Apocalyptic Arithmetic

Fragments for the End of Time   presented by Da Camera 2/26/2012

 

 

 

 

“For every one of us, living in the world /means waiting for our end…” Beowulf,

Seamus Heaney translation [1386-7]

 

Prophetic Minutes

There is a certain static that invades the front of my head when I’m overwhelmed with little tasks I could do, but for a thousand reasons, haven’t. For me it starts as a barely perceptible mechanical noise that pumps away like an old engine flooding the kitchen floor with waste water, or drilling someone’s tooth while I await my inevitable turn. It continues. It grows into a force that rumbles in  the joists, threatens to shake away my life. Usually it takes the form of forms, where each following page to me is like holding on to something electric and insulting.  Walk past a desk piled with papers, or behind a sagging soul carrying sidesprung bags of three ring binders and you can feel the sad struggle of panic on a leash. That annoying hiss is the constant pressure of the end of the world, a fundamental knowledge that has no real name. It would be a mistake to believe that it isn’t so powerful that it takes all the power of every divinity to put it to order, and every second of our conscious effort to ignore it.

Last summer I purchased an unused leather Franklin Covey planner at a yard sale for $5.00. Although it was a well-made piece of leatherwork with  pockets and double zippers, no one seemed interested in it except me. It was just another failed time machine, a fill-in calendar to divide out hours into spiritualized business  appointment goals, like Palm Pilots, hand held tape recorders and the cacophony of digital alarms that stand in for the Grim Reaper; they are our weapons against the day when there are no more days, the End of Days. Depending on the number and quality of tasks on your To Do List, we’ll greet that day with relief or lamentation.

I don’t think the End of Days, or Last Judgement, shouldn’t be confused with the mere End of Time. Generally the ends of time are calculations that give specific data a dramatic form such as a kalpa, the current Mayan 12/21/12  b’ ak’tun mania, when the sun explodes into a red giant, or my personal favorite, double life plus ninety-nine. The end of our time is the logical extension of all knowledge; we run the numbers on everything until everything is used up, then make bets on the exact day it will happen. The entire universe can disappear down a black hole without guilt or purpose, and all we have to do is develop a few details into the pitch for a screenplay. Really you can’t expect to do better than that from a cubicle. It seems an odd dissonance in my observation that people who are constantly flirting with rescheduling the Last Judgment find a calculation like Global Climate change so repellent. Perhaps our neurology is limited to only embrace one form of cosmic destruction at a time. However we all do seem to crave some form of that hug.

Last Saturday in one of my favorite spaces, The Rothko Chapel, I attended a concert featuring works from the 9^th and 10^th Centuries focused on music reflecting the End of Time. During the hour and a half program two of my life’s desires were fulfilled. I heard sections of both Beowulf and Icelandic Eddas sung in a great hall accompanied on harps and swan bone flutes as they may have been originally performed.  Assuming my mortification is limited to uncomfortable seating and the music is in performance (as opposed to recordings) I feel connected listening to music from the middle ages. I heard a lot of Gregorian Chant in my youth; it still echoes. Although my medieval Frankish, German and Anglo Saxon are limited to recognizing a cognate here or there, and I found a few as I tried to follow the program translations. A lifetime of intermittent study was fulfilled in two twelve minute fragments of song (which is about my span of attention anyway).  Apart from the varieties of dragons, angry archangels, black suns and celestial destruction, the End of Days is a formal accounting, the double red line.. Every person and deed being brought forward and then held to judgment was a common theme.

Assuming I can correctly do some arithmetic for the Apocalypse, it looks like it might be a good day to actually buy those magazines at the grocery checkout, there could be waiting. The current estimated life expectancy in the US is 78.7 years. I subtracted the 8.7 years to allow the soul to reach the age of culpability as I believe St. Thomas Aquinas discerned it. So I began with 70 years to account for 16 hours a day of conscious discretionary sin time. This allowed for an average eight hours of sleep, assuming the slothful will make up for the insomniacs. Then I factored in 60 second periods for offenses considering the thoughts, words and deeds possible that’s 1080 daily entries into the golden book, if you’ll pardon the pun, on a good day. On a day you’re stuck in traffic and the kids from someone else prior marriage are demanding McDonalds, you’re late in the maze to go through airport security, or the new girl at work wears the wrong outfit,  the numbers leap exponentially.  Our minimal maxima mea culpas average out to 394,200 events to account for per year, or 27, 594,000 discrete sins over 70 years. The current population of the United States on the Sunday I’m writing this is 313,086,790.  8,639,316,883,260,000  faults to enter into the Cosmic Quicken just for people currently alive and holding citizenship in the United States to file. The world population is estimated at 6,996,927,144, if you try to calculate in every person who has lived since Adam, it really adds up. We’ll have to imagine that number since I don’t have a device that can show it to me.

If you find that difficult, remember the 1080 events a day you’ll be called on to confess? This year we had a Leap Year day. Can you recall even one thing you did last Leap Year’s day? Unless it was the day your murdered  your parents or won the lottery, it’s a task that will require a couple calendars, a phone call to a friend and spacey ambient background music.  Any behavior analyst will tell you that it takes at least three times as long to explain what you did than it did to do it. If the sequence of events that brought time forward was reversed there wouldn’t be enough time since the Big Bang to apologize for all that we had done regardless of where or how you believe time began.

Decades ago, as a youthful theology student, I learned that trying to anthropomorphize divinity was an inaccurate reflection of our own human limits. That stopped me from enjoying paradoxical riddles about the comparative size of God’s appendages, or if God could make a rock too heavy for God to lift. (I also learned that God may play, but doesn’t joke, but I don’t want to put too fine a point on my pointing out.) However when I visualize the schedule, my initial notion of panic returns to me, I’ve got to empathize with whatever has to pencil in those events.  Anthropromorphs aside, it would put any conceptualization of omnipotence and omniscience to the test. I believe, of course it can be done, but just like those piles of forms, when would it be done might be a different question. And as any procrastinator can recite in their fitful sleep, the longer you wait the harder it gets. It’s a juncture where my belief overtakes my reason. It’s something I can’t imagine without my private static growing into a computational tsunami, a devouring horde of fantastic equations. In our collective unconscious we’ll all have to go rogue to comprehend not a prophetic Last Day, but just the astonishing counting to bring events to account.

Still, we all desire at least one day when someone can explain everything with undeniable certainty. How will the world exist without me?   What was everyone else really doing and thinking? Does suffering mean anything? What suffering did I cause?  Call the role of all the forgotten dead. Reveal all that’s hidden. Explain why my cousin Ronnie, who was better, braver and more deserving than me in so many aspects, died at the beginning of his adolescence of a mindless horrid disease while I saunter through days as if I were a character on a television program. I would like to at least confirm that each life has some kind of Freudian vine rooted in primal events that bind past to the future. But within the genetic code of knowing there is also destruction. To possess your life and know your life are two different realities.

Let me confess one of my sins into this tenuous now of words. When I was twenty-one I had a sordid summer affair with a married woman. I expect no forgiveness. As part of our dissembled romance she drove me to rural Kentucky where in a fly-filled trailer home a part-time short order cook and psychic was going to predict our future. It was sweaty hot, but he still wore a knit stocking cap that kept seven black stones arranged against his head. She wrote the check. He described a few detailed privacies from my past interspersed with visions of my future including reptile-like butterflies that lived beneath the surface of the colonized planet Venus that could breathe in ammonia and twilight in a pastel desert of stone houses. For the love affair he found nothing beyond apologetic tics and twitches. Then as if he were following stage direction, he changed his tone from frazzled and flailing to conversational. “You are the last male in your family line.  If you don’t have a male heir, your name will die out. You will never have a son.”  I was sitting on a bent folding chair next to my partner in adultery with one of my most secret fears got casually tossed out next to a half-eaten baloney sandwich. Such is my personal experience with prophesies of private Armageddon.

One sunset twenty years after I was married, I was standing beneath the Congress Street Bridge in Austin, Texas. A million waking bats came fluttering like dark butterflies out from their colony beneath the bridge. The stench of ammonia from the guano seemed unbearable. A few years later I visited my daughter in Terlingua where for her own reasons she had taken up residence in a primitive stone house. To my reckoning the single feature to recommend it was its view of morning and evening moving through the Chesos Mountains. I traveled to my grandfather’s village in Italy; he was right about the son as well. What we think we know about the past, or the future is as malleable as what we know about the present. If a guy with a b.o. stained truck stop tee shirt can see into my future and someone singing thousand year old song fragments in languages I don’t understand can speak in concert to my past, I find myself more inclined to accept my community with those poetic voices of prophesy, than judge them.

At the end of Fragments for the End of Time, with all the ravening,harrowing, earthquakes, celestial blood storms  and monsters I walked home still hearing Beowulf “The Lay of the Last Survivor “the last of the Geats  who “…wandered joylessly through day and night, until death’s flood covered his heart.”  He stopped counting the treasure, sealed the dragon’s cave and waited for his measure of oblivion with a calm kind of elegance, equanimity of acceptance. I’d like to believe he didn’t hear the static then.

Stealing What’s Lost

 

Thieves came again. This time they got into my car.

They took my tennis racquets and shoes. I had only worn the shoes once before I pulled my Achilles tendon last year, so they were in perfect shape. Ever hopeful I kept them in the back of my car with a canvas bag of gear: bandaids, vaseline, sunscreen, neoprene  braces, a pair of warm up pants, extra socks,  colored tee shirts and two old sweaters. Junk mostly, things I’d accumulated over the years as a result of minor injuries, experience and sentiment. The racquets were my unmatched pair of Wilson Pro Staffs, one slightly heavier, the other had a slightly larger head. That was the state of my game, imagined adjustments to add speed or extra spin to the ball. It was all illusory. I was only playing with the memory of tennis. The good shots gave me flashes of what I once did better and the poor shots reminders of what I had lost. But it was still the game of sweat and angles, strategy and endurance.

There’s a Galway Kinnell poem,”On the Tennis Court at Night”, about old men playing doubles at the cold end of a day,
“of this arena where every man grows old // pursuing that repertoire of perfect shots,// darkness already in his strokes…” .
I thought about it more frequently as I played out in November evenings, when the wind shifted in and I could feel twinges in the oblique muscles in my lower back, or took slow laps after playing to cool down, or any of the hypochondriacal tennis folk remedies that would get me a few more good days keeping the ball between the lines.

For me winning had already diminished to bittersweet, losing was crueler, more resonant, but both came accompanied by a limp, stiff back or shoulder. Winning is the point of tennis, but not the common reality. In a tennis tournament with a thirty-two person draw, thirty-one will lose. In the best, most competitive match you’ll ever win; you’ll lose 49.4% of the points. Like distance running it requires a banked passion to play well and continue training, practicing and adjusting over the long years of trying to offset physical decline.  Tennis even has a mannerly conservationist nature that supports the silent kinship and exertion. Courts all over the world are exactly the same, there are the polite rituals of changing ends, or waiting until your opponent is ready before serving, and always that large quiet punctuated by shuffling shoes, soft thuds and labored breathing.

