In The Mind's Eye

Weatherpeople: Ralph and Mo

Ralph

"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of the gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry."

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice

Cleft is intentional, intentionally not clef.  It could be a clef, but we couldn’t know that until much later.  Later even than the end.  Some people call this kind of thing a conceit.  Well, some people say all kinds of things.  Blah, blah buy this.  Blah, blah freedom that.  Blah, blah going forward.  Maybe they’d be better off if they would just shut up and listen.  With any luck, you'll understand later.  Much later.  It’s not a mystery to be solved, but it is a kind of conceit and probably has something to do with whoever Ralph was and what happened to him.

A time not long ago people were a little like they are in our time.  We had an anomalitic interregnum (sometimes you have to create words when the best one doesn't exist) there for a decade or two.  People during the interregnum thought lofty ideals could make everyone better.  They were wrong.  Everyone doesn't want to get better.  Everyone just wants more.  So anyway, people a time not long ago, but before the interregnum, held unlofty ideals, wanted security and were attracted by TV's seeming magic.  And almost everyone believed in love.  The kind of love they thought they saw in Rock Hudson movies (they thought).  Even though their ideals were unlofty, they considered themselves concerned about morality.  Actually about immorality.  In others.  I guess they hadn't read what whoever wrote about Paul  wrote: "I know, relying on the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean of itself.  Only if a man supposes it unclean does it become unclean for him" (Rom 14.14).  Well, they might have read it.  Some of them read the Bibles they had lying around the house.  But even if they had read it, they didn't buy into it, as we say.  They bought into a lot of things but not into that.  At least not if you were to judge by their behaviors and judgmentalism.  The time for thinking that the whethers or nots about "unclean" were a matter of supposing would come later between then and now.

It was a time to be quiet.  Even in church.  At least around where he lived.  Ordinary people like him would usually offer a sentence or two only if they were pretty certain what they said was correct.  You can imagine how quiet it could be.  In school, of course, it was real quiet.  It wasn't strict.  No beatings or anything.  No, that's not exactly true.  There was his woodshop teacher in junior high.  But you could tell.  The teacher wasn't doing it to be mean.  He was reluctantly following the rules of the shop.  The rules he wrote.  At least that's how it seemed.  It also provided some digression for the non-offenders.  So mostly everyone accepted it.  Like most things that kept people quiet back then, the teacher didn't need to use the large wood paddle very often.  Things were quiet even in the noisy woodshop.  A person could go on for pages about this.  You could expound, propound, exhilarate and extrapolate, drawing analogies to capital punishment and acquiescence.  But why?

I hope by now you get the picture.  In fact, it was a lot like a picture.  A Norman Rockwell picture.  Actually more like a Norman Rockwell scrim.  The paddling happened backlighted behind the scrim. So you have this picture.  In the business, we call that the visual.   Besides the visual, you have the verbal and the non-verbal.  The non-verbal is what isn't or can't be uttered.  The emotions.  Especially the high emotions, because they would interfere with the picture.  Emotions like rage come to mind, and fear, lots of fear.  The unuttered.  But more on that later.