The Pundit (2014)

[Originally posted in 2014]

O

dd things qualify an otherwise unremarkable person to become a pundit—a failed vice-presidential run based on having held a largely ceremonial job as village mayor, for example. A few speeches written for an actual vice-president. Claimed predictions of dire events. A thirty-year sojourn on top of a pillar.

That last one was what qualified Daniel the Stylite, an otherwise-unremarkable small-town monk, to advise an emperor in the warped world that was the Fifth Century of the Common Era, that liminal moment between Antiquity and the Dark Ages when the western Roman Empire tottered on the brink and finally gave up the ghost. That ghost—we know it as the Great Church—animated its twitching corpse and held the living Eastern Empire in its grip.

And that’s the clue to Daniel’s career. He probably never stood a chance of anything resembling a normal life. It’s not only that the times were out of joint—when were they not?—but that his mother promised him to God before he was born. By the time he was twelve he was hanging out at the local monastery full-time.

Present-day Christianity is strange enough to the uninitiated, but ancient Christianity was something else again. Today we think of snake-handlers and tongue-speakers as bizarre fringe-figures in Christianity. Even faith-healers are out there. These were mainstream in Christianity back then. To be noticed you had to do something really dramatic. Vows of silence, self-flagellation, never washing—these were the sorts of things you had to do to get noticed. A guy named Simeon came up with a new gimmick; he climbed up to the top of a pillar and stayed there, supplied with food by acolytes and curiosity-seekers.

On a trip to Antioch with his superior Daniel heard of this guy and wanted to see him. Hoisted up to the top of the pillar, Daniel conversed with him and received his blessing. Apparently it made an impression on him.

His first attempt at notoriety wasn’t pillar-sitting, however. After the superior died Daniel briefly took over his position, but soon abandoned it to live among the jackals and owls—and reputedly evil spirits—in an abandoned temple. Despite the annoyance this caused the neighbors, Daniel acquired a reputation as a saint and miracle-worker.

He’d been at this for some time when he ran into Sergius, Simeon’s acolyte. The pillar-sitter had died, it seemed, leaving Sergius his religious garb. Sergius had tried to pass the relics on to the Emperor Leo, but had been unsuccessful. Daniel seized on the opportunity. Why not take over Simeon’s gig? Sitting on a pillar was no doubt an improvement on living with jackals, and possession of the saint’s castoffs was authority enough, it seems, especially with Sergius willing to sign on as Daniel’s acolyte, assuming that Daniel wanted the position. Daniel immediately started looking for a likely pillar.

The pillars of the old temple were in too bad a shape to serve, but one of his fans set him up with a new pillar, and early one morning Daniel climbed on top of it, “where he soon became an object of curiosity and devotion to the sight-seers and pious of Byzanium,” according to Sabine Baring-Gould. “Crowds came to see him, and brought lunatics and sick people to be healed by him. Those who were afflicted were hoisted up to the top of the pillar, and then Daniel applies his hands to them, and was so successful as to cure many.”

As a pillar-dweller he was a hit. The Emperor Leo not only built him a more sumptuous pillar with a roof and a small room to protect him from the elements, but also came to consult him on matters of state. The Emperor Zeno, in his turn, consulted Daniel on matters both great and small. At one point Daniel predicted that Constantinople would suffer from a great fire, which it did—a connection that apparently raised no eyebrows in those simpler times.

In the end the celebrated pillar-sitter passed on at the age of eighty. His hagiographer tells it as follows:

Just about the time of his holy departure from this life a man vexed with an unclean spirit suddenly cried aloud in the midst of the people, announcing the presence of the saints with the holy man, naming each one of them; and he said, “There is great joy in heaven at this hour, for the holy angels have come to take the holy man with them, besides there are come, too, the honourable and glorious companies of prophets and apostles and martyrs and saints; they are tormenting me now, and to-morrow at the third hour they will drive me out of this tabernacle; when the holy man is going to his home in the heavens and his saintly corpse is being brought down, I shall come out.” And this did indeed happen. Our glorious father Daniel died at the third hour on the following day, a Saturday, December 11th in the second indiction (A.D. 493), and at the time of his death he worked a miracle in that the man with an unclean spirit was healed.

The people wanted a last look at the revered pundit. To accommodate them the local authorites had the body fastened to a board and raised upright so all could see and admire. When the body was taken down there was such a stampede that the men carrying it were knocked down along with the body. “By the grace of the Lord the carriers did not suffer any injury” according to his hagiographer.

