to Walker Percy, whom I also like.” The good bishop used to be a blogger himself, though it seems he’s deeper into Twitter these days. Led there, no doubt, by the sensus fidelium. I liked this line: “Know what you must in conscience vigorously oppose in the agendas of whomever it is you decide to vote for; know these things at least as well, if not better, than you know what you can support.”

This plague is not a hurricane

By: Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson is a professor of history at Tulane University.

29 March 2020

On Mardi Gras Day this year, we had friends over to watch the marchers and musicians of the St. Anne parade strut and dance past our balcony on Royal Street. By the end of the procession, many of the marchers had dropped out and joined our party, wearing their clever costumes. A few were dressed as the coronavirus, with bodysuits that mimicked the beer bottle and hoods that made them look like viral rockets. It was still early enough to be amusing.

Now as I look down from our balcony, Royal Street is nearly deserted. A lone cornetist on the corner is playing a slow rendition of “I’ll Fly Away,” but there are few people to drop tips into his bucket.

Did Mardi Gras help make New Orleans a hot spot in the current plague? Probably. Should it have been canceled? Well, obviously, just as in hindsight it would have been good if we’d canceled all big gatherings and sporting events in the country in mid-February rather than mid-March. But I can’t blame our governor or mayor for not knowing that. By Mardi Gras weekend, there had been no deaths or reported community-spread cases in the United States, and Trump that Monday tweeted, “The coronavirus is very much under control.”

Now there are 3,540 reported cases in Louisiana, as of Sunday, making it rank as the ninth most-afflicted state in the nation, and 1,127 have been hospitalized. New Orleans has 1,350 of the cases and has suffered 73 deaths so far. The governor says hospitals in some parishes may soon be filled, so the city’s convention facility is being converted into an emergency facility. While the toll will be nowhere near the 1,500 or so who were killed in Louisiana by Katrina, I understand why we have been called an eye of this hurricane. It’s an apt analogy, because the atmosphere in much of the city, other than the hospitals, is eerily calm but charged, just as in a hurricane’s eye.

There is still some music in the streets. Doreen Ketchens, the beloved clarinetist who plays with her band on Royal Street in front of our corner grocery, performed to an empty sidewalk a few days ago. “It’s the week after the madness, but we’re out here anyway,” she said. “We wanted to give some music to a very quiet Royal Street.” She sings a final rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” stressing the verse about “when the sun begins to shine,” then plays happy birthday to her tuba player. In Jackson Square, a lone drummer plays in front of the cathedral. As Brandi Carlile once sang, “You can dance in a hurricane/But only if you’re standing in the eye.”

Walker Percy, a Louisiana novelist with a wry philosophical depth and grace worn lightly, had a theory about hurricanes. “It was his impression that not just he but other people felt better in hurricanes,” he wrote of the semi-autobiographical title character of his second novel, “The Last Gentleman.” During a hurricane, we no longer feel alienated or uncertain. We know what to do, and we do it. We are together, in the same boat. Then we have a hurricane party.

But this plague is not a hurricane. In a hurricane you know that, if you ride it out for a day, the sun will begin to shine, the waters will recede, and the earth will begin to heal. During this plague, we’re not quite sure what to do, other than stay socially distanced. New Orleanians are not good at social distancing. It’s also unclear how this storm ends. The song that resonates is not Brandi’s “The Eye,” it’s the Neville Brothers’ cover of “Sitting in Limbo.”

So we look for something to do that might be useful. Throughout the city, restaurants have set up tables outside for people to come buy takeout plates of their specialties. For the homeless and less fortunate, pickup trucks with volunteers drive through the neighborhoods handing out boxed meals for free. Various groups, including my Tulane students, have scrambled to set up funds to help hospitality workers, musicians, those in the gig economy and others who have been hurt.

