The Ungrateful Domain

The Ungrateful Domain

       by Rouglas Deimer

rover rover in the clover

when yer gonna bark

hover hover little lemman

how'd you get in the ark

give me money give me sweet things

suck the candy till its gone

rover rover in the clover

i've got nothing left to pawn

Sniffing sharply, Rover barked his concern and turned to defecate by the fence, as close to his neighbor's yard as he could wedge his back end so the smell would possibly penetrate deeper into that ungrateful domain. Rover had never forgiven Bob and Wilma Yearly for building that fence. He could now never see them anymore, the boards between them as they were, and force them to acknowledge him with look and pretended gentleness in order to impress upon his, Rover's, guardians, that they liked a dog they hated.

       Yearlåy managed a company called Ye Olde Trailmix. Every day at seven a.m. he left home for the office. Each night at six p.m. he returned. The company had recently declined in viability for one reason or another and Bob had decided to take what money he could out of it and hide it in his back yard in waterproof containers so as to make sure that his retirement was secure. So now, during the month of January then--now being one winter some years after erecting the fence that Rover increasingly disliked--Bob spent each evening laying Tupperware down under the snow in a drift close to the fence between the neighbors and himself. He dug right to the bottom of the drift and laid the containers of twenty-dollar bills on the frozen grass. By the end of January, having done this twenty-six days altogether, he had amassed a substantial sum of money there. Though he had not counted it, Bob had secreted one thousand times one hundred times twenty, for a total of two million dollars. Bob knew that the monthly finances would be completed early in February and so he would have to be finished what it was he was doing by the end of January. He himself did not fully understand what he was up to.

       On January 31, 2001, Bob and his wife ate dinner as usual. Then, when she went out to visit the Seafood Emporium on the corner of Taylor and Waverley, as she predictably did when Bob complained at supper that they never had fish anymore, and coupled the trip with a visit to her friend's house for evening tea, as he suspected she would, Bob watched out the living room window till he saw her car drive away and then quickly donned his parka and took up his snow shovel and went into the back yard to dig up his money. He did that. But Rover was outside, too, dropping a big load by the fence. She barked at him with her usual ou faire couler le sang, barked while she shat. She dug her scat under while he dug his cash up.

       Soon they were both finished and Bob could not resist one final act of revenge. He called the mutt's name in tones at once insinuating and ingratiating, accusing and inviting, and Rover responded with her paws up on the fence boards and a voice as raucous as any irate dog could wish for. Immediately, Bob gave the fence a mighty whack with the back of his shovel, the reverberations so gargantuan that they precipitated the canine onto its back. She lay there deafened and surprised, whimpering, and then lunged up with renewed joie de vive du canine, vociferating more insistently than ever before, furious, raging, aching to get at the man she disliked with such a burning dislike.

       If only she could sink her teeth into him, into this smug human who had outmanoeuvred her, had blocked her in, had forced her into her visual exile, powerless to manipulate the world of the two-legged, entirely cut off from passersby. She raged while Bob loaded the wheelbarrow. She bow wowed unrelentingly while he wheeled it away to his car. She howled in the fury of impotence while, she could hear, he loaded things into the car trunk. And she hurled her crescendoing at the sound of him backing down the driveway.

       Rover lost any chance to hurt him. Bob never returned. Rover did not know that where Bob lived others built fences for him and served him and killed dogs that barked too uncivilly if he indicated his distaste for them. On the western coast of southern Mexico one has many reasons to fence oneself in but almost never because dogs bark at one. As well, it is there unusual for the world to reek of dog shit in spring.       

Substituting Anglo-Saxon for Latin

Substituting Anglo-Saxon for Latin

       by Dirigible Doug

wopity wopity wopity wopity wopity wopity woo

billy informed miss smith that she'd just stepped in his doggie's doo

I was telling my company last Sunday over faspa about an issue at my school. When it came to my attention, I said, that certain boys in my school were being caught swearing I made it my business to preclude the use of expletives as efficiently as I possibly could. I called their parents, repeated the words the youngsters had said, made them swear to control their children's behavior, and then rewarded them with praise in the next month's Explicator, as in the following excerpt.

Parents often delay attending to child behavior problems because these are so difficult to identify and address. But we have among us some who, when confronted with the possibility of even small requirements for disciplinary action, leap to the task and before long solve the problem at hand. I wish to commend Henry and Marietta Franzen, Bill and Annie Cornelson, and Betty and Sven Klassen for their fine, skillful and helpful responses to my concerns this past week.

Clifford Pankratz, especially, caused troubles at recess with his references to private parts and intimate behaviors. His parents may well have been at fault since they live on Third Street.