It was a grotesque coda to a grotesque life. Daniel’s reward (I suppose) was to have influence in the halls of the incompetents holding the actual reins of power. It was probably worth living with jackals or standing for three decades atop a pillar, if that’s the price you have to pay for the cloak of authority. [11 Dc 2014]

Peace and Good Will—We Should Be So Lucky (2014)

[Posted in 2014]

T

oday is Human Rights Day, commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly on this day in 1948. And how appropriate it is to the season. Consider Article 1:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Damn right. In a way it’s sad that the remaining twenty-nine articles have to exist at all, spelling out that people should not be tortured (Article 4) or enslaved (Article 5), or deprived of employment (Article 23) or leisure (Article 24) or education (Article 26). Shouldn’t this all go without saying? Apparently not; when the nation that prides itself on being the city on the hill and the beacon of hope for the world descends to torture and degradation of human beings for political ends all bets are off.

The release of the heavily-censored report on torture in the United States comes to us during this joyous season, thanks to the vagaries of politics and our President’s lame-duck attempt to kill it altogether. And this on top of the spate of random police officers killing unarmed civilians over minor crimes or perceived threats. Not that the rest of the world has that much to boast of, with Pakistan orchestrating lynchings over the purely imaginary crime of blasphemy, Russia and Uganda persecuting gay people and anybody who so much as says such persecution is wrong, Ireland and Saudi Arabia engaging in the worst kind of religious oppression, India’s promotion of rape … All, all are guilty.

On the whole a noble document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights favors good things—equality before the law (7), equal pay for equal work (23), the right to privacy (12), freedom of thought (18), freedom of opinion and expression (19), freedom of movement (13), the right to an adequate standard of living (25), the right to enjoy and arts and share in scientific advancement (27), and so on. It lies squarely in the tradition represented by classic US documents like The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

If there’s a single document that spells out the meaning of the season in practical terms, this is it. It was supported in 1948 by states as disparate as Afghanistan and Mexico, Egypt and Thailand, Syria and the United States, Iceland and Turkey. No one voted against it, though a handful of states (including unsurprisingly Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, and the then-segregated Union of South Africa) abstained from voting.

Too bad we can’t live up to it. [10 Dc 2014]

ATTN: Time-Travellers (2009)

[Originally posted 8 December 2009 here at Rational Rant.]

T

his is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day, in which the objective is to try to blend in unobtrusively with current customs and mores.  Some suggested activities include:

·         Greeting people by referring to phenomena of the past and future; some examples might be: “What spectrum will today’s broadcast be in?” or “Is this song available on 78?” or “Can you direct me to the nearest sleep deprivation chamber?”

·         Walking up to random people and asking them, “What year is this?” and on hearing their reply, muttering (after a moment’s pause), “Then there’s still time” before hurrying off.

·         Standing in front of a statue, falling to your knees, and yelling “Nooooo!”

·         Dressing in moderately anachronistic clothing and speaking in slang from varying decades.

This one really appeals to me; I think it was my father who used to suggest that one way of appreciating the mundane world was to imagine oneself as a time traveler experiencing the past (or future) for the first time. [8 Dc 2009]

A Fine Piece of Police Work (2002)

[Passage from my journal, written 12:21 a.m. on 6 December 2002]

I

’ve been mostly sleeping the past few days, or weeks, or whatever, so everything’s kind of screwed up. Today I got up at five in the afternoon (Darryl was at the door), watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer from six to eight mostly up in my room, and then something on Court TV called The Interrogation of Michael Crowe. This was a fascinating account of how the police somewhere in southern California framed a kid for the murder of his sister by convincing him that he must have done the murder even though he didn’t remember it and urging him to give a false confession so that the system would show him some leniency. “You have my personal guarantee that the help you need will be forthcoming” said the detective, if the kid gave a detailed confession. They had an avalanche of evidence, he claimed, that would bury him. What disgusts me about the whole thing is not that they picked on the kid in the first place—that he did it was not an unreasonable hypothesis after all—but that they decided to go for this bogus confession rather than do any actual investigatory work. The police actually had in their hands (as it turned out) a shirt with Stephanie Crowe’s blood on it that belonged to a transient who was in the area that night, and who may well have been the guilty party. (At the very least he has some explaining to do.) But the police took the short cut of going for the confession rather than looking for evidence, which is slipshod work at best (confessions are never as reliable as hard evidence). And the upshot of this fine piece of police work was that they put a bereaved family through hell and let the real killer of this little girl (she was twelve years old) go free. Even when they had the solid evidence in their hands the authorities screwed around for awhile apparently trying to figure out if they couldn’t come up with something to save their asses. [5/6 Dc 2002]

Time Out in the Great Beyond (2012)

[Originally posted at Rational Rant on 5 December 2012]

W

hen I was a child there were certain records we weren’t allowed to touch. We had a cornucopia of recordings of all kinds—45s, LPs, 78s, 7ips reel-to-reel tapes—that we could play, but there were a handful that were off limits. Most of them belonged to my mother, and, frankly, most of them didn’t interest me—Edith Piaf, Django Reinhardt, and the like. But there was one that did—a jazz album called Time Out featuring jazz pianist Dave Brubeck.

