blogomania

Yes, I’m a skeptic, but a yearning skeptic like those characters in the novels of Saul Bellow who reject orthodox religion but are smitten, nevertheless, by the mystical strands of Judaism, like the Kaballah, in which they are intellectually and emotionally wrapped.

Logically, we know we are specks of dust; the earth we stand on is a mass of rock. And our mutual spinning starts and stops. We are tops, both the Earth and we ourselves, and so we spin on for our day before we topple.

What then to make of all this talk of the soul?

It’s an expression that is ancient and impregnable. No one will put aside the word, the thought because  I scoff at it a bit. It’s been rolling down the eons, unobstructed, since before we began to make history.

We think of the “primitives” around their campfires, keeping out the dark and chill, invoking the name of their gods, imploring a connection with something larger than themselves. The soul is what united them with what was out there in the dark, beyond, way beyond their rational understanding.

We think, without too much difficulty of the modern primitives who huddle around the campfires of their churches, invoking God and soul against the howling darkness.

Or the mystics, nuts, Hare Krishnas, New Agers, you name ‘em, who insist on connection.

What do you mean by soul? I asked my wife, the other night, part of our pillow talk. As Jen is the daughter of a conservative Protestant minister, she might seem entitled to have an opinion on such things.

She looked at me sweetly and confessed her uncertainty.

I wonder, I said, if it’s not just that connection with our ancestors, the thread both genealogical and more than that, with whatever it is that has come before us — and that will keep us going in the form of our heirs and assigns?

The soul is that “father-stuff,” to use a Whitmanism, or “mother-stuff” that we send through the eons? That spunk off the old block with which we ward off terror and provide for something beyond ourselves? The roots, shoots, leaves, and tendrils with which we reach down, and up, rejoicing that we are not, after all, alone?

The family has suffered the loss of several dear ones in the past year or so — our father (who art in heaven, if he has his way), our brother-in-law Russ, our sister Barb, and a cousin, Rachel, who died very young, at 20 years, leaving behind a baby.

These losses have occasioned much sorrow and reflection, not least regarding the prospects of an afterlife.

Michelangelo's "Last Judgment." What an imagination!

I grew up with the Catholic idea of resurrection and was nurtured on it, attending mass and reading the lives of the saints, including all the bloody virgins and martyrs who went to their end with the full assurance of an everlasting reward.

Then a secular and may I say secular humanist education intervened. I traveled mentally from the precincts of Catholic parochial school education to the elysian fields of the university, where, as they say, the mind is wont to roam, even romp. Just as my dad predicted, but in a different way, I lost my faith. No one preached against Christianity, but of course I read all the great authors — English, American, and German — that were part of my double major in English and German literature. And most of these figures, especially the moderns, were skeptical. They looked, inquired, prayed, protested — and heard a resounding nothing from the heavens.

I’ve not been a practicing Catholic or Christian since the days of my university education, and now more than ever, as I age, I see fewer and fewer reasons to resume such belief.

In fact, at Rachel’s funeral, just a week ago, as the priests prattled on about resurrection and recited the gospel story of Jesus, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, the disjunction between what was available to see and what was hoped yawned like a chasm.

Yes, the story says that Jesus said, “Lazarus, come forth!” and he came forth from the tomb.

“Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” as Hemingway might have put it. (Yes, he was one of my atheistical heroes during my undergrad years and then, later, years of teaching literature and language.)

But not to get entangled with that myth too much, the funny thing is that Lazarus was resurrected in the here and now, while the faithful are asked to wait for the last day.

Yes, Lazarus, Jesus’s pal, got immediate gratification, while the rest of us are asked to hang around, moldering forever, till the last day, whenever that might be.

And without much evidence of any kind, the faithful, evidently, buy this.

Both Rachel’s grieving mother and her sister assured me, when I embraced them, that Rachel “is in a better place now.”

Oh, my. A far, far better place than you and I have dwelled in?

Will heaven be a place without drugs, say, or sex, say, or any other of the immediate gratifications that might have proved Rachel’s downfall — and that of how many countless others?