I recall one late spring afternoon when I was an undergraduate at Xavier University. My roommate Drew and I were playing tennis instead of attending class. Two courts down Fr. Peters, Head of Biology, and Fr. Schmidt, the Head of the Philosophy Department, were playing tennis in dappled sunlight filtered by an elm. They seemed unimaginably old to me then. Their games reflected a style of play perfected when men’s tennis was played in long trousers. Long underspun slices and slow flat drives, punctuated with an occasional “Good shot Reg.”. Their serves were elegant with elaborate choreographed hitches in the toss. They moved steadily and efficiently, and although they seemed to have adopted a no drop shot policy, they didn’t seem much different from us, or we from them (excluding their considerable knowledge). Even though we were barely twenty, Drew and I both realized we were witnessing both the past and an unspoken hope for our future…that we would remain friends for the rest of our lives and play tennis into our old age with an equivalent grace.

Since those days, I’ve played in some forgettable tournaments, made the tedious telephone calls for USTA leagues, climbed up and down couple of local ladders and done a little coaching. I estimate I’ve spent well over 20, 000 hours of my life hitting tennis balls. Over forty years on the courts with nothing more notewothry than a church deacon might assess his lifetime of church attendance, a self-satisfied humility. Nothing anyone would remember but a few friends and me. We strived together for hours in an intimacy of painted lines, but sat in mutual isolation on our benches. Every match ended the same way, a quick honest handshake.

One year my father and I traveled to Wimbledon. It was a late, unexpected blossom in our relationship. We spent a week scurrying around London, taking the tube out to the tournament or catching rebroadcast matches on the BBC in the hotel pub.  Our few days as ticket holding guests of the All England Club seemed an inauthentic order imposed  on our private world of chaos. Those summer lawns are the physical dreamscape of tennis, and we were proximate to a place akin to royalty. Even the great champions like Pete Sampras, Roger Federer or Martina Navratilova only get to play a few hundred rarified hours on that grass in exchange for years of unimaginably lonely practices and painful training. Lifelong fans might have only one ticket, on a blustery afternoon like the one in 1994 when Lori McNeil defeated Steffi Graf in the first round. My father and I watched with newspapers shoved under our sweaters to block the wind, and then, by chance, we met a woman I had briefly coached on high school tennis team. Most tennis isn’t like that.

 Most of tennis is serial variation like watching television, or reading murder mysteries, divertimento in the constant rush of time. But two hours of  that day were, as greeting cards promise ’ moments to remember’ . It was an instant of Latinate perfection; time comes to a brief grammatical completion, an occasion like engraving names on a trophy. It recognizes an absurd point, valued, even if it is bound inextricably to an understated class distinction, tangential to peerage filigreed in the Victorian Age, or built on a millisecond collision felt in the tension of two strings rubbing together.

Of all the many items stolen from me during my life: the silver dollars and two dollar bills given to me by old Italian relatives, bicycles, luggage, jewelry, books, an orange pickup truck, laptops, tools, ladders, tape recorders, cash… their losses were primarily annoyances, just stuff removed in a Zen kind of way. The shoes and racquets felt different. They were a frayed bag of tools I had assembled to stave off aging. Even though I hadn’t played since last year’s injury, I knew I would return to the court soon. I believed that. Or at least I could believe it until all that was stolen. Now I’ll have to shop to replace it, bit by bit.

 But these things will be more desperate and much more expensive. Technology designed with an exact purpose, but no personality, like motel rooms or generic ibuprofen. What I’ll have to purchase will be flavored not by the optimism of an athlete, or even the bravado of the theft, but by the overly circumspect shopping of someone knowingly buying my own used dream. I had enough displaced anger about aging and losses that I considered leaving tennis to the eternal youth.

As if cued, Daisy, my young friend down the street, called me to say she had her racquet restrung and wanted me to hit with her on Saturday. I never say no to Daisy. By chance I would be across town near Tennis Express. A twenty-something year old clerk cheerfully offered to help me chose the newest in my long line of racquets. Four walls were lined floor to ceiling with code named racquets glaringly painted with sixties hot rod color schemes. We discussed fast swing power sticks and open strung oversized forgiveness. (Forgiveness is the amount of technology dedicated to minimizing off center ball striking.) In a short time I was overwhelmed with data chatter. It was humbling trying to equate how much forgiveness my pride would endure. Somewhere there’s a racquet designed with my game in mind; I may find it. In the meantime there’s an old wooden Pro Staff in the closet. It’ll be a good lesson for Daisy.

History doesn’t provide much forgiveness, just a little grace for the late afternoon.

…where I spend part of my life

 

Just the other day was one of those days wherein all the pieces fit together with serendipity, without the frustration of puzzling them into a picture of a fraudulent mountain landscape, and ultimately scooping the curlicued bits back into their gray box. 

In the morning I drove over the Jemez Mountains for lunch in Taos with longtime, dear friends I can see only rarely. The scenery as I drove was the kind of invigorating autumn we might imagine Vivaldi was describing in Le Quattro Stagioni, although he was more bent by the gusts suddenly rounding the corners in Venice more than trembling Aspens the forest fire three years ago allowed to return from their dormancy…  No that’s not off track. That’s exactly the point.  For years I’d been periodically driving to Los Alamos looking at the dismal charred and fallen trees from the forest fire three years ago, but this morning the firewood was stacked in rough pyramids for winter pick up. Gigantic colonies of Aspens had reclaimed the sunny sides of the valley. It had taken years of negotiations with the Forest Service, Stimulus Funded labor and the forgotten surprise that a root network of Aspen had been buried by the shade of the Ponderosa Pines. Sections of forest destroyed in the terrifying fire, were now soporifically echoed in the trembling glow of the Quaking Aspens. All of that on the specific morning I was driving.

I didn’t mention yet  that there was practically no traffic and two trucks pulled over so I could pass,

or the sky was cloudless and the color of my other’s eyes when she was happy,

or that I startled a flock of ravens (called an unkindness) that seemed like a shadow alongside the road that suddenly shattered and flew away in pieces,

or that I was in a rented minivan with an XM Radio that played seamless hypnotic music,  alternated with Stan Getz, Grant Green and a station that played nothing but Frank Sinatra whom I only enjoy on certain occasions and this was one of them, 

or that the road was dry and empty enough to drive straight through the middle of curves and feel the centrifugal and centripetal pulls grab and release…not at all bad for a vehicle that uncomfortably seats seven.

I slid past the security checkpoint into Los Alamos which made it seem like it was a medieval town with sleepy guards at the gates and it wasn’t until I passed Bikini Atoll Lane that the stranger reality of where I was crept back.  But it was Thursday morning and there’s a farmer’s market in the park, and I had a shopping list with fresh peppers on it. I was ahead of schedule, so I stopped. Walking over to the market I could smell  fresh cider, which reminded me of the Pyatt Street Market  my family used to visit on Friday afternoons back in Ohio. Hucksters yelled ”Fresh picked corn!  Apples bushel or basket!” and my father assured me if he didn’t pick the basketful one by one there would always a rotten or wormy apples at the bottom. And driving home we all might sing “I love you a bushel and a peck…”

Wandering the morning market I was drawn to the oily aroma of peppers roasting in fiery rotating bins. Brilliant cascabels, shiny poblanos, sweet yellows in bushels, spicy and sweet Italian. Vendors still stalking off the morning cold, shifting behind their counters. “There really was frost on the pumpkins Mam, these are the end of the tomatoes.”  From across the street I heard unmodulated screams.

Almost every other day for the last decade you could probably find me cheerfully working in Special Education.  I’m familiar  with the sound of screams. I can recognize when to bring assistance, when someone is being ignored, when there’s danger, even when to empathize with the mourning of a person who has already had too much school, and the afternoon seems so endless. But this scream I rarely hear passing classrooms, or being led by the hand though the door…this was pure joy, unadultered ecstasy, as if the Earth itself were speaking through these children. It’s a scream I’ve forgotten how to make.

Waiting at the crosswalk five families in the morning sunlight as gorgeous as the trembling Aspens. Three boys in wheelchairs flailed at the air embracing the morning, another girl was smiling almost painfully wide as her mother caressed the side of her swaying head. Here was a lesson long banished from school’s curriculum, that world is unimaginably beautiful and you can be moved through it in the genuine embrace of love. Then I got a cup of green tea and drove off.

Winding out of Los Alamos and down the mesa to Espanola, I was listening to a radio broadcast of an execution that took place in Georgia in 1992. It was one of those horrible events I wanted to turn off, but felt somehow bound to listen through to the conclusion, because in some kind of duty/guilt based rationale I needed to hear that horror on this particular day. But instead of cruelty, I was impressed with politeness, the unexpected tone of care between both the executioners and the victim. There was a mutual recognition that this death, in spite of the intimacy of their actual hands, was out of their hands, and their clear shared desire for these last moments to be a rare kindness exchanged.

Later there was a series of any last words (still delivered in lucidity before the recent policy of pre-execution valium)…requests for forgiveness, bitterness, curses, thanks, and as I’m driving through the ochre cloud of a pickup truck turning off the highway onto a dirt road, the voice of a man who is one moment away from having fifty thousand volts of electricity forced through his body. “If you’re living, I’m living with you; when I die, you die with me too.” We were drivingto lunch.

I’d corresponded with Dale, but hadn’t seen or spoken to her in the thirty years since we’d met in graduate school in Vermont. Gladys and Leslie I might meet every five years or so, at a writing conference party or a sporatic evening. We all shared a long protracted affection that time and distance seeed to have preserved instead of dissipated.

One of those homey aphorisms you hear people say on airplanes and at wedding receptions is you know you’re getting old when you arrive everyplace early…then I’ve been old for as long as I can remember. We had a two week old loose e-mail invitation to converge at Graham’s Resturant at 12:30. By 12:10 I had us on the list for an outside table and was grateful for the few moments to sit in the lounge and scribble a few details to recollect later. All of us had  been composing our own public and private fictions longer than thirty years with varying levels of success.  Each of us had drifted in and out of the events our own lives, as if that obsession to observe, the cost of that habitual drawing back came to no more than this, a chance to tell it all one perfect afternoon to wise and deeply sober friends who would break into smiles of recognition. Somehow I wanted us to believe that the time/space relavities contained  the collected hours of domestic misunderstandings and relentless revisions might even find kinship in this mountain luncheon.

Something not geographically unimaginable, like the first lunch following the arrival seventy years earlier when the scientists  of the Manhattan Project came to Los Alamos. How comforted those men must have been to sit in a dining room, and not be the only person waiting for a salad who had spent the day considering atomic theory at its most lonely human level.  Every embrace should be like those that ended my wait, sweet overflowing and sincere.

 The three hours we had allotted  to restore three decades escaped amid trout cakes, salmon, salads, artichokes and grilled fennel. Then lingering walks to cars. There’s always someplace else to be.

Leslie was already late delivering groceries and an inflatable bed. We walked Dale back to her casita, returning her to her month of retreat composing her novel. Gladys and I stretched another hour and a half of our delicious dessert of aimless walking and talking as if we had seen each other yesterday. Shadows told my fortune; I had three hours to race the darkness retracing my route through the mountain pass.

