If there is a through line to this week's Nose, I would have to call it trespass.
In the remarkable third episode of Louis C.K.'s from-out-of-nowhere filmed theater web series thing "Horace and Pete," the two characters (and there are very nearly only two) played by Laurie Metcalf and C.K. are working out the nature of trespass, as it appears in the Lord's Prayer. As adulterers, they are each trespassers. (But then, we are all trespassers.) And they are both aware that, in trespassing in order to seek pleasure, they create their own hells.
This was an insight that came to me in church last year: that when I have trespassed for my own gratification, I became as unhappy as I had ever been. There's a lot going on theologically in this episode. C.K., as the titular Horace, lets drop a pretty interesting insight: that our most horrible trespasses are also pretty mundane. He doesn't use words like affair or adultery. He calls it doing each other "and not telling anybody about it." Not exactly Francesca da Rimini and Paolo. But the punishment is the same, because transgressive sex is the hardest illness to get moral reimbursement for.
For DOTUS, trespass is a much more literal thing. Stay off my lawn. And oh, can I put a sign on your lawn? He wants the Mexicans off his lawn, but he wants the Pope to stop trespassing on his stuff too. And Francis is saying: "No. That's not what 'trespass' means."
And then: Not going to a funeral -- is that a trespass?
GUESTS:
- Taneisha Duggan - Producing associate at Theater Works in Hartford
- Rich Hollant - Principal and design director at CO:LAB
- Tracy Wu-Fastenberg - Director of development at the Mark Twain House and Museum
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Chion Wolf and Betsy Kaplan contributed to this show.
