Dr. Metablog

Turtles and Metempsychosis

I would not want to be reincarnated as a turtle. Not at all.

Should it happen that I were to be reincarnated, I would prefer to return as one of those great sea birds -- the Wandering Albatross or the Great Frigatebird  or the Northern Fulmar -- that cruise for hundreds of miles over the Pacific -- soaring effortlessly, joyriding the thermals, blissfully savoring the salt spray at dawn and dusk. It would be glorious -- although not entirely without a downside, because if I were such a bird I would have to sustain myself on a repulsive sushi diet of raw fish. Yeesh.

But to live the next or a subsequent life as a turtle -- what a grim unpleasant prospect! Turtles do not soar; they're earthbound, and they move so slowly that they're almost immobile. At very best, they slog or plod. It's not that they're unsuccessful in their own way; after all, they've been around for 200 million years. Generations, therefore, have plod, have plod, have plod. But is there a creature on earth whose bodily configuration is more limiting, more dictatorial? Turtles spend a lifetime schlepping carapace and plastron up and down hills or over the desert sands. How can an animal constrained to eternally lug an outsize ponderous shell experience any kind of freedom or joy? 

Besides, turtles are ridiculously ugly. 

 

Bulky thick inelegant legs ending in frightening claws. Absurd useless tails. Toothless gaping mouths. Prominent nostrils, wrongly placed. Horrid corrugated necks. No ears, none at all. Foolish, fatuous expression. The only part of the turtle that might be considered attractive is the carapace (when it's not coated with slimy vegetation or studded with leeches), but in the entire history of the planet, no turtle has ever been able to admire its own integument. 

 

Imagine being reincarnated as a creature so imperfectly designed that it can't regain its legs when tipped onto its back. If I were a turtle, I would hate that. Legs flailing in the air. Undignified. Double yeesh.

 

Plus, many turtles eat worms.

 

Moreover, if I or someone dear to me were to become a turtle -- it's going to be a long haul, reincarnation-wise. Let's say, for example, that you were to be born again as a dung beetle -- why, you would endure a very unsavory couple of months, but then -- on you would go to the next life. Once reincarnated as a turtle, however, you're liable to be stuck in that ungainly shell for a century. And worse still -- some turtles "brumate" for half their lives. That's a heck of a lot of time to spend in a state of suspended animation. In addition -- and this is rather shocking -- some turtles extract oxygen from water through their "cloaca." I can't imagine how they do that, and, frankly, "'twere to consider too curiously to consider so." Not to mention turtle sex. Do turtles cuddle or snuggle? It must be quite an accomplishment to work around those massive clanking  shells. 

 

So no turtle reincarnation for me. But to tell truth, I find reincarnation itself, like most religious or quasi-religious ideas, utterly baffling. I presume it works something like this. I die, my soul is released from my corpse and immediately enters into a new body -- in this case a newly fertilized turtle egg. (I have no idea how this process works -- but let's all agree that it does). Immediately, there's a glitch. Turtle gender is not determined in the usual way, by XX and XY genes. Turtle gender is a consequence of the temperature at which the embryos develop inside the eggshell. Warm, male; cool, female (or vice versa in some species). What this means is that if my soul was infused or assimilated or injected into a turtle egg, it would not be immediately known whether I was going to be a boy turtle or a girl turtle. I don't really care, frankly; there's not much advantage to being one or the other. Turtles are not particularly sexually dimorphic and both genders are equally hideous. But I would like to know right away and not have to wait on some quirk of the weather. 

 

Reincarnation puzzles me for still another reason. How can I be sure that I haven't already been reincarnated? Perhaps I was a turtle (or an albatross) in a past life. I don't remember being other than I am, but how can I be certain? 

 

Or, to switch points of view, perhaps one of the turtles pictured above was once, let us imagine, Ragnar Naess (1900-1972), a bachelor sorghum farmer from O'Neill, Nebraska. Or even one of my less brainy former colleagues. How could we determine it; how could the turtle know it? If it's undeterminable, why does it matter?

 

Gosh, reincarnation is a tough nut to crack.

 

[December 15, 2022. Pearl Maneli writes: "I believe current reincarnation theory explains that your soul wouldn't transmigrate into a turtle at the moment of conception; it would do so only when the turtle hatches from the egg. So you can let your mind rest easy on the question of your turtle gender."]

 

[December 16. Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks, Pearl. I am much relieved"]

Are Baboons "Spirtual'?

A friend is intimately acquainted with a primatologist. She (the primatologist) has spent many a year, almost a lifetime, studying baboons. She has lived with them and claims to have been accepted as one of the troop. She travels with them when she can. I'm impressed by her dedication. I wouldn't want to travel for more than a couple of days with a group of human tourists, let alone energetic lower primates. My one encounter with baboons, in a  rest area in South Africa, was unpleasant. The baboons were noisy and aggressive. Sub-Yahoos.

The primatologist told my friend the following  story. She was accompanying a troop of baboons on a trek from one feeding place to another. They came to a river that they wanted to cross. They all stopped, sat down on the ground, waited silently for about thirty minutes. Then they all arose as one and proceeded to wade across the river. 

My friend said, and I quote verbatim, "it was a spiritual moment." 

To which I immediately responded, "I don't know exactly what you mean, but I can tell you that never in a thousand years would I interpret such an event as 'spiritual'."

All of us around the table were polite, so the conversation moved on to more fruitful topics and did not become contentious.

But later, I thought, what did he (and the primatologist) mean by the word "spiritual."  And the best that I can come up with, is that they both deduced that the baboons engaged in some sort of prayer--that they paused to solicit divine intervention before setting out on a hazardous adventure.

I'm not even slightly sympathetic to that reading. In actual fact, just between us, I think it's kind of dumb.