Driving through the dimming forest I glanced at an elk looking back at me and saw three deer dive into the dusk. In the distance as I turned down and down through the San Diego Canyon,  I felt guided by the faint glow of a strange, familiar fire atop Virgin Mesa, that’s above the village where I live part of my life.

A Few Words about 21st Century Religious Tolerance

My good friend Michael is worried about his son. He and his family are embarking on a two year mission of passive proselytizing in Azerbaijan. A few weeks ago an acquaintance of mine posted a Facebook comment promoting religious tolerance in regard to the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’. The ensuing comment string was volatile enough to have the discussion withdrawn. This was all vitriol from her friends. Notwithstanding Facebook friendship being by definition a new variation of friend, the old etiquette about not discussing money or religion seems proven valuable. That isn’t an extraordinary conversational tone these days.

On the days after the peculiarities of local 9/11 commemorations it was a struggle for the opprobrium of news coverage. FOX versus Al Jezeera. Hardly anyone believes print anymore. Newspapers, blogs, books are variations of true and false to reinforce what you believe. Our religious dialog doesn’t seem like national expression as much as a series of drunken barroom tirades by screaming television heads. Thoughtfulness isn’t a very highly regarded as a contemporary virtue. One Saturday afternoon I was witness to a group of photographers tracing a GPS map of Vice President Dick Cheney’s face over the open ground surrounding the Menil Museum. At the same time from behind a hedge of bamboo I could hear the amplified voice of a Rabbi deploring the burning of sacred texts. Using my cell phone I photo-documented a satellite directed point of an imaginary shirt collar close enough to the protest of another protest to overhear members of an Ecumenical group praying for tolerance of one another. Somewhere in Gainsville The International Dove church store room awkwardly housed a couple hundred Qu’rans and a banner that designated 9/11”Burn a Koran Day”.

Anti-Islamic sentiment seems free flowing, popular and restrained about as much as cursing in front of children. Islam-o-facists, Extreme Islam, ect. are common parlance on public airwaves and hardly attracts anything but an approving shrug. It’s infotainment. This kind of prejudice is an example of an acceptable behavior from a dominant group towards a minority. I recognize this because I come from a long tradition of religious extremists; I was raised in a Roman Catholic Slovak parish in the 1950s.

I went to Mass every day. I memorizied my prayers  in Latin, English and Slovak. I learned how to burn frankincense in a censer. Our Christmas hymns were strange beautifully inintelligible atonal chants. No woman or girl entered my church without having her head covered.  Fasting was seasonal and commonplace. To eat meat on Friday was to purchase an eternal ticket to Hell. My pastor wore a cassock and biretta fashionable in the 11th Century while riding in his Chrysler Imperial. Nuns dressed in habits one veil shy of a birka taught in my parochial school and struck students with impunity if they didn’t learn. Our church community was insular, both protected and embarrassed by its other worldly character. We felt selected by God, but persecuted by a barbarous world that ate steaks on Friday, went to movies on Sunday and looked at the clergy we respected as side show freaks. I empathize with my Islamic brothers and sisters. America hasn’t always been a tolerant country; Christians haven’t always been a tolerant people.

The Roman Empire reached its peak under the Emperor Trajan around 112 AD. A century later on October 12, 312 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine saw a glowing “in hoc signo vinces” before the Battle of Maxentius. His vision transformed the symbolic Cross of the Christ from lamblike surrender to sacrifice into a battle standard. Within seventy years the Roman Empire effectively became the Holy Roman Empire, but the romance of persecuted Christians continued.

The most melodramacizied Christian persecutions were those by the cinematically affected Emperor Nero following the Great Fire in Rome in 64AD. The reality was at that time Romans regarded Christians as one troublesome sect among troublesome sects of Judaism. The Roman Army was engaged in an unsuccessful “paxification” of Palestine that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. It was also around this time that Gospel of John was completed. It features the prophetic “ …destroy this temple and in three days…” [John 2:19], as well as predicting the martyrdoms of the apostles Peter, James and John. Not disputing the nature of inspiration, these are prophesies of events that had already happened by the time the Greek text was compiled. For many theological historians the cult of martyrdom and instantaneous heaven had its origins during that era.

Third Century hagiographies of Christian martyrdom under the Emperor Diocletian note that the persecutions actually began as an attack on Manicheans, followers of Mani. Mani was a Persian prophet who combined the teachings of Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus. St. Augustine was at one point in his life a Manichean.

Spurred by reading bird entrails, Diocletian shifted his persecutions to Christians known as the “Great Persecutions”. The murders took place primarily in Antioch, not in Roman coliseums. The “Great Persecution” lasted approximately twenty-five years. Roman officials did provide an option for Christians to surrender their scriptures to be burned instead of having their tongues ripped out, or any of the plethoras of cruelties otherwise awaiting them.  Early Church historian Eusebius reported that some Christians willingly sought out martyrdom.

Diocletian committed suicide in 311AD.

In 313AD Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire.

By 380 Theodosius declared Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The history of Christians persecuting other Christians began within the same year.

The politically empowered Christians began persecuting heretic sects including Arians, Danists, those Christians who had surrendered their Scripture during the Great Persecution, and, of course, Manicheans.

By 381 pagan sacrifices were forbidden under pain of death.

Within a decade Christians had by law co-opted Roman holidays and began destroying temples and replacing them with churches.

If all of this seems ironic, it should. Theocracies, like revolutions, tend to be harsh and inhumane because of their radical dependence on an exclusive orthodoxy. Consider some of the extravagant history of the seven Crusades. Christianity’s march as if to war.

The Crusades began with a call from Constantinople for rescue from the Seljuk Turks. Constantinople was to the late Middle Ages what New York City was to the Twentieth Century ; it was the new Rome. The capital of the deteriorating Byzantine Empire, it was an exotic, tolerant marketplace where vast wealth accumulated and changed hands. Roman Christians, Moslems, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Vikings, even Manicheans, all found ways to moderate religious differences for the sake of trade.

In 1056 the Eastern and Roman Churches split ostensibly over the theological doctrine of “filioque”,i.e., whether the Eucharist should be made of leavened or unleavened bread (still unresolved). In 1071Seljuk Turks, under Alp Arslan, defeated the Byzantine Army at Manzikret and took control of Anatolia (which became modern Turkey). The Seljuk Turks, who descended from the Central Asian Tartars had already conquered Persia and Bagdad under the rationale of reclaiming the empire of Mohamed. Anatolia had been the eastern half of the Byzantine Empire that merely fifty years before provided safe passage for pilgrims and traders to Jerusalem. In 1096 Pope Urban II promised heaven to any man or woman who died helping Emperor Alexius I recover the Byzantine Empire from the Seljuk Turks.

Hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised Europeans dressed themselves with red crosses and became “Crusaders”. In the first year Peter the Hermit, among others, led pious, but disenfranchised, mobs across Europe chanting “God Wills It!” They looted their way along their ill-planned pilgrimage east. Thousands of Jewish people were robbed and massacred in the Rhine. Christian Hungarian cities were besieged for their supplies. When this People Army arrived at Constantinople, a large portion was promptly slaughtered by the Turkish Army in their first encounter.

Meanwhile French and Norman nobility were borrowing money from Venice and Genoa to equip troops and arrange passage by sea. The reality that Constantinople could no longer defend its empire meant all of its real estate was on the market to anyone with a private army equipped to take it.When they arrived the Crusades began in earnest. Crusaders who came to support Emporer Alexius found it easier to capture territory than to return liberated land to Constantinople. They wanted to establish private fiefdoms both in this world and the next, typical of this group of Soldiers of Christ was Bohemund of Normandy. 

Bohemund was part of the army of European nobles who laid siege to Antioch. After a long siege, both sides were facing starvation. Remnant pilgrims from the People’s Army were given over to cannibalism. Finally the citadel gate of the Two Sisters was opened by a bribed Armenian with a grievance. Slaughter ensued. Bohemund along with Tancred and Robert of Normandy occupied the city and its palaces.

However nearly immediately they were trapped inside Antioch under siege from the late arriving Islamic relief army led by Kerbogha. Desertions ensued.

Faced with more starvation and an overwhelming military force, the Crusaders were  miraculously directed to find lost pieces of the “Holy Lance” that pierced the side of Jesus. Relic inspired  the Crusaders went to battle reporting widespread visions of Sts. George, Demetrius and Maurice. Turkish desertions ensued. After a short brutal battle, Antioch remained in the hands of Bohemund.

Having secured the city, Bohemund wrote to the Pope, was relieved of his vow to return Byzantine lands to Alexius, and had himself declared Prince of Antioch. His crusade ended in profit. He wasn’t alone, Crusaders continued gaining, regaining and losing territory for centuries. Jerusalem was only briefly under Christian control.  Byzantium disappeared. Throughout there was a steady flow of treasure. It wasn’t until 1798 when Napoleon dispossessed the Knights of Malta from their island fortress that the last Crusaders left.

The First Crusade brought martyrdom on both sides that was beyond medieval methods of calculation.

Estimates range between one to five million European casualties.

 300,000 people were killed at the Siege of Nicea.

100,000 Moslems were massacred after the Fall of Antioch.

100,000 Christians were killed at the Fall of Acre.

These numbers are nearly incomprehensible, but not unprecedented in the history of religious warfare.

Following missionaries Spanish Conquistadors left between 10-15 million corpses before the Americas accepted the Peace of Christ.

Bernal Diaz in his description of Aztec human sacrifice reported that he found 136,000 human skulls neatly racked in Tenochitlan.

The Sixteenth Century French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots left three million dead.

While the US was engaged in its bloodiest conflict, the Civil War [750,000 casualties],the Taiping Revolt in China left an estimated 20,000,000 people dead as Hong Xiuquan attempted to establish a Christian-like “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”.

The knowledge and innovations of the Twentieth Century theocracies added only more efficient brutality and the cruel irony of merciless state religions of Atheism.

Churches have been burned, temples destroyed, shrines defaced, icons stolen. The blood of martyrs and heretics seems a constant flood to water deserts, fields, forests, and cities. Judeao-Christian, Islamic, and Hindu texts are embroidered with tales of battle, territorial wars and divine battle plans. Buddhism came to Tibet at the point of a sword (and appears to be leaving the same way). Mohamed came to Mecca leading a conquering army. Arjuna received his enlightenment from Krishna the night before a horrific battle.

We’ve learned to expect excess in religious wars, probably as much as we’ve learned to accept religious wars. Organized religion can often be a mitigating force in cultures bringing virtue, commonwealth and generosity, but its shadow theology also provides a system for rationalizing the widespread murder and torture that is a violation of the precepts of nearly all religious thought. Faith is private and irrational; we all have to believe in something. Faith by governmental decree seems at best hypocritical and in light of history, dangerous. The difference between a Christian Nation and a nation of Christians is more than a grammatical revision.

I’m not much of a history repeats itself believer. That seems merely entertainment to pass a long car drive ,or a way to twist a few historical sinews into a propagandistic Frankenstein.  We’re not acting as Crusaders or even pilgrims when we burn books, vandalize mosques or condone the slander entire religions without even a cursory pretext of understanding. In spite of our fears we are required to consider from past religious wars is the horrific scale of casulties embraced by pious, intolerant people.

