Abbe Boulah!

By Thorbjoern Mann

Abb Boulah!

A collection of strange stories featuring pranks, adventures and cantankerous comments by and about the mysterious Abb Boulah and his weirdo friend Bog-Hubert.

There are tales from the mythical Fog Island Tavern and Bog-Huberts schemes such as his Island Beach and Beauty Restoration enterprise, the rumors about his secret still in the swamps of North Florida, (producing the potent Eau dHole) and various commentaries about architecture, urban design, downtown revitalization: The Designers Dream, CRA Sticking in Abb Boulahs Craw. and The T-Square and Bumwaderhole.

A yarn of strange foulups in the intelligence agencies (Counter Intelligence), various unconventional machinations about a metropolitan mass transit system (Tallahaitian Mass Transit) are mixed in with Abb Boulahs musings about education, (Peace Prize Problems, The Evolution of Education, The Tragedy of Education, Plaintive Soliloqy). on leadership and power (Stupid Power, On Leadership) a different take on a famous journalists book regarding the shape of the Earth (Flat World Rings Hollow), presidential elections Abb Boulah for Ex-President), even a kind of utopia on an abandoned oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico (Rigatopia).

Other wild ravings contain creatively different views on various global and societal problems, such as interspecies relations (AbbBug-Lah), Mideast problems (Holy Coin), the deplorable lack of imaginative names for real, imaginary and complex numbers (NameYourNumber.zip), the human and legal rights of multiple personalities (Judge Severin M. Aledict), and other recklessly unconventional ideas and proposals. But even with a final prank concerning emergency planning in the Sunshine State, the mystery of Who Is Abb Boulah? never gets completely resolved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462824113

Thorbjoern Mann

Thorbjoern Mann, Ph.D. has been teaching and writing about architecture, architecture and design theory and methodology, building economics, time management for designers. Retired from teaching, he continues to write, draw, paint, and consult on design issues. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida but spends part of his time restoring an old farm house in Austria.

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I

Who Is Abbé Boulah?

(Excerpt from a letter by a friend of Bog-Hubert’s to his uncle Hyazinth Groubahr.)

Dear Uncle Hyazinth:

Today I hope to finally provide something you have been looking for all these years: some answers to the question ‘Who Is Abbé Boulah?’—though there are more answers than you might care for, and none of them seems to be definitively satisfying, in spite of his frequently (in some quarters, anyway) invoked name.

Vodçek, the mythical proprietor of the Fog Island Tavern that you have often heard me talk about, used this name for one of his numerous friends, an equally mythical architect or faculty member of some arc hitecture school with whom he shared many adventures and endless discussions while exploring the non-tourist gastronomy of Florence, Italy. This friend had the rather unprofessorial habit of yelling ‘Abbé Boulah!’ whenever he got excited about anything, especially a good platter of Penne Arrabiata or a bottle of Solaia from periods before American wine magazines discovered it. In time, the name stuck to him as well; and by now it is impossible to distinguish which of the curious stories, ideas and theories are due to the friend or to Abbé Boulah himself, or to Vodçek himself, for that matter.

One historian proposed a theory that Abbé Boulah was one of the many aliases of the more manifest but equally mythical Bog-Hubert (see note 1) However, this is soundly refuted by the fact that many letters exchanged between these two have recently been discovered in a sunken boat in the Crooked River of Northwest Florida (unless one wishes to entertain the preposterous notion that Abbé Boulah and Bog-Hubert were not only one and the same but also in the habit of writing letters to themselves). I have shared many a bottle of Zinfandel with Bog-Hubert—a wine preference he attributed to his friendship with Abbé Boulah. And though I cannot claim to have a crystal clear memory of these occasions (Zinfandel being what it is) he did not at any of these times write letters to himself. Of that I am quite sure.

