In which I briefly discuss being a human pincusion, and how much more fun it is to be alive than dead

The sky has drifted from blue to gray over the course of the afternoon. I love overcast days and the promise of rain. The greens look greener and the asphalt looks less harsh. No doubt it its still hot and steamy, but at least it appears more bearable – the light isn’t boring into my skin.

Speaking of boring, I had to have another biopsy yesterday, of my left breast. I am always amazed at medical science. They make such extraordinary leaps in technology and yet they cannot design any device for human comfort. Stereotactic biopsies aren’t painful – they shoot you up with lidocaine and then the extraction needle itself continues to inject lidocaine – but the contorted position you must hold for 30 minutes or so is. Perhaps it wasn’t that long. Perhaps it was just the incredible tension in my neck, which I was forced to twist to one side as I lay face down (“Don’t move!”), and the creeping numbness in my right arm, or the fact that the positioning device felt much like an unending mammogram. I greeted the lidocaine with some relief, although after a number of minutes of immobility, I began to imagine the remarkable discomfort had disrupted the flow of time and I was not entirely in the room but was perhaps also inside that computer screen just out of my line of vision. At times like these, doctors and techs display a remarkable serenity and deliberation, as if they are not in the same reality with you, the reality in which you are being compressed with some force into an unnatural state of being. Instead, they are in a world without limits, with an infinite amount of time to adjust, examine, adjust again.

Afterward the tech told me that they inject epinephrine along with the lidocaine. I asked why and she told me that it reduces bleeding. “When we have someone in here who can’t tolerate epinephrine, this whole room is covered in blood by the time we’re done.” I gave myself a little mental pat on the back for my good relationship with epinephrine. I was very grateful that I did not have to stumble out of the room slipping in my own blood.

I’m supposed to have the results in 5 days. I’m not unduly worried, because I simply do not have the energy to worry about it. It has reminded me, however, of how much I like life and this world and how uninterested I am in heaven. Sorry, but I would much rather be with my family than with God, and given that He created us to have fierce ties to other people and our own lives, I don’t think he should expect anything else. Lately I’ve wondered if I have any deep belief in an afterlife. When I was younger I thought it didn’t much matter – once you were dead you had no consciousness with which to be disappointed. It matters while you’re alive, while you’re alive and someone else is dying. You don’t want them erased or even “to live on in your memory.” Really, that latter is pathetic. I don’t want someone in my memory – I want them in the flesh. I find heaven difficult to believe in. I won’t even bother with hell, which is so obviously some sort of sick fantasy dreamed up to satisfy both our bloodlust and our sense of justice.

Besides the obvious desire not to miss watching my children grow up or travel around the world with Dear Husband, I find myself hoping that I don’t die without seeing the final Harry Potter films. And what a shame if I were to miss the next technological advance, or the emergence of the next great actors or writers or artists. Or even the next morning’s coffee. There seems to be so much to look forward to, even when I lag and am weary and depressed.

The wind is growing wilder and the sky is drawing close. I expect to soon see the first dark marks of rain against the pavement. I’m looking forward to watching movies with the family, or perhaps reading a bit, and then sleeping in as much as Firecracker will allow (DramaQueen would sleep until noon).

Make Mine an O+, Please

Dear Husband and I have been catching up on Season 2 of True Blood. I do love me some vampires, and we’re just a-poppin’ with ‘em these days. I revel in it. Well, I haven't been able to get into The Vampire Diaries. Seems too much like Dawson's Creek with fangs. I think I will have to revisit it because of Ian Somerhalder, who plays bad-boy Damon (and with that name could he be anything but bad?) - he's dark, sexy, snarky and so much more interesting than his goody-two-shoes vamp brother. A goody goody vampire? Seriously? I mean it’s nice to be all noble about not killing people, but you need to at least let your potential menace shine forth.

Now True Blood, it’s crazy-ass Southern culture with fangs, specifically bayou culture with fangs, and that’s just perfect in my opinion. The idea of red-neck vampires is truly scary, and then there are the Southern gentleman vampires and foreign exotic imports to lend a bit of class. Lots of sex and naked people - these vampires are strictly adult content. And they look really, really sexy in a menacing way full of promise. (Well, not the red-neck ones, who look like they hide their coffins in double-wides with tires in the front yard.) Vampires are all about sex, anyway, and the deep dark recesses of the subconscious, your own private bayou, so to speak.