So if people want to look to artificial stars to guide them to face a version of a father war god, or amplify their voices to speak to no one, they seem more rational to me than flying planes into buildings, detonating  C-40 vests or occupying countries. I appreciate religious art, cathedrals, mosques and shrines. If religious battles for supremacy must be waged, I suggest architecture. In the long history of religious war, I haven’t encountered any that have been won or glorified their dieties.  Being religious , or spiritual doesn’t relieve us of responsibility. We are responsible for what we know. We’re responsible for what we permit. We are responsible for what we believe; it isn’t responsible for us.

Nenikikamen

Somehow I transformed from being a general lay about with artistic intentions and disdain for any sport, to having my joints permanently numbered by chips, swellings, pulls, irritations and sport related injuries. My wife grudgingly endures a painted chest of drawers filled with unmatched white socks in various conditions of dishevelment, another drawer filed with ace bandages, Neoprene and Velcro ankle, knee and back supports.  In the bottom drawer I have frayed tee shirts commemorating marathons, 10ks, 5ks, professional tennis matches, Cambridge University, the first Dodge Poetry Fest, the New Zealand All Blacks, two long sleeve Jingle Bell runs, a couple Cool Max hot weather shirts, perspiration wicking winter wear,  and favorite tattered sweat shirts and paint stained tee shirts for running on muddy days. There’s that gray Everlast tee missing a sleeve that used to be my father’s and a Jose Posada Yankee shirt I bought for a student who moved away. Another drawer has  two moth eaten tennis sweaters and unmatched warm up suit parts. Next to the chest are pairs of athletic shoes, new, good weather, rain shoes, shoes with collapsed midsoles but still not distressed enough to throw away, tennis, running and the pair I use for cleaning the roof. These aren’t ironic or iconic clothes, these are just my ‘I’m going to work out and I don’t really care how I look’ wardrobe. I have various gift clothes that seem too nice to sweat through. Of course I have overwashed sports hats, also souvenir hats, torn stocking caps and the lucky John Deer Gore-Tex lined bill cap I wore running eight marathons. I’m down to two tennis racquets in my bag (excepting the three wooden racquets I keep stored in the library closet in case tennis returns to its roots). In the medicine cabinet there’s a family size jar of Blue Gel Freezy Hot and enough generic aspirin and ibuprofen to help me limp down the stairs the mornings after. My contacts list has entries for two masseuses, a first rate sports orthopedist and a chiropractor physically large enough to crack my spine like a whip. My point in listing this catalog is I shouldn’t have any of this stuff. They’re play costumes and props. Even if I train three times as diligently I’ll always have the body of an amateur, the real bodies are born professional.

Kobe Bryant, Le Bron James and Alex Rodriguez account for $64 million worth of the United States’ high school diplomates average salary. That’s roughly 1,240,000 weeks work for an average worker with a high school diploma. To be fair that only comes to around 400,000 weeks of work (500,000 if you work less than 35 hours per week) for what one of these three gentlemen makes on average for fifty-two weeks. Last fiscal year Floyd Mayweather ‘s $40,000,000 led part-time US workers without a high school diploma. He balanced out the average figure on the pay stub most high school drop outs look at while they’re waiting in line at Pay Day Loan. I don’t mind people getting rich. It would be a good thought for all labor to be equitably rewarded, but…

This isn’t about inequalities of pay; it’s about inequalities and the fleeting, brilliant triumph of bodies.

I’ve been befriended by people who used to race motorcycles, run marathons, play satellite tennis, bicycle cross country, power lift, scuba dive, play rugby in leagues, ski the black diamonds, swim in open water triathlons, hustle pool, struggle to make the cut to keep from requalifying, and play AAA baseball. We all go as far as we can for as long as we can, then look back into a nostalgic glass…that’s the nature of an athlete’s life, even a mediocre athlete.

In high school I served my time in PE with a convict’s enthusiasm. I could barely do a push up. Throwing and catching were activities as impossible to me as walking a circus high wire. Throughout adolescence my athletic experiences were a disastrous series of embarrassments, ridicule and dull painful endurance in a failed attempt to please my family.

One sophomoric afternoon my PE class was threatened by Coach…anyone who couldn’t run ten laps in ten minutes would fail PE. My GPA has never been in any condition to absorb even a half credit noncredit. Fortunately I had had a fair amount of running away training from my neighborhood, and frankly ten laps on a cinder track isn’t that tough. Somewhere in that afternoon run a part of me loosened up or came together.  I didn’t turn into Forest Gump and discover a miraculous facility for running…but my hamstrings stretched enough to find myself running easily through a cold spring afternoon and experiencing the pleasure of my own body in motion. I’d like to link that physical epiphany with some immediate change in my life, but I can’t. It was one more awakening like many I was experiencing, love, music, driving, sexual rejection… thoughts began to appear in my brain, books contained ideas…there was a once out of control world calling me. I started to take life a bit more seriously, I read my assignments, got a decent SAT and took up playing tennis. Sports seemed as natural as growing a beard.

Freshman year my college had one of the worst athletic programs in its conference. To supplement the academic curriculum the university only had only a few NCAA sports, football, basketball, baseball and a mysterious absentee two man polo team.  I arrived the year mandatory ROTC was phased out. For undergraduates that meant physical training was an open gym, free tennis courts and no athletic dorm to be excluded from. On crisp autumn Fridays half of the football team got drunk and beat up anyone they could find in our dormitory; on crisp autumn Saturdays they lost football games. The basketball team was so frequently overmatched they employed a player whose on court purpose was to produce enough vicious flagrant fouls to encourage opponents to keep their victory margin under embarrassing. I never went to a baseball game; I’ve always hated baseball.

One of my roommates was Denny O’Toole. The year I met him he had signed as a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. In 1969 he was contracted for the astronomical price of $13,000. He was regarded as a living god by many of the jocks on campus. Being a god has its moments, but it seemed lonely. Nearly every athlete on campus wanted to work out with Denny, or play him at some game to find out how good they really were. For Denny it was a dulling and annoying risk that always carried the threat of accidental injury. The boys just tried too hard. He couldn’t afford for an intramural field day to end in the emergency room.

I liked Denny; he was self possessed and smart. If my other roommate, Drew, and I weren’t acting too obnoxious, he’d  sometimes have dinner with us in the cafeteria. We played basketball a couple nights at the gym. He was a natural. He dropped in jump shots, dribbled easily with either hand and rebounded with deft authority. There was no player on our varsity that appeared as at ease on the basketball court as Denny (He had been offered basketball scholarships before accepting his pro contract.) He could put on his satin White Sox jacket and pick up any number of girls in bars. In the middle of February while the rest of us were frozen in Cincinnati, Denny would pack his bags and drive to Sarasota for training camp. We never asked why he came back to school for six weeks instead of staying at home…there are parts of athletes lives we just don’t enjoy imagining.

One semester Drew and I took  liberties with Spring Break and decided to visit Denny in Florida. It was the kind of trip that has become a standard script for comic coming of age films. After a few misadventures we were in Sarasota standing next to the White Sox pitching coach. Denny was unleashing some pro heat in practice. Drew and I argued over what we thought we heard him mumble. Good fastball, no control, or no fastball, good control.

Seasons passed, Denny drifted through summers of minor league ball and was called up to the major leagues as a reliever every August. Then he got traded to the Cleveland Indians. Then he played in the Lizard Leagues. When he was ready to stop playing, he quit and spent the summers driving his daughters to the Wisconsin Dells. It was an admirable athletic career in my opinion, except for one unfortunate judgment…one afternoon he invited me out to his house for lunch. After lunch he handed me a catcher’s mitt. I had never caught a hardball in my life.

We walked over to a shaded side yard with a pitcher’s mound and a pentagonal rubber plate set about ten feet in front of an embankment. We tossed a shot-put back and forth as he explained the game. My instructions were simple. I was going to catch. Fastball was one, curveball two, slider three and the change up four. If it gets away, or goes into the dirt don’t try to block it…let it go. That was the extent of my preparation…as if there could be preparation for what was about to happen.

Denny kicked at the pitching rubber, and then set his right foot with the ball hidden in his glove. He used a hip-kick delivery that brought him suddenly into complete animation. Left leg lifting, turning back and kicking forward as his arms cocked back and began his release over his shoulder. A yellowed baseball appeared frozen in Denny’s fingers at the top of his delivery for a long instant. It seemed I could almost make out the alignment of the seam threads. The ball was still, resting on a tripod of two fingers and the edge of his thumb. There was that calm time in his hand, then the terror started moving.

A just reasonably good pro boxer can hit you with a jab at 30 or so mph and have his glove back before the pain starts to sting your cheek. At 40mph it takes a hardball one full second to travel out of that calm hand and cross home plate. At 80mph it takes 0.5 seconds, and that won’t keep you in AAA ball. If you cut that time by 10/100ths of a second you’ve got 103mph fastball and that gives you a chance to be on bubble gum card.

We were going to pitch the 1971 World Series, Pittsburg vs. Baltimore. Denny had committed to memory the ‘book’ on every player on both teams. He would tell me who was a bat, what they could and couldn’t hit, and what they liked. I was allowed to call the pitches. He determined how accurate each pitch was, if it was a ball, strike or a hit. He showed me each of his four pitches.
The fast ball moved a little up or down as it drove straight at my navel. The curve ball immediately flew sideways towards the trees then swung back around towards my head and kept swinging down towards my ribs. The slider looked like the fastball until it suddenly began diving diagonally towards the inside of my right shin. The change up seemed so slow by comparison I didn’t care what it did.

His pitches traveled to me in only two dimensions there was no depth perception on my part. Each one started from the quiet place in his hand. Then they moved up, down, and sideways until they arrived as explosions at my squatted body a fraction of second later. As the imaginary innings played out and Denny tired, I remembered the pitching coach conundrum Good fastball, no control, or no fastball, good control. I tried to solve it with invisible men on base and the ghost of Roberto Clemente at the plate. Pitches twisted, dove, rose, and spun in the dirt, more than one found my shins and ankles. Wild pitches flew past my head. As the imagined batting orders returned in the later, critical innings, my desperate four fingered pleas for change-ups were shaken off in favor of painful fastballs and hard angled sliders. For about two hours I caught baseballs until my left hand was bruised purple. The Orioles won. I was exhausted, still somewhat terrified, but proud to have endured my singular experience catching, even if it was only practice pitches in the side yard of a barely professional athlete.

Denny could make a baseball perform in ways that perhaps less than two hundred and fifty human beings alive at that moment in time could. In that same moment, there were hundreds more people alive who could perform neurosurgery than could bring a 100mph slider to a major league batter. It wasn’t merely that Denny practiced or had good coaches. He had physical gifts, like Le Bron James or Alex Rodriguez. With genuine giftedness, whether music, art or sports, there’s no amount of practice and coaching that can develop it in the 99.8% of the rest of us. What gifted people have to do to perform at what level, or how much they get paid is extraneous. They exist.

They exist next to us as a mystery virtue, and not merely a modern one.