I can think of many a reason why a congregation of baboons might assemble themselves and take a moment. Perhaps they were assessing the flow of the river. Maybe they were waiting for the current to become less strong. Or perhaps they were looking at the other bank to see if there were predators hiding in the underbrush. Or, most likely, they were simply tired and were gathering their strength.

I think that my friend wanted to believe that baboons are spiritual, because it follows that if baboons can pray to a higher power, then there's something natural and universal about belief in a deity, even if it's the Great Baboon in the Sky. Conversely, I am just as convinced that baboons are smart enough to look around carefully before taking the plunge. No supererogatory hypothesis required. 

To me, the natural and material explanation is completely obvious -- although I must admit that the primatologist who offered the spiritual explanation and the friend who repeated it are both scientists of considerable repute.

The Precious Gift of Atheism

Although my parents were pure and perfect atheists, they did not advertise their atheism or disparage the religions of others -- at least not in my hearing. They were exactly the opposite of what is sometimes called "militant atheists." To be militant would have been to give religion too much regard, too much importance -- and they wouldn't have bothered. To the best of my recollection, they were utterly indifferent. In our house, it was as if theology and worship had never been invented, practiced, or pondered. While my parents didn't enforce or evangelize their views upon their children, their unconcern, their lack of interest, was eloquence enough. Of course my brothers and I grew up to be atheists, and have remained so. Peaceful and positive atheists.

My parents were both readers. Every Tuesday my mother trundled over to the McDonald Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and trucked home a shopping basket full of books. There were volumes of all kinds -- mostly fiction and mysteries for my mother and, for my curiosity-driven father, politics, law, science, history, art, and of course, gardening. But I never saw a book on religion. Not a one. In their bookshelves at home, I remember only one volume that might have touched on the subject. It was a collection of essays by the Freethinker Robert Ingersoll. 

I was young boy, perhaps 10 or 11, when I overheard some friend or acquaintance of my mother say something to her about prayer, or putting faith in the lord, or some such platitude. She waited politely until the person departed and then turned to me and murmured, quietly, "Well, I suppose some people need a crutch."  I think that's the sum of all I ever heard from her on the subject of religion. One might think that the dismissive term "crutch" hinted at disdain or superiority (they need crutches but we don't) but it was not so. My mother's observation was made without prejudice or judgment. 

Where other households might have worshiped or wondered or discussed, for us there was absolutely nothing. Religious education?  None, not a drop. In our home, there was no attendance at temple, mosque or tabernacle, no religious ceremonies, and not even a Bible. I can remember my father and me dribbling our basketball to the schoolyard to shoot some hoops. When we passed the local orthodox synagogue, my father said, "Bingo.They play bingo in there." But he was not condemning the religion. It was the gambling. He disapproved of gambling (even Bingo) and the idea that a religious institution would allow gambling every Tuesday night offended him deeply. 

When I was a questioning adolescent, out of a spirit of curiosity and perhaps rebellion, I liberated a bible from our local public library and secreted it under my treasured collection of Mad magazines. While others of my age cohort were squinting at smuggled Playboys or at The Amboy Dukes under the blankets by flashlight, I was acquainting myself with the holy scriptures. In my ignorance, I thought of the bible as a forbidden book, one which my parents would have disapproved. But I was wrong. They wouldn't have noticed; they wouldn't have cared. Looking back, I'm sure that they knew about my thirst for forbidden knowledge and probably enjoyed a giggle at my expense. Many years later, when my father was a widower, I gave him a copy of an annotated, edited Bible that I used as a textbook in one of my literature courses. Did he disapprove?  Not at all. He said, "It's interesting."  But of course he read it not as an inspired text but as history and as fiction. 

To have been raised in such a household was my good fortune. My atheism was an unearned gift. I got it free, and I'm perpetually grateful. Many of my friends, growing up in religious families, have struggled to achieve atheism -- often with painful inner conflicts and anger and resentments. I admire them for the strength to break free -- especially those that live with irreparable breaches to the family. I endured no such struggle. 

Philosophically speaking, it's been an easy life. There's a clarity about atheism. It's based in reality, not (dare I say what my parents wouldn't!) in wish and myth and superstition. Atheists, I think, are afforded a purer appreciation of human achievement and a clearer, less conflicted understanding of health, disease, and death. Reason and the evidence of the senses may not always lead to perfect understanding, but they're the best tools that we have, and we must cherish them.   

Billy Graham and Me, 1957

In 1957 (I was 18 and in my second year in college), the reverend doctor Billy Graham led the largest revival meeting in history -- an average attendance, in the old-old Madison Square Garden, of eighteen thousand people a night for three months. What was his message?  It was half jingo, half Christian fundamentalism. "Let us tell the world that Americans believe in God, that we are morally and spiritually strong as well as militarily and economically. Let us tell the world that we are united and ready to march under the banner of Almighty God" -- not a sentiment that would have been dear to my heart. No Almighty God in my upbringing or anywhere in my brain. 

Graham was a fervent anti-Communist, but of a sort that left me baffled: "My own theory about Communism," he proclaimed, "is that it is master-minded by Satan. I think there is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism in which they seem to outwit us at every turn, unless they have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given to them."  Let me try two non-Satanic explanations for apparent Communist success: 1) "They" didn't outwit us;  in fact, they were dumber than us, overplayed their hand, and collapsed. 2) European and American imperialism had left a mess in the "underdeveloped countries" that was ripe for exploitation.  

How was a secular partially-educated young fellow supposed to understand such a paranoid, irrational  analysis of world politics?

