The Bible?

The Bible!  I’m one of the relatively few that’s actually read this sucker (well, most of it) and my rants could fill a thousand unreadable pages.  My parents made an honest attempt at raising me Lutheran – they actually succeeded in getting me confirmed – but I never believed a word that came out of the Good Book or the pulpit.  I could never tell the difference between Zeus and Jehovah, the contradictions were obvious and not all that mysterious, and the whole affair seemed more like a compulsory display of social obedience than a thoughtful contemplation of the unknown.  And the fact that some of the people around me actually believed this stuff – it scared me.  Either they were crazy, or I was, and there was only one of me.

                I’ll limit myself here to my favorite tale.  It comes right out of the gate, early on in Genesis.  I’ve forgotten the chapter and the names, but the story doesn’t need them.  God’s chosen people, the Abraham Jews, were out wandering in the desert, and they saw a town that needed sacking.  In this town lived a bunch of nice people who had never met the Abraham Jews much less wronged them.  So God’s chosen tribe gives the town a fair deal, saying to the townspeople, “Oh ye people who dwell in this down, God is generous and will spare you.  Provided, of course, that you cut off the tips of your penises.”   And strangely, instead of telling these fetishistic Semites to eat dirt, the townspeople accept the offer without much ado.  They accept the God of Abraham, proving their sincerity by mutilating every penis they can find.  And stranger still, the following day the children of God go back on their word and sack the town anyway, murdering with ease the laid up men, and probably raping the women and children.

                When I think of this story, I like to imagine that it’s one of the few Biblical stories that actually happened.  I picture the little town, which given the time and place is little more than strategic piles of stone and dirt, sitting on a hill in the sweltering desert sun.  It’s pocked with hovels, maybe a modest marketplace near the center, some oxen and sheep meandering about.  Up marches this stinking, travel-weary hoard from the depths of the desert, and they send forth a single envoy.  The town is on pins and needles, wondering if these are marauders or honest wayfarers.  The envoy reaches the gate and delivers his message:  “We have recently acquired the ability to talk to God, and he says you should all snip the folded little bits of skin off your dicks.  If you don’t, he’ll be very angry.”  The envoy leaves in a dirt cloud of dignity, and the townspeople are equal parts baffled, frightened, and amused.  They decide to hold a meeting.

                “This is obviously a joke,” the wheelwright says.  “They’re having a go at us.  If we do this, they’ll spread the word from here to Babylon, we’ll be a laughing stock.”

                “But what if they speak true?” comes the inevitable doubt from the wheat-puncher.  “Where have they come from?  Surely, if God is anywhere, he lives in a cave in the desert.”

                “If we do this, I think the duty should fall to each man’s wife,” a woman dares.  She, like every other woman, is often misused, and relishes the idea of cutting just a bit too deep. 

                “Perhaps, if we cut the tips from the fingers of the women, and present them to these men . . .” the dirt-watcher trails off.

                “Yes,” utters a wise old lecher, “but if I were them I’d ask to see our cocks.”

                “Maybe we could peel the skin back when we show them?”

                “Why would God make cock decrees?”

                Eventually it is settled.  The risk of God outweighs the risk of embarrassment.  The shears are sharpened, the deed is done.  And the next day they all get slaughtered regardless.

                It was in my second semester at the university that I read this and other Biblical Tales in a class called The Bible as Literature.  More or less agnostic at the outset I was full gallop atheist before we ever got to Solomon.  For though I had never believed it, I had always taken it for granted the Bible was at the very least a collection of fables and morals which in summation had a genuine message to convey.  It ain’t anything of the kind.  In fact, there are a multitude of atrocities committed on the name of God that are so bizarre and creative that I never could have dreamed them up on my own.  The Bible is much better described as a depiction of the tribalism, brutality, and insanity of humankind sans knowledge, and it is useful only as far as it warns us against the pitfalls of ignorance.  An honest Bible comes with this preface – “Here lie the paths of ruin.  Know them to shun them."

                By the way, if you ever have the opportunity and the unction, read the Book of Revelations in a dimly lit sauna while listening to experimental jazz.  It’s a trip. 