A few days ago, my wife and I drove two hours south to Grand Isle, where the marshes meet the Gulf of Mexico. People used to go there in previous centuries to escape the plagues. There was a semblance of normalcy. The Starfish restaurant was serving at outdoor tables, and as we drove back up along Bayou Lafourche, we stopped at the tin shed of Big Jim’s seafood dock and bought a couple of dozen oysters just off the boat.

Louisiana used to go through these plagues regularly. The worst year on record was 1853, when 7,800 of 115,000 New Orleans residents died of yellow fever. Right after that plague receded, the town’s first Mardi Gras krewe was formed. The pent-up city needed a release.

Will there be a Mardi Gras next year? Yes, but only if it’s safe by then. There’s a resilience in a city that has come through many plagues and hurricanes in its history and which, like our nation, will come through this one.

COPYRIGHT 2020: The Washington Post

The persistence of Percy

Is there a more enduring minor American author than the guy whose breakthrough novel won the National Book Award thanks to an embittered sportswriter? Anyway, Friend of Korrektiv Paul Elie is back on the Percy plowhorse in The New Yorker. Maybe he really is our cool Dostoevsky. Happy New Year, everybody.

Spinning along the highway in this bright little beetle…

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“My little red MG, however, is an exception to the rule. It is a miserable vehicle actually, with not a single virtue save one: it is immune to the malaise.”
— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Dept. of Rejected New Yorker Cartoons, New Editor Edition

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Well, The New Yorker got a new cartoon editor, so to celebrate, I sent a new cartoon.

One day in New Ionia or Tennessee, as the case may be…

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Do you read? Do you read? Are you in trouble? How did you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought help? If you did, did help come? If it did, did you accept it? Are you out of trouble? What is the character of your consciousness? Are you conscious? Do you have a self? Do you know who you are? Do you know what you are doing? Do you love? Do you know how to love? Are you loved? Do you hate? Do you read me? Come back. Repeat. Come back. Come back. Come back.

(CHECK ONE)

Do fetuses dream of unborn sheep?

*young-philip-k-dick-600x744

An interesting and astute piece on all things “Phildickian” over at Chronicles:

But Dick also had a conservative side, represented by his strong (if heterodox) religious devotion, his distrust of large bureaucratic structures, and his longtime anti-abortion stance. In the last decade of his life, as he finally began receiving substantial amounts of money for his writing, Dick donated thousands of dollars to pro-life causes. He also wrote “The Pre-Persons,” a powerful story in which parents can abort any child under 12. Yet both the speech by Dick-the-hippie and the story by Dick-the-conservative are recognizably the work of the same man—both, in fact, were produced during the same period of his life. The first endorses rebellion, no matter how nihilistic, against a soulless apparatus of power; rebellion, at least, is human. And the story denies the government the right to define who is a human being, arguing that this will only produce a totalitarian system akin to the one the juvenile delinquents in the speech are rebelling against. One need not be pro-vandalism—or pro-life, for that matter—to approve of the underlying point.

*Dick and Percy: Separated at birth?(!)

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Gerasene ’17: The Kollektiv at Notre Dame

4a52b04c-9854-4f8d-857b-c68d95a89614-002[Image: the Mississippi gravesite of Senator LeRoy Percy, Walker Percy’s uncle.]

CONFIRMED: Two [hopefully three] members of the Korrektiv as panelists at this summer’s Trying to Say “God”: Re-enchanting Catholic Literature, June 22-24 at the University of Notre Dame. Rally, Korrektiv, rally!

Thought Experiment in the Making…

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How close is Webster Parish to West Feliciana Parish and is there something funny going onsuch as wives presenting themselves rearward – in that parish too?

Hey, look at that—AP says I’m Trump Country!

crawford county map
See me up there in the upper right-hand corner?

As Percy would say, I’m “validated” like the young man who sees his own town in a film or lights up William Holden’s cigarette without acknowledging that he knows Holden knows he knows who Holden is, etc.

