Days of Flickering Sanity

“Well, you can certainly say this for Jesus,” I tell Lady, “he absolutely stirs around. No grass grows under his feet, I can assure you. Because two weeks ago, he was curing the man miraculously of dropsy—which I had always thought was epilepsy, but which turns out to be merely edema. Well, ‘merely’ unless you’re like the drug addict I passed on the way to the drug store. At least, I presume he’s a drug addict, otherwise how did his leg swell up to such gargantuan proportions?”

“Oh, that’s Robert,” said Lady, “though come to think of it, I think Robert’s lost both of his legs. But then, maybe not. He’s in a wheel chair, anyway.”

Lady tends to knows these things, and if not, Elizabeth from the gift shop does. She’s the one who told me that the old man who instantly sniffed me out for a sucker had gotten in trouble with the law. What had he done? Run drugs, either knowingly or unwittingly. Anyway, he’s not around, which is nice, since he posed a moral problem: was I sinning by begrudging him for asking me—after he had put in his order for bread, orange juice, and ham—for an extra five dollars so that he could buy a hamburger at Burger King? Full confession: I sometimes eat hamburgers too.

“Anyway, it does seem that Jesus would find plenty to do, here in Old San Juan. I mean, we’re living an almost Biblical existence here. The poor are everywhere, diving into dumpsters, begging money, displaying their running sores. And then of course we have the Philistines—re, the tourists, who are completely oblivious to it all. And the locals, most of whom—like me—have settled on two or three people to whom we give money; I keep hoping that somehow there are enough of us, and that we’ve all chosen different people….”

“Well, I always give money to the lady dressed as a medieval nun, complete with the rope tied around her waist.”

“Oh, so that’s how she buys the bottle of El Canario Cooking wine,” I told her.

“Oh, dear—didn’t know that.”

“Well, I give a dollar to the guy raising money for his sister in Barranquitas, since it’s for a liver transplant, and who more than I should be sympathetic to that cause? Oh, and to Gale, since she’s from the Bronx, and she’s always making these little collages out of seashells and corals and anything else she can find. So it’s a salute to tribal unity and entrepreneurism both….”

“Right—but why all this interest in the poor and needy?”

“I think the cantatas are getting to me, and that—if true—is totally bad news. Because today’s reading is particularly glum. Yup, Jesus sails through again, this time curing the man with palsy; he also, by the way, reads the thoughts of the skeptical scribes, and upbraids them for their lack of belief. And once again, the multitudes go off amazed—wait, it’s good enough for the actual quote:”

But when the multitudes saw it, they marvelled, and glorified God, which had given such power unto men.

“Mathew 9:8, King James Version. Oh, and once again we know nothing about the man with palsy—it’s one more four-verse miracle, which leads me to believe that Jesus has invented the equivalent of a drive-through miracle station. Good American efficiency—wait, better than that, German efficiency!”

“You know,” said Lady speculatively, “the absolute dearth of information on these miracle recipients—and shouldn’t there be a better word for that? Maybe a miraclee, as opposed to the miracleer, if not miraclist. Anyway, the point is that if we knew anything about the miraclee, then the assumption would be that he or she—and his or her individual circumstances—had somehow earned the miracle. That the widow of Nain was pious and poor, or that the man with palsy had given alms to the poor, before the palsy struck. But having them utterly faceless, as it were, means that the miracle was granted wholly independent of circumstances…..”

Damn, she’s good!

“I strongly suspect sheer laziness, though your theology may be correct. Anyway, however grim the official readings for the 19^th week after Trinity may be, the texts Bach chose are just awful. What do you do with a text that reads—roughly—‘Oh, destroy this Sodom of sinful inhabitants, but spare the soul and make it pure, so that it can be a Holy Zion for You!’”

“Ouch—is that for real?”

“Very much for real, and that’s just a snippet. In fact, most of BWV 48—one of the cantatas for the week—runs on exactly that rail through twenty minutes or so of self-flagellation. If ever a piece of music were a hair shirt, this is it.”

“I begin to fear,” said Lady, “that all of this religion-making is unbalancing you mentally. Have you checked in on what deleterious effects plagued the creators of the most recent religions?”

“Hmm—excellent point. Are you suggesting I get a psychological workup before plunging any further into this.”

“Nah, but it would be an idea, perhaps, just to find out what happened to those who trod down the same path…”

Right—Google time!

“OK—it’s not starting so well. I mean, I knew that the Mormons were wackoo, but I hadn’t realized how much. I mean, I thought old Joe Smith had died peacefully in his bed, but it turns out that a couple of his followers had had Smith thrown into jail on charges of perjury and polygamy. And they should have known, since Smith had proposed to both of their wives!”