With mockery, I'm afraid. Sometime in the middle of the summer of 1957, along with a bunch of wise-ass PS 217 cronies, I took a break from my Sears, Roebuck warehouse job and took the subway to 49th Street to take a gander and a listen to the Crusade for Christ (it was free). What do I remember?  A chorus (probably led by George Beverly Shea but I can't swear to it), bright lights, a cheering, milling crowd. I remember that Billy spoke, but I have no recollection of what he said, though the bronze gong of a voice resounded through the hall. Did he tell us of the five ways that Americans could most effectively combat Communism? By "old-fashioned Americanism" -- whatever that was, by "conservative and evangelical Christianity," by prayer, by "spiritual revival," and by "personal Christian experience." All five of which sound pretty much the same to me. And remote from my experience or desires.

Needless to say, I wasn't his most sympathetic or susceptible auditor.  

I wonder if he touched on another of his favorite topics that night: that "a woman commits sin when she deliberately dresses in such a way as to entice a man"; "that a wife "should keep herself attractive and give her husband a big kiss when he comes home from the office instead of yelling at him from the kitchen."

Except for the spectacle, it's all vague in my mind. I do remember, though, that when leaving that Garden I accidentally and momentarily found myself on the line of people who had made a "decision for Christ" and were heading to the podium. That was scary. I beat a quick retreat.  

I wonder how many other members of the audience were rubberneckers like me. 

I'm reminded now of the great old gospel song by the Carter Family, "Something Got a Hold of Me."  It's a parable that tells the story of a man who goes to a revival meeting to scoff. "I says I'll go down, take a look at the crowd/  It's just the weak-minded I feel."  But then there's a revelation: "They sing and shout and they all clasp their hands/ And they all got down on their knees./ When the fire fell from heaven it fell upon me,/ And then I fell to the floor." Because

Something's got a hold of me.

Yes, something's got a hold of me.

I have a spirit I'll never forget

That something's got a hold of me.

Well, nothing got a hold of me. No fire from heaven, no road to Damascus revelation. If anything, I was confirmed in my scoffery and atheism.

What did I learn? Not much. At the most, only that if the people who inhabit this country, my fellow Americans, are incomprehensible to me, then it is equally likely that I am incomprehensible to them.

And frankly, the mysteries that I encountered in Madison Square Garden in 1957 are, sixty years later, still mysterious to this day. Perhaps even more so.

Words of my Life: "Worship"

There are some words which one might read, study, and parse the dictionary definition and yet still not understand -- words for which one has no intuitive or even rational conception. For example, there's the word "heaven." I know that "heaven" can mean "sky," a definition that poses no problem, but when "heaven" is presumed to refer to a place beyond the sky in which the souls of dead people are eternally rewarded, then I'm absolutely baffled. My brain empties out. "Heaven" in such a sense is to me incomprehensible and meaningless nonsense.

Another such word is "worship," a word which has always puzzled me, right from the start, when the church bells of St Rose of Lima would ring on a Sunday morning to call parishioners to mass, leaving me and my brothers to play stickball or punchball all by ourselves. I recognize that "worship" is a word to which communities of English speakers give assent, and I observe that people attend temples, mosques, and tabernacles to perform certain activities, such as kneeling, genuflecting, singing hymns and uttering hosannas. Nevertheless, I can't agree that such activities equal "worship" -- because "worship" presupposes that there is a entity to which these activities are directed. And that entity, like "heaven" in the religious sense, doesn't exist. Just as heaven is a non-existent place, so worship posits a non-existent entity. And therefore the word "worship" has no intelligible meaning, to me.

Perhaps I lack what Charlotte Bronte called an "organ of veneration." Or, alternatively, worshipers are engaged in mass delusion. 

On the other hand, I have an excellent grasp of the word "awe." In fact, I am a great practitioner of awe. I'm regularly "awed" by both the achievements of my fellow beings in art, architecture, music, literature, mathematics and science, and also by the majesty of nature, in the form of grand canyons and in the triumphs of evolution. Moreover, I've felt "awe," in cathedrals and once, in the Church of the Rock in Helsinki -- a magnificent building that melds human ingenuity with natural beauty, -- overwhelming, transcendent awe.  And I can understand that for some people what I identify as "awe" might translate into "worship."  But again, not me. Though I'm awed by Rembrandt and Bach, but I don't worship them or their works.  I'll stick with awe.

I may lack an "organ of veneration," but I have a highly developed organ of wonderment.

Update on "worship."  For the first time in my life, a few weeks ago, I attended a religious service. I was in New Orleans and friends suggested that I join them at Vespers at Trinity Episcopal Church on Jackson Avenue. The attraction was Ellis Marsalis, who was to play a few notes for the attendees. A priest or whatever he's called, said a few words, read a prayer, and then elderly, frail Mr. Marsalis sat down at the piano and improvised for a few minutes. It was beautiful and perhaps transcendent. I suppose it was a form of worship. And it didn't hurt a bit. 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

My Afterlife

Shakespeare took a few shots at depicting a hellish afterlife. 

 

The most extended, if I remember correctly, belongs to Claudio in Measure for Measure.  "To die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;/ This sensible warm motion to become/ A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit/ To bathe in fiery floods,/ Or to reside in thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;/ To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,/ And blown with restless violence round about/ The pendent world; or to be worse than worst/ Of those that lawless and incertain thought/ Imagine howling: tis too horrible." It's a damned scary vision, and mostly easy to understand, though it helps to be reminded that sensible= having sense, "delighted" = darkened, "thrilling"= piercing, "viewless" = blind, and that "lawless and incertain thought" refers to non-Christian speculation. Shakespeare gives Claudio a number of choices for eternal suffering, each one worse than the other.  

 

When Othello realizes that Desdemona was innocent after all, he foresees a one-dimensional hot hell, one in which devils will "Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulfur/ Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire." Clear enough, painful enough.

 

And finally, Lear imagines himself "Bound upon a wheel of fire,/ That mine own tears to scald like molten lead." 