I went to Greece to run the Marathon. In the days before the race I took a bus to Delphi, the site of the famous oracle and the Pythian Games. 2,500 years ago athletes and poets met there to honor Apollo the god of beauty, speed and art, with their performance. I jogged a slow lap of gratitude on the grassy track at the stadium. Two mornings later I raced from the village of Marathon, around the burial mound of the heroes of the first Greco-Persian War (perhaps even the ashes of the legendary runner, Philipides) and on to Athens. Following the race I laid an olive bough in the Temple of Nike Athena. I don’t believe I’m an Olympian Polytheist, it’s not impossible…but I know where to find the roots of Western democracy. I had willingly put my body in some level of extremis to try to touch and honor human tradition by running in the footsteps of the classic age of Greece. I’ve visited the mountain running paths of the Tarahumara, the Circus Maximus, the Ball Courts of Monte Alban and the ball courts of Wimbledon. These visits, like learning to catch a hard ball, seem to me inexplicably apt acts of respect…of looking back to see what it is we do to show who we are…what we have aspired to be in the corpus of our world. In the real Darwinian competition sports are as extraneous as deities and idols…or as necessary. We nurse our cultural needs for the illusion of beautiful victory. Games have remained sacred, not because they distract us from our world, but because they provide a place where we can believe our illusions are possible…at least for a rare few of us.

Kenneth Patchen, Steel, Rage and Youngstown

 

“What the story tells itself when there’s nobody around to hear it.” Kenneth Patchen (Painted Poem)

I’ve been rereading The Collected Works of Kenneth Patchen. It’s one of those books I’ve had for years carrying from one place to another, north to south. He is a poet of a range that doesn’t seem possible in my current world. He, more than any poet I might have named, influenced my poetic aesthetic as I was growing up. He was sort of my patron poet in the same convoluted way people realize other people’s dreams or wear zodiac charms. Not that Kenneth Patchen and I had any connection beyond being born within thirty miles of one another. I confess to not being initially crazy about his poetry. There are other Ohio poets whose poetry is more quickly attractive, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Richard Howard, James Wright, or Rita Dove to name four. But I found uncanny similarities with Kenneth Patchen in his tastes: jazz, politics, self education, John Cage, visual poems, bondage to the working class ethos and a vision of rebellion and protest as a dialect of salvation. He died when I was nineteen; I was an anonymous fan of the idea of Kenneth Patchen.

My Kenneth Patchen was an anarchist ghost I needed to abandon, or at least recognize and address as one of the secret relationships I carried in my subconscious. Like that singular Sunday my father took me to the Butler Art Institute.

We looked at the hand blown, pitched glass bells and George Bellows “Stag at Sharkey’s”. Today I still guard and cherish a lemonade set of etched amber glass with musically toned glasses and keep boxing in a kind of religious communion with my lost Ohio home. One hot afternoon I was running in Memorial Park in Houston, when to my amazement I discovered I was running alongside Evander Holyfield. We stopped in the parking lot and briefly chatted. I told him how my Dad, who had died that winter, thought Evander should throw left hooks to the body more when he was “inside”. Mr. Holyfield said he was sorry about my father’s passing, and would try to take that advice to heart. I felt more relief and spiritual connection delivering that message from a dead man to a professional boxer than I ever did in church. That seemed more about being part of the mystical body…even if it was a hint about thudding it under the ribs.

Perhaps it was growing up alongside the violence of steelmaking that bonds me to that psychic landscape. We still classify historical ages by the substance of their tools, stone, bronze, iron…I was born at the end of the unionized  steel age. One of the earliest known hot worked iron objects was a dagger found in an Anatolian tomb from around 2,500 BC. It was made of meteoric iron, i.e., iron extracted from meteors. Until the discovery of mined iron ore, all iron came from meteors, we get the name iron from the Etruscan word “aisar” meaning “ from the gods”. Traditionally making steel has been a semi-divine, cruel and secret art (consider poor Hephaestus). The subcontinent of India has a history of ironworking that extends back pasr 1,500 BC. They developed a method (now lost) for producing the Woolz Steel famous in classical antiquity as being more valuable than silver or gold. Woolz Steel was traded and used throughout the Levant to produce legendary Damascus Steel. The Damascus Steel was the even more legendary patterned curved sword wielded by Saladin against Richard the Lion Heart in Sir Walter Scott.

By 500 BC iron metallurgy was known by Celts, and in Britain and Northern Europe. It doesn’t take a huge stretch of imagination to suppose that the myth of Merlin, the alchemical magician, and Arthur drawing Excalibur from a stone, or Siegfried miraculously re-forging his father’s sword under the nefarious direction of Minne the Dwarf obliquely reflected the mysteries and costs of the human relationship with steel. One of Patchen’s early poems “Orange Bears” speaks from a childhood gift of rarefied kindness from those workers who used to be called ‘mill hunks’ when such jobs still existed.

The Orange bears with soft friendly eyes
Who played with me when I was ten,
Christ, before I’d left home they’d had
Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs
Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting
Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped
Out, and I went down through the woods
To the smelly crick with Whitman
In the Haldeman-Julius edition,
And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail
Into the cover—What did he know about
Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal
And the National Guard coming over
With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers?

I remember you would put daisies
On the windowsill at night and in
The morning they’d be so covered with soot
You couldn’t tell what they were anymore.

A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!
“The Orange Bears”

Our Father wasn’t in Heaven, he worked shifts in a Bessemer Furnace.

The treatment of steel workers has been cruel in both legend and reality. From Hephaestus explusion from Olympus to Minne’s attempted assassination of Siegfried, through the strikes, private armies and National Guard battles, to their slow industrial dismemberment by depreciation and pension raids, the men who made steel have been a suffering fraternity. A brotherhood of indescribable labor, betrayal and rebellion, gave making steel a consciousness of what was near the essence of men and what would always be denied. That incredible array of humanity who walked through the gates at Carnegie, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Republic, ARMCO, US Steel all carried shattered parts of the Nothung Sword of Siegfried in black lunch boxes that they had to re-forge as the shards of an absent father’s work. The myth and the opera end in blood and fire for all and then the destruction of the known world ends in freezing and abandonment…like February along the Mahoning River.

Mills were like an unrecognized childhood trauma, or rite of passage. They were deep, and mattered.  How much did it matter to the aesthetics of my imaginary patron saint Kenneth Patchen? Or other poets who wrote quietly living in the shadows of the then dying mills like Frank Polite, E.G. Hallaman, Andrena Zawinski, Jim Villani and his famous Pig Iron Press ?

Consider Patchen’s predecessor in the Mahoning Valley, Michael McGovern, the Irish born “Puddler Poet”. McGovern, a Youngstown steel worker published Labor Lyrics and Other Poems in 1899. He wrote these lines to read at a rally to support the Homestead strikers:

…Send forth the words on spirit wings
That wealth no longer shall maintain
In this free land its petty kings,
With armed thugs to guard their reign.
With justice in this noble fight
Wealth’s private armies we defy;
With votes as weapons wielded right,
The cause of labor shall not die.
“Labor’s Cause”

When I grew up I played tennis and met girls at Homestead Park, a public space named in solidarity with the victims of the bloody steel strike in Homestead, PA at the Carnegie Works in 1892. The United Steel Workers Union Hall was a few blocks from my parent’s home. I had a summer job at Calvary Cemetery where every two weeks I cut the grass in the section with Michael McGovern’s grave. It had a tall granite tombstone with an epitaph:

“Just place a rock right over me
And chisel there that all may know it
Here lies the bones of M. McG
Whom people called “The Puddler Poet””.

A puddler was a steelworker who worked with 2,500 degree molten ore. I can’t think of many other poets so invested in a job as to meld it into their poetic identity. Later I spent a couple of years working in steel and aluminum mills. It was wild and gloriously dangerous work…at least when I was young. But what I saw in the soaking pits, slamming onto the rolling table, or shoveled up as burning scale was only the corpse of the dragon. By then the hellish struggle of steel work had been abandoned in Youngstown leaving a shrinking population, permanently unemployed workers, and neighborhood bars on nearly every corner that used to cash paychecks on Fridays given over to serve cheap liquor to a steady parade of variously mangled men.

How can you unlearn the rage of a place like that…and how can you not try every day?

With increasing rarity “The Deer Hunter” shows up in rotation on one of the cable stations. Parts were shot around Youngstown and I always watch for the scenes of the working mills and what I can convince myself are scenes of my hometown. It almost seems like an obligation, like New Yorkers watch “Law and Order” to identify the locations. Except, of course that NYC hasn’t disappeared (and well it shouldn’t since many of the girders that support its classic skyline were hot rolled in Youngstown mills). Like a nostalgia for childhood trauma, the film is magnetically horrible, but so precious we keep it locked in the deep embrace of ourselves. My late mother, who hadn’t seen a film in a theater since “The Sound of Music”, saw “The Deer Hunter”. “It’s about suicide.” she offered in her telephone review from her perennially smokey den on the Southside, “and living with suicide…like everybody in Youngstown”.

A proletariat life is a life of concrete values, the minutes of working class life are calculated by dollars and down to parts of cents. The Labor Relations Board can furnish you with the cash value of a severed finger, a lost eye or prorate paralysis. Human beings sell their bodies for a contracted time, after that transaction the rest of their life becomes secondary. In wage slavery, the wage is relatively inconsequential, slavery is always the consequence. Men in mills frequently loved the work, but hated the job (as opposed to the salaried supervisors in short sleeve white shirts in the tiny air conditioned boxes who hated their work and the men who did the work). Labor Unions bargained for money, pensions and a certain amount of safety, but what they symbolically negotiated was the illusion of humanity…that a worker had human rights and his ownership had limits in some unread clause of the contract.

If you count my 48 hours as a Teamster, I’ve been a member of four different unions over the course of my working life. The bitterest union disputes I witnessed had to do with shop rules and whose job entailed what activities. I only heard whiskey tales about the “Little Steel” strike, threatening scabs, lock outs, or “wildcats”, but I felt the powerful sense of kinship in the rebellious “No!” Rebellion appears so near to freedom as to be indistinct walking the picket line. One of the signature experiences of our current age is that restless, adolescent seething, stalking away…obstreperous refusal for an ethical principle…or perhaps it’s the loss of that capacity into marketing focus groups and manipulated images that fuels our anger.

In some ways that collective anger was what I was hoping my conceptual Kenneth Patchen could clarify for me. He might poetically calm me, change me and my history into something more spiritual and open than shattering mills, a filthy mill town and a constellation of lost promises and bars. I hoped that his writing would bring, if not philosophical order, an understanding mirror, or at least a level of respect to the proletariat chaos that ebbed and fell around me. Of course he couldn’t quiet me, that was hardly his job.

Besides the early trauma of steel mills Patchen had his own struggles, pacifism during World War II and the wars beyond, a continually deteriorating back injury and lifelong poverty. Nonetheless he continued writing and protesting for human dignity in a defeated world. He published his first book in 1936 and continued writing until his death in 1978. He is a member of the generation of poets like W.H. Auden, Muriel Rukeyser, Josephine Miles or Edna St. Vincent Millay whose work is constantly being ‘rediscovered’ and lost. He collaborated with John Cage and jazz musicians including Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Charles Mingus to set his poetry in musical recordings and extended the language and evocation of American poetry into new American forms. The Beats as well as modern popular artists like Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson are indebted to his experimentation. The extensive body of his work is a shifting amalgam of poetic and visual forms all at once political, mystical, surreal, ugly, clever and humane. He expects a hard day’s work from his readers. He owned little and left much. Like the Orange Bears, he withstood an abusive world and gave away kindness.
 