“Hmm—we may have to rethink this project…”

“Right, now moving on to Mary Baker Eddy, of Christian Science fame. And here the news is substantially better: Eddy died of bacterial pneumonia in a very well-heeled suburb of Boston—if indeed suburbs can be well-heeled. Anyway, there’s nothing particularly lurid about her life, except that she may have been a drug addict, she was definitely a spiritualist, and she believed in something called reverse animal magnetism—the power of negative thoughts to harm others, which she felt her former students were using against her. So she had her current students stand outside her door, guarding her as she slept. See?”

“Well, yes, an improvement. Though there’s not much of anywhere you can go, compared with jail and murder. Who’s up next?”

“Well, it’s our old friend Charles Taze Russell, who founded what would become the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And he certainly wasn’t without critics, who accused him of publishing all those tracts, just to make money. Then there was his wife, who stated that Russell had called himself a floating amorous jellyfish, happy to engage with all he encountered. Oh, and then there was the thing about the miracle wheat, which one accuser said Russell was selling at 60 dollars a bushel. By the way, I went onto quotewheat.com—wonderful what we have nowadays—and bush is going for just over five bucks a bushel today.”

“Well, those miracles don’t come cheap,” said Lady.

“And then we come to L. Ron Hubbard….”

“What? The scientology guy?”

“Absolutely, and if you can find a crazier dude, I’ll bow my head to you. Full disclosure—I couldn’t even read the full Wikipedia article on him. But did I need to? He started as a pulp fiction writer, and then verged into religion, and at one point he took to the seas, on his private yachts with his holiest of holies. And they were all so nutso that…well, here’s Wikipedia on the subject.

Britain, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Venezuela all closed their ports to his fleet.

 “Anyway, he certainly didn’t do badly for himself, though he ended his life in a motorhome, although admittedly on his private ranch in California. Oh, and he had a reported 600 million bucks at the time of his death….”

“Hmmm—there is some serious money here. But really, Marc, is it worth it? Do you really want to found a church that attracts wackos like Tom Cruise?”

“Doubt if Cruise would get into the sacred works of Johann Sebastian Bach. But you may have a point.”

“Beethoven,” said Lady. “The perfect antidote to the at times excessive cerebrality—another much-needed word—of Bach. Beethoven is just what you need.”

And so I turned to a work that had saturated and informed a part of my past, as I struggled to get my mother’s last days and death not out of my life, but rather in its proper place. For she would have been the first to want it: the dead must be left behind, which is perfectly as they wish it, and the living? We all have to move on.

Heiliger Dankgesang, here I come!

  

  

Ode to St. Michael

They believe nothing, these modern people, so I must tell them of the eternal truths which our church has revealed and will not stop revealing.

The devil exists, however much we would prefer that he didn’t, and to deny him or to ignore him allows him to grow that much stronger. And how do I know? Because I’ve met him.

I was fourteen at the time, and I, with my friend Georg Erdmann, had won a scholarship to study at the St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg. So we set off together to walk the 180 miles to our new school.

Yes, I said walk—since how else were we to get there? True, a passing farmer with his cart would take us to the end of his fields, or perhaps into the nearest burg, if it was market day, but mostly we walked. At night, we would sleep in the fields, or perhaps beg permission to sleep in a barn. And so the days passed pleasantly: we were young, we were excited, we were seeing the world for the first time, and it excited us.

Mostly, I think we were full of wonder. There are two children near me, of about the same age as I was then, and they are predictably playing video games. I glance at their faces, and they have the dulled look of an opium smoker. Nothing amazes them, not even the wondrous device that both stimulates and sedates them.

For me, every experience was new. I saw flowers growing by the road, and they were not plants but jewels. The stars at night shone only on us, and each one was a piece of God’s love that he had mounted just for us. Even the fatigue, at the end of a day, had a special divinity to it: we slept well no matter how rough the bed, if indeed there were a bed.

All was well until the day that Georg, who tended never to look where he was going, took a fall, and badly twisted his ankle. A farmhouse was quite near, and I helped him to its door.

I felt it as soon as I entered the house, and had Georg not needed a place to rest, I would never have stayed a minute in the place. For the sense of evil was palpable, from the moment we saw the sullen, suspicious face of the wife to the moment we said farewell to her drunken oaf of a husband. Because you could feel it—the menace in the air, the hatred, the fear and the lies. It was a house of pure evil.