 

I think the whole afterlife thing is a fraud, but if there were a hell, here's what mine would be like.

 

I'm on a commercial flight, steerage class, cramped into a seat too narrow and lacking adequate leg room. A middle seat. On my left is a very large gentleman whose massive shoulders and thighs encroach upon my territory. He stinks of tobacco. He drinks too much alcohol and tries to engage me in conversation. On my right is a similarly-proportioned lady who reeks of cheap perfume and who glares at me whenever my bony elbow makes contact with her fat forearm. I'm hungry and all there is to eat are some horrid plastic pretzels in a bag that only a safecracker could open. A scruffy fourteen-year-old boy sits behind me. Rap "music" leaks from his earbuds and he kicks the back of my seat at irregular intervals. My only reading matter is a airline magazine that advertises expensive gimcrack novelties that no sensible human would ever dream of buying. My bladder is distended and painful but the seat-belt sign is perpetually lit. This plane never lands. Sometimes it threatens to do so, but at the last moment it's diverted to another airport.

 

This continues throughout all eternity.

 

And it is much worse than vats of liquid fire. Far worse than anything that Shakespeare could possibly have imagined.

666

Donald Trump has taken credit for the rise in the stock market. "The stock market hit yet another record high yesterday. There is great confidence in the moves that my Administration is making.”  If he is responsible for the rise, then surely he is also responsible for the fall. It can be no accident, and can only be a signal from the other world, that Trump's market fell exactly 666 points last Friday. One trillion of market value was erased with the wave of the supernatural wand. Six hundred and sixty- six is "the number of the beast" in Revelation. Inasmuch as everything happens for a reason, we must ask what the Lord is telling us. The 666 point drop undeniably demonstrates that DT is "the man of sin" who "opposes and exalts himself above every god or object of worship" (2 Thessalonians 2:1). He is the false god who has erected his tower at 666 Fifth Avenue. Heed, O supporters of Trump, the words and acts of the Lord, for the man of the flaming hair is the egg of the serpent, the false prophet, the anti-Christ.

No possible probable manner of doubt.

Zeus: the Apology

If I've offended anyone, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to; I have tremendous respect for pretty and desirable women. 10s, all of them. So let me just start by saying that many years ago, decades or centuries I can't remember exactly when, I had a thunderous crush on Io. She claims that she signaled me that she wasn't interested, but I did not stop. You know, when you're a god, they let you do it. You can do anything. It was probably a mistake to have turned her into a heifer but I think she enjoyed it then -- even if she complains about it now. Same thing with Leda; it's possible that I misinterpreted her but I honestly thought that her "no" meant "maybe" or "yes," so I turned myself into a swan and grabbed her by the pussy. Maybe I should have backed off, especially since she had already spent that same night with her husband Tyndareus, who had, as everyone knows, very small hands, if you know what I mean. It's good to be a god. And then there was Semele. I mean, she was one of my very own priestesses, and I realize now that your own priestesses ought to be off limits. But she provoked me by bathing nude in the river Asopus. And I happened to be flying by in the shape of an eagle. What happened, happened. It was definitely wrong of her to ask to look at me face to face and I regret that I incinerated her, but it wasn't my fault. Europa was also an error, but she should have known better than to come near to me when I'm in the shape of a white bull. And the same with Taygete who came to me as a doe with golden horns. I couldn't stop myself. I've always had a thing for golden horns, though I think Pindar made a bit too much of it. And then there was Dia, who happened by, so she says, when I was in the shape of a stallion. What can you expect of a stallion? Alcmene, that's another story. She was tall and beautiful, with eyes that reminded me of Aphrodite. I definitely wanted her. I had to disguise myself as her husband Amphitryon to make love to her. Maybe it was wrong to do so, but I don't think she ever figured out what actually happened, which kind of excuses me. And then there was my adventure with Antiope, where I disguised myself as a satyr; and once you're a satyr well, you know, a satyr does what a satyr does. To seduce Callisto, I had to transform myself into Artemis, which sounds a little like girl-on-girl action, but it really wasn't because it was me. Come to think of it, I can't remember exactly how we did it. And also: I blame Acrisius for shutting up his daughter Danae in a bronze tower. I took it as a deliberate provocation. I had to sneak through an air vent to impregnate Danae in the form of a shower of golden rain, which, I have to tell you, wasn't entirely satisfying and just a little bit kinky.

But what can I say?  I don't want to play the victim, because, after all, I am a god, but I had a hard childhood, what with my father castrating my grandfather and then me being suckled by the goat Amalthea. You get off to a bad start when you're suckled by a goat. 

More Genealogy Written for my Grandchildren

Dear grandchildren:

I once asked my father, your great-grandfather Emanuel Pearlman, where in the Ukraine we originated. He said that he was told that it was a village called (and here he used a very deep guttural initial consonant) Xhosantin-gebernya  -- an answer that left me not much enlightened. If he knew more -- and I don't think he did -- he didn't say. Our family did not cultivate nostalgia for the old country. Nor much curiosity either. We had no reason to yearn.

But new information about our past has recently come to me. According to a correspondence between my late cousin Marion and a distant Israeli relative, it is now clear that our family hails from the the town of StaryConstantine -- also called Starokostiantiyniv in Ukrainian and Alt Konstantine in Yiddish. It was a small city of perhaps 30,000 people at its height, founded, as far as wikipedia and I can figure, in the sixteenth century by a noble or wealthy person named Konstanty Ostrogski who built himself a castle sometime during the 1560s. Castles are built for protection in lawless places, but then, most places were lawless in late medieval Europe. Old Constantine is in northern Ukraine at the junction of the Ikopot and Sluch rivers. Here's a picture of the Old Constantine castle across from the Sluch:   

 

 

But when, you ask, did your and my ancestors settle in Old Constantine?  I remember it mentioned when I was a child that our family came to the Ukraine from "the west", which I assumed to be Germany because my grandmother Eta's maiden name was Hessel (though in fact Hessel is more commonly Danish rather than German). The Jewish community in Old Constantine dates to the sixteenth century, it is reported. "The town’s Jews suffered Cossack onslaughts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century, more than half of the town’s population was Jewish." That's all we know.