Yet another rumor has it that Abbé Boulah (or, as he used to insist when interviewed by rookie reporters: Boulahgthhpf, with a silent gthhpf) had indeed been a man of religion, though not quite an Abbé. And that he had been defrocked for some extraordinary piece of heresy that had confounded his superiors and shaken the hierarchy of his church to the core.

His preposterous thesis was this: Starting from the commonly accepted truth that the Deity is indeed Almighty, it seemed to logically follow that He (2) would therefore not only be the source of Truth in the World, but that he might also on occasion contradict Himself. (For what’s the use of being Omnipotent if you have to be consistent?) Whether one chooses to assume that He actually exercised this power and put contradictory facts and statements out into he world (recorded in writing by His chosen prophets) or refrained from doing so, in benevolence to human truth-seekers who would be disturbed to no end if He did: It seemed necessary to now regard the world AS IF it might contain or even be governed by such Divine Contradictions. Specifically, it seemed necessary to allow for the disturbing possibility that the writings of Holy Men—which, in all religions, have traditionally been considered manifestations of His One and Only Truth—could also contain some of His Contradictions.

This, as Abbé Boulah was not afraid to assert aloud, quite recklessly in politically correct diversified but not always polite company, put human truth-seekers in a difficult position. For one, the question arose whether there, in the end, is or was only One Truth, which the Deity just chooses to contradict on occasion as if to amuse himself, or whether the very nature of truth was to be found in Contradiction itself. Truth: a kind of Möbius strip? A snake biting its own tail (in constant danger of swallowing itself)? Another consequence of this idea was that the task of finding and understanding the meaning of the Holy Writings would henceforth have to include the challenge of identifying the contradictions He had maneuvered to be put into them, and then, of course, to ascertain which of two contradictory statements was indeed the one intended as truly true.

Abbé Boulah further confounded this issue by raising the possibility that there might even be more sides to a contradiction than the two the word implies it to contain (the pro and the contra): there might be several ‘contradictory’, or perhaps they should be called ‘multidictory’ (3) versions of Facts and Divine Revelations about one and the same question or phenomenon. (Being an observant reader, dear Uncle, you will doubtlessly find in all this ample material for further inquiries into the nature of ‘counterfacts’ (which as yet have not been empirically confirmed, even though the adjective ‘counterfactual’ has been in use by scholarly writers for some time. (Not even to speak about ‘counterfeit’; but do you think the etymological closeness of these terms can be mere coincidence?))).

A slightly less profound but practically more disturbing consequence of all this was that seeking the truth could no longer rest upon mere pious study of the writings of Holy Men: Truth-seekers were confronted with the painful task of constructing for themselves the ways by which truth and contradiction could be properly evaluated, and the basic premises upon which they would have to rest.

The scandal of Abbé Boulah’s inquiries was not confined to religious circles. It soon invaded the refined realm of philosophy of science as well. Reasonable and self-respecting philosophers of science had always held that the task of science was to seek the Truth about the laws that govern the universe. In doing this, contradictions were the object of intense effort, not to understand but rather to eliminate them. For it was held as self-evident that truth cannot coexist with contradictions of itself. (Some philosophers of science sought to cheat their way around this firm and unshakable foundation, but they were roundly castigated and put in their place by Sir Karl Popper, for example. Proponents of such views henceforth kept a low profile).

The problem was that, upon closer inspection, this noble principle was itself tainted by the very human frailty and temptation of intolerance: those seeking to dominate, oppress and put others down, found Truth the most potent weapon among their various tools—even if they had to betray it in the very act of invoking it to do so.

All this, as you can imagine, did not sit well with authorities both religious and scientific. (By comparison, governments long remained unconcerned since they were notoriously slow to evaluate reports of their intelligence-gathering services.) Nor did some of the practical implications of such thinking, for those daring enough to venture into such implications. For example, education would have to be totally reorganized so as to accommodate the contradictory nature of knowledge. This caused considerable controversy and even riots in some places where such new ideas were tried out, and almost put the venerable tradition of true-false tests to a well-deserved rest. Almost.