The great thing about these popular genres is the way they mirror the issues and obsessions of the time. While the literary novels are busy being cool and minimalist, or grungy and despairing, or poetic and earnest, the genre writers are down on the streets, not hesitating to be playful and trashy and ephemeral. In True Blood, vampires mirror gays. The vampires have “come out of the coffin,” and are trying their best to integrate into regular society. Meanwhile the completely cuckoo Fellowship of the Sun (a more genteel and better-armed Westboro Baptist Church) is all “God hates fangs” and sharpening stakes after Bible studies. Despite the fact that the vamps are swigging synthetic blood and really putting their all into living in the open and not sucking on unwilling humans (they seem to have enough willing donors to keep them from starving), they are still loathed and feared, when folks aren’t exploiting vampire blood as a recreational drug. People hate them yet profit off them. Yeah, that sounds like the world.

Sometimes these genre entertainments step into the sublime. In the midst of all the delightfully gratuitous sex and fighting off the bad guys, True Blood has its philosophical moments. Lately they’ve been rolling in some Greek mythology, a maenad hosting huge orgies and ripping out folks’ hearts in the hope of calling down Dionysus to devour her (and presumably everyone else). Yet when she talks about mysticism and how our culture roots out any whiff of the ecstatic, she makes perfect sense, even while she’s sauteing a human heart with butter and scallions. Truth and evil mixed up.

And, of course, you can’t have vampires without some reflections on mortality and the soul, evil and redemption. I found this scene of the vampire Godric choosing to meet the sun strangely moving. First there’s the sad parting between him and his "child" (and damn these two are gorgeous), and then there is this dialogue about God between him and the heroine Sookie:

“Do you believe in God?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re right, how he will punish me?”
“God doesn’t punish - God forgives.”
“I don’t deserve it, but I hope for it.”
“We all do.”

Then he says that in her tears he sees God.

Man, it’s just full of awesome.



And did I mention that these two men are really, really hot. I mean, I would happily lick away those tears of blood. I have a very giving heart.

Me, Myself and I

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so...

~Peter Handke

Besides watching episodes of this fascinating BBC teen drama Skins on Netflix (you'll be glad to know I'm using my time so wisely), I've been slowing turning over various thoughts. My mind is not like a rock tumbler - the stones don't come out polished and shiny. My thoughts are more like the clothes you forgot in the dryer, so wrinkled you need to put them back in the wash.

The wrinkled laundry includes: ambition and desire, artistic production, doubt and longing, God and creativity, God and desire, emotions versus values, and my stupid tooth. I'll get that last out of the way first - I had a root canal and now another tooth hurts. All expressions of deep sympathy are welcome. On the positive: I now have a bottle of Lortab.

I keep thinking about that Insurrection event. I've already mentioned Peter Rollins' take on doubt, which I found incredibly comforting and challenging at the same time. I've been practicing not leaping in to fix negative feelings. You know how therapists will tell you to rewrite the tape or recognize the distortion and rebut it? Well, I'm giving that up. My thoughts and emotions are what they are and if I try to correct them at every turn I'm just getting more enmeshed in myself. So, no beating up doubt with the cudgels of faith. I'm tired of always trying to soothe myself. No wonder my memory is crap - my eyes are pretty firmly fixed on myself.

At one point, he said something along the lines of "I desire your desire." At the moment he was alluding to the human need for approval, love, and admiration, but it made me think of God's desire for us. If we yearn for Him, he must also yearn for us. I guess that's Christianity 101, but it isn't something I get. It's like doubt, which we say is important and understandable but we really just tuck it away with the ugly Christmas present from Aunt Agnes. We act as if God were a frigid, purse-lipped missionary who drops by to say the occasional hello, leave some pamphlets, and check the sheets. Or perhaps as the smug and glib CEO who drops by on a Sunday morning to graciously receive our applause and drop a few inspirational words in our ear in return for dippy praise music. If God wants us, really wants us, that's kind of...weird. Why would He?