I have my doubts. If it’s the same on earth as it is in heaven, we won’t be able to wait in heaven, either, when heaven comes at last. We can wait forever, hang around for eternity, in the hope of this afterlife. (Of course, we’ll be moldering as we wait — in a bitter place, the grave — or our ashes will be dispersed.) But when heaven comes, there will be our dear departed ones waiting for us, ready to hand out the pleasures that we enjoyed on earth — the drugs or booze of our choice, the sexual delectations, the pizza rolls, the Gummy Bears, the Red Bulls, you name it, that we might need to stay awake forever.

Let’s not scoff at the Muslims and their promise of virgins in the afterlife for their lunatic martyrs. Not until we give us similar naive hopes and learn to dwell in the present, which is all we have, both heaven and hell. And learn to accept life on its own terms. And get on with it.

Timothy, an "extremely stressed-out" orange tabby, was rescued from the frozen highway but died later

Yes, someone or some ones (any idea re the demographic?) glued a 7-month-old tabby cat (whom the rescuers called Timothy) to a highway a half hour west of Mankato, Minnesota a week before Christmas. A passing motorist spotted the cat and got help, but Timothy, “extremely stressed-out,” died despite veterinary treatment by Second Chance Rescue Center in Sioux Falls, SD.

We wonder, of course, who could have done such a thing. What perversities of human nature were engaged by the sight of such a small, defenseless, powerless creature facing death. What grotesqueries of humor were evoked by the idea of gluing a living animal to a highway. If this isn’t an image of powerlessness and helplessness — a scene begging rescue, as in the old melodramas, where Dudley Dooright rescues the maiden on the railroad tracks — I don’t know what is.

Yet this is no silly melodrama. No case of right overcoming wrong.

The cat glued to the highway, immobilized — poised to be rescued or, more likely, run over. A passing motorist, a good Samaritan, sees the little beast, stops, takes it to a shelter, but it’s too late for effectual rescue.

We picture ourselves lying there in the same helpless position. We think of Prometheus (absurdly, I know) bound to a rock in the Caucasus. But this is no hero, pecked by vultures sent by the gods. Nor is it Jesus, suffering for our sins. It’s a tabby, just seven months old, maybe a stray, who knows, without its tabby family or a decent human one. Someone wants to dispense with it, this bit of fluff, this nothing protoplasm. And so, in glee, in company with others of the same mind, if we can call it mind, takes it out to the  frozen stretch of highway and glues the struggling animal to the pavement.

No, it’s not Prometheus. It’s not Christ. It’s not a holy martyr of any kind. Yet it is a sacrifice to good sense, kindness, reason, humanity, qualities we evidently more and more seem to be able to do without these days.

Ex-Hollywood actor Ken Wahl, now an animal rights activist, has contributed to a reward fund to find the perp(s), citing the possibility of another budding Jeffrey Dahmer on the loose. Sure, and we start with torturing animals, then graduate to powerless humans. If they’re not already powerless, we knock them out with drugs, we drag them into our den, we slice them up, we suck their blood.

Or we do something about it. We keep our eyes open. We watch for perversions of our better nature, and we dissect them. We think about it. We do something about it. We take a time-out and meditate depravity.

One of our first days in Mexico, in early July, Jen and I were walking through the cobbled streets of Ajijic, on Lake Chapala, and J stopped in the middle of the street, apparently lost.

A gallant fat man stepped out of his shop on the far side and asked if he could help her find something. J was fine, she said, just pausing, and in this pause I came up and acknowledged I was perpetually lost, it was my particular human condition.

When I inquired what the man did in his shop, he pointed into the dusky, dusty interior and said he was a carpenter. He and his workers made all kinds of things, senor — from cabinets, tables, and chairs to coffins.

Whoa, there! I protested. I’m not ready for one of those just yet, sir! Give me a few more years if you please.

At which, of course, he laughed.

But is it a laughing matter?

Sure, and why not, lads and lasses? Like life itself?

Have been reading – and am now almost done with – D. H. Lawrence’s early novel Sons and Lovers (1913), a book I began at home some months ago but was not able or willing to make much progress with. Now, with the leisure afforded by this month-long vacation and the brilliant light of the Mexican highlands, I am flying through the novel enraptured.

Enraptured – a strong Lawrentian word, to be sure, that suggests the tone of the book altogether – Paul Morel’s raptures in love and learning, nature and art – which become our raptures, too, impossibly, as we enter into the text and are swept away by it.