My musical interests as a young person were primitive, bizarre, and eclectic. I liked things that stood out from the ordinary wash of music that formed the background track to our suburban post-WWII lives. The rock ’n’ roll that enamored the kids I went to school with left me cold. I liked stuff that incorporated noise, unusual instruments, exotic-sounding rhythms…

It was probably the unusual time-signatures that made me like Time Out. Most of everything playing on the radio was in the same 4/4 time, with the occasional 3/4, 6/8, or 2/4 thrown in. The 5/4, 9/8, and alternating signatures were interesting, at least, and the feeling that the music gave at times that it was just about to head over the edge into pure madness, was, well, refreshing.

For reasons that remain obscure to me I didn’t ever buy my own copy of it on vinyl, though I did acquire some other Dave Brubeck albums. I bought my first copy of Time Out decades later, when the CD era was upon us, and I replaced a lot of my old vinyl, and consciously sought out music I’d liked but never owned. I still enjoy it, even though I’ve long given up my childish ambition of playing piano like Brubeck.

Anyway, I see in the news that Dave Brubeck has passed on. His heart stopped earlier today on his way to a doctor’s appointment. Tomorrow will be his 92nd birthday. Damn it. [5 Dc 2012]

A Deteriorating Stand-Off (1979)

[Passage from my journal, written 4 December 1979 at 11:46 pm PST]

T

he things are crawling out from the walls of the nation now; the wood is rotten. This is not a good time for the United States, nor for my own country [Cascadia]. It is revolting when it is somehow treasonous to criticize the Shah of Iran, ex-Shah really and ex-Iranian, a bloody tyrant who—bluntly—deserved to lose his country. I am not going to change my beliefs just because his replacement is another of his ilk and further has showed his true colors by not only supporting the murderous PLO but also by holding hostages with his own already bloody hands. For my part I support this Iranian revolution—stupid though many of its manifestations be—as a return to the basics of the cultural fabric. But it has shown itself bankrupt in its fruits and in its leader. It has massacred Kurds and Arabs, slaughtered its political enemies, and directed violence against its women. Were it not for this last incident, Khomeini’s regime would have collapsed by now, or would be in the process of collapsing—if it hasn’t collapsed already.

The things are crawling out of the rotten wood. God help us when the Ku Klux Klan—which only recently massacred unarmed folk at a rally—is cheered for planning a counterdemonstration in favor of the Shah. God help us all when the PLO can appear as a savior, as a responsible organization—when still engaged in its illicit traffic in human lives. And God help us all when holy men call for war.

The logic of the situation inevitably is leading to war, because there is literally no way out for either party, short of intervention from heaven. Consider this—there is no way that the terrorists in Iran can back down now, without losing face and in any case it is clear that they are living in a very alternative universe. They may seriously believe that there is a chance of the US handing over the ex-Shah—although it is difficult for me to imagine how, given my mindset. More probably they realize that there is no chance of this happening (and have realized this from the start) but are caught up in the push of events. In either case they cannot moderate their demands now—how? Would they be satisfied with the handing over of a ransom from the ex-Shah (always assuming the ex-Shah is willing to pay such a forfeit)? I wouldn’t be, in their place. What then? A UN inquiry, rather than justice? When the UN is obviously dominated by the CIA? I may well be caricaturing their views, but I feel that has to be the direction they’re going, to judge from their rhetoric—a poor source, but what I’ve got. What compromise is possible?—the ex-Shah cannot be halfway handed over.

But they are trapped, nonetheless. They cannot get the Shah, and their only alternative is to sit forever in the embassy with the hostages. Really, they cannot proceed to the next step without great difficulty. Killing the hostages would likely provoke US reaction and (discounting the words involved) would be avoided. Even staging a mock trial I believe is more dangerous than they dare to go. They may of course go ahead with such shows, but they must realize what toboggan they are climbing on in that instance; they will escalate the shouting but must hold off on action.

Neither can the US act now. Again, there is no way that the US can give in on this point. But military action is basically impossible until the hostages are killed—at which point it becomes pointless. Economic actions on either side will have no real results. So—

So it’s a deteriorating stand-off. Deteriorating, because both sides must give the appearance of taking steps, and sooner or later one will have to cross the line. The US must move closer to military action, while the terrorists towards their trials. We both realize that the other is bluffing; but we also both know that our bluffs will sooner or later be called.

If any of the US folk are put on trial (perhaps with confessions extracted under torture) then the US will have to take action—either that or back down. If it invades Iran, then the interests of the Russian Empire are threatened inevitably (just as they were when the US had a military presence there). The US would certainly take a dim view of Russian maneuvers in say Mexico—and the reverse holds true. A US/Russian Empire conflict in Iran is not out of the question, although I do not think it would go further. I don’t think it would, but it is not a desirable thing to have happening.