Desire, ambition, yearning, creativity. I desire your desire. I am reminded of that interminable book I read many years ago by Deleuze and Guattari, which spoke of desiring machines. I only read it because I had a crush on my lit crit professor. It was over my head, or full of crap, or both - something about production and schizophrenic capitalism. It was very French. But that in turn made me think of a friend who told me she got turned on listening to a lecture about Paul Ricoeur. I guess we all have our kinks. I tried reading Ricoeur and it did nothing for me. Which made me think about the excitement of ideas, because I actually totally get what she means. Why else did I have a crush on my lit crit prof anyway? He wasn't all that cute, but he was a purveyor of interesting ideas. That's why we have celebrities that people obsess about. If you hear music that completely floors you, that breaks open your heart, and there in front of you is the musician, that musician becomes the most desirable person on earth. You would like to be their best friend ever, or have their babies, or just a few hours in a motel, whatever. You think that surely God swept through that person, and maybe He's waiting there for you. Or at least I think like that. I have the urge to yank the divine out of the people I lust after admire.


He also talked about how the stories we tell don't always match up with how we actually are. The way we appear online, but also in person, is highly edited. Of course. Otherwise everyone would hate us. I have one story at work: straightforward creedal Christian, dry sense of humor, something of a scandalous past that I've fully repented. I know the lingo and I can use it. With others I would downplay the Christian part, because I'm way too cool for that. It's just decoration. In general I want people to think I'm witty, intelligent, a good writer, insightful. I'd rather be smart and clever than nice, but I would rather be nice than contradictory. I want everyone to like me. I desire your desire, only that sounds as if I want to sleep with you, which I don't. Well, some of you maybe. I reveal a lot about my weaknesses and foibles on here. But, in fact, I am the definition of "disingenuous." It is, I find, quite easy to deliver over parts of myself; I can transform them in the writing, give them a bit of panache, and it's all about me. I've always been fascinated with me, even when I've loathed my very existence.

Peter mentioned Columbo in connection with making the story told match the events that actually happened. Well, Columbo reminded me of the great film Wings of Desire, in which Peter Falk appears pretty much as his TV persona. There - desire again, the desire of angels to experience being human, which is the desire of humans to experience being human, the suspicion that this world should be heaven, because the leaves turn brilliant colors, and cats sleep in the sun, and there are paintings by Caravaggio and Rothko and poetry by Rumi, John Donne and Mary Oliver and music by Bach and Schoenberg and Owen Pallett. Shiraz and Chardonnay, strong coffee, chocolate chip cookies, romance and love and friendship. Heaven should be that, for everyone.

But the problem is, I'm all talk, and I really have to change that.

The Human Abstract

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain

~William Blake

Advent

I’ve been reading posts about Advent and wondering how to think about Christmas. I so dislike that little phrase “Jesus is the reason for the season.” If I am completely honest, I would not like Christmas nearly so much if there were not presents and trees, lights and decorations. Although I don’t like the relentless consumerism and marketing of the holidays, I really like many of the secular aspects of Christmas.

I’m not quite sure how to extract Christ from the sentimentalized narrative of events that I’m not sure even happened. Where I work, the thinking is that if the Virgin birth is not true, then Christianity falls apart. I don't know why. The story of a virgin birth really seems like something patched on later to explain how this man could be completely human and divine at the same time. But it’s a beautiful image – the soul of the world waiting for the divine to enter as one of its own, God binding himself in human flesh out of love for his creation, giving himself to his creation. Despite my prevarication, I don’t really feel hypocritical reciting the creed about Jesus being born of a virgin and that he died and rose again. I think so many things are true that aren’t literally true. Good fiction is true. Good poetry is true. And yet there may not be a single actual event in either. They transcend the literal and ascend to a world of – what? – archetypes? Platonic forms? The Christmas story is beautiful. It’s poetry, it may be fiction, it is a vision of what the world could be if we truly followed the law of love, it speaks of our greatest hope that humanity is good, because Jesus was a man and was good, because he championed the outcasts and afflicted, and we ourselves can nurture that goodness.

Dear Husband is frustrated at my lack of passion for Christ, as he puts it. He considers my sense of not fitting in to be of my own making. I do find it very difficult to engage. He loves our new pastor. I find his messages simplistic. Dear Husband thinks I'm antisocial. It's not that I don't think there are other people like me - I just don't think they're at our church. And, yes, I have my guard up based on what I hear people express. My husband fits comfortably into orthodoxy. He doesn't take issue with anything. When I hear our pastor say that doubt must be met with faith, I feel frustrated. It's like saying that hunger must be met with food, and yet the tables are bare. Dear Husband says I didn't really listen. Oh, but I did. I listened, hoping I would hear something startling. I am always hoping I will hear something that will touch me, stir me, invigorate me.