This despite the faults of plot and narrative – Lawrence’s ungodly preaching and didacticism; his inconsistencies in describing his characters’ states of mind; his falling, all too frequently, despite railing against the demotic values, into the pit of sentimentality (the psychological coal mine he would hack at and exploit).

Yet even now, almost 100 years after Sons and Lovers was published, this book and others by Lawrence retain an elemental force and power to move us up and out of our mundane tempers. Chief in his arsenal of artistic weapons may be his nature writing – a clumsy term to express how keenly observant Lawrence is of all the forces of nature around him (or his character Paul Morel) and that includes the independent life of plants and flowers; the force of rivers, streams, and ponds; the insistence on animal life and living, whether dog’s or man’s.

Naturally, his insistence that man is an animal is what made – and makes – Lawrence revolutionary. Long before he wrote Lady Chatterly, that cause célèbre, he was showing us how we too are subject to and frequently overmastered by natural forces; how the blood rises up in us, as in Morel the young virgin, and carries us away, a flood far, far stronger than all the polite words we might muster to represent, or conceal, our human condition.

So even when Lawrence preaches about his characters’ emotions, telling us, for example, with almost shocking frequency how one character hates the other, we realize the characters are being borne on tides of passion and emotion, natural forces that will go far toward washing away the muck of Victorian repression and dishonesty that plagued those times – and that continue, in only slightly altered forms, to plague ours.

Even if the young Paul Morel’s painting does not much suggest an ablution of the old values, Lawrence’s prose is a perfect flood – a hundred-year event, we might say, to cleanse the floodplain of both art and life, and make both possible once again on a higher plane.

(Last August, in Chapala, just a few miles down the road, I finished Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, the first draft of which he had finished in the very house, now a B & B, in which we were staying. I thought the book both wondrous and preposterous, so much passion and melodrama, so much preaching and protesting against false European and bourgeois values. The heroine, an American lady, gives in to the force of a Mexican revolution in cultural and sexual mores, sacrificing herself on the altar of respectability to the force of the new Quetzalcoatl.)

Jen and I visited a small shop in Ajijic yesterday, a women’s cooperative in which women from the local area knit and sew and crochet various articles of clothes and décor, from blouses and dresses to change purses, some very nice work indeed.

The young woman clerk on duty was there with her infant son of nine months, she told us. Her name was Candy, she allowed, and his was Benjamin.

Aha! I proclaimed. Like Benjamin Franklin?

Like Benjamin Button! she countered. (Ben-ha-MEEN Boo-TONE.)

Candy with her cute-as-a-button Ben

And her little Benjie was indeed cute as a button in his mother’s arms. And wrapped in the mantle of the silver screen, as I’m sure Candy had seen the recent film based on a Scott Fitzgerald story, not read the story itself. (I’ve seen neither.)

What a gauze our Hollywood spins! What a worldwide wonder fabric!

And we hope that Benjie, our little boo-TONE, will not grow younger and younger over the years –heavens no! – like the character in the Fitzgerald story – but will grow older and prosper and, who knows, some day achieve an education that Candy may never have had – and be able to decide on his own whether he wants merely to see the movie or will read the book. (Will reading survive to his maturity?)

These coop feminists, I inquired after taking the Madonna and child photo, are they crazy? Oh, no, Candy protested. Are they dangerous? Why do you ask, sir?

A stitch in time can save nine, indeed – and the lives of many a young and pretty boy.

So why don’t you write something about Michael Jackson, someone asked. So why not, and just what should I say?

It’s not that I have especially fond or powerful memories of the man / boy / victim / abuser, as I do about the Beatles, for example (for whom my generation swooned when they performed and wept when they broke up). My son, born 15 years after Jackson, might have identified with him more, and certainly listened to him and saw his moves on MTV in Jackson’s heyday of the early to mid-‘80s.

Pathetic testimony on CNN just now (we’re waiting at the Mpls.-St. Paul airport for a flight to Houston and from there to Guadalajara, Mexico) from a weeping nurse about how Jackson begged her just four days before his death for some heavy-duty pain killers, whether Demerol or whatever.

Yet we can yearn, we who are deadened and desensitized to pain so much that it takes a mega-jolt of celebrity pain to wake us, overexposed as we are to such flattering and flatulent “news,” merely to escape the noise.