I had intended to say a few things about the perceptions of the Iranian terrorists, who can see the CIA as being so powerful. It is sad to think of the kind of oppression that would produce this misconception—misconception outside of Iran, I mean, not necessarily inside. But I am tired, and the night is wearing on, and soon, when I turn out the lights, the things will again creep out of the woodwork. [4 Dc 1979]

Three Short Notes [1990]

[A repost from 3 December 1990]

T

wo instances of surprising ignorance in my weekend’s reading: Bruce Michelson in an essay on The Mysterious Stranger mentions that Mark Twain already had the idea for the book before The Innocents Abroad; he goes on to say “In the Alta California letters from which Twain’s first real book developed, there is a sketch for an ‘Apocryphal New Testament,’ in which Jesus returns to earth as a playful boy:”—and the passage that follows is Twain’s description of two incidents (the clay birds and the dyer’s shop) from the Infancy Gospels. It sure looks as if Michelson thought Twain was inventing a plot, instead of repeating a well-known story, and even if Michelson somehow was unfamiliar with the Infancy Gospels, he must have read The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, and this matter is dealt with in the introduction. (Another oddity is the fact that Michelson speaks of the second manuscript (Young Satan) as if it were the first, and overlooks the first (“Mr. Black” etc.) altogether.)

In Tell Me Why Tim Riley seems to think that George Harrison wrote the words of “The Inner Light” (from the Tao Te Ching), instead of merely setting them to music. “George’s philosophical musings are less condescending than those of ‘Within You Without You,’…” And yet, even if we grant Riley’s ignorance of one of the greatest religious works of all time, he has read I, Me, Mine, and that should have straightened him out. Worse yet, in his description of The Beatles Forever he quote Schaffner as saying, “The lyrics to Harrison’s ‘The Inner Light’ were ‘pinched almost verbatim from a Japanese poem by Roshi, translated by R. H. Bluth’”.

George Bush, it is reported, has appointed Robert Martinez of Florida to the post of drug czar here in the land of the free—another illustration of how phony this “war” on drugs really is. During Martinez’s reign in Florida drug use has increased. What is the secret of his success? He emphasizes punishment over education, jail over treatment. How does Bush justify his choice? He points out that 61 (or some such number) men have been executed in Florida during Martinez’s rule—a revealing admission. It’s blatant now—he doesn’t even bother to hide the fact that the “war on drugs” is a phony war to conceal the real war on the Bill of Rights. One thing’s for sure—whether we have Conservatives or Moderates in office, the government gets more and more power over the citizen. [3 Dc 1990]

[Note and Update: The Bruce Michelson essay referred to above was “Deus Ludens: The Shaping of Mark Twain’s ‘Mysterious Stranger’” in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 44-56. (8 Ap 2011)]

The Daily Nighmare (1978)

[A passage from my journal, written 27 October 1978 at 8:17 am PDT in Crookshank 213.]

I

 was down badly yesterday for no good reason that I can see—perhaps because nothing repeatedly continues to happen. The idiom of despair—the small certainties comfort one: that sooner or later the sun will come up; that whatever one does, nothing fundamental is going to change; that eventually the daily nightmare will end, to be replaced in its turn by tomorrow’s nightmare; that one day in the not too distant future life will end, probably with one’s brains scattered over the blanket of the bed, but certainly by one’s own hand. What is there to say? We are aliens, strangers under one roof, and hostile at that. To play unpleasant games in one’s head is not the most comfortable way to spend the day—still, the time passes.

They say that time flies when you’re having fun—I’ve always found that time goes by slowly when you’re enjoying it. Last Thursday is a long time ago, last August an æon. It’s when you’re caught in routine, performing a daily ritual, that one day merges imperceptibly into another, and Thursday a month ago is separated from now by paperthin walls—the days are interchangeable, and eventually you look up and a year has gone by, and in your memory is nothing but the same day, repeated in more or less uninteresting variations.

—thus goeth my mind. This is the sort of crap I’ve been into for a week or so—which is to say I am depressed. Maybe it will go away sooner or later, maybe not.

I keep telling myself that I’m going to eat out sometime soon but the trouble is I want to get “home” to play the piano while I have the place more or less to myself. If I could go out in the evenings—but that’s probably bullshit also.

Speaking of piano, I’m currently working on the “Maple Leaf Rag,” the rest of “The Entertainer,” the twelve scale chords and various variations, and perhaps the second movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata (I started “The Entertainer” and “Moonlight” Sonata yesterday). I’m also working on piano versions of “Let It Be” and (tentative title) “Nothing is Real,” (Lennon/McCartney parody)—the last two are beginning now to go fairly well.

While I’m on the subject of current efforts perhaps I should mention again that I’m attacking the storyline/plot question by assembling stories by modern authors (who are taken seriously) as well as sf, mystery, and humor writers.