Washing the Corpse

  

 

“and since they knew nothing about his life

  they lied till they produced another one.”

                                    Washing the Corpse, Rainer Maria Rilke

                                                            [translated by Edward Snow]

Tuesday my friend, Michael Silver Dragon died. He had been fighting his illnesses for as long as I knew him. He had been in hospice care for nearly a year. He was lifelong motorcycle rider; two summers ago he sold his motorcycle because he couldn’t ride anymore. A couple weeks ago he wanted to take me out for drive in his Tiburon. Over the last months he had taken up driving the mountain roads by himself and smoking little cigars while using his oxygen respirator. “I’m going to die soon” he told me” so cigar smoke isn’t going to kill me.” I suggested the exploding tank might; he laughed. It was a hacking laugh that suggested he was whacking things with a hatchet. I went on the condition that he wouldn’t smoke cigars while he was using oxygen. He took the curves and hills a little too fast, and drifted over the  line a bit while telling me what once was down this dirt road, or what Fenton Lake looked like before the highway went through. We laughed a lot with the loud laughter you sometimes hear in bars—that vague coughing sound that usually has little to do with what’s been said, but is releasing something that isn’t being said, but wants to. The paved road ran out and we decided to turn back. He was tired, but wouldn’t let me drive. We stopped in Seven Springs and visited a friend. We sat in her kitchen drinking tea and listening to the brook that runs outside her back door. It was a painterly moment…maybe a little too restless to be Romantic or Impressionist.

A silence fell into our conversation as our friends ate lunch. I looked at Michael and saw suppressed surprise in his eyes. He was lost, but I didn’t know where I should look to find him. Eventually the tea and honey found him and brought him back. Like most return trips we don’t remember many details, that was true of us and soon we were saying good-bye in the library parking lot where we left my car. By chance his wife and friend, Berta, was parking her car to attend a meeting. We all stood hugging and thankful. It would have been a kind perfection for things to have just evaporated into those instants of affection and fullfillment.

But they didn’t.

That is the kind of vignette that makes genuine human character rhetorical. It’s warm, sentimental and allows itself to be contrived by the pathos and a hinted knowledge of death. At this point Michael Silver Dragon is really dead. But in these scenes I have replaced him with my desire to produce an elegiac fictional Silver Dragon. I’m not writing an obituary; rather contriving a sweet eulogy intended to make my reader abstrusely sad, but also to engage in my fictionalization as a form of easy belief. You as my reader must believe this, in order for it to grow to be the truth. I confess to knowing practically nothing factual about Michael. For me he had little history other than our private shared adventures on my holidays and vacations. He could have been my Great Uncle Johnny. The day after he died I was asked to write the obituary. Those dictated facts were a series of revelations, which I suppose a certain amount any obituary actually is, but an obituary is also a symbolic punctuation indicating when the dead receive a new life as adjuncts to those of us who remain and construct memories. They belong to us, like movie characters or pop stars. We build the dead out of need. We shape them as the  poetic corpse washers shape the lies they need to tell one another. This is more about me, about my need to remember and forget the same thing. 

“Not all truth comes in beautiful words; not all beautiful words are truth.”

 Last Saturday morning Berta called from her panic. Michael wouldn’t wake up. Again. He had died several times in the years I’d known him. Yet he returned from the hospital again and again. He had fallen and hurt his neck, he had  pneumonia and he didn’t want to eat. When I arrived I found him twisted awkwardly on his bed. Berta was trying to support his neck. He moaned and pulled at bed clothes and the neck support pillow until his head drooped forward in a posture that made me cringe. Together we lifted and shifted him in their bed. He made noises, but not to us. Then he fell back to heavy sleep. Berta had hospice on the telephone. They were suggesting a hospital bed and neck brace. They were willing to bring them out that afternoon.

Things were collapsing too quickly.

Berta and Michael had scheduled respite care in a facility in Albuquerque so she could go to her father’s birthday party. I was supposed to spring Michael from the rest home the following Saturday. We would eat dim sum, find some mischief, then I’d bring him home. Berta and I surveyed the available space in their home. It would take some significant rearranging, but we could squeeze a hospital bed in somewhere, shifting out her study and furniture .

Things were spinning apart.

We tried giving Michael his medications. It took two of us to try to open his mouth. The pills drooled out on the wild goatee he’d been growing for twenty-five centuries. He was thrashing weakly. He was moaning. The medication took effect, he seemed quiet. I drove 30 miles to the Walgreens in Bernalillo for a foam cervical brace. We got it on him. The collar didn’t provide him any comfort. The hospital bed didn’t seem such a good idea. There were no beds available at the hospice hospital unit.

We’d have to wait for someone to die. 

The next morning Berta called.  A hospice bed on the unit was available. Michael would be transported by ambulance to Albuquerque. It would take most of the day to transport him and get his paperwork checked at the hospital. She wanted to do it by herself. She said she done it so many times, that alone was better. She suggested I come

later in the afternoon.

I drove to Santa Fe to the International Folk Arts Festival for diversion. I wanted to get lost in the crowds and ersatz open market of rugs, jewelry and carvings for a couple of hours. I had a couple of artists I wanted to see specifically. One made fantastic painted resin dioramas of Bolivian peasant life crossing barriers into other realms where they might be suddenly drinking or dancing with devils, angels or skeletons. The other was a Mexican muertos artist from D.F., who carved intricate calaveras on matchsticks. It was the last day of the festival; many of the artists were tired of listening to English. They sat sullenly painting, or dully detailing metalwork with small hammers. I couldn’t find the two artists I wanted to see. By chance I ran into Jacobo Angeles, a wood carver whose studio I had visited in Oaxaca. He was exhausted from shaking too many hands. His English met my Spanish and he turned me over to his nephew. “We have a website.” He handed me a card angeles@tilcajete.org. I bought a glass of iced tea made with all renewable resources. It had rooibos leaves, beet roots and ginger; I had a stomach ache, albeit a healthful one. It served to keep me from being dulled by the early afternoon sun.  There was drumming and dragon dancers were leaping on the plaza as I boarded the bus to the parking lot.

Driving back I found the World Cup final on the radio. It was being broadcast on a Spanish station. With the score zero, zero and cinque minutos left in regular time I spotted my favorite used bookstore in Santa Fe and a place to park. I found a used CD of the master copy of “John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard” and Edward Snow’s translation of Rilke,  A Head of All Parting. These items seemed essential in my immediate future. When I returned to World Cup the game was in extra overtime. Although I, along with the entire Spanish speaking Western Hemisphere, had waited for the elongated scream of “G-o-o-o-o-a-l!” when it happened I wasn’t much relieved. I stopped at the Santa Domingo reservation for gas. $2.59 a gallon. I chewed a few berry flavored Tums and drove towards the hospice hospital in Albuquerque.

Berta called on my cell phone, room #1029.

In Lovelace Hospital if you press the elevator button for the tenth floor any employee on the elevator, or getting on later, first is suddenly silent, tries to smile, then looks blankly away. Modern hospice care is a hospital service, not a dread Hotel Dieu, but quiet, orderly and intensely humane. What judgments the staff makes, they keep to themselves. They don’t use euphemisms; it’s death and dying. They look at you when speaking with you. When I asked at the desk, they knew who Michael was and that Berta was in the room with him.

Michael looked worse than the day before.

He was restless and more jaundiced,

He appeared to be suffering less.

We had had our last conversation.

I smoothed his hair and sat down.

Berta was exhausted and dazed.

We went out to find some dinner,

it turned out to be salads we pushed

with our plastic forks and then threw away.

She drove back home and I returned to #1029.

I sat as the sun was starting its slow summer setting. The hide-a-bed love seat sunk me deeper than was comfortable, but there was nowhere else to go. As distraction I wondered about Walt Whitman’s days as a nurse. How he must have learned, as these nurses had, how to intimately diagnose each detail of approaching death. I wondered how he was able to keep experiencing the buzz and yarp of the world. I wondered what that change meant to him as he walked home, or worried about enduring his persecutions and keeping his position a little longer. Did he still see the great cosmic body transcendent…or like me in this golden evening, seeing it struggling minute by minute, breath by breath, cell by cell, system by system, moving towards absence.

 Four years ago Michael completed translating The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. Having no Chinese, only his ambition translated the notion of wei wu wei.

[ http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/tao-te-ching-of-the-way-and-integrity/856790?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/1 ]

At the party when he finished it, I imagined, he’d discretely disappear along the huts at the Great Wall. But he didn’t, he continued living inside his dying.  Less than a century after the man who was the original author of the Tao Te Ching died, no one knew precisely when or where he disappeared along the frontier of the Empire. There were arguments over his family name, afterwards he was just called Lao Tzu, Old Man.

Michael Silver Dragon McKain (1939-2010)

Bourgeoisie Angels and Working Class Angels (Part II)

 

“There is no angel that is not terrifying…”Rainer Maria Rilke

Over the last few weeks I’ve traveled around Northern New Mexico for fresh vegetables and cheese, to haggle for rugs and for a sort of spiritual companionship. Here in the Jemez Valley, where I frequently stay, there is plenty of reliable religious fellowship. This village contains theological multitudes; parishes, congregations, cloisters, bodis, rabbis, wiccan circles, agnostics and secret pueblo religions. I have friends and acquaintances who are shamans, healers, former monks, nuns, aged priests and artists. Prayer and meditation are serious parts of their life, as are moderation, tolerance and other civic virtues suburbs hint at, but seldom possess. I appreciate the fact that they let me alone.

The Dali Lama seems like a genuinely nice guy who wears brown lace ups (size 7 ½); the Pope doesn’t appear particularly nice and wears red slip-ons (size 11). Most religion seems like that to me.

I have empathy, but little sympathy for the hypocrisies that abuse the good intent of religion. Dying is lonely; I appreciate the desire to have fellowship in passing. These days I really don’t pursue as many communal sacred diversions as I once did. Nonetheless I’ve been turned away on the road to Billy Graham’s Eagle’s Nest and asked a pilgrim’s entry to a variety of shrines, retreats, sanctuaries, kivas, mosques, and paid my admission to others.

I keep going. They’re like poetry—extravagant and often sincere.

In my life now everything seems sad, serious work, even play and pretending.
Yes, I recognize my tonal symptomolgies of depression, anhedonia, dysthymia, anxiety, insomnia. I’m intimate with the litany of our modern sadnesses, and the legends of their cures. I’ve passed being fifty and avoided suicide and other age appropriate disasters; my psychological state is of little concern to anyone. In deed I’ve reached that level of venerability as to endure periods of seeming invisibility…which aren’t without a certain disconcerting charm. Increasingly I feel shunted off to less vivacious groups. So increasingly I force myself into singular travels. Long drives across a desert, a solo hike in the forest, or a few weeks alone temporarily restores my sense of independence, but I know none of us are mavericks for long.

But as I have since my youth, for adventure I pursue ideas I don’t feel comfortable with…like angels.