However, in the nineteenth century, there lived in Old Constantine a husband and wife named Yaakov and Menucha Sheindl Perelman. They dwelt in a house on the corner of Ragnedinshkaya and Bolshaya Vasikovshaya streets (a house which was destroyed during the second world war). Yaakov Mikolshtein Perelman was born about 1830, lived a long life, and died in about 1920. According to the story, he resided in the one house his entire life. His wife, Menucha Sheindl came from Radomyshyl, a village not far from Old Constantine that was historically a center of Jewish settlement. (In 1797 a total of 1,424 people or 80% of the total population were Jewish). Menucha Sheindl Perelman was the daughter of a sugar and wool merchant named Solomon Rabinovich, who was so rich that "they changed houses for Passover" -- which is a custom heretofore unknown to me. Menucha died in 1908 at age 75 or thereabouts. The family, once wealthy, lost everything in the 1917 revolution and the disorder and purges that followed.  

And how are Yaakov and Menucha related to you, my grandchildren?  Well, they're your great-great-great grandparents. According to the newly discovered information, they had eighteen children "mostly twins," of whom only nine survived to adulthood. Seven daughters were born before your great-great grandfather Isaiah (also called Buzya or Buzzy) saw the light. Isaiah it is reported, was born "the year the serfs were freed," which is 1861, but I know that he was 83 when he died in 1946, so I calculate that he was born in 1863. But perhaps Isaiah didn't know his own age which wouldn't have been unusual in an era of bad record keeping. When he was thirty-five, Isaiah emigrated to America, arriving in 1896 or thereabouts.

Why did he set out for the New World?  Certainly the troubled conditions in Old Constantine were reason enough. But there's also something of a story. Isaiah married (I don't know whom) but after one night of marriage he asked for a divorce. I don't know if the divorce was granted, but I do know that very soon afterward he left town with Eta (or Yetta) Hessel, also from Old Constantine. She was 23 or 24, a decade or a dozen years younger than he. 

Why the one-day marriage?  No one knows what happened that night, but it couldn't have been good. A sexual impediment?  An arranged marriage gone bad?  Prior misdeeds come to light?  The discovery of pregnancy?  We're free to speculate, but never to know. 

However, we do know that Isaiah and his father did not see the world with the same eyes. Yaakov was religious; his son Isaiah was an atheist. We don't know Yaakov's politics, but we know that Isaiah was some sort of leftist or communist. Something of a free-thinker, after the style of Moses Mendelssohn. And perhaps Karl Marx. And we can also guess that it might have been impossible to remain in Old Constantine after the marriage contretemps. 

In New York City, Isaiah and Yetta had four children: Max, born around 1896, Solomon, born about 1898; Mollie, born in 1900; and my father Emanuel, the youngest, born on December 22, 1904.

My grandfather Isaiah also had two younger brothers. There was Chaim, who followed him to America some years later and from whose daughter Rose spring the Goldberg and Chodosh lines. And also Isaiah's youngest brother, who was named Meshulam Zusi Perelman. He did not follow his older brothers, and I don't know his history, but his family left the Ukraine and it's his Israeli granddaughter Nechama Sheindl Brukman (born Perlman) through whom these facts were recovered. Nechama Brukman died in 2008 at age 86.

It is most melancholy to read that in 1939 there were 6,743 Jews living in Old Constantine, accounting for 31 percent of the total population, and that the entire Jewish community, some no doubt our cousins, were murdered during the first years of the war.

My Grace

I'm devoutly secular, just as I was raised. Moreover, almost all of my friends are equally unreligious: either retired Catholics or atheist Jews or freethinkers or lapsed UU's or never-wases. I was therefore taken aback and a bit unsettled last week when at a friend and neighbor's dinner party, just as the guests were starting to dig in, we all paused for a moment and held hands while the head of the household thanked the Lord for providing. It was a brief and inoffensive grace but still startling because so unfamiliar. I had momentarily stepped into another world.  

And then I thought, if I were preparing to deliver a "grace" before a meal, what would I say?  Who would I thank?  For I readily confess that I feel great gratitude every time that I lift a loaded fork to my hungry, salivating mouth.  

To begin, I wouldn't thank any god or gods, because I don't see the least evidence or sign of the supernatural around the table. No god of the beets or the chicken or the lasagna.

Instead, I would thank, sincerely and reverently, all the people, present and past, who have in fact made a real and palpable contribution to the meal. Let us think for a moment about the slice of bread. While I could not detect the real presence of anything transcendent, yet the bread was immanent with the labor of the farmer. And the trucker who delivered the fertilizer and the trucker who took the wheat to market. And the guys at the John Deere factory in Moline who made the tractor that harvested all the seven grains in my particular slice. And the baker. Road builders. And for that matter, now that I think about it, how about our intelligent Neolithic ancestors who first spotted the einkorn or emmer and decided that it was a plant worth domesticating. Moreover, the butter that I lavished on the bread did not arrive by flights of angels but through its own particular chain of development and distribution. And then the wine, the "merry cheerer of the heart" which wouldn't have cheered anyone's heart if someone hadn't mastered the technology not only of wine-making, but also of glass bottles. And I would also like to thank the furniture makers -- the designers, the carpenters, the turners -- because there would be no sitting at the table without their help. And therefore foresters and the manufacturers and inventors of chain saws. I could go on and on, but I think the sitters-down at my board would take my point. A moment's reflection reminds us that when we collect ourselves for dinner, we profit from the efforts and endeavors of not dozens but millions of people. Diachronic and synchronic, now and then.