Class is about ready to begin—I think I’ll stop here and get a drink of water.

Polycarp: John’s Disciple? (1999)

[Note written before 9:42 a.m. PDT on 24 October 1999]

I

 just got a couple of messages while I was online staring at the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Polycarp. I wonder whether religious types ever actually think about how their reasoning might appear to outsiders. One of the issues in the life of Polycarp is whether he was in some sense a disciple of John—presumably the John who was the brother of James and one of the inner three of the Twelve. One of the factors to consider is when Polycarp lived—or rather, in this case, the date of his death. (He was supposed to be 86 when he died—at least 86 actually—so if we have the date of his death, we have the date of his birth and hence the span of his life.) According to Eusebius Polycarp died in 166, so he must have been born in 80—which makes it difficult for him to have been a disciple of John, though he could have seen him maybe when a child. But wait—among a number of researchers (admittedly mostly conservative types, though that doesn't affect the argument) the date of 155 is favored for Polycarp’s death, based on the dates that various officials mentioned were in office, and so on. In this case Polycarp was born in 69, which makes it a lot easier to see how he could have been a disciple of John. But is this sound, or mere wishful thinking? There seem to me to be difficulties with both dates, and I see Helmut Koester simply has Polycarp martyred “after 160” which is probably about as much as can really be said, as the inconsistencies in the lines of evidence seem to me to show that either (a) we don’t know enough about the times various officials were in office to reach a conclusion, or (b) some of the data we are working with are simply inaccurate. Or both.

Anyway, the Catholic Encyclopedia article after reviewing the evidence as to date comes down on the side of 155 because “155 must be approximately correct if St. Polycarp was appointed bishop by St. John.” But this is the very point at issue! What I get from this is that the author was determined to reach this conclusion no matter what, and that the evidence presented is basically so much window dressing. And yet up till that point the argument followed an apparently impartial course. It kind of makes one wonder. [24 Oc 1999]

M-x R-ff-rty on the Ills of Society (1969)

[written 22 October 1969]

E

verybody see how clever I am! Boy am I exposing all those dope pushers, pornography peddlers, and all the other evils that beset your children.

In the first place, only I, M-x R-ff-rty, am right—accept no substitutes. Oh, there are some smart people, some clever people, who try to oppose me with logic. They claim they want facts. Let’s knock this crap out here and now. Logic is behind all the ills in our society today. If we didn’t have logic, we could clean up the movies, hang the smut salesmen, and destroy the pot pushers. Oh, he’s a glib one, the logic monger. He’ll sell his mother for a syllogism, and with every word he gnaws away at the foundations of all Morality. He’s the pinko professor urging hairy kids to dodge the draft, and anything else he’s afraid to do. He’s the smut pusher who sells Lysistrata in the bookstores. He’s the “entertainer” who plays pop music that blows kids’ minds. He’s the scum of society, the lowest of the low, and he’s gotta be stopped! We can’t have our kids’ minds corrupted by logic! How could I manip—I mean, how could they be safe? We are beset on every side by dangers. Why don’t the courts do anything about this? For the same reason they let criminals go free all the time.

[I broke off with a bit of bad prophecy: “I could write like that for hours. Max Rafferty, Ronald Reagan, Al Capp, and their ilk, are simply nothing. Unintelligent mumbling from men who can’t tell truth from lies, or fact from fiction. Their names will be buried as part of the shameful past of filth and savagery from which we are slowly emerging.”]

I Hope I Never Come Down (1979)

[passage from my journal, written 10:37 p.m. PST on 21 October 1979]

I

’m behind in everything, facing a disastrous midterm to-morrow (no, Tuesday rather) and now have two papers upcoming in Christian Origins assuming I revise the first—a project I worked all day on. Oh well. To-morrow is another day and maybe I can get a little ahead. Maybe I should just write up my Christian Origins first paper as it stands (I feel fairly confident of what I’m doing there). And I have rent due again all too soon and I need money for food and books and such (though if I live on bread and water I think I can make it to December…)

Anyway, I’m not depressed, I can’t think why. I’m so fucking glad I’m not depressed—in fact, I’m in this nothing-can-bring-me-down phase, fundamentally out of touch with reality. It’s great; I hope I never come down. I’m a little afraid right now—I’ve got that grungy corrupted dirty feeling, that often precedes a crash, and I can’t afford a crash now, not at all. It’s been so good; I don’t want it to end.

The Day They Knocked Down the—Liquor Store? (2009)

[Originally posted at Rational Rant on 20 October 2009. The largish 1910 house that was then my home has now joined the liquor store in oblivion.]

E

xhaustion lingers, but I ventured outside today, making it as far north as Lombard to pick up a few grocery-like objects. I had second thoughts as I stood unsteadily at the MAX station, debating whether to commit myself by actually buying a ticket. Something didn’t seem to be right in my immediate environment. There was something wrong, something missing.