This summer I’ve been searching for angels. Not like a cable television documentary or expose, I’m merely asking about people who confess commerce with celestial beings. In this part of the world, I seem to find more of them. Although I studied the translations of Jeanne D’Arc’s trial (recommended) and spent hours at the website of a person who claims a Doctorate in Creationism (not recommended), I travel by word of mouth. It feels more seemly that way. Angelic people are easy to ridicule, but that’s not my intention. Ridicule is for the young or clever. I’m merely shallow enough to try to reflect passing images. I loafe and admire my fellow travelers.

South of Santa Fe there’s a place called Stardreaming recommended by my friend Cyrus. You can visit it by appointment for $22. For $3 you can view the infamous Dionysian D.H. Lawrence paintings at the La Fonda Hotel in Taos, $20 for the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, and for $13 at the Loreto Chapel in Santa Fe you can visit the Spiral Staircase miraculously constructed by a legendary traveling carpenter, thought to be St. Joseph. There’s no admission to the Sanctuario at Chimayo and it’s been there the longest.

On the appointed day of my visit to Stardreaming it was blindingly hot and windy. Like a character out of Gide or Paul Bowles I was punctual and overly polite. One o’clock. There were four women on the verandah sipping purified water, chatting and laughing loudly. I announced myself to a bearded man in a field hat. He recalled my name, gave me a map and waved his arm by way of orientation. Feeling self possessed I accepted a self-guided tour, but first walked to my car for water and a broken golf umbrella that would serve me as a parasol. As I was re-buttoning my sleeves a woman reloading her bags into the hatchback of  the rental car parked next to me struck up a conversation. She was from the United Nations. “It’s failed really…and we’re investigating different ways of expanding the ideal…like this place.” We agreed to try to meet at the Taos Inn for tea the next day. I walked steadily towards the Temple of the Stars.

There are sixteen open air temples created by James Jereb at Stardreaming. They are stone constructions limning out various interpreted alchemical or indigenous shapes and labyrinths across a flat desert hillside. Some have required massive labor, some are constructed with rare minerals, others are eidetic and weird. I walked through all of them. In spite of the wind frequently reversing my umbrella, I walked each labyrinth as patiently and as consciously as I could. I listened. The wind chimes were wild. One broke free. At the Temple of the Talking Stones I was accompanied by a butterfly intent on visiting the small blossoms that had grown between the guide stones. Wind gusts bent back the stems and blossoms, but the butterfly held on. One doesn’t ordinarily think of a butterfly as tenacious. At the Temple of the Thirteen Grandmothers I enjoyed the memory of the feeling of my mother. I was grateful for that sensation, and content to leave it. I poured out water as a formal offering of libation…perhaps to the memory, perhaps to close my dreaming.

James was alone in his studio when I returned. He offered me some water and asked me about my experience. As I started to talk, he took out a leather notebook and began writing. I wasn’t clear if he was taking notes on what I was saying, or something else. It was something else. The studio windows were opposite four 4’X 7’ paintings of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael. The paintings were a combination of folk art, Eastern Orthodox icons and a trained eye. My seat faced the paintings. James said I only saw the final layer of each painting and there were seven paintings beneath each one. This technique was dictated to him by Archangels and intuition. In a prior avocation James F Jereb PhD, published a book on Moroccan Arts and Crafts with Chronicle Books (They’re the people who put moleskin back into bookstores). James was enjoyable to talk with, laughed  and appeared comfortable discussing any topic I brought up. I brought up angels.

I wept when they told me I had to give up my writing contract. I had a three book deal with a major British publishing house. My life was made. I cried, but I had to do it. They said I would paint and make art in the desert. I wasn’t a painter. I didn’t know about making art. Now Raphael is my agent. He said he’d take care of everything…No that’s your cell phone alarm, they drain the batteries. [reconstructed]

That’s how I knew out interview was ended, my cell phone battery died. I didn’t ask him why angels want to drain cell phones, or why Archangel Michael directed Jeanne D’Arc to restore the French Monarchy only to have it end in the Reign of Terror. Angels are anti-rational. Like religion they serve to permit madness in a rationalistic mind.

That James Jereb can or can’t speak with three Archangels simultaneously, or has a diminished opinion of those forced to channel, or that in his opinion Archangels are sometimes evasive, seemed insignificant next to the obvious manifestation of his sixteen temples. By some direction James came to the New Mexico Desert and materializied his enormous dream. The world his Archangels choose for him is mineral, fallow and merciless. Perhaps it takes a belief of preternatural connection to have the courage to undertake a risk that specific and eccentric. It’s the risk of a creative life, but even art monsters like Picasso or Diego Rivera weren’t directed by their muses to the bleak edges of nowhere to truck rock.

Within ourselves we recognize familiar places that we sense shouldn’t be familiar. We’ve all experienced déjà vu, premonitions, had vivid dreams, felt a deep bond to a stranger, come to a place that somehow spoke to us, or been surprised by an impulse. But only a singular few of us do anything extraordinary with that mysterious information. At best we sift through it like archaeologists finding a false door in an excavation, perhaps we pay someone to analyze the beauty out and leave us with a neurological artifact, or we chatter it away as if it was yesterday’s sports score. These experiences are disconcerting to most of us; they seldom inspire confidence. Instead we’re almost desperate to be relieved by the security of our predictable mundane. We despise digging our ruts, but hate to leave them. Our daily trenches are essential. The structure they provide allow us to walk through our lives dreaming we know who we are and what we’re doing. Like James we construct labyrinths, only interior ones that keep us in a sense of dreamy wander, but return us exactly where we began.

Perhaps it takes a message from an archangel to penetrate all the fear we have to accept to not believe in our own possibilities. I don’t know if James’ Archangels are real, but he is. I’m not sure I’d follow him to relieve the siege of Orleans, but that’s not what he’s asking. He’s only asking visitors to go off to relieve their private sieges.

 And the truth is I asked to visit him.

Bourgeoisie Angels and Working Class Angels

It’s late, almost too late to begin something, but I’ve been thinking about angels. A friend sent me a remembrance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a martyr of the last century under the Nazis. For some parts of my life, it may take days and false starts and distractions until I can resurrect a context to retrieve information I’ve buried in my memory. So sit with me briefly waiting in my mother’s kitchen smoking a Garcia Vega cigar, wearing a second hand tan cardigan over a buttoned up white shirt and be nineteen for the last Easter I went to church. You can stroke our first real beard and page through The Cost of Discipleship for the paper we’re writing on Bonhoeffer and civil disobedience. Or you can just sip black coffee and wait for my mother to ask if you’re going to church dressed like a bum from down on the tracks.  

Like everyone since April 30, 1945 I had been sporadically searching for Hitler. Not the Hitler identified by the x-ray of his dental bridge, but my personal Hitler, the one who had escaped to the Buenos Aires of my imagination. He was the ugly knife’s edge of pacifism, the sounding depth of Humanism and the fantasy object of untold fictional searches in thousands of disturbing forms.

Perhaps my most excessive is an astonishing film by German director Hans-Jurgen Synberg entitled “Our Hitler, A Film from Germany”. With a 442” running time it took me two days to see it at the Rice Media Center (which in those days had only apropos, but ultimately unbearable canvas director’s chairs).  Utilizing actors, documentary clips, faux documentary clips, puppets, circus charades and Brechtian staging, the film presents a vision of the psycho-cultural freak show that surrounded Hitler,and still surrounds our personal cults of Hitler. The film concludes with an actor haranguing a puppet of Hitler for inventing spiritual death. Prior to that I had merely a few weeks run of “The Producers” managing the old Mt. Adams Cinema and a poorly attended week of  Marcel Ophuls, ”The Sorrow and the Pity”, weighing in at a mere 251”.  For censorous reasons we canceled the engagement of “The Night Porter” after one night, so I’ll just hint at those images in my memory’s Hitler filmfest.

I mention these images because  Hitler was closer to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer (and I) expected from an angel’s arrival on Earth.

An angel is generally a messenger from a God whose enigmatic will had been disobeyed, and now was in the enigmatic process of correction. With broad ecumenism messengers climb up and down heavenly ladders. In the Christian Bible Adam has commerce with angelic beings after Satan convinces Eve to eat the fruit and angelic constables come for their eviction. In dramatic contrast The Quran describes a prior struggle between Adam and angels, over domination and knowledge, and subsequently Eve is tempted and so on… Zoroastrians had individual guardian angelic spirits called Fravashi. If you are a Bhuddist you might recognize the messages of  Devas. Hindus can be enlightened by both Devas and Apsaras. The list goes on, Elohim, Melachim, Malaikah, Chenrezig, I know the individual names of Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, plus Selaphiel, Jehudiel, Baracheil, Jeremeil and Moroni. Sheraphim, Cherubim, Powers and Dominions were the classification of Angels and Archangels I had to learn in grammar school. This isn’t even begining to consider the angelic in Swedenborg, Blake, Rilke, or Rumi. And these are only the “good” angels.

Human beings have rough formed angels out of clay, depicted them in monumental architecture, paintings, statues, movies, television, plays, songs, operas, turned them into silver pendants, brass broach pins,  figurines, holy cards, and greeting cards. They’re employed to lovingly decorate nurseries, kitchens and Christmas trees.  I recognize most of this as sincere, religious expression. We also have toilet tissue, baseball teams, vigilante groups, bored strippers, snow rakes, tee shirts, copyrighted reading cards, two versions of a sexy crime fighting trio, and drops to remove secretions from dog’s eyes all named after angels. Angel wings decorate motorcycle paraphernalia and debauched angels model the line of Victoria’s Secret lingerie that bears their name.  I recognize most of that as crass, religious exploitation. Should His Holiness come under attack, the Pope retreats to Castel San Angelo; I don’t know what I think about that.

However an over familiarity with this all this angelic information, names, hierarchies and a modern sense of angelic agency seem rampant in the world I’m traveling through. I’m a pilgrim in a world with a thousand convenient petit religions and very little real moral obligation. I can connect you to a person who can get you a callback from the Archangel Raphael with the same facility a twenty year old can find you illicit drugs. It wasn’t always like this. 

When I grew up there were two types of angels, monstrous angels and guardian angels. The monstrous angels had power and proportion like Hitler. When they arrive things happen— frequently terrible things, the demise of Paradise, deluge, fire and brimstone, ends of reigns, death of every first born, Apocalypse. They didn’t bring messages about worrisome investments, finding real estate, or to tweak soul mate dating. Their fiery swords were unsheathed and they were merciless in their work.

The other type was guardian angels…sort of working familiars.  Many of us can remember a lurid religious print called “Heilige Schutengel”. It depicts a kindly fairy-like woman, looking a lot like Glenda, the Good Witch, with enormous white wings hovering as two shoeless peasant children stray across a rickety bridge over a chasm. It’s a dark and stormy night.

I grew up in a time and place when holding a union card was considered normal. Guardian Angels, I assumed were the rank and file angels, not quite probationary Clarence Oddbodies, but somehow from a lesser, dues paying caste. Guardian Angels were celestial security guards armed only with an inaudible whisper. By Ecclesiastical Tradition each of us had a personal guardian angel, but I wasn’t sure if membership applied to all mankind, or just the card carrying members of my specific religion. But the concept that lesser angels might be employed as unionized safety men seemed believable enough. There were lots of bad, dull jobs to complain about in my little city, so I assumed whomever (or whichever, I’m not quite sure about gender versus entity) had the job of guiding my spiritual safe conduct wasn’t enthusiastic about the assignment.