The English Paper from Hell

This post isn't quite about a book.  It's about a paper written for a high school composition class by yours truly.  I include it because its omission would ring false -- like blank pages where the crisis goes down.  I figure Copperfield got thrown to the workhouse, Griffiths got lit up and crashed a car, and I got expelled from high school.

High school, for those of you who don't know or prefer to forget, is the public vat of puberty.  It's that strange place between cuteness and alcoholism, where adolescents are hammered into more usable and less thoughtful shapes.  Three lessons are incidentally conferred in this limbo.  First, cheat with precision, and equate the ability to cheat well with the ability to have abilities.  Second, Hollywood edits out all the funny noises and awkward laughter.  Third, the most efficient way to deal with authority is with a bowed head and a forged apology.  These three in combination light the path toward modest success, which is the desired effect of public education.

Whether I was too smart, too dumb, too high, or too lame to come into this knowledge, my seventeenth year came and found me wanting.  I didn't care enough to cheat, I was still terrified of girls, and it was too much fun to piss people off.  Without the ambition or wherewithal to raise hell, I went passive aggressive and voiced my dissent through the assignments I managed to complete.  In health class I wrote a paper defending cigarettes; in speech class I advocated legalizing it; in philosophy I achieved, with some difficulty, a zero percent on a true or false test; on the biology final I soliloquied the frog, etc.  Probably the most telling stunt I pulled came in homeroom, where every Friday somebody was designated to bring in treats.  Most brought Twizzlers and Pepsi, a few brought homemade cupcakes and juice, I came with a loaf of bread and a jug of water.  A simple gesture, but it accomplished two things that were important to me at the time:  it extended the prison metaphor, and it let my classmates know exactly what I thought of them.

These and other antics often earned a sideways look or a tired shake of the head, but they never landed me anywhere near expulsion.  They were just innocent pranks, really.  My ticket to freedom would require something altogether more ridiculous -- I would have to wax rhapsodic about masturbation and the devil.

Anyway, here's the paper:

Adam Spieman

Hr 7

Comp 11

Life, as I perceive it, is naught but a jumble of apparently meaningless experiences that, when pieced together as a whole upon the termination of any particular example thereof, can be interpreted as an ocean of endless possibilities, or as an endless ocean lacking every possibility.  For some, the waves of single experiences form currents of growing thought and enlightenment, and the currents circle the world of the Self and formulate the equation of life's ideal.  Others become lost behind the wakes of giant, thought-compressing ships, such as organized religion, politics, or mental illness.  Personally, I would like to think that I am one of the former -- that my mind is open and, as I proceed through life, I learn from the scenes before me without bias or indifference -- that I am willing to accept the far-fetched idea and able to question the popular opinion -- that my only goal in life is to understand that which I live.

I am currently seventeen.  I am young and ignorant of many things (the most hindering of which is my own ignorance).  Presently, I am completing the junior year of my high school career in Sauk Rapids, MN; and I would like to take this opportunity to inform the reader that public schooling is a sham.  I have learned nothing within the walls of that school; all that I have learned I have learned in spite of that school.

To turn to the topic originally assigned:

How have I changed over the past year?  How am I different?  It is hard for me, as myself, to observe these things, for I have no constant with which to compare the variable; I have no point of reference.  As a rule, I must change with myself; there is no part of me which is left behind.  When I change, it is impossible for me to recognize it soon afterwards, for I feel like I am still the same person I was, although I may not be.  Therefore, I must complete this assignment as someone who is not me -- someone with an outside perspective and hence a point of reference, the elements necessary for such observations as are herein required.  I must take on an alter-ego, a him who is not I.  I will call him now.

He answers thus:

Hello, my name is Mud.  Adam Spielman has called upon me to share with you the different ways in which he has changed over the course of this past year.  I will begin with him at the beginning:  He was a good boy, a well-groomed boy.  His friends liked him; he had no enemies.  Life was a happy, joyous field of magnolias for Adam Spielman -- an endless field of the purest of joy and unfiltered adoration for the simplest of pleasures.  He lived and he loved and he loved to live.  Breath filled his lungs and opportunity his hands.  And he read -- many books he read -- and he learned from what he read and was commencing his own ocean of thought and wonderment.  Yes, things were looking bright for Adam Spielman.