It took me a second to figure out what it was. Across the street, where someone is leveling a city block to build an apartment-and-retail complex, a single earth-moving machine stood, claw uplifted. Most of the houses were now gone, even the debris and the naked chimneys that had marked the sites where they had stood for so long had vanished. And that’s when I noticed.

The Ice Cream Store was gone. It hasn’t actually been an ice cream store for decades, but it was one for a long time, certainly throughout my childhood. The old-timers remember it for its fifty-nine flavors; what I remember primarily about it is waiting in the car while my father zipped inside to pick up magazines. The Scientific American, Mad, Galaxy—all these came from there, and I’m sure other magazines I’ve forgotten. When he returned, however, he would come bearing ice cream for my brothers, and a Hershey bar for me (I detest ice cream and always have). It was a treat; it was something we enjoyed, a ritual that rounded off an otherwise-mundane trip.

The geography of childhood is funny. The Safeway I remember as being a bit of a walk from our (then) home is actually just down the block and across one street, though it’s a Harbor Freight today. The Ice Cream Store is—no, was—only a couple of blocks further on, but I remember it as being a long way off. And frankly, most of my memories of it do in fact come from a time when we no longer lived anywhere nearby; we would stop there on our way back from Portland to our home across the river in Vancouver. Maybe that affected my sense of location.

I can remember vividly sitting in the car, the huge neon sign across the front of the store flickering and buzzing, while waiting for my father to return. Looking out across Interstate I could watch cars stopping for gas at a station there. Up from it was an auto repair shop (the sign said it had been in business since 1924); in my memory it is always closed, but of course we stopped by the Ice Cream Store in the evenings. I can’t help but think that I must have some time looked at the largish 1910 house to the other side of the gas station, but I have no memory of that. I certainly never imagined that that was the place I was going to someday own, that my brother’s kids were going to grow up thinking of it as the traditional gathering place for Thanksgiving, that it would become by default the family center.

Now by the time we actually moved here the Ice Cream Store had become something else—I’m not sure what any longer. For awhile it quit being a store of any kind; the display windows were bricked up and the doors turned from glass to steel. For some of that time it was a distribution center for the Portland Oregonian, and most of the activity there went on in the early morning. For the past few years it was a liquor store. Then, this immediate past year, it was a vacant building awaiting destruction. And now, as I stood there at the MAX station, it was just—gone.

“Excuse me, sir, but I'm sixteen cents short for a ticket, and I need to get home.” Real life in the shape of a rather shabby-looking guy, one half of a couple, intruded on my recollections.

I groped in a pocket for change, trying to hold on to the mood, to savor the liminal moment, and thrust a few coins blindly into his hand.

“I’m not a panhandler,” he said, affronted, plucking out an offending dime and nickel too many, and shoving them back at me.

“Okay, whatever,” I said. I really wasn’t feeling up to this. I was committed, though; I’d bought my ticket and was ready to face the consequences. Sort of.

So, yeah, the Ice Cream Store. We didn’t always wait out in the car; that was only when my father was in a hurry and just wanted to pick up a couple of things. Sometimes we’d go inside and look around.

The periodicals there were many and varied. Along the north wall was a rack of magazines my mother always encouraged me not to look at, bearing stories of true crime and degradation, desperate tales of survival, and pieces involving the deaths of large animals. I seem to remember one that advertised in large letters, “The Night Jackie had to Say No To Lyndon.” (I’m sort of hoping that was a takeoff, but at this distance, who can tell?) Under the windows facing Interstate were a variety of puzzle magazines, children and teen stuff, glamour, TV, all like that there. Science magazines, Popular Electronics, that sort of thing seemed to move about more; you had to kind of guess where they would end up. The New Yorker, Atlantic, Saturday Review—

“Excuse me, sir, but here's your four cents.” The shabby Intruder from Reality was back, giving me change from the two dimes he had deigned to accept from me.

“Yeah, okay, thanks,” I said, or words to that effect. I put the coins in my pocket, and tried to disentangle my thoughts again. The Ice Cream Store—old memories—there was nothing there. Literally nothing, in a way—a socket in the ground where Something used to be. It wasn't the Day They Knocked Down The Pallais, exactly, but still—

“Thank you.” It seemed the social transaction was still not over; my new acquaintance was shouting at me halfway across the station. I peered around myopically (I’ve got to get new glasses). “Thank you,” the shout came again. The guy was standing with his lady, glaring at me. His tone demanded a response.

“You're welcome,” I said weakly. Screw it—let the dead past bury its own. “You’re welcome,” I said again, a bit more firmly, and that seemed to satisfy him. The transaction was closed. He turned to face the street where his train was about to pull in and I likewise turned to face my soon-to-arrive train. In the here-and-now I had groceries to pick up.