(p.s. This is not meant as a provocation, so please if you have anything bad to say about the current president, I would refer you to previous dust-ups at this blog on that issue, which I won’t even link to because I don’t think it bears any relevance to this post. Here, it’s all peace and joy and I don’t really care what you think about the current president – I’m making a Percian point here, which is much more important.

As a smoking/meat-smoking friend of mine in California might say, “Oh, you don’t like my politics? That’s nice. Did I mention that I bake bread?”

Except in my case I would say, “Did I mention I make a helluva good Chicken Cacciatore and that I can make you a martini that you will never forget? Sit down right there at my kitchen table and I’ll stir us a couple, and then let’s light up a smoke—cigar for you? Perfect!—and cigarettes (unfiltered) for me. Let’s talk then about the beauties of poems that completely nail the execution of a perfect enjambment of lines, of women who wear their hair down, of early R.E.M. albums and whether they were meant to be concept albums in the tradition of Pink Floyd and Yes but tinctured with a Southern Gothic ethos, of love in a time near the end of the world, and of children and how, one way or another, the little dears are going to get you out of bed in the morning. Yes—oh, and how’s your drink? See? I told you so….Cacciatore will be ready in about 20 minutes. How ‘bout another round?” )

 

Horn! reviews The Moviegoer

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The man’s website is here.

It’s Walker Percy’s Hundredth Birthday and We Suck

… but here’s the beginning of an epic poem about the time a young man met the man himself:

November 22, 1989

The day I met Walker, the rain had fallen
in Louisiana sheets, and I’d left
my tent illicitly pitched in the Bogue Falaya
State Park, along with a bookish bottle
of Early Times I’d taken a few swigs off of
in the dark the night before as pine cones pitched
and fell outside as if in triadic morse code
from Flannery in heaven telling me grace was in
the river. And alligators, too, I reckoned.
I walked the cracked sidewalks of Covington, aimlessly,
dazed by the wonder of seeing vines sprouting
through the cracks in a sacramental vision,
a concelebration of the namer and the named,
and lept across the flashflood puddles
as I made my way towards no destination
but found myself in The Kumquat bookstore
to oggle shelves bursting with signed copies
of The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot,
The Second Coming, The Thanatos Syndrome, Lost
in the Cosmos, The Message in the Bottle, books
that had changed (and continue to change) my life.
Oh Walker (Oh Rory) I was twenty-four
and pining for a woman I was also
on the run from in triangular
despair (yet thanks in part to you I also
was aware, at least a little — a foothold —
of the despair, contrary to that Kierkegaardian
epigraph, precisely pitched though it is).
Oh Walker: so I bought a stack of books,
some for me and some for those I loved,
and left instructions with the keeper of
the store to have you encode, in your
physician’s scrawl, your cracked prescriptions
where the vines of love and truth might grow from bourbon
and ink, the cumulative bliss of limitation,
where you and I might clear a space for being.

The Walker Percy Serenity Circle

Read all about it.

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Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

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The Official Poet of the Year of Mercy

Augustine on the Delta Factor?

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As I read my Lenten reflections, Augustine’s “On the Psalms” (sadly, the ACW series translation only got as far as Psalm 37) I hear little squeaks of Percian linguistics peeking through Augustine’s take on Psalm 9…

“Thou hast blotted out their name forever to the age of ages [Psalm 9:7]. The name of the wicked has been blotted out; for they who have come to believe in the true God can no longer be called wicked. Their name is blotted out forever: as long, that is, as this world shall last. To the age of ages. Now what is this age of ages? Is it not that of which this world is, as it were, an image and shadow? The course of the seasons following one another, the waning and waxing of the moon, the sun returning to the same position year by year, spring, summer, autumn and winter each passing away only to come round again – all this is a kind of imitation of eternity. But the duration underlying an immutable continuity is termed the age of ages. It may be compared with a line of poetry, first conceived in the mind and then uttered by the tongue. The mind gives form to the spoken word; the one fashioned an abiding work of art, the other resounds in the air and dies away. Thus, too, the age which passes takes its pattern from that unchangeable age which is termed the age of ages. The latter abides in the divine workmanship, that is to say, in the Wisdom and Power of God, whereas the former is worked out in the government of creation.”