“Ye both can stay, but you’ll have to earn your keep,” said Otto, the husband, and referring to me. I was willing, but what could I do? I could sing, I could play the violin and the harpsichord—but farm life I knew nothing of.

And so the next morning I was up at dawn, and began toiling: there were the slops to feed the pigs, there was the hay to be forked down to the cows, there was an endless succession of tasks large and small that kept me busy.

All this was good enough: I was young, I was healthy, I liked the feeling of work. What didn’t I like? The constant feeling of being watched.

Was it real? Was I imagining it? I know not, but it was nonetheless powerful, even if it were unreal. I felt Otto’s eyes on me at all times, and I would turn, only to find him looking at something else. But what accounted for that strange feeling that everyone knows so well of being observed?

Nor was it just when Otto was present that I felt under observation; even alone in the barn, in the fields, everywhere, I felt eyes watching me. I would whirl around, always to be confronted with nothing.

Soon, the feeling of being watched was supplemented by the sound of a low mutter, speaking a language I knew, but too softly to make out words. Was it just I, or did others hear it too? I asked Georg; he heard nothing.

I began to sleep badly, despite being tired from the work on the farm. And it was then that I could hear Otto, in the room next door, arguing with his wife. At first, it was impossible to understand what he was saying; later, it became impossible to ignore.

He was drunk at the time, but that was hardly the point. He accused his wife of having a roving eye, of desiring every man but him, and of having relations with anyone who would have her. Nor was that all; very soon the insults were followed by slaps, then punches, and then—most grisly of all—beatings against the wall.

The next day, the wife would appear with bruises and black eyes; she would limp with her eyes cast down about the house, doing the tasks of cleaning and cooking. The last was a particularly vexing point, since we were both fourteen, and the needle on the appetite meter tended to be stuck at “ravenous.” And so we were constantly told that we were eating them out of house and home, that we were a burden, that they didn’t know why they didn’t turn us out. Were we grateful for their generosity? We tried to be, but really, we could not.

Oddly, Georg was less offended by all this than was I. Because, through lack of sleep and the situation in general, I became irritable and snappish. Unexpected sounds rattled me, the barking of a dog at night gave me nightmares.

Then, the smell began.

Like everything else in that accursed place, it was there before I knew it. I did not so much start smelling it than I realized that I had been smelling it—and for some time. Nor was it a smell—it was more like an invading agent. No—that’s not quite it, either. It had the feeling of something that would permeate everywhere. It was the smell of an animal who had died, and whose unattended corpse was rotting in the hot summer sun.

As I grew more and more distracted, I grew more and more careless. I began dropping food; this would provoke long tirades and bitter accusations. And then, I noticed that Otto was now openly looking at mean, with slitted eyes that seemed to concentrate the hate and spite. Nor did he attempt to disguise his hate; he muttered profanities under his breath quite openly.

He grew more abusive to his wife, calling her a slut and a fallen woman and a whore quite openly in front of us, nor did he attempt to hide the fact that he was beating her.

It came to a head late one night of exceptional fury, when he was raging at his wife, calling her a filthy bitch and accusing her betraying him. I could stand it no more, and shouted from my bed for them to be quiet. Instead, he erupted with rage, and in a matter of seconds, it seemed, he was standing at the bedroom door, with his wife beside him. He was holding her on tiptoes by her hair.

“SO TAKE HIM, YOU CUNT, TAKE HIM IF YOU WANT IT SO MUCH!” he shouted, and then he shoved her toward me. I dodged and she fell. And that is when he started the most violent beating of all.

There was very little we could do. We were both 14, and one of us was still injured, though on the mend. And we were gentle youths—we had come from homes of good and sober people, where drunkenness and vice and low living were nowhere to be found. And so we stood in horror at the near murderous assault the wretch was delivering to his wife, when very easily we could have found an object and hit him over the head with it.

“Get out,” called the woman to us, “get out of the house.”

And that is when I met the devil, for Otto turned, then, and I saw the red eyes of hate, I saw the sulfurous flames darting round his head, and lastly…I smelled the horrible, offensive odor of hate and death that had tailed me all those days. Yes, I saw the devil, and the devil saw me, and there was no Otto there, and the devil knew that very well, and knew that I knew. He looked at me, he acknowledged me, and then…

…he spat at me.

We stumbled out of the house; I half carried Georg away from that house, and down the road that took us away, but that didn’t, since I learned this from the devil. Once met, a part of you will ever stay in the devil’s hands.  

  

(St. Michael's day was 29 September; Michael is revered as the guardian of the church, and the archangel who wrestled with the devil and won.)

