Darling (22 page)

What clay should teach us to reply to Hamlet is that loam is as much the beginning as the end.

If you are afraid of its darker implications, it is not brown you fear but life.

The Three Ecologies of the Holy Desert

The curtain is down; its fringes are ripped; the curtain is patched and faded. From behind the curtain, there are sounds of a crowd, faint laughter. A dented brass band plays, ending with a drum roll. Mounting exclamations of concern and then tightrope silence. Amazements are in progress. A cymbal is struck followed by uproarious laughter and applause. The lights in the theater are extinguished as the curtain begins to rise. The only sound now is the buzzing of a fly. On stage, an old woman lies on a pallet on the floor of an empty room. A handkerchief covers her face.

1. The Mountaintop

I wake up because the floor lamp in my bedroom has been turned on. (Passive construction indicates all that is seen and unseen.) It is three o'clock in the morning. My chest feels bruised, heavy. I am certain my mother has died.

Caveat: The lamp has a dimmer switch. My mother is in a hospital a few blocks away.

Several days later, I tell a neighbor, a man I know well, that my mother died and that the floor lamp in my bedroom came on during the night. My neighbor is sincerely sorry to hear of my mother's death; he supposes there must have been some kind of surge in the electrical grid.

Our lives are so similar, my friends' and mine. The difference between us briefly flares—like the lamp in my bedroom—only when I publish a religious opinion.

•   •   •

On June 17, 1992, Anita Mendoza Contreras was seated at a picnic table in Pinto Lake County Park, near Watsonville, California. Mrs. Mendoza Contreras was thinking her thoughts, as people used to say about someone staring out a window or worrying the hem of an apron, and among her thoughts were her children, about whom, for reasons of her own, she worried. She worried, and so she knelt down beneath an oak tree to pray. As she prayed, Mrs. Mendoza Contreras experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary. During the vision, Mrs. Mendoza Contreras's attention was fixed upon a portion of the trunk, high up in the spread of the oak tree. After the vision ended, Mrs. Mendoza Contreras saw that an image of the Virgin had formed within the bark of the oak.

Word of an apparition circulated somehow, and, the days being long, the nights being warm, people got into their cars after work and drove to Pinto Lake to see the oak tree with the Virgin's picture on it.

That is what we did, too—two friends and I—after an article about the image appeared in the
San Francisco
Chronicle
.

The parking lot was a vacant field. I stepped in a cowpat. Federico Fellini, who as much as anyone entertained my adolescence and taught me the hope of magic, interjected into several of his movies comic scenes of crowd hysteria in the wake of miracles. As a worldly Roman, Fellini relished the humor of piety. As a Roman Catholic, as a lover of circuses, he shared the human need for marvels.

We saw people coming toward us who had already seen the
tree. They looked the way adults look—parents with young children—after an amusement has left them stranded: torpor, hunger, school tomorrow. Children were picking up acorns to put in their pockets. Already, I could see this wasn't going to be what I wasn't even aware I was hoping for.

Some women were sitting on aluminum foldout chairs, praying their rosaries in Spanish.

Easy to spot the relic tree within the grove because there were votive candles at its base. Boys with convinced expressions held compact mirrors with which they directed our eyes to the image by reflecting spangles of the setting sun onto the tree trunk.

I seem to remember there were already objects hanging from the branches—T-shirts, teddy bears, petitions—the forensics of hope.

I saw what they meant; I saw the shape. But I could not see what they saw. What Mrs. Mendoza Contreras saw. Though I, too, felt the need for visions that people brought to the tree and left there.

In the holy deserts of the Middle East, mountains rise from flat plains. It is on the mountaintop that God condescends and human hope ascends to within a hair's breadth of what humanity needs, what humanity fears. In the world's famous mountaintop theophany, Moses ascends Mount Sinai, under cover of cloud, to receive the Ten Commandments from God. The Israelites who wait below on the desert floor grow bored, unruly, forgetful of the wonders they have already witnessed. And that is the way of such stories. Heaven on one side of the veil; the field of folk on the other. Sometimes a souvenir passes from one side to the other.

We stayed half an hour; we stopped in Pescadero for green chile soup on our way home. No souvenir.

•   •   •

Another summer day: After the attack on the morning of September 11, someone posted on the Internet a photograph of one of the disintegrating towers. The image of a face seemed to form from whorls of black smoke—people were quick to say the devil's face. The face had a bulbous schnoz and more closely resembled the face of W. C. Fields.

Anyway, it was not Satan that people I know talked about in the days and months after September 11. It was religion—the religion of the terrorists—and the dangerous presumption of men who say “My God.”

After September 11, it became easier, apparently it became necessary, for many of my friends to volunteer, without any equivocation of agnosticism, that they are atheists. It was not clear to me whether they had been atheists all along or if the violence of September 11 tipped Pascal's scales for them. People with whom, as my friend Will used to say, I would share my lifeboat, declared their loathing for religion, particularly the desert religions of the Middle East—the eagerness to cast the first stone, the appetite to govern civil society, the pointy hats, the crooks and crosses, the shawls, the hennaed beards. One of my closest friends, who lives in Memphis, observed that God looks to be deader than Elvis. (In his e-mail, my friend nevertheless resorted to a childhood piety: “God” is hallowed as “G-d.”) But most of my friends left it at nothing. Whiteout. January First of the rest of their lives. (Buddhism retained its triple-gong rating.)

