Thursday, February the 17th, 2005

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A Note on Bags

Yesterday, in the piece dealing with Dobson's abortive soup encyclopaedia, we mentioned in passing the Old Testament Book of Haggai. This brief text is a favourite of mine. It mentions pottage, of course, which is always a good thing, but also includes the phrase “he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes”(1:6).

I have always felt a pang of sympathy for that man, whoever he may be. He is the only person in the Bible who carries a bag with holes, a bag so unlike the ones mentioned in Luke 12:33, “bags which wax not old… where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth”. Clearly the Haggai man has allowed moths to corrupt his bag, and that is why it has holes in it.

I can't help wondering if he is a little simple, this man, to be putting his wages into a moth-eaten bag. He is a prototype of the Holy Innocent or the Holy Fool, perhaps, that mythic figure which had such resonance in Tsarist Russia, among other times and places. Rasputin certainly exploited the idea for all it was worth, and although there is no reliable account of him roaming the corridors of the Winter Palace carrying a bag with holes, I like to think he did. At the end, of course, his assassins had such trouble doing him to death that they shot him at least three times, so it is possible that any bag he had with him at the time would have had a hole or holes caused by gunfire, even if it had escaped corruption by moths.

To my knowledge, no one has yet pursued a close study of moth infestations in the Tsarist palaces, but if someone with the requisite scholarly background were to do so, we may learn something of importance. I am not sure whether the moths lying in wait to feed on Rasputin's bag would have been Alder moths, or Antler, Autumnal, Bee, Black Mountain, Black V, Black-veined, Broom, Cabbage, Crimson-speckled, Cynthia, December, Dew, Drinker, Ear, Early, Emperor, Fisher's Estuarine, Fox, Garden Pebble, Ghost, Goat, Great Peacock, Gypsy, Heart, Hornet, Leopard, Lobster, March, Meal, Mouse, Muslin, Netted Mountain, Ni, Northern Winter, November, Orache, Orange, Pale November, Peppered, Puss, Spanish Moon, Swallow-tailed, Sweet Gale, Turnip, Wax, White Satin, or Winter moths, and I would like a top lepidopterist with some knowledge of the fall of the Romanovs to tell me.

Readers should note that “the bag of deceitful weights” is not mentioned in Haggai, but can be found in Micah 6:11. It would not surprise me to learn that Rasputin had such a bag, too, given that he was a deceitful monk as well as the “mad monk” of legend. His bag of deceitful weights and bag with holes may have been one and the same, of course, a possibility which makes the brain reel. This is the kind of historical conundrum that Dobson ought to have written a pamphlet about, but never did. If he had, we might be a little further away from bag quandary, and a little closer to bag truth.

“Bag truth” sounds like a Yoko Ono escapade, so the still, small voice of common sense whispers in my ear, “be silent now, be silent”.