A Psalm for the Paining

“You do realize the trouble you’re in, don’t you,” said Lady. “If this is to be anything like the Bible, you’ll have to have at least four gospels, all giving mostly similar accounts of the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, but with just enough jarring details to provide scholars for the next millennia to do exegesis.”

Damn, what’s exegesis? It’s one of those words I always look up, understand vaguely, and then forget. Sort of like “semiotics,” except that I never even understand that one…

“You know, scholarly interpretation of the text,” she went on to tell me. “Then you’ll have to have all the other books, and the Apocrypha. Oh, and guess what? You’re gonna have to produce a couple hundred psalms, unless, of course, you want to emulate King David, who according to one Dead Sea Scroll, wrote 3600 of them. So that’s one a day for almost ten years. Get going, buster!”

“I absolutely refuse to write psalms,” I told her. “And speaking of which, did you know they’re crapping up all the good ones? I can tell you because I listened to this absolutely great cantata the other day—BWV 131—and it’s based on Psalm 130. You know the one that starts, ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee.’ Well it’s a lovely old thing, but it has a little ticker in it, namely about fearing God. So I looked the new version, and it’s been scrubbed up, leaving it substantially dirtier. Now, instead of fearing God, it’s “so that we may serve you reverently. Is that nuts or what?”

“Well, I don’t fear God,” said Lady.

“Are you crazy? I’m utterly terrified of God, and I don’t even believe in Him. Imagine if I did? I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning!”

“Stop saying you don’t believe in God,” said Lady, “since you perfectly well do.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you couldn’t be the kind of person you are if you didn’t.”

Well, every discussion with Lady has many corners, most of which I back myself into.

“Look, you’re the poet, not I. Why don’t you write the damn psalms?”

“You gonna paint houses?”

“I could certainly paint houses!”

“Yes, but would anybody buy them?”

“Well, you didn’t ask me that….”

“Get down to work,” she told me, “and remember, you have to use the word ‘Selah,’ every once in a while.”

So I do:

Psalm 1

Unto the hills I sought you,

Treading on paths foreseen by ancients

Smelling the green of spring pounced

From the gray of winter. Selah.

On the banks of the rivers I searched for you,

As fish swam your glory and wind whistled your adoration.

I drank and was made more thirsty; my tongue

Clew to the roof of my mouth, and yet I praised you.

Athirst, I sought you in the deserts, and flung myself

To cool in the ardent sun,

Which shaded every live thing, but not I.

Not I, who seek you more each day,

As you elude me, leaving only a laugh in the air,

And a smirk on the path.

Yes, you dance with whores and drink with thieves,

But I, dear Lord? I, who stand before the table you just left,

Staring at the crumbs

You have forbidden me to eat?  

My God, and I have ten years of this stuff?

The Miracle of the Sightless Thief

The boy continues sad, listless. When will he realize: there is no cure for the pain of death other than work? For to dwell on sorrow is a very great sin, since from there how easily may enter the devil? But still Carl Phillip refuses to do his exercises, and his teacher at school tells me that he has failed in his most recent exams! Surely, if he continues on this path, he will fall into perdition.

“You must whip the child, Sebastian,” said Anna Berthe, the elder sister of my late wife, María Barbara, who came to live with us when we got married. She had no home then, she has no home now, and so she came to live with us. An excellent woman, who knows her Christian duties and does them without complaint. Though, as we learned all too soon, she can have strong views, and no hesitancy in expressing them, as we learned early on.

“This bread won’t do,” she said to my wife two days after coming to our house, “will you never learn how to do a thing properly? Here, let me show you.”

Indeed, the bread had been as hard as freshly-kilned brick, but was the comment welcome?

No, but the help was, since Anna Berthe was as often correct as she was blunt. The two women went into the kitchen, where the elder sister taught the younger. The bread improved greatly, but did the relationship?

Ah, I have fallen into thinking as these new people do, they who have brought me back. For we didn’t have “relationships,” then, and there could be no worrying about how they fared. We had instead obligations, to which we attended, if we were upstanding in the eyes of the Lord.

“It’s very easy to fall into the sin of anger,” I counseled my María Barbara later that night. “Be not proud. She means well, though her tongue is harsh.”

Fortunately, María Barbara was a gentle soul, who could rankle, but never sustain the injuries  for long. A slight or insult was felt, yes, but never nurtured. And the next day, the pair would begin anew, and what would it be for the new day? A dress ironed imperfectly, a floor swept badly, it hardly mattered what. I grew weary of the bickering, and needed to assert my God-given authority as father and head of the household.