Even in latency I found the idea of constant surveillance creepy. But if I was hesitant about running out into traffic, drinking unmarked bottles of poison, or crossing ramshackle bridges, that was due to the work of my Guardian Angel. On the other hand,  if I carelssly sauntered towards occasions of sin, or committed sins (My precocious literacy had given me categorized lists of sins in “The Examination of Conscience”, so quite early on I recognized I had a full day of work before me.) Sister Ursa told me this made my Guardian Angel cry while trying to watch over me. Something like trying to do your math exercises after a nun slapped you.

At the risk of appearing chronologically inconsistent I feel obligated to discuss Grigori, or Watchers. The Watchers, sometimes called the “ Awakened” or “Sleepless Ones” , have a long and more colorful religious history than mine. In the Antediluvian Age there were by legend 200 Watcher Angels. These celestials fell for women. One thing led to another and before long there was a race of sort of Promethean giants known as the Nephilim [Genesis 6:4].  According to various sources including the Apocryphal Book of Enoch they brought mankind, weapons, mirrors, writing and cosmetics.  However by Genesis 6:5, they were at least partially responsible for bringing The Deluge. This early excess may account for the seeming excessive regulations on modern Guardian Angels.

Because of the exponential fruitfulness of the human race I assume guardian angels must be working on a spiritual/human assembly line, like our maligned social workers. Close the file on one soul, move on to the next, falling towers of files…a certain margin of error has to be anticipated. Maybe they apply for promotions, maybe they have focus groups and performance reviews…I can only guess based on the gifts of the Nephilim. If you have any feelings for angelic beings, please have some compassion for my poor Guardian Angel. Once I got a transistor radio in the third grade, my capacity to hear subsonic suggestions has been twisted by twangs, drumbeats and static.  My antropromorphisized Guardian Angel has changed from the beneficent Good Fairy on the bad bridge, to the worn look I get from Ms.Catar, the office manager at my Sports Orthopedist. ”Fill out the form again anyway…Whudja do this time Achilles?”.

Maybe adults don’t deserve guardian angels…maybe children shouldn’t be on collapsing bridges with or without their better angels. We all have to do the hard work in our own world; it’s not cheap or easy. “…our struggle today is for costly grace.” at least that’s what Bonhoeffer said.

Cistern of Atavism

The other morning I went out to hand water the garden. It’s a quieting ritual I share with a few birds before the sun comes over the mountain to my east. I noticed the hose didn’t seem to work to draw water from the catchment cistern. After various Laurel and Hardy-like routines of switching hoses, looking in working facets and so on, I climbed a ladder and peered in. The 500 gallon cistern was nearly empty. My body reacted the same way it did years ago when I sat on the curb and saw the car I wrecked, or watched police break through my door, or shook my grandfather’s hand the hot afternoon I got married. A physical sinking flush of realization that I was powerless to change what was happening, and that event was staring into me. Looking in that dark water I felt a deeper unmediated part of me silently shrieking. I felt as if I’d fallen off the ladder and was struggling to run away, but couldn’t…that dream. Be clear, as close as I come to farming is shaking hands with people at the farmer’s markets where I buy vegetables when the weather’s nice. My garden is herbs and ornamentals. I was raised in an industrial city in northern Ohio, not a drought plagued geography. My experiences with cisterns and drought have been limited to tourism, art and literature. So I was more surprised at my reaction than, the actual low cistern. Where did such a deep wild reaction originate from within me, some lost memory, the collective unconscious…was I channeling a maintenance message from the dead owners of this house?

Sometime in my more academically ambitious past I was researching possible relationships between the contemporaneous Rilke and Jung. I was interested not just in their theories of memory, art and the collective unconscious, but “Blood Memory”. Blood Memory, now primarily restricted to detective novel titles, old Star Trek episodes and confused fringe groups, was a fashionable theory at the turn of the 20th Century. It was a way of knowing without learning or experience. It extrapolated genetics into a primitive cultural feeling of déjà vu by inventing a corpuscular memory bank; it was popular with both artists and racists.  It gave credence to unarticulated feelings that seemed too real to be merely transient or random. My Grandparents would have learned about Blood Memory in the same passing way we understand Alzheimer’s disease or deep water drilling. It was Social Darwinism for those who didn’t want to accept or bother to read Darwin.

Eventually my project disintegrated into a pile of manila files, a shelf of pretentious books and unreviewed notes. For me the parts became more valuable than the whole. I traveled to Austria and had a deep, satisfying reading of Rilke in a small cottage with the wind whispering under the door, and spent a couple years in Jungian analysis, and seemed to have moved on. But the value of knowledge doesn’t reside in institutions and mere information, its nature is direct contact and experience. It is the tedious, hand to hand relationship with the world that forms (or deforms) every culture and art piece by piece. Failing to maintain that person by person integration leaves civilizations broken and in ruin. To integrate genuine knowledge of the world requires a marriage, a mutual possession. For the most part that possession is what a university lecture or a museum can only demonstrate in fragments…which in part brings me back to Rilke and Jung and a famous fragment of a statue. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo” Rilke explores a relationship of interiorities between the viewer and the viewed:

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo, RMR, translated Stephen Mitchell]

He prescribed a kind of reflexive struggle of perception where the viewer encounters an object and is entered by that object. The jarring admonishment Rilke gives at the end of the poem comes neither from the viewer or the object, but from a voice created by possession.

Jung had a similar, if somewhat less lyrical description of possession”… In the state of possession both figures [animus & anima] lose their charm and their values; they retain them only when they are turned away from the world, in the introverted state, when they serve as bridges to the unconscious. “ [Concerning Rebirth C.W.]

The idea that a person can be spiritually or psychically held, enthused, ridden, inspired, taken over by a being or sense other than their conscious mind has been in human parlance since there has been human parlance. And in nearly every form of language possession has been used as a form of preternatural communication.

Possession isn’t at all a foreign notion to our age, not in a world where people strap explosive vests to themselves to fight Holy Wars, the Wall Street Journal publishes articles detailing whether or not members of Sarah Palin’s former congregations spoke in tongues, and people have images of dead loved ones tattooed on themselves. For a great many of us, we are our possessions. Excluding the explosive vests and war, I’m not too critical any of this. I suspect nearly all human beings need to be “possessed” at some times, and some quite frequently. Many of us go deeply out of our way to have that experience. We pray in varieties of ways to varieties of deities, dutifully dance to our favorite songs, do yoga (religious and secular), search for hours to buy rare trash on Ebay, fall in love with strangers, gasp at horror movies, write poems, meditate, keep our dreams in journals, sing in our cars, train for ultra marathons,  cry over tele-novellas, obsessively practice musical instruments, dress in period costumes to reenact Civil War battles, and ingest all manner of psychoactive concoctions…all for that perception of both being more than real and genuinely there at the same time. To varying extents we assess the value of our efforts based on the same criteria Rilke and Jung outlined…of being more fully present than we are in the tedium of most of our lives and an other-worldly awareness of simultaneous connection with the past and present and that this connection has resonance in our bodies. Being there.

But there is so seldom an authentic there. It’s a weird adverb; it’s always a relation, and always just there away from us. Both Rilke and Jung seem to agree that  to be possessed, to get there to recieve the message requires some courtship, a pilgrimage, a ritual..a great silence. For twenty or thiry years I pursued the mysterious people who built mounds and pyramids all over North America. Since my youth I’ve read and engaged in intuitive preparation, from visiting Mound Builder sites, to sleeping on earthwork serpents, building earthwork sculpture and crawling through terrifying humid tunnels in pyramids constructed to inter much smaller men than me. I didn’t want mere knowledge; I wanted contact.

Not too many summers ago I was standing in the noontime sun estimating how many billion cochineal it would have taken to dye the Placio de los Juguares red, just as my grad student tour guide at Tenochtitlan began presenting her theory of Las Vegas. “It is a simulacrum…designed to look like a Venice, Egypt, or New York, that doesn’t exist except by façade and in the imagination of tourists. It’s a pronoun without a physical antecedent.” Her implication was that tourists were too ignorant to know better, or wanted to co-opt another culture on the cheap. Somehow vacationers and gamblers had no right to experience even a faux physical knowledge of places they hadn’t actually visited. Her thesis was that American architecture had abandoned self possession in favor of the artificial security of commercializing things past.

Apart from the air conditioning, I asked, how that was different from our wandering Mexican ruins imagining the culture that had been there 1,000 years ago?

Unconsciously I had paid an erudite woman to distract my anticipated communion by generating a post PoMo critique of the Las Vegas strip while we were strolling the thousand year old ‘The Avenue of the Dead’. She chattered passionately covering the barely audible trickle of the baths that once fed and cleansed a city of 200,000 sophisticated human beings. She waited in a shaded café while I climbed the legendary Pyramid of the Sun,  a structure consecrated over and over in the blood of human sacrifice. The Aztecs visited these ruins, when they visited ruins.  It was the home of Quetzacoatl. We could only talk about a fake Vegas.

Neither she nor I could be were where we were, or who we were. She was distracted by a conceptual Las Vegas she found attractive, but not beautiful. I was ignoring the physical fragments of a city I had traveled an exhuasting distance by bus to visit. I wasn’t making a personal connection on any level in the presence of some of the most important monumental art on the continent. I had possession of nothing but a sunburn and a lecture.

And then suddenly one morning I’m looking down the hole of a water tank and I’m stunned. I’ve been siezed in the fangs of Tlaloc, the god of rain. I’m connected like lightning to a dark terrifying world of loss that both Rilke and Jung tell me I should live in and care for like my garden. I’m possessed.

It doesn’t take Rilke, Jung or even a second rate psychic to understand what a 58 year old man sees in the bottom of that well. I was possessed by my own death and it was looking back at me. The dry reality of my limited days and  the diminishing resources of my own life were my “borders” and “bursting star”. The message of the warm black water was the same as followed the polished white torso.

 Over the next few days when I thought or wrote about  the cistern, or Rilke’s broken statue, Jung’s unconscious realm of battling shadows, walking through Tenochitlan or even Venetian canals in Las Vegas. I became nervous and ennerated. I couldn’t read.  Mere knowledge was just so much stuff next to seeing my own death. Thinking made me want to brew more tea, drive in to town, check World Cup scores…watch “King Kong” again. Part of me had fallen into that cistern and  I couldn’t repossess it.

On a whim I stole a piece of my wife’s water color stock and mindlessly began painting circles with her water colors. First pale painted spheres the size of cherries, surrounded by yellow gold rings, then periwinkle and purple saucer sized loops nestled in the colors of shaded mountain grass, and this encircled by cloudy blotches of blue. It meant something to me, but I had only an inarticulate sense of what it might be. But it brought me  a deep physical relief and a faint whispering under my skin.

I believe there is  enough water in the cistern for the garden to survive. I believe it will rain soon; I can feel it in my blood.