A Deep and Profound Silence (2002)

O

ne of the things I find absolutely fascinating is the bizarre reaction of the public and media to announcements just made by the Bush White House—it seems that Al Qaeda has reestablished itself, that the war in Afghanistan was “counter-productive”, that the US is as unprepared to meet a possible terrorist threat as it was before 11 September 2001. Please note—this is not election-year propaganda by Bush’s enemies; this is being announced by his own people. There is even an odd note of pride to this accomplishment. Billions of dollars and thousands of lives have been expended for what? Apparently less than nothing. (Not that I necessarily believe this stuff—nothing that comes from “President” Bush and his associates has been reliable in the past—why should this?) So you would think people in authority—or at least the news media—would be asking some pointed questions. But so far there has been a deep and profound silence. The news is reported, and allowed to die. Something is off somewhere. [19 Oc 2002]

Greetings from Ephesus (or Maybe Rome)

T

oday’s saint is Luke, according to the Roman Calendar, anyway. “The glorious Evangelist Saint Luke was natiue of the city of Antioch, son to noble and rich parents, and from his childhood inclined to the study of good learning, and all vertue,” according to Pedro de Ribadeneira (The Lives of the Saints, St. Omers, 1669). “His perseuering all his life a Virgin, was a signal testimony of his honesty. He studied much eloquence and other sciences but more particularly Physick which he practised: and Saint Paul calls him the most beloued Physitian.”

There’s a lot to unpack in these claims, especially considering that the only historical fact we have about Luke is that Paul of Tarsus mentions him in a letter to Philemon as one of five people sending him greetings. Everything beyond this belongs to hypotheses piled on top of rickety foundations.

The first notable addition came late in the first century, when somebody took it upon himself to write a letter in Paul’s name ostensibly to the Colossians. Taking the letter to Philemon as model, Paul’s imitator expanded on it in its conclusion. Where Philemon has:

Epaphras, who is my fellow prisoner for Christ Jesus, sends you his greeting; and Marcus, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers, send theirs

Colossians reads:

My fellow prisoner, Aristarchus, sends you his greeting, and Barnabas’s cousin, Mark, sends his. (You have received directions about him. If he comes to you, make him welcome.) Joshua, who is called Justus, also sends his greeting. These are the only converts from Judaism who have worked with me for the kingdom of God; I have found them a great comfort. Epaphras, who is one of yourselves, sends you his greeting. He is a servant of Christ Jesus, and is always most earnest in your behalf in his prayers, praying that you may stand firm, with a matured faith and with a sure conviction of all that is in accordance with God’s will. I can bear testimony to the deep interest he takes in you, as well as in the followers at Laodicea and at Hierapolis. Luke, our dear doctor, sends you his greeting, and Demas sends his.

Are these new items of information about Epaphras, Mark, and Luke derived from solid tradition? Or are they just corroborative details, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing production (to borrow from Pooh-Bah)? Personally, I lean towards the former possibility, given that the new composition was probably created within living memory of the original, but there’s no real way of telling at this distance, and the audacity of forgers knows no bounds.

So we now have Dr. Luke rather than just plain Luke. For what that’s worth. I suppose we could examine what a physician in the Roman era might be expected to know, and from that build a generic picture of the good doctor. I don’t say it’s a waste of time entirely—but it is guesswork built on an uncertain basis. The other element—ἀγαπητὸς—could mean anything. It could be as meaningless as the word “esteemed” often is in English—the esteemed Dr. Luke sends his regards—or an indication of high regard—the extremely popular doctor, Luke, salutes you. Assuming that Paul’s imitator intended these new details to resonate with his readers, we may suppose that they believed—or would be gratified to learn—that Luke was a beloved figure.

With the next development of this historical snowball we are clearly in artistic verisimilitude country. Some second-century author, whose style suspiciously resembles that of a distinguished pillar of the Great Church, took it upon himself three letters in Paul’s name—two of them addressed to Timothy, and one to Titus. In 2 Timothy (4:10–13 to be exact) we find the following wonderful farrago:

Do your utmost to come to me soon; for Demas, in his love for the world, has deserted me. He has gone to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. There is no one but Luke with me. Pick up Mark on your way, and bring him with you, for he is useful to me in my work. I have sent Tychicus to Ephesus. Bring with you, when you come, the cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books, especially the parchments.

I love the mentions of the cloak and the parchments; Polycarp (or whoever it was) had a delightful imagination. “There is no one but Luke with me” he has Paul say with some pathos. So Dr. Luke, the much-loved physician, stayed with Paul when Demas, Crescens, and Titus had all deserted him.