And that is why I am about to turn once again to a more formal style of worship. This next weekend I plan to visit an Episcopal church. I don't necessarily think that I feel completely comfortable there. I have so little experience with this style of worship. I've been to Episcopal/Anglican churches that were sadly out of touch. But I want to experience a little quiet veneration, a different rhythm, the Eucharist as a rite, ritual prayer. Dear Husband is beginning to think I'm a nonbeliever. In many people's opinion, I would be. Not in my own. I just feel tired.

Hooked

"I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread." G. K. Chesterton

The quote above is one Evelyn Waugh used in his novel Brideshead Revisited. How ironic that my favorite book in the whole world is about grace and conversion. I, who am constantly negative and struggling and generally sarcastic about religion, love this book beyond reason. I’ve always felt that I’m on that unseen hook and line. God hasn’t bothered to reel me in, but I can’t get away, either. I’m just swimming about, irritated. In fact, I’m in such constant irritation that by now I should be spitting out pearls.

My mind balks. Make a statement about faith and my skepticism kicks in. If it’s the children who enter the Kingdom, well, I’m the brat who has temper tantrums, contradicts everything and always complains she’s bored.

I would like to experience the presence of God. Oh, and to know that’s what I’m doing, so that I can say, “Hey, that’s God. Cool!” I would rather the presence weren’t coolly eternal. I expect warmth and affection from my husband and friends, so I don’t see why God shouldn’t deliver something similar. Someone will say it isn’t about feelings and emotion, but I am a friggin human after all, and I experience the world through my senses, my mind, and my emotions. So unless I’m going to experience God on some ethereal plane, I would prefer something tangible, or a sweeping ecstasy perhaps. Hell, even the mysterious joy in the Lord that people refer to would work. A little change in brain chemistry. A vision maybe. My husband got a vision. Why not me? How are they parceled out?

The truth is, I’m a snob. I’m an aesthetic snob and an intellectual snob. Not in everything, but definitely in religion. I’m not going to lift my hands during crappy worship music and get all weepy and emotionally choked up. I can’t insert Jesus and Praise God into every conversation. Or even every 14th conversation. I can’t talk about “a personal relationship with Jesus” without flinching and wanting to suggest that we reframe the discussion into language that doesn’t sound like it belongs at a tent revival. Same for “born again,” a perfectly nice term that I have to scrub with bleach before I can handle. Give my life over to Jesus? What the f@#k does that mean? Should I wrap it up with a bow and leave it on His doorstep? I can’t read the Bible as if it were literal or settle for that much-used cop-out: “God speaks to us through His Word.” Meaning, shut up already and get your lazy ass to read this big boring tome. Then All Will Be Answered. I’m sorry. A book by Charles Dickens really is more interesting. Bite me.

So I’m bitchy sometimes, not exactly alight with Christian love. It’s not pretty. I’m well aware that pride is one of my flaws. But the thing is, I feel like a complete sham, completely false, when I try to fit into contemporary evangelical culture. I’ve tried, and I know that I am lying or at best telling half truths.

Which brings me to the few times I have experienced something beyond the ordinary, a sense of being lifted out of time and feeling a connection with the stream of human history and endeavor and its creative source. I’ve felt it when looking at certain paintings. When reading fiction and poetry. When listening to music. Sometimes when sitting in a cathedral, in a patch of quiet that smells of frankincense. Sometimes when driving and the light hits the trees in a certain way and the world seems like a pathway and yet at the same time the destination.

I have never felt it during a contemporary worship service. Or during a bible study group. Or during most of the praying I’ve done in devotions, or when anyone has prayed over me. Not even a little bit.

What I’ve felt in those true moments isn’t particularly Jesus-y or Christian-y. It feels more like being unfolded. That’s the term that came to me – not sure what it means. I suppose: that my soul which is forced to remain in my finite body, a rather cramped cage, gets to stretch its legs for a moment and suck in some fresh air. Then it gets shoved back in the cage.

Despite the lack of overt worship and Christian trappings in my daily life, I’m pretty invested in Christianity. I want it to be true. Maybe not literally true – do I really care if Mary was a virgin? – but True to the substance and nature of the Divine. That Christ reconciles a screwed-up world to the Father. That he died and rose. That He is creating a new kingdom and a new earth with us. That we aren’t at the mercy of the most hellish aspects of ourselves individually or corporately. That there is a life beyond this one. But don’t get me started on heaven, because I think singing praises to God all day long sounds dead boring (Waugh said, “The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.”)