It is to all of them that I offer my thanks, my gratia, my grace. And in doing so I acknowledge my continuing connection to all members of our wonderful, horrible species.   

Maureen Dowd's Theology for the New Millenium

Fifty years ago I enjoyed arguing with people of religion about the existence of god, but nowadays I find it to be a singularly unprofitable exercise. The believers and the atheists are so entrenched in their positions hat no one ever convinces anyone of anything. Moreover, the faithful are so damned touchy that it's no fun to talk to them! They are easily offended, I think, because the weaker their evidence and logic, the more intense their compensatory passion.

I give thanks that at this my moment in history and geography, the true believers may be angry with me but they don't have the power to bludgeon me into obedience. (In general, the less intelligible the religion, the greater its reliance and economic and corporeal sanctions to compel allegiance.) 

These philosophical musings are inspired by a New York Times article that has received an ungodly amount of attention. Maureen Dowd, who has made a career out of cracking wise at figures of authority, especially Clintons, has given over her space this Christmas week to a column on theology (or, as it is sometimes called, the Subject without an Object). She endorses the argument of a priest-friend. He (the priest) makes an end run around the classic Problem of Evil -- which is, that inasmuch as the world is very obviously a thoroughfare of woe, then an omniscient god must be either powerless or malicious. Here's Dowd's priests's formulation: "If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives?"

A very good question indeed and one that believers in a beneficent deity have failed to resolve yea all these many centuries. Dowd's priest's answer (which is loaded with a bunch of transparently obvious smuggled assumptions) is that "for whatever reason, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us....  We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not."

Let me try to understand this argument. This new twenty-first century god, the "dowdgod" let us call him, has entirely disappeared. He doesn't actually do anything at all. He's so hidden -- absconditus, in the traditional language of theology  --  that he permits all kinds of suffering and instead chooses to manifest himself merely as a comforting presence.

Is that the argument that Dowd thinks is worth a column of valuable newsprint? Yes, so it seems to be. Astonishing.

Faith," the priest continues, "is lived in family and community, and God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be in God’s presence...." (No god for the solitary, then.) "When my younger brother, Brian, died suddenly at 44 years old, I was asking “Why?” and I experienced family and friends as unconditional love in the flesh....  The many ways that people reached out to me let me know that I was not alone. They really were the presence of God to me. Suffering isolates us. Loving presence brings us back, makes us belong." His animating idea: the love of friends is a manifestation of the deity. Wow. How shallow, how trivial, how wrong!

No one would disagree with the notion that suffering isolates us and that friends and family console us.  I can't argue with such a proposition. It's plainly obvious. But what in the world does such an observation have to do with the existence or the nature of a supernatural being? It's not evidence for god, it's not proof of god; if anything, it's the contrary of a proof. Human beings console us, not "god"; the god part, the theology part, is utterly supererogatory and unnecessary. What Dowd's priest has done is to change the word "compassion" into the word "god." But we know that compassion is not supernatural; it's entirely and essentially natural.

So the dowdgod turns out to be no more than a feature of human nature that "soothes broken hearts." But what does it mean to believe in, or worship, the dowdgod. Not much.  All a person has to do is to notice that it helps to have some folks around when you're in pain -- and then to re-label the good feelings that emanate from friends as god. It's so very easy, so undeniable. And utterly meaningless.

And what a nice old friendly god it engenders. Whatever happened to Augustine, Calvin, Luther. Those tough old guys are turning over in their graves. The dowdgod is a far cry from from Jehovah, from Allah, and certainly from the demanding Jesus who came to bring not peace but a sword. Those were gods to reckon with. But now, out with Jupiter Tonans, the thunderer, and in with Jupiter Manus-tenens, the hand-holder. Or Jupiter Sussurans, the whisperer.

It hardly matters whether one believes or doesn't believe in a god so weak-kneed and thin-blooded, so positively humane.

Maureen Dowd might say, if she were surrounded by compassionate friends "You make me feel god." In the same situation, I might might say, "You make me feel good." The difference is only one minuscule "o" vowel, which, honestly, is very like a zero. And zero is all that this new theology offers.

Does Religion Rot the Brain?

Unaware that I was choosing a splashy and controversial best-seller, I selected from the library's new book shelf something called Unorthodox (New York, 2012), by one Deborah Feldman, and a sadder, more dispiriting book I have rarely read.

Ms. Feldman had the misfortune to be raised in the Satmar branch of the Hasidic movement -- a sect that, at least as she describes it, is unhappy, puritanical, finicky, repressive, ferociously anti-rational, patriarchal, and bossy. Boys study Talmud but girls are not educated past a high school -- what would be the point, when, as Deborah's grandfather once told her, "girls belong in the kitchen?" Feldman's memoir is not just dreary, it's ostentatiously lurid. Its subtitle is "the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots" -- and the attention-mongering scandals that she recounts are mostly sexual in nature. 

There is a old story that John Ruskin collapsed in a heap when he discovered, on his wedding night, that his bride had pubic hair. Feldman out-Victorians the great Victorian, claiming that she did not know that she had a vagina, an entrance, an opening, "down there." Is such ignorance possible in this age?  And then she explores her sexual failings, mostly her vaginismus-induced post-honeymoon extended virginity -- which she blames on her Satmar upbringing (although want of curiosity might also be a factor).

Feldman's memoir has upset the Hasidic community and there is at least one website devoted entirely to attacking its veracity. And in fact the memoir does contain the commonplace omissions and elisions of autobiography --  none of which seem to invalidate the whole. However, the defenders of the sect miss the point (as does Ms. Feldman).