Enter:  [teacher's name removed]

Hate -- an unadulterated lust for death and destruction, an uncontrollable urge to kill -- rage -- rivers of flame, pools of knives -- fingers lacking flesh, body lacking soul.  That is the best I can portray the thoughts of Adam Spielman as [name removed] entered his life in the form of a composition teacher.  "Satan!" he cried, but no one would listen.  "That is no teacher of English!  Can you not tell demonic entities from high school staff members?  It is Satan, I tell you, Satan!"  Slowly and steadily Adam's outlook on life deteriorated from fields of magnolias to a pestilence of leeches and bullfrogs.  Day after day and vomit-inducing day, Adam was forced to endure the distorted words and foul teachings which poured forth from the leering mouth of Satan - the leering mouth of [name removed].  The ruthlessness of the beast -- of the machine -- battered Adam's happiness and slaughtered his innocence.  Yes, things were looking dark for Adam Spielman.

Enter: the brave new world of masturbation.

Then one day, amidst those terrible days above mentioned, Adam had an idea.  He liked his idea, and when he tried it out, he really like his idea.  Soon this was all he lived for; he forgot about [name removed] and her evil ways; he knew only the exquisite pleasure that resulted from the daily exercise of his new idea -- his brave new idea.  He never told his composition teacher of his idea, for fear that she might steal it from him.  And so he's been, from the birth of his idea to the present, masturbating constantly and neglecting his English homework.  Well, Adam Spielman, you're not back to even, but it's a start.

At the time I wrote it and handed it in, I was oblivious to the quirks that might raise more than an eyebrow.  It was a lark.  The progression from the ocean metaphor to the split personality to the devil to masturbation was simply absurd and beneath consideration.  Inappropriate as always, but certainly not worthy of revulsion.  But looking at it now, for the first time in a good chunk of years, there are a few things that strike me and I can't help empathizing with the decision to boot me.  For one thing, to say that "currents" of water "formulate life's ideal" is very poorly done.  You've taken a strange turn when your ocean is calculating formulae.  And, though it may not be outright impossible to simultaneously know and not know a thing, saying that you are aware of the ignorance that hinders your awareness is a little strange.  Perhaps most importantly, a second personality is not a unique perspective and can solve neither the Identity Paradox nor the Uncertainty Principle.  That is just plain bad reasoning.  And since it's the pivot of the paper, it really is an egregious lapse of judgment.

So the house phone rang one morning and a voice told my parents there had been a disturbance.  That afternoon found us all in the principal's office, where we talked about pipe bombs and sexual harassment.  Later that week I received a letter that said if I ever came within so many feet of school grounds they'd arrest me forthwith and bring me to the nearest magistrate, from whom wouldst erupt  a mighty castigation in accordance with Statute 517 of the Code.  Then, about a month later, another letter came saying I'd missed too many days of school, and if I didn't come soon they'd declare me a dropout.  Finally, say a few weeks later, I received my last high school report card.  Fs and Is were scratched into every box save one.

I got a B in Composition.  




If you like the blog you might like the book. Link's over there somewhere. -------->

     

Don Quixote

Don Quixote was a birthday present and I sallied forth on my fifteenth summer.  I made battle with the enchanted windmill, freed an ungrateful chain gang, pined for my tavern wench on a solitary mounntain top, and dutifully harangued all unwary passersby.  From the opening sequence to the closing paragraphs, through all the absurdities and profundities, I got it.  I just plain got it.  And while academia has since tried to endow me with a six dollar interpretation, it doesn't even come close to a fifteen-year-old's two penny epiphany: "Fuck it - I'm a knight."