The new philosophy of contradiction (Neocontradictionism—4) thus brought forth by Abbé Boulah was not itself free of disturbing questions. For example, is mathematics to be included in the set of disciplines potentially tarred by divine contradiction? But who would contradict it and its apparently self-evident theorems and proofs? It seemed to be a veritable paradox: could the Deity contradict Himself in some areas but not in others?

So, to investigate whether even noble mathematics was indeed infested with contradiction, (encouraged by the known existence of paradoxical elements in conundrums such as whether sets of sets not containing themselves sets contained themselves), Abbé Boulah enticed several seminarians and graduate students at prestigious universities that had recklessly invited him for guest lectures, to examine the foundations of mathematics and search for mathematical countertruths. Tragically, several of these unfortunate countertruthseekers lost their minds and had to be institutionalized; upon which their lawyers brought multimillion dollar lawsuits against the religious establishment to which Abbé Boulah belonged.

This was the last straw. Abbé Boulah had to be dealt with. Church lawyers went to work constructing a case of heresy against him. However, and perhaps predictably, that case got hopelessly entangled in the contradictory nature of the subject. After many months of unfamiliar intellectual struggle, they gave up and instead hired a retired Sicilian Mafia enforcer to try other means of persuasion that might entice Abbé Boulah to refrain from teaching his theories, or at least to cease doing so as a member of the church.

Abbé Boulah managed to arrange for negotiation talks and met this person on neutral ground in a village tavern outside Sarajevo and shared a bottle of wine with him; a certain ‘Nero’, as the name implies, a black and satisfyingly potent beverage from the mountainous regions of Southern Italy. Thus inspired, they soon reached an amicable and mutually satisfactory agreement. Abbé Boulah voluntarily removed himself from the ministry, but retained the right to be called Abbé Boulah. This was not his real name but had a certain ring to it that he had come to appreciate. He also agreed to ‘disappear’. That is, he gave up any identifiable sedentary existence and corresponding postal address. Even an email address was not allowed by the agreement. He agreed to to perpetually move around. This turned out to be acceptable to the church since it made him relatively inaccessible to a broader audience, though it did not prohibit him from pursuing his ideas entirely. Such a ban would have put them into an unfortunate light of persecution and intolerance they could ill afford in our increasingly secularized society that intolerantly outlaws intolerance. The arrangement allowed them to ‘wash their hands’ of him, as it were.

There had, of course, to be an element of enforcement. The punishment was that he had to keep moving to avoid being found. For someone fond of growing his own tomatoes, basil, and hot peppers, this was indeed a hard fate. If the enforcer found him, he would be deemed to have violated the agreement, and be subjected to the unspecified penalty the enforcer would impose. It did not occur to the enforcer’s employers—but Abbé Boulah had made sure the enforcer saw the wisdom of the mutually beneficial arrangement—that as long as he would not be found, the enforcer would be able to keep his job (highly secret, of course, and well paid). This put effective constraints on his diligence in ferreting out Abbé Boulah’s whereabouts.

To make things easier on both of them, Abbé Boulah had in this informal arrangement agreed to periodically leak fuzzy information (‘chatter’) of his planned itinerary that invariably would send the enforcer off in the wrong direction. They had both agreed that the improbable but not negligible possibility of accidentally running into each other in front of witnesses had to be scrupulously avoided, of course. Abbé Boulah, a benevolent and generous soul, also made sure that the enforcer was always sent to interesting and pleasant places so that he could enjoy his work.

This theory explains the elusive trait in all extant accounts of Abbé Boulah. Which, needless to say, are full of strange contradictions. It also gives him an aura of mystery that could make his ideas appear more interesting to the naive seeker of truth than they inherently deserve…

(The remainder of the letter is omitted, being of purely personal interest in inquiring about the health and well-being of the uncle’s numerous cats. Ed.)