The Satmar movement isn't reprehensible because it dishonors brains and women and especially women's brains. It's reprehensible because it is erected on a lie. "We learn in school that God sent Hitler to punish the Jews for enlightening themselves. He came to clean us up, eliminate all the assimilated Jews...."  What an absurd and odious doctrine! Are we expected to entertain the hypothesis that six million Jews died for eating lobster?  "The first and greatest Satmar rebbe said that if we became model Jews, just like in the olden days, then something like the Holocaust wouldn't happen again, because God would be pleased with us." So Hitler and the Nazis and the SS and the camps are a) the fault of the Jews themselves, and b) God can be placated if all Jewish women wear thick stockings and wigs and cover themselves from collarbone to wrist and knee.  It's a brainless argument, and one that, if you think about it for a few seconds, gives the victory to Hitler. Plus, it's an argument that creates a god who is even crueler and more idiotic than usual.  

Indoctrinated with this criminal bullshit, the survivors of the Shoah and their descendants voluntarily re-ghettoize themselves and, of their own foolish accord, imprison themselves into a new dark age of their own invention.

Here's what I learned from this book. Satmar is a check-your-brains-at-the-door cult that controls 130,000 adherents who manifest all the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. It's "bad things will happen to me if I step on a crack on the sidewalk" raised several painful orders of magnitude.  

Ms. Feldman may have escaped the cult but she's still in the dark. She's left Satmar behind because she couldn't read the books she wanted to read or wear the clothes she wanted to wear and she couldn't locate her own vagina. But it's not her vagina that readers should worry about;  it's her brain.  

On "Cults"

Megachurch Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, an enthusiast for Governor Rick Perry (the Texax governor for people who think that George Bush was way too bookish) has labelled Mitt Romney's church (Latter-Day Saints) a "cult." Jeffress made the charge while addressing a convention of right-wing "value voters."  (The particular value which Jefress himself exemplifies is "smugness.")

According to Jeffress, Perry's church is a "religion" and Romney's is a "cult."  By which he means, I suppose, that a "religion" is good and true and "cult" is bad and false. 

But to an outsider, like myself, it appears otherwise. It appears that the one is older and the other newer.  The origins of Christianity (not the Baptist part, but the religion generally) are decently obscured by the mists of antiquity. The origins of Mormonism are o so transparent and so unpersuasive. But on any rational scale, the religion (virgin birth, bread-into-wine, three-in-one) and the cult (golden tablets, magic underwear) are equally incredible. There's nothing that would allow one to claim superiority to the other.

A cult is a new religion; a religion is an old cult. How does a cult get to be a religion?  It absorbs a whole lot of converts. It becomes wealthy.  It asserts authority -- such as the power to stigmatize newer religions as cults. 

Similarly, a "myth" is an old but dead religion. A "superstition" is someone else's religion.

Here's a related question:  what's the difference between a language and a dialect?  The standard answer among linguists: "a language has a bigger navy." 

Reposted: Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my wise and courageous grandparents left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world. Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with us." If he had been born in the old country, before the Russian authorities imposed legal cognomina upon us, he would have been named Emanuel ben Isaiah -- his father's name appended to his own as a patronymic.

Despite his traditional moniker and his commitment to the essence of Judaism, my father was fiercely hostile to the irrationalities of religion. His view -- and my grandfather Isaiah's even more strongly -- was that for a thousand years our lineage had been kept in poverty and darkness not just by the czars and the Cossacks but also by the rabbis. In politics my father and grandfather began as socialists and became New Dealers; in philosophy, they rejected theological doctrine and were among the children of the Enlightenment whom Moses Mendelssohn had led to the promised land of evidence and reason. I doubt that any of my ancestors knew Karl Marx's sentence that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," but they spoke and acted as though such wisdom had been absorbed from the cradle. My brothers and I were taught to resist the exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony and especially the triumphalism of religion.   

We now have a religious controversy in our peaceful, progressive, and largely secular western town. A group of orthodox Jews have petitioned the city council for permission to construct an eruv. What is an eruv? It’s a “symbolic boundary that allows orthodox Jews to carry things, including their own children, outside their home during the Sabbath." (Carrying is considered work, and orthodoxy's strict interpretation of religious law prohibits sabbatical labor.) A latter-day eruv is constructed out of fishing line that is strung on utility poles; curiously, it may incorporate functioning electric and telephone wires. If you're within the lines, you're "in" your home.

I know that my forbears detested eruvim and similar expressions of irrational piety. I myself am not enraged by these useless but harmless superstitions. Constructing an eruv does not endanger our species; it's not like opposing contraception or prohibiting stem-cell research. An eruv consoles the believers and doesn't much bother the rest of us. Yet if there is a spirit in the sky, which I very much doubt, I would hope that he would not be so small-minded as to issue ukases about carrying infants on Saturdays; infants should be carried as much as they want, which is just about everywhere and always. And if the god of Abraham and Isaac has become so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would also hope that he would be intelligent enough not to be flummoxed by such transparent trickery as hanging mylar filament on poles.   

I have no intuitive conception of god, but I think that the orthodox trivialize our human and shared longing for transcendence when they sanctify such petty practices. It would be far more pious for the orthodox to take every nickel spent to appease the Ancient of Days and bestow it on a poor Jewish family from Tashkent. If the eruvim-makers can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the believers re-direct their enthusiasm and their resources toward truly charitable enterprises, they will honor the universal immigrant experience and they will also practice the very worthy Jewish virtue of compassion. The effort spent to construct an eruv is a foolish waste of time.

Here's my father's view:  "It took us hundreds of years to fight our way out of the ghetto and they want to put themselves back in jail. If the rabbis had their way," he would say, "Mahler and Bernstein and Gershwin would play accordion in a klezmer band in Bialystok, Einstein would balance the books for a caftan maker in Kiev, and a hundred and fifty Jewish Nobel Prize winners would squander their intelligence davening in a dim Vilna synagogue."