“There will be no hard words here in this house,” I said sharply. “María Barbara, it is you duty to honor Anne Berthe, as your elder sister. And you, Anne Berthe, will curb your tongue.”

“I’m sure I now my place,” said she, “since an unmarried woman is seldom welcome in a married sister’s home….”

“Enough,” I said, “There will be no more talk thus.”

Did it end? Of course not, but it did drive it down to more manageable levels. And so my wife learned a good deal from her elder sister, and loved her, as the Bible and our good Lord commanded her to do. Anne Berthe, however, never could quite control her desire to meddle, and so she was instructing me, days after I had heard the news of my late wife’s death.

I sighed—what to do? Carl Phillip was but five; his mother had died recently. I was nine when my mother died, but Carl Phillip was half that age.

“I shall talk to him first,” I said, and instantly regretted it. For why should I explain and excuse myself to this woman? Had not my obligation ceased, after the death of her sister? And yet where was she to go, and who would tend to the house and the womanly duties it required? Still, Anne Berthe frowned, but kept her silence.

“Are you well, my son,” I asked, after noting that his eyes were puffy and reddened.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Would you like me to tell you a story?”

“Please, Papa.”

“There was once a man, Albert, who had a stone of great beauty. Where he had found it, and the circumstances surrounding it, the man would never reveal, but people came from miles around to see it.”

“What color was it,” asked Carl Phillip.

“It had the best qualities of every color. It had the purity of blue, the mystery of grey, the vitality of green, the radiance of gold, and the passion of red. Indeed, it was a color never seen—a color that left men speechless with awe. Word spread of the stone throughout the lands, and the multitude would come, begging to have glimpse of it. The simple Albert always obliged, nor would he accept any fee for displaying it. Eventually, word of this stone reached the ears of a wicked man, named Sastro. Instantly, Sastro conceived a plan to wrest the stone from Albert. He assembled a great army, which circled the humble abode of Albert. Sastro, with four of his men, strode into the cottage and ordered the poor Albert to cede him the stone, under pain of death. Very quietly, Albert showed him the glorious stone, and Sastro burned with lust to have it. And so, Albert put it inside a gold casket lined with velvet and gave it to him. Sastro returned to his castle.”

“And then what happened?”

“When he returned to his castle he immediately declared that he would hold a great feast, and that he would display the wonderful stone that had so amazed the multitudes. And so the preparations were made.

“And then what happened?”

“The day of the feast arrived, and Albert greeted each of the nobles with great condescension, since he alone possessed what they did not. They supped and drank, and at last did Albert stand, and reveal the stone.”

“And?”

“The nobles roared with laughter, for what had Albert shown them? Nothing more that a common piece of fieldstone! Thus how the ill-gotten gains had transformed themselves!”

“So what did Albert do?”

“He ordered the nobles from his castle, and slunk to his room. There he wept and wept, as much for the loss of his stone as for the loss of his dignity. He wept rivers, and could contain himself not.”

“I’ve been crying too, Papa.”

Aaah!

“I know, my son, but we must go on. It is a very great sin to despair.”

“Tell me more, Papa, about Albert and the wicked Sastro.”

“He wept so much that one day, he felt a strange weakness in his eyes. And thus daily did they grow weaker, until one day, he could see no longer. After seven days and seven nights of weeping, he had gone completely blind. He left the castle then, and wandered the dusty roads desolate, until Jesus did see him, and inquire of his plight.”

“And what did Jesus say to him?”

“He said, ‘Behold and I shall cause you to see,’ and there did the Albert stand with his vision restored, and the people said that a very great prophet had been sent to them, and the news did spread out wondrously.”

“So is that the end of the story?”

“Yes, and no, for only in the Apocrypha do we learn the other side of the story.”

“And that is?”

“Yes, the savior had restored sight to the thief Sastro, but he had performed another miracle as well. He had made all the rocks in the world as lustrous as the one Sastro had stolen, and the people rushed in a frenzy, picking up stones and putting them in their pockets or buckets or in their up-raised skirts. Sastro alone was still.”

“Why, Papa?”

“Yes, Jesus had restored vision to Sastro, but he had decreed it that Sastro would never see the color of the rock he had stolen. And thus, it was a blessing and a punishment at the same time.”

“And the stones, Papa? Are they still there.”

“As time passed, the people ceased to care about the stones, but if you want my opinion, my son?”

“Yes, Papa,” he said sleepily, for the tale had done it’s trick.

“Yes, the stones are still there,” I whispered, and got up to leave.

Had he heard?