* * *

Notes:

1) Some of my Continental Friends tell me they recognize here a bastardization of the name of another mythical character from the ebullient early 60’s: a certain Bogubert Orphifi, whose existence must be considered to be as hypothetical as the implied identity.

2) Editor’s Note: Here and in the following, the Deity will be referred to as He, where by He is possibly meant She, or even (if consistently following Abbé Boulah’s theory:) It. The reference could have been made more politically correct by using, for example, the contraction S/He. But pursuing this further, adding the above-mentioned third possibility, could lead (especially if read aloud) to unacceptable misunderstandings which we would rather avoid. Even though it is well known that this form is indeed frequently invoked by persons in a state of severe excitement or disappointment.

3) ‘Trinidictory’ being only the most modest of these possibilities…

4) It was reportedly Abbé Boulah himself who cautiously insisted upon the ‘neo’ part of this label, since he suspected, not unreasonably, that this ‘ism’ might have been proposed before, but was too lazy to scrutinize the history of philosophy to find out.

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II

Bog-Hubert’s Beach and Beauty Restoration

The leisurely discussion among the Fog Island Tavern regulars was interrupted by the arrival of another group of visitors. A dozen or so ladies emerged from the fog like a flock of fantastic birds. They were wearing large floppy hats and white flowing robes covering a strange garment—a cross between a fisherman’s vest and a mechanic’s overall, with large but now empty pockets everywhere. The ladies were all on the chubby side but walking with a strange springlike gait, as if relieved of some heavy burden. Which they actually were. They had stopped on the deck halfway up the ramp to unfasten these vests from underneath their floppy robes and hand them to a gaunt sunburnt man with piercing eyes but an irresistible smile that he bestowed liberally on these rubenesque beauties; each one returning the gift as if she alone had been its favored recipient.

‘In all of Pedro Domecq’s cellars exclaimed Barry. What is that? The others turned on him in astonishment. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Bog-Hubert’s operation yet?’

‘Bog-Hubert? Is that the guy?’

Renfroe explained. ‘Bogubert R. Pheefey is what he calls himself. We call him Bog-Hubert. Word is he runs a still in some bog outside of Wewahitchka, nobody knows for sure.’

Vodçek’s eyes darted towards one unlabeled liter bottle in the corner of his shelf. It looked like water; clear contents. But nobody noticed.

‘He’s an economic genius, the rascal. He’ll sell you your own shirt off your back for a fortune, making you think you got the deal of the century.’ Dr. Balthus sounded envious.

‘What’s he doing with those ladies?’ Barry wanted to know.

‘It’s his spiritual weight-loss beach restoration program’.

Raised eyebrows.

‘He gets these ladies down here on the island for a special high priced, medically supervised weight loss program. Very expensive, very exclusive. No advertising, all word of mouth. Application and admission upon personal interview with Bog-Hubert himself. He takes them down to the east end of the island on his fancy houseboat that looks like a cross between a Playboy penthouse and a Tibetan monastery inside. They are conducting some kind of exercises there on the beach, chanting and carrying on. He preaches to them from a book by Ken Wilber. Has them rinse their sinuses with salt water. Gives them some story about the special minerals in the water just there. They turn their heads from side to side ’till they’re dizzy, and they love it.

‘Then he puts those vests on them, plus the robes just to cover them up and make it look more spiritual. Maybe they are just mosquito screens. The vests are filled with sand, all the pockets; he adjusts each of them individually with Velcro strips. Heavier than Mount Everest backpacks. Then he marches them down the beach. Carrying sand! Singing strange foreign hymns; they don’t know they are actually Bavarian hunter association drinking songs. And he makes them pay for it!’

Obviously, Dr. Balthus wished he had some scheme like that to finance his research.

‘What the devil for?’ Barry was incredulous.

‘To lose weight walking down the beach in the surf, of course. But what they don’t know is that it’s also his solution to restore the