What the hell God was thinking in giving me this mental apparatus that constantly second guesses and deconstructs I do not know. I will never have a simple, trusting faith. I’m resigned to that. Still, I’m a fish, a hungry fish, so I took the bait. Now I’m just waiting for the twitch on the thread.

“Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.” Evelyn Waugh

God has Left the Building

“And I love the idea that the viewer goes through a similar process; because there's something so sexy about treasure, something so alluring and elusive about this fantasy of finding gold. And to some degree, you have to engage in what part of us lives in this fantasy, and what part of us is willing to see the other thing that's occurring; because we all want the fantasy. But there's always something more.” Quote from Darius Marder, directory of the documentary Loot.

The second sentence of this statement really struck me. This documentary is, I gather, about two men who, following war, buried treasures in different parts of the world, and in their old age they meet up with someone who leads them on a journey to recover it. I haven’t seen it yet, and I’m not sure I will like it, but from what I’ve read, the treasure hunt uncovers all sorts of things besides treasure.

What is a fantasy trying to tell us? The things I find alluring are not just about the object themselves. Obviously. I touched on that in my last post, how my fascination with this angel character reflects my own struggles with faith. Dear Husband might say I am rationalizing the fact that I think the actor is super attractive. But why do we latch onto celebrities in the first place? We all know it is more to do with our own desires than the actual person. The actor is beautiful, beautiful in a heart in the throat sort of way. But I’ve seen him all season without giving him a second thought. It wasn’t until Castiel became important that I found him alluring.

I develop short-run obsessions with characters, and in turn with the actors who play them. I obsess because they embody some issue or quality or need. Lie to Me and House: Dr. Lightman and Dr. House see through lies to the truth. They know when you're bullshitting. How desirable and painful at the same time. I wish someone would cut through my lies, and I tell myself plenty, and I tell others plenty. I would never in a million years have thought Tim Roth was attractive if he didn’t play this particular character. It’s all mirrors and glamour, in the old sense of the word glamour.

I’ve had these passionate interludes with fictional characters (and books themselves, too) for as long as I can remember. I’m sure others do, too. At times the experience of reading a really good book, the kind that stays with you through life, is a lot like infatuation. I have read books that made me breathless and tremble with excitement, oblivious to everyone at first, and then mad to tell everyone all about my beloved.

I think first of Brideshead Revisited, which may be indelibly ingrained in my psyche. I was in love with that book. With Sebastian and Oxford and the almost too rich, elegiac prose. There’s a line in the book about being in love with love, which is pretty much what I experienced. But then there is the theme of God drawing us in with an unseen hook and an unseen thread. There was a miniseries, and the actor who played Sebastian embodied the character so perfectly, that I was smitten with him as well.

Other fictional loves:

Sherlock Holmes: The allure of the unavailable.

Nabokov’s Real Life of Sebastian Knight: How much of the pursuit of someone else is a study of ourselves? What kinds of games can you play with reality and with words?

Raskolnikov: What do you do if you do the unforgivable? What is repentance?

Louis in the Ann Rice books: How do you live if you loath your very essence? What do you pin your hopes on?

Sydney Carton: Redemption.

Sometimes I am the character, sometimes the one who loves the character, and sometimes I just roam around among all the words.

So, recently, I’ve wanted to cut away the lies and pretense and admit that I am not ever going to fit where I seem to find myself. And then there is the questioning, the doubt, the sense that God is remote, the CEO of a corporation that churns along with its own rules that have so little to do with His true nature. Or at least I think or hope that is the case. I have never met Him, and I don’t think Castiel has either. In Supernatural, evil is real and present, but God is a cipher. Lucifer shows up, but God does not. Like Castiel, I’ve decided that I am not a good little soldier. If there is a side, I am definitely on the side of the messed up and burned out, the heretics and blasphemers, and the sovereign God, that construct of Calvinists, is in fact no god at all but a bunch of bureaucrats with their own agendas. As the angel Zacherias says in Supernatural, God has left the building.

Road Trip to St.John of the Cross

To the left is an installation by Bill Viola, called Room for St. John of the Cross. This picture doesn't tell you much, but more about that later. Before I saw this installation, I had only vaguely heard of St. John of the Cross, and I had never experienced this sort of art.