Our next stop in this trip is Irenaeus, writing late in the second century. He tells us that “Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him.” This is the first reference to Dr. Luke being a writer as well; he is presumably the author then of the two-volume work addressed to Theophilus that appears in the New Testament as The Gospel According to Luke [volume 1] and The Acts of the Apostles [volume 2]. (If there were subsequent volumes they have not come down to us.) Raymond E. Brown in his introduction to the New Testament gives this description of the author as determined from his work:

An educated Greek-speaker and skilled writer who knew the Jewish Scriptures in Greek and who was not an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry. … Probably not raised a Jew, but perhaps a convert to Judaism before he became a Christian. Not a Palestinian.

There is nothing in this description that would either confirm or contradict its attribution to Dr. Luke, which is about where Raymond E. Brown leaves it. If Luke and Acts are his work, however, we are in a position to deduce quite a bit about him based on his own writings. But again, it is worth noting, to do so we put ourselves in the position of piling conjecture upon conjecture.

Our final stop on this tour will be a prolog written to the gospel, possibly as early as the second century, but more likely a couple of centuries further on down the road (considerably abridged here):

The holy Luke is an Antiochene, Syrian by race, physician by trade. As his writings indicate, of the Greek speech he was not ignorant. He was a disciple of the apostles, and afterward followed Paul until his confession, serving the Lord undistractedly, for he neither had any wife nor procreated sons. [A man] of eighty–four years, he slept in Thebes, the metropolis of Boeotia, full of the holy spirit. He … in parts of Achaea wrote down this gospel…. And indeed afterward this same Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles.

So, there you have it. That’s not really the end of the road; in later centuries we will learn that Luke was also a painter, as well as a close confidant of Jesus’ mother Mary. Not bad for a guy whose only real claim to fame is that he sent his greetings to a fellow named Philemon a couple thousand years ago. It’s better than you or I are going to do anyway.

Summer of Haight (opening) [1982]

[From Cellophane Visions, written 17/18 October 1982]

I

t was the 14^th of January in 1967 that the greed and stupidity of the HIP merchants and psychedelic hucksters of the Haight got it together to blow the lid off and make San Fantasia the adventureland Mecca for all the middle-class high schoolers who wanted to enjoy a brief fling into the exciting world of play poverty. They called it the Human Be-In. Like all the other events in which Finnegan played no part, it was lame. When Finnegan thought of how it could have been, he was ready to weep for the arrogance and disgusting flatulence of it all. All it was was a chance for the would-be radicals and so-called hipsters to indulge in a little public mutual masturbation, but it was enough.

Finnegan was slow in the realization of what was going down. The Gutter Free Food program was taking up so much of his time that he did not have time to put the promoters of the Summer-of-Love hoax in their place, which was weighted down with cement at the bottom of the San Fantasia Bay, but instead was merely content to let events take their course.

Finnegan had to wonder just how long these hip radical escapees from the middle-class could keep on kidding themselves. He thought of warning their intended dupes of their mendacity, of using his position as a counter-cultural folk hero to short-circuit the fast-buck ripoff artists who passed themselves off as the “leaders” of the new movement, but he felt that his anonymity, his reputation of never seeking the media limelight, was more important. He merely smiled to himself, and continued hustling the stuff that was needed to make the Free Food thing work. If the lemmings of the high schools of America wanted to throw themselves into San Fantasia, that was their lookout. Finnegan has always believed in letting people dig their own graves, if that’s what they want to do.

In those days, when he was trying to finish up high school without destroying his mind, Stephen Farnham began to picture himself as a character in a Jack Kerouac book. The long gray roads were calling him, the seagull cries of Heceta, Greyton and Cauldron on the Wyano coast, the mysterious beckoning of the Cascadia desert towns, Rattlesnake and Death Gulch and Desolation, the names like tombstones under the dry sun, and last the siren call of Fornicalia. San Fantasia. Everybody was going to San Fantasia that year. The secret was out, and all the hip people were hanging out in the Haight-Ashtoreth district. The Cosmic Park regulars all knew the inside story; smuggled copies of The Oracle circulated from hand to hand, each as precious as parchment hand-written copies of the Tao Te Ching, and each told o the marvelous mystic world where L.S.D. and marijuana flowed like wine, and where love was free.

Stephen had experienced the fantastic way that acid had of making the world into a mixed up salad of colors exploding across the retina like phosphorescent paint splashed across living flesh in the warm wet night. But was that all that it was about? Saruman spoke of metaphysical highs, mysterious planes of mystic consciousness, and God. Saruman spoke of God quite a bit in those days, but Stephen never knew what he meant by it.

Saruman was one of the people who never slowed down, rockets streaming through the psyche and gone already before there was time to register their passing. He had gotten his name from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. He had never read the trilogy; he just liked the sounds. Saruman sounded hip to him, like the sort of name a wizard should have. He called his place Perelandra. There were always a dozen or so people staying there, crashing out on the living-room floor or standing around drinking beer in the kitchen. Like Stephen he had taken to sleeping out in Cosmic Park himself; the two of them would smoke dope and talk until the sun rose. [17/18 Oc 1982]