I shall try not to contribute much, then, to the din, except to add that the fruits of celebrity are far more ponderous and poisonous than is commonly allowed.

Yesterday, July 3, my lady love and I took a hike after lunch down to Lake Chapala, in Jalisco, Mexico, where we are vacationing this month, to admire Ajijic’s new malecon, a wide stone walkway stretching perhaps three-quarters of a mile west of the fishing pier.

When we had strolled two-thirds of the way down the malecon, admiring the stonework and a mini-Dionysian theater in the half round, we encountered in the road that goes down to the lake and separates the two parts of the walk, a group of three beer guzzlers, two men and a young woman, talking to an unshaven vendor who was dragging around a cardboard box tied with twine.

When we approached to resume our walk on the other side of the malecon, the vendor left and we joked a bit with the drinkers, saying it was early for happy hour (must’ve been about 3 pm). We hopped onto the malecon again, then, a more recreational space now with basketball courts and fountains, and encountered just a couple of minutes later the vendor once again or, I should say, he accosted us.

He was skinny, leathery, a bit of dried skin or spittle flecking his lower lip. He talked excitedly, in country dialect, and gesticulated wildly. Yes, he was selling us the goods — to be precise, the contents of his cardboard box, which he advertised as he untied the twine as an elixir past all others. It would cure gastrointestinal distress, backache, and, of course, cancer. It was country-fresh and country-raw, the ingredients a country secret. But for a mere 10 pesos, less than a buck, it would do all this for us and more.

But he also loved the campo, the countryside, near his home, and described in extravagant pantomime and country patois the fruits (and vegetables) of his labors: the peaches (dur-ASH-nos), pears (PAY-ras), blackberries (shar-sha-MO-rash), and mushrooms (ON-gas) that he tended and plucked and ate.

He was such a character and a charade, this Rosario (Ro-SHAR-e-yo), from the hamlet across the lake called La Manzanilla de la Paz (the little apple of peace, nay, of happiness, of delirium –- Man-sha-NEE-ya) that we could not withhold our smiles and our coins. We gave him 20 pesos for his pains – and he permitted us in turn a few photos. No need for your elixir, sir, we protested, after a sniff of the evil stuff. Your face, that open book (reading delusion, desperation, enterprise, cracked joy), is payment beyond compare. And Ro-shar-e-yo, thanking us profusely many times, declared us, even as we trotted off, “Muy amables, muy amables” (very friendly indeed).

Angelina-Aphrodite, fresh from the sea

She stands against a deep blue sea and an azure sky, does Ms. Jolie. Stands visible from the breast up (a bust and then a bust, we might say) and giving us, her adoring public, her panting men-children, the once-over. Her hair is slicked back, wet with ocean; the moisture glazes the skin of her face and naked shoulders; her eyes are narrowed, under arching brows, and though the pupils barely show, floating just under her long lashes, she is looking down at us — down on us — from the height and hauteur of her beauty, of her unavailability, of her aquiline nose, her slightly parted lips (the lower plump and sensual).

Her lovely face is pointed — that is, her nose, her chin, and the down-driving angle of her regard, and they’re pointing us in a direction too. Her naked shoulders and chest, her chest and the tops of her breasts, are driving us, relentlessly, over the cliff of some decision we will regret (this is an awfully beautiful woman and a clever photographer / image manipulator). What else can we say of the tattoos — the locked black horns, or antlers, delving down, pointing low, just above her declivity, and the twin pink roses, cum leaves and tendrils, gracing the heaving top of each breast cupped in the black retro bustier one-piece? Except that the head of this deer, this buck, this black buck points down, like the head of the phallus itself, toward the proving ground of our pleasure.

Yes, she’s just risen from the ocean, this siren. And our best chance is to strap ourselves like Ulysses to the mast.

She is saying, says a student of mine, a frank and horny young automotive technician, “Eat me!” And no doubt this is true. She is saying eat me up, you swine. Feast on me, you lowly beggars, and despair. Buy my images. See my films. Worship me from the dirt where you writhe, you worms. Eat me and secrete me through the sweat piss shit that pour from you as you make your painful way through life’s dirt, which is your portion and not mine.

Eat me, vermin, and then die.