In the winter of 1987, I decided to travel cross-country with a college friend. She was one of several exchange students from Scotland, and as part of the program, they were given a van for transport. For whatever reason, we lucked into having the van ourselves. Denise and I weren't close friends; we just hung out with the same people, so I don't know why she asked me or why I decided to go. Perhaps I just didn't want to be home for the holidays. It was dull and my parents found and I felt squelched and defensive. Maybe it seemed like an adventure.

The trip began auspiciously with me throwing up. I had gone out with a high school friend the night before and drunk too much of something very strong. Usually I avoided hangovers by drinking a lot of water before passing out and not eating the next day. But that morning, since I was going on a journey and didn't want to get a cold, I took my vitamin C. Never take vitamin C after drinking. Happily, throwing up seemed to make the world right again and I set forth light of heart and stomach.

This was a winter of storms and blizzards. We cautiously approached Tupelo in a deluge, listening to reports of flooding on the radio. We stood in the dark, soaking parking lot of the small house where Elvis was born. Denise was an Elvis fan, so this was a Special Moment for her. I was just wet. In Memphis it was freezing, and we ended up sleeping in the van in the parking lot of a 7-eleven. We could hear the Christmas Carols being piped through the streets of downtown. The next morning we stumbled into the Drake to watch the red carpet rolled out and the resident ducks make their way to the hotel fountain. It’s kind of amazing we were up that early. We went to Graceland, of course, and the Lorraine Hotel (surprisingly shabby and unassuming). Then we made our way along a route I don’t remember very well, except that at one point we were driving up a mountain in the dark with no guardrail and an ominously dark bunch of nothing past the drop-off, and one night we slept at a hotel for truckers—bungalows with space beside to park your 18 wheeler.

As we drove into Yorktown, a blizzard hit and it was like trying to drive in a blanket. Despite the blizzard, and because we were total idiots, we took the time to stop somewhere to buy cheap champagne, to keep us happy while we waited out the storm in a dingy hotel. The next day we visited Yorktown, where all the information was blatantly anti-British (as Denise pointed out repeatedly), and then Jamestown, by which time I was so cold I easily understood how an entire village could disappear. Denise knew someone who lived in Williamsburg who took us in a back way that avoided entry fees. The place was nearly empty, with a few workers dressed in period costumes and looking cranky about it. We took refuge in a hotel and drank hot buttered rum.

At some point we got ourselves up to New York state, where Denise had arranged for us to stay with one of her many contacts. She knew a lot of people because she was friendly and undiscriminating. This was often the cause of problems, or at least I saw them as problems. She seemed not to mind if we ended up in a pub with two drunken bikers after the buses stopped running or in a house full of rowdy and randy Scots on New Years Eve in Edinburgh. She was a friendly girl with a nice word for everyone. Which is how we came to be staying in Yonkers with a girl who had been over at St. Andrews for some study program. I disliked Yonkers Girl on sight. Then I met her friends.

OMG. We ended up in a bowling alley. A bowling alley. I was a bohemian kid with a pierced nose and a horror of suburbia, so spending time in a bowling alley was a soul shriveling experience. And here I was talking with an RN (an RN, I tell you) who was afraid of catching AIDS from a bowling ball. Anyway, boring suburban Yonkers girl took us into Manhattan and to MOMA. I have to think MOMA was my idea, as I don't think Yonkers girl had ever entered it before. And as fate would have it, we happened upon the last few days of an exhibit of Bill Viola's work. I'd never heard of him, but it was art, it was culture, it was a Manhattan art museum and not a bowling alley in Yonkers.


I walked into a dark room, with a small structure in the center, warmly lit from within. A video of snow covered mountains was projected on one wall of the outer room, the film jerky as if the cameraman had been running. There was a roaring sound like wind. As you moved closer to the structure, which represented the cell where the mystic had been imprisoned, you could hear a voice reciting poetry in Spanish. Inside the cell there was a desk with a pitcher and a video monitor showing the same mountains, only quiet and serene. The catalog explained who St. John of the Cross was and printed some of his poetry. Wow, I had never read anything like this. I had never heard anyone speak of God like this--it was erotic, sensual, surrendered, a love song. What, I wondered, would it be like to experience God that way?

I don't remember anything of the trip after that: what happened to Yonkers girl, how we got out of Manhattan, the trip back to Atlanta, if we ever met up with the other exchange students. The narrative unravels here.

When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.


I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

God