Before you accuse me of being thickheaded, or suspect me delusional, I'd like to unpack that little nugget.  It's been lodged in my brain for some time now, crossing signals and bridging synapses, and it's had some effect on me.  First, there are two very distinct and mutually exclusive world views that evoke the fuck it.  One is merely pessimistic and defeatist, the other is a more nuanced acknowledgement of the arbitrary and the absurd.  The defeatist's fuck it lays its foundation in futility, where existence is of no importance and its constituents are hopelessly invested, and the only intelligent response is apathy.  The absurdist's fuck it founds itself in relativity, where every perspective is more or less true despite the surface contradiction, and the only intelligent response is creativity.  Though they celebrate the same motto, they derive it through irreconcilably different means, and these two champions of fucking it could not be more estranged.  The defeatist languishes, the absurdist thrives; the defeatist sighs, the absurdist laughs; the frowny-fran dies with a shrug, the wanking-wally exits with a bow.  To state the difference more viscerally: Some say fuck it because the world is a drifting tomb, some because the world is a mad circus.  I, and I believe Master Quixote, are in the latter camp.  We roam undefeated because we paint the world with our eyes.  Second, the claim that I'm a knight has nothing to do with ego or mental stability.  It is a reflection of the same arbitriness that inspires the precursing fuck it.  I am also a fish, a rainbow, a sailor, a king, and a chamber pot.  In the arbitrary world even my identity is a shifting and transmutable thing, so why not throw it this way or that?  Who's to say I'm not the Mastodon of Fertility or the Goddess of Rock'n'Roll? 

Fuck it - I'm a writer.

Anyway, that was all rattling around in my head in some form or another.  Mostly it was vague and immature, but it was there.  I leafed through Don Quixote's exploits on our newly built deck, in the shade of a box-elder tree (which was really an ash tree) drinking cherry cola and wearing a shit grin.  If Dickens introduced me to the magic between the lines, Cervantes showed me the power of the ideas behind them, and I've been defying the Enchanter ever since.

[The preceding is a restoration of a scrap of paper discovered in an unmarked chest that once belonged to Amadis Gaul, purchased at an estate sale by an anonymous Protestant for thirteen dollars.  Though the surviving text is in English, several peculiarities have prompted scholars to suggest it may in fact be a translation of an older, now lost, document.  The casual vulgarity has led some to believe it has a French origin, while the laziness of the opening and closing paragraphs have given rise to the Italian School.  Still others point to stylistic disparities - the stoic clunkishness of the middle paragraph, the sleepy nostalgia of the closing remarks, etc. - and claim that the work has several authors and as many translators, at least one of whom is either Russian or German.  There is no hope of consensus.]                       




If you like the blog you might like the book. Link's over there somewhere. -------->
     

      

David Copperfield

This is the first real book I ever read.  I remember holding it in my hands, feeling its weight, fanning through the pages, thinking it would be a feat unmatched in modern times if I could finish it.  I must have read the opening paragraphs a hundred times, overwhelmed by what I understood, in awe of what I didn't.  There was magic in those pages, magic that wasn't in the Stephen King or the Dean Koontz books I'd read, and over the months it took me to get through it I developed a love for the written word that has since driven me to start penning my own novels.

I was fourteen at the time, or close enough, and living cozily in my basement bedroom.  It had once been two rooms, but my dad decided one summer that it would be fun to knock down some walls and the two basement beds became one - and upstairs the kitchen and the dining room and the living room became a lividitchen.  I had two closets, a king-sized water bed, Grandma's old couch (which we sawed in half, shoved in through the window, and stapled back together), a TV, a CD player, and an empty bookshelf.  It was cool in the summer, and I read every page of David Copperfield tucked into the corner of Grandma's couch with the windows open and the ceiling fan on high.

I haven't read it since, and it's strange how little of the actual story I remember.  A few pieces stand vividly, but the rest is washed away.  I can still see Steerforth, his shock of red hair wild in the cold wind, grappling with the mast of a foundering ship so near the port, and the booming swell of the storm and the silent swell of the onlooking throng.  Or Lil' Emily's father, scaling all the mountains of Europe in the desperate search for his daughter - I always picture him with a beard and a cane, and he's always toiling upward, and Lil' Emily is the sun setting away from him.  Or that crazy dwarf woman, who in my memory has a many-colored face and trinkets hanging from her clothes.  Or David standing alone in a London thoroughfare, watching helplessly afoot as little thieves make off with his luggage.  Other than those images, and perhaps a few others, I have almost no idea what was going on in the novel.

But that doesn't stop me from loving it, or from telling people it's one of my favorites.  I could care less about the themes, the structure, the character delopement, the history of it.  Because this book is really about a fourteen-year-old kid sitting on his grandma's couch in a bedroom missing a wall, reading by sunlight and getting lost for the first time in the world between the lines.