       Third Street is a hotbed of swearing. Of course, people swear in other parts of town, too, but not publicly, nor volubly, nor with such indifference to taste. For instance, Paul Friesen might say to Dennis Leatherdale that he wishes the "h" business would pick up, but he would never in mixed company refer to a pig's privates in Low German. He would not make reference to the pointy part of a chicken's rear end during a dinner engagement, whereas Ben Hoeppner of Third Street would grin and speak of a chicken's "pleutz" while pretending to take a bite of and thoroughly enjoy chewing it, to the general approbation of the Mexican Mennonite men around the table and the apparent discomfort of the Mexican Mennonite women.

       Here and there in this town, this Winkler that is called a city now with its influx of so many Russian and German immigrants in the last fifteen years, people surprise me with their lapses. The other day I got invited to supper at Mrs. Sveta Clandervaaggen's house and when we had finished the meal she announced, suddenly, stretching and rubbing her tummy, that she had eaten enough to pull the short ones off a sow's ass. For someone of her age and respectability that is unforgivable, except that we were only the three of us and we laughed and she blushed and apologized but smiled to show that she now and then did allow herself an expression not acceptable in the ordinary way of things. Usually, you will hear statements such as, "Man, I've eaten enough to kill a cow," or "If I take one more bite my gut will bust!" but not such crudities as hers. We here from Seventh Street and up don't refer to body parts in their coarsest possibility.

       Oh, I've been to the Mexican Mennonite villages and I know where the tendency originates. I visited the Idzes in the Chako in 1983 on a trip organized by Delbert Plett and I discovered there this truth. I myself became quickly habituated to rough language and had to debrief for weeks after my return in order to reunite with my proper self. They live in the old Mennonite style houses attached to barns by a "gank," or walkthrough. Chickens wander underfoot on the yard, cows bellow to be fed and gotten into the barn, horses defecate along the road and driveway, and boys and girls go behind the barn to do their business instead of inside or in the outhouse. You may come around the corner of the chicken shed and see squatting there a woman whom just two minutes ago you saw hurrying from the house on some errand. Her long skirts protect her from observation, true, but you can hear the stream coming from under them just as if a calf were urinating in the stall. No toilet paper round, I wonder with what they wipe themselves. I never noticed them applying paper to their persons during that whole time I visited. Nor do they seem intent on washing after defecation or the emission of bodily fluids. That astonished me and preoccupied my thoughts for some time. I had to wrestle with myself to overcome a sense of disgust and be able once again to enjoy their fine meals, tasty and nutritious. But. to my dismay, also, I discovered that the language used by Mexican Mennonites surpasses anything I have accidentally stumbled across in street, home or even on the schoolyard at recess.

       Phrases of inappropriateness emanate with regularity from their lips in mixed company. Pete will say, "Shuve deen morsz eva, du fula futz," and Hank will smirk and stay where he is. Eva might be ironing something and turn to Betty and say, "Fruh, treijk dee doch betta oewn. Deeni taetjeus deij steikje meijst goewns ruewt and Peijta vowt seijk bepesshe soew schvind aus heij siene naes hiej nan staechjt." References to "ass" and "tit" are common as pig manure in these villages. I heard a preacher speak, in confident tones, mind you, of how his "pisser" was itching him. He got off his horse, scratched at his privates, and said, smiling at myself and his hired hand with him, "Mee jeikt di pisshat," and then he added, "Meeni fruh deij jeikjt sike dowe ook meinchjmol." I couldn't believe my ears. Plainly, our children receive their education at home, and Third Street has its taproot still nestled firmly in the bosom of home in Mexico. I really have no hope of altering their proclivities, I added to my company, helping myself to another of what had been more than my fair share of my fine wife's white buns and a heaping pat of butter and spoon of wild plum jam. But I do not despair so much, I said, as struggle to maintain a sort of dignity on the schoolyard at least.      

Dead Sea Capers (cont'd)

Dead Sea Capers (cont'd)

These--the scrolls, that is--were to be kept out of reach of all scholars and also out of the public eye. Nothing was to escape the vigilance of the repressors of information.  No communication of any sort was to be allowed about them. No publications in journals. No newspaper accounts of how Malek the Shepherd found them when he threw a stone into a cave and heard pots breaking. Imagine! Two thousand years after they had been put there they had not been discovered! Nor robbed! Nor any piracy whatsoever done to them! Astonishing! Why astonishing? Because the Bedouins, who share that particular desert around Kumran where the Essenes made their last stand against the Romans in 70 AD on the top of not Mount Oreb but that fascinating mesa that the Middle East has come to call Masada, have for centuries done a flourishing trade in and made a passible living from the sale of codices such as the Dead Sea scrolls. The only difference is that they get big dollars for these texts and I mean big dollars! So, guess what. They break--yes! Can you believe it! Literally break, and it breaks my heart to even say it, I cannot bear to--these old, old scrolls into fragments that they sell to buyers with the promise of providing more of the same if the buyers come up with another half million denarii. God! God in Heaven! How can such a travesty be let to exist? No appeals to the divine. It will help you nothing, let me tell you.