Further along, looking at verse 11, Augustine rounds out the notion thus:

“And let them trust in thee who know they name [Psalm 9:11]. Again, the Lord says to Moses: I am who am; and though shalt say to the children of Israel: HE who is hath sent me. Let them trust in thee, then, who know thy name, so that they may not trust in the things that flow by on the rapid stream of time, possessing nothing but the future  “will be” and the past “has been.” For the future, when it comes, at once becomes the past; with longing we await it, with sorrow we see it pass away. [Augustine revisits this idea in greater detail in his Confessions.] But in God’s nature there will be nothing future, as if not yet existing, nor yet past as if existing no longer, but only that which is; and this is what we mean by eternity. Those, then who know the name of Him who said I am who am, and of whom it was said, He who is hath sent me, must cease to trust in and set their hearts upon the things of time, and must betake themselves to the hope of things eternal.”

The question, then, is this: Is the “search” Percy talks about a sort of fumbling around in these ages looking for that age of ages the way Helen Keller fumbled around with her fingers before she grasped the idea of water? Furthermore, when one stumbles upon the search, does he do so as a gift from God or is there something within our nature that desires to find that age of ages even if we’re as deaf, dumb and blind as Ms. Keller?

 

Walter Isaacson on Walker Percy’s Theory of Hurricanes

In yesterday’s issue:

Walker Percy had a theory about hurricanes. “Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case,” he wrote of Will Barrett, the semi-autobiographical title character of his second novel, “The Last Gentleman.” “Take hurricanes, for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one. It was his impression that not just he but other people felt better in hurricanes.”

Percy was a medical doctor who didn’t practice and a Catholic who did, which equipped him to embark on a search for how we mortals fit into the cosmos. Our reaction to hurricanes was a clue, he believed, which is why leading up to the 10th anniversary of Katrina, it’s worth taking note not only of his classic first novel, “The Moviegoer,” but also of his theory of hurricanes as developed in “The Last Gentleman,” “Lancelot” and some of his essays.

Percy lived on the Bogue Falaya, a lazy, ­bayou-like river across Lake Pontchartrain from my hometown, New Orleans. He was a kindly gentleman whose face knew despair but whose eyes often smiled. With his wry philosophical depth and lightly worn grace, he was acutely aware of his alienation from the everyday world, but he could be an engaged companion when sitting on his porch sipping bourbon or holding court with aspiring writers at a lakefront seafood joint named Bechac’s. “My ideal is Thomas More, an English Catholic . . . who wore his faith with grace, merriment and a certain wryness,” he once said. That describes Percy well.

Indeed it does. Thank you, Walter

But will it also be true of earthquakes, when the really big one comes?

The Last Crawdad, Man!

Since the Kollektiv isn’t traveling south this year, Korrektiv Kollektiv: Soldiers Grove Unit decided to bring Nawlins up to Cheeseland for an evening in honor of Third Oldest Daughter’s birthday… That’s her in the middle with her sisters posing as Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos…

Spin, measure, cut...spin, measure, cut.... spin, measure, cut. OK. Got it.

Spin, measure, cut…spin, measure, cut…. spin, measure, cut. OK. Got it.

Just a taste of what we’ll be missing this October – but, we hope, not next year…

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All mine…?

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Dad’s crawdads….

Let the games begin!

Let the games begin!

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Crawdads and uncles…

Still life with escrevisse and cousins

Still life with escrevisse and cousins and beer can.

Mudbugs in the milieu...

Mudbugs in the milieu…

Hand and claw...

Hand and claw…

Bernadette's Feast

Bernadette’s Feast

One fine evening in southwest Wisconsin...

One fine evening in southwest Wisconsin…

Don't forget the pie (One apple and one berry).

Don’t forget the pie (One apple and one berry).