I was driving an elderly friend to a funeral. In response to nothing I had said (I suppose because we were on our way to a funeral), my friend announced her conviction that the world would be better off without religion. “I mean all of them,” she said. An angry gesture of her open hand toward the windshield wiped them all away. As we drove on in silence, it occurred to me
that I had interpreted what my friend said as something about men, though she had not said men. I had interpreted what she said as about God. But she said religion.

“I feel the same way about the Olympics,” I said.

“Don't get me wrong,” she said after a while. “I believe in the Good Lord. It's religion I don't like.”

From his desert perch, a drab, plump ayatollah rejoices in the deaths of young martyrs who send infidel dogs to hell. The teachings of Jesus Christ go begging when a priest falls to his knees on the hard rectory floor to fondle and blight an altar boy's innocence.

My friend the doctor, whom I see every Sunday at Mass, whom I follow in the Communion line, asked, as we were leaving church, if I think the world is better or worse off for religion.

If you think the world is perfectible, then worse.

•   •   •

In American myth, the Village Atheist is a loner, a gaunt fellow in a flannel shirt, standing on a hill on Sunday morning. He faces away from the steeple in the dell. Perhaps he is putting flowers on his wife's grave. The hater of Sunday lives in a trim white house, eats porridge for breakfast; no wreath on his door at Christmas; gives generously to the Community Chest. His roses are the envy of the garden club, of which he is not a member.

Here are the three atheists of my youthful apprehension, apostles of the rounded sleep: Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Bertrand Russell, James Joyce.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair was a professional atheist who appeared on television talk shows in the 1950s and '60s. She was blowsy, unkempt; I could imagine her living room—the card table piled with legal briefs and Swanson TV Dinner trays full of pens and paperclips. She had two sons. Her fierce humor—I
suppose I would now call it a lack of humor—was directed at Americans willing to violate individuality by insisting on public religious observance. O'Hair sued the Baltimore school system to outlaw the reading of Scripture in public schools; she sued NASA to stop astronauts from quoting Scripture in outer space. One of her sons repudiated her and she him; that son became a Baptist minister. Madalyn O'Hair was abducted by a former employee whose motive was, ostensibly, ransom. Her second son and her granddaughter were also abducted. All three were murdered.

In 1901, at the age of twenty-nine, Bertrand Russell discovered paradox. He wrote:

Let
R
= {
x
|
x
∉
x
}, then
R
∈
R
⇔
R
∉
R

Nor do I.

When I entered college, Bertrand Russell's book
Why I Am Not a Christian
stood face-out on the shelf of the campus bookstore—the face of a philosopher, I thought at the time. The face of an Anglican bishop, perhaps. The fluffy white hair, the starched collar. The face of an ancient satyr. In 1958 Bertrand Russell wrote: “I do not think the existence of the Christian God is any more probable than the existence of the gods of Olympus or Valhalla.”

An affront to his ghost, I suppose, but Catholics, in our infuriating way, held out hope for James Joyce. Haunted, wasn't he? “Haunted” was the word we used. Old Jimbo exhausted his breath with sacrilege, yet the Church was forever cropping up in his book, wasn't it? He took it all too seriously, too young. Don't you worry, he'll have come round at the last, like Molly Bloom:

. . . as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create
something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves . . . ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are . . .

•   •   •

I have never been to the mountaintop, if that's what you mean. The only thing I know for a fact is that God never uses His own money. He hasn't got any money.

Some well-meaning person once referred to Dorothy Day, in her presence, as a saint.

“Don't call me a saint,” Dorothy Day said. “I don't want to be dismissed that easily.”

Dorothy Day, as one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, ran a hospitality house for the poor on the Lower East Side of New York. This was in 1956. The building that housed the hospitality house did not meet the fire code of the borough of Manhattan.

Dorothy Day was fined $250, which she did not have. The city ordered her to make repairs. The fine and the circumstance were reported in the
New York
Times
. The same morning the
Times
article appeared, Dorothy Day was leaving the hospitality center for the courthouse in order to plead her case before a magistrate of the Upper Manhattan Court. A disheveled man in bedroom slippers stepped forward from a line of people waiting on the sidewalk for clothes to be distributed. The man handed Dorothy Day a check for $250.

The man in bedroom slippers was W. H. Auden, the greatest poet of his generation. Auden read the article in the
New York
Times
while eating his breakfast, got up from the table, exited his apartment with a check in his hand, marmalade on his chin.

In a preface to a book of critical essays, W. H. Auden defined his vision of Eden (by way of divulging how his critical faculties were colored) as: “Roman Catholic in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints . . . Religious Processions, Brass Bands, Opera . . .”

When I asked a priest-friend for his vision of paradise, he said: “Well, it will certainly be a surprise, won't it?'

•   •   •

Wayne lived in one of the welfare hotels on Turk Street. He may have sold drugs; if he did, it was penny-ante stuff. He may not have taken drugs; he said not. Wayne was about seventy-five percent trustworthy, a rarified percentile. He couldn't read. I fear he may be dead. Wayne sat in front of the store across the way from Tillman Place Bookshop with a cup and a sign—he depended on fellow vagrants to make his signs for him:
VETERAN. GOD BLESS
.

Wayne was sweet-natured, simple-minded. Wayne told me he sometimes heard voices urging him to nefarious behaviors, but he refused those voices. He had no teeth, or few; he was often beaten up by bad men, particularly one bad man, who wanted Wayne's space in front of the store across the way. Wayne's space on the sidewalk was prime Sunnyside. The bad man, having chased Wayne away with hummingbird-like aggression, would then fold himself into abjection, would call out,
God bless you, sir, God bless you, ma'am,
to passersby, and he was, perhaps, an authentic agent of God's blessing, but not for Wayne.