       Back to the story. Now, having found these scrolls, this shepherd, not learned in the nasty art of scroll profiteering, actually went to a local scholar, not a man of any renown, but still someone who understood the seriousness of the find and himself longed not for money but for the joy of historical fulfillments of various sorts. This reminds me of The Pardoner's Tale. The maligned Pardoner, the hero of that tale, decides to confide in his fellow travellers--these men and women are on a pilgrimage to Canterbury in spring time and each agree to tell a story or two--confide to them that he is a cheat and a liar. Now, imagine that! A seller of relics and religious artifacts no more holy than the baubles the Germans sell in their Haupmarts to "seely" tourists in May and June, say around the Porte Negra, he agrees to come clean. Why? Why, really? Ask yourselves. He has nothing to gain from doing so. Oh, scholars have argued that he does it to pinch and piss off the other less pecuniary companions, but I have another theory, one imminently and eminently more intelligent than anything I have read in Modern Languages Quarterly. or the Journal of British Literature. He does it to illustrate the fallenness of all people. No one can hide behind his goodness, no one can pretend by being shy or quiet or nice or gentle to a goodness that saves him (or her, in the case of the Wife of Bath). No, we all are saved only by grace. by Grace! Think of it. Not a one of us will ever make it to any happy eternity one wit sooner by giving money to the poor. No, we will not. Anyway, what I began to say was that Chaucer understood as few have done that few earn the right to respect. The Pardoner was one. This scholar Sharbek was another. He still lives in the same village and has been essentially forgotten. Of course. Who reveres human goodness? The scrolls made their way quickly, and this time in their entirety, to some government office where they were kept for a few days until archivists familiar with the preservation of valuable codices arrived and in a rude fashion for the time being caused them to be protected against the elements.

       Soon they were housed more permanently. When word leaked out that Gnostic texts of biblical significance and old as Christ had been discovered, scholars around the world wished to see and study them. Guess what? No one--not a soul, including myself--has been let to see a word of these documents. Not the Nag Hamadi library, at least. Oh, one or two fragments were photographed and given out as a sort of plastic prize to appease who I don't know. But all the hundreds, nay, thousands of important fragments, words that might change how we receive the gospels and the message of salvation and even the historical figure of Jesus himself, all this has been repressed and scrupulously kept from the eyes of the general scholar. Why? I think it is to keep the news from leaking out that Jesus was a Sadduccee. He was one of those fighters who carried a long dagger under his cloak. Did you know that, you who paid twenty dollars to come hear me speak on these matters, that he was a militant? Yes, he carried a dagger and likely killed for the Essene cause. He may, too, have died on Masada. Way up there from where you can see Golgotha on a clear day. One of the suicides.   

      

Dead Sea Capers

Dead Sea Capers

       Sightless Douglas the Weightlifter

              I never did like floats. Other kids would

                        favor them but I always got a cone.

I swim but I don't float. Even in the Dead Sea I sink. My partner floats so very well that her toes and nipples stay out of the water. When we visited the Dead Sea last summer I think hardly an inch of her buttocks sank out of sight. She dislikes the culture of intellectual debate and so spent most of her time tanning and swimming. The food at the banquet hardly lived up to expectations. Too salty, everything. And the lectures wearisome as well.

       One sold the other studied. That's the way of the world, agreed? Read Homer, for instance. Or better yet, Horace. And after Horace read Ovid. When you tire of the classics, turn for a few well-spent evenings to Beowulf and Gawain. End with Chaucer. Here we have the greatest purveyor of, or better yet, the most intense dealer in, the contradictions between the meditant and the merchant.

       Who am I? My name is Meckling. I teach philosophy of religion at a small college in Trier, the oldest city in the country. That is neither here nor there, though. In my spare time I read--increasingly, to my curiosity; why anyone else's? nobody cares, and for good reason--accounts of the intrigue around the granting of Dead Sea scroll privileges. These codices are all housed in the Kumran Building in Hafiz. Access to the library of fragments is strictly controlled by particular members of the Department of Antiquities, at the university of Hafiz. That is, ostensibly. Actually the credit for the restrictions goes to the Israeli government.

       What is this to you? Nothing, really. This is a question for the trained thinker, not for you. Not for commoners dabbling in ideas as if they were indifferently stirring their pudding after a satisfying meal of roast beef and succulent pig. I eat no pig. My name should tell you that. Mine is one of the few sects, in fact, let me qualify to you, which still observes ritual holidays and fervently follows traditional rules. I am a believer, that is. That is neither here nor there, though. You, unfamiliar with either Jewish ritual or German intellectual rigor, will about now be throwing this book aside for some less patently partisan and more piquantly sexual reading.  But bear with me. This is the end of my digression into exposition of this sort. Let me now tell you a little about the intrigue here. Adventure, see? Now you are all ears, for the moment! So let me begin.

       First, however, I wish to ask you if the name Eisemann means anything to you? No? Never mind. I will introduce you to him. Eisemann toppled the Israeli government single-handed over this business.

(To be continued)