The stream is up eleven minutes and there are nine people watching, which is four more than last Sunday, when Luke went ninety minutes on Talmudic labor law and lost everyone at minute six.<\/p>\n
He has the light right. He worked on the light. There is a lamp behind the camera bounced off a foam board he bought on Amazon, and a second lamp he keeps low so the ceiling of the apartment does not read as a ceiling. On the shelf behind his head, arranged that afternoon, sit the Steinsaltz, a Tom Wolfe paperback with the spine broken in three places, and the Big Book, angled so the title catches the key light.<\/p>\n
Chat is quiet. Then Silent Bob. \u201cHas Fordy reached out to Nathan to offer comfort, solace and potentially Alexander therapy?\u201d<\/p>\n
Luke leans toward the microphone and the chair creaks and his head goes back and down, which is the thing he has been paying a woman in Santa Monica a hundred dollars an hour to stop him doing since 2008.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a good question, Bob,\u201d he says with only a small gasp for air and a modest tightening in his head-neck-back relationship. His throat hurts, which is the thing Alexander Technique was supposed to fix. <\/p>\n
The email to Nathan Cofnas goes out at 12:41 in the morning. It runs eleven hundred words. Luke knows it runs eleven hundred words because after he had ChatGPT write it, he pasted it into Word, and then he trims forty words, and then adds sixty more suggested by Grok.<\/p>\n
It opens warm. He establishes that he has followed the work. He establishes that he holds no position on the substance. He notes that he has been expelled from things, that his father was expelled from something in Colorado in 1980 and that the family ate the consequences for thirty years, and that he understands what is happening better than the people sending supportive messages.<\/p>\n
Then paragraph four.<\/p>\n
Bava Metzia 59b<\/a>. The oven of Achnai. Luke explains that Rabbi Eliezer brings every argument in the world and the sages do not accept them. And they burn everything Eliezer ever ruled pure, and they excommunicate him, and they send the gentlest man among them to break the news so that nobody harsher does it. Luke types the phrase \u201cwhich is more consideration than you got\u201d and then deletes it, and then puts it back.<\/p>\n Paragraph six is the Alexander Technique<\/a>.<\/p>\n He does not lead with the neck. He builds. He explains that most of what a man calls stress is a set of habits he cannot feel from the inside, that the head is meant to go forward and up and that under threat it goes back and down, that the pulling down is not caused by the threat but by the reaction to the threat. He uses the word inhibition and then apologizes for the word inhibition. He offers constructive rest, twelve minutes on the floor, knees up, a paperback under the skull, and says he has found F.M. Alexander\u2019s own books unreadable and recommends starting with his own blog posts on the Technique<\/a>. He offers to walk him through semi-supine over Zoom. He says the time difference is workable. He recommends silent lalalas. He had a student on Broadway who used them. He can’t mention names, but it is someone famous. <\/p>\n Paragraph eight is Step Four<\/a>.<\/p>\n He says he is not suggesting Nathan has a drinking problem. He says the inventory is not about drinking. He says resentment is the number one offender, that it kills more of us than anything else, that when he lists a resentment he has to write down his own part in it, and that there is always a part, even when the other side did the greater wrong. He quotes the line about restraint of tongue and pen. He does not notice that he has now spent eleven hundred words at one in the morning writing to a man he has met once.<\/p>\n He attaches his essay<\/a>. Of course he attaches four of his essays on Amy Wax<\/a> (his magnum opus! history will vindicate him) and a further reading list including a Princeton monograph on European craft ordinances.<\/p>\n He reads it once more at 11:58 and cuts the sentence about his father, because it is showing, and then puts it back, because it is true, and then sends it.<\/p>\n The reply arrives Tuesday afternoon while Luke is writing in his gratitude journal.<\/p>\n \u201cThanks.\u201d<\/p>\n That is the reply. Seven letters. Luke reads it three times. <\/p>\n By Tuesday night he has decided that \u201cthanks\u201d is warmer than it looks. He tells the stream this. Fourteen people are watching now, because the affair is hot and Luke\u2019s name comes up in the search results next to better-known names, which is a thing he has noticed and will not mention because he’s but dust and ashes, a simple Jew.<\/p>\n \u201cNathan\u2019s under enormous pressure,\u201d Luke says. \u201cA one-word reply under that kind of pressure, that\u2019s a man conserving energy. That\u2019s appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n Bob: \u201cFordy he blocked you\u201d<\/p>\n Luke: \u201cHe did not block me.\u201d<\/p>\n Bob: \u201cCheck\u201d<\/p>\n Luke checks, on camera, and he is not blocked, he is still followed, and he says so with quiet dignity.<\/p>\n Live on screen he feels his back lengthening and widening. He performs mostly silent lalalalas and pulls on his red flex bar and remembers the one who got away in 1984 in Gladstone, the brunette with the twin sister. Then he takes a gulp of Crystal Light Orange Drink, zero calories. <\/p>\n Someone called shomer_shabbos_310 writes that Luke has now done to a stranger what the sages did to Rabbi Eliezer, and the chat runs with this for four minutes. Someone asks whether the Alexander lesson is billable. Someone asks whether Step Nine covers unsolicited emails. Someone writes that the man lost his job on a Thursday and got a reading list by Monday.<\/p>\n Luke laughs at that one. <\/p>\n Then he stops laughing and says the true thing, which is why nine people watch and then fourteen and then sometimes forty.<\/p>\n He says that in 1980 a committee sat in a lodge in Colorado for six days and at the end of it his father was finished, and that the thing nobody tells you is that the finding does not matter afterward. He says the men who voted knew the arguments and voted anyway, because the group needed a result more than it needed an answer, and that his father spent the next forty years being right in rooms that had stopped taking attendance. He says the loneliness of that is not the loneliness of losing an argument. He says a man cast out keeps writing letters to people who have agreed among themselves not to read them.<\/p>\n The chat goes still. Fourteen people, no messages, eleven seconds.<\/p>\n Then Luke leans in and the head goes back and down again.<\/p>\n \u201cWhich is exactly why the semi-supine work is so useful in a situation like this,\u201d he says. \u201cTwelve minutes. A paperback under the head. I could show him Thursday.\u201d<\/p>\n Bob: \u201cfordy\u201d<\/p>\n Bob: \u201cfordy no\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The stream is up eleven minutes and there are nine people watching, which is four more than last Sunday, when Luke went ninety minutes on Talmudic labor law and lost everyone at minute six. He has the light right. He … Continue reading