I think it’s in a Wallace Markfield novel that an old Jewish guy confronts a group of twenty-something Jewish hippies/slackers in Miami Beach. After a heated discussion, he admonishes them:  "And don't ever be ashamed that you’re Jewish. It’s enough that I’m ashamed that you’re Jewish."

Which is pretty much how I feel about the eruvistas.  Well, not exactly ashamed.  Embarrassed, perhaps, by their superstitious infatuation with the "dark backward and abysm of time." 

Phallophagia

I was informed that the granddaughter had become interested in Egyptian mythology, so I decided to buy her a book on the topic. It's hard to know what to put in the hands of a young lady whose reading level is astonishing but who is just eight years old. I visited the "young adult" quarters at our local library and withdrew four books on the subject. Which one to buy?

The first book that I looked at was clearly inappropriate. It read as though it had been condensed out of the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Hard words, unelucidated, and a patronizing, paleocolonialist point of view. The next book was too simple -- all pictures and treacle. The third book, a retelling of the story of Isis and Osiris, was moving along nicely until Seth tore the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them all over the landscape. "When Isis heard this, she paddled over the swamps in a little boat looking for the fragments of Osiris to put them back together again and make them whole. After much searching she found all the parts of Osiris except his phallus which had been swallowed by a fish." Can this story be recommended for eight-year-olds. Would it be appropriate for Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers?

Call me squeamish if you must. Diagnose me with an advanced case of castration anxiety. Stigmatize me as indifferent to the profound Jungian significance of this gruesome story. Say what you will -- I do not want to explain phallophagia to the young lady. Frankly, I don't even want to explain "phallus." 

Book number four seemed to be acceptable and I have purchased a copy of it. I hope I made a good decision. Book number four is about Egyptian religion, not Egyptian mythology ("mythology" is an unquestionably loaded and derogatory word).

The book might be a little hard for the granddaughter and it might be a little too detailed. I'm hoping that she skims or skips the section of the book that describes Egyptian embalming techniques. "Inner organs were usually dried after removal and placed in special containers called canopic jars. The embalmer's tools included a spirally curved copper hook for breaking the ethmoid bone in the back of the nose to remove the brain, which was then discarded."

Eeew, as they say nowadays.

Perhaps I am just a tad squeamish. 

Somnus Imago Mortis

It's an ancient commonplace -- sleep is the image of death.  In some versions, it's a preparation for death: God has provided us with sleep to get us ready for our inevitable end.  "Somnus imago mortis" is all over Shakespeare:  "sleep thou ape of death,"  "death-counterfeiting sleep," etc.

My own personal sleep is so wracked with awakenings and nightmares and night-sweats and fluff in the lung and a feverish tongue that I can't easily think of it as a preparation for anything.  For me, sleep is rather a task, an effort, than a period of oblivion.  I want my tombstone to be inscribed with the motto, "No more insomnia, forever."

But just six weeks ago, I experienced a pure "somnus imago mortis" moment.  I was on a gurney, drugged, prepared for surgery.  I was wheeled into a room.  Time came to a complete halt.  And then several hours later I was awakened. Nothing -- nothing -- intervened from the time that I was put under until the moment when I came to. (Perhaps there was an amnesic in the drug cocktail -- I wouldn't know.)

It was such a profound and eventless sleep that it has, in fact, prepared me for the sleep of death.  There was not a whisper, not a thought, nothing.  Now, at last, I know how it will be.

In the hospital, there was a very welcome rebirth.  But why, then, does the phrase, "I have been half in love with easeful death" continue to resonate in my brain?

Earthquakes - Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc - King Lear

We all remember, and we're all still shocked and amazed that the late, unlamentable Jerry Falwell proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks on the US were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians." How to understand either the logic or the brain of such a thinker? We moderns tend to reason in terms of cause and effect, and cause and effect just doesn't cut it with Falwell. Was he thinking something like, feminists cause sin (a debatable proposition) and Al-Qaeda wants to cleanse us, so they run the airplanes into the towers. That would be unbelievable nonsense, even for Falwell. Here's another attempt to divine his mind: feminists are dangerous and evil and therefore the good old US of A has become Sodom/Gomorrah/Ephesus and the Big Guy in the Sky is offended and therefore he engaged Al-Qaeda to punish the US for its sins by enabling or permitting those young Saudi jerks to fly planes into the towers in order to persuade us to repudiate the feminists. Does that make sense? Very little. 

Similarly, Pat Robertson deduced that Hurricane Katrina was all about abortion. In this case, the Ancient of Days didn't even bother to enlist human agents. Noticing that there were abortions being performed in the US, he let loose the winds from the caves in which he had confined them and instructed them to bust up the New Orleans dikes and drown a lot of people.   

Jerry and Pat are a pair of idiots, not only because they lack intelligence, but also because their view of the world is five hundred or a thousand years behind the times. They'd be mainstream in dark/medieval Europe when Attila the Hun and Timur (or Tamburlaine) the Great competed for the title of Scourge of God -- the flagellum dei. They pillaged and burned and raped over vast areas of the world not because they were  imperialists and conquerors but because they were instruments of god. They wreaked vengeance on our sins. It was orthodoxy. Cause and effect? Sorry, not part of the picture.   

The fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc  -- "after this therefore because of this"  -- means that just because B comes after A doesn't mean that A causes B. Just because an abortion is followed by a hurricane doesn't mean that the abortion caused the hurricane. Just because someone prays to one or another god and recovers from illness doesn't mean that the prayer caused the cure. The volcano isn't quiescent because we sacrificed the maiden. No religion, not a single one, can bear the light of post hoc. Fully honored, it puts them all out of business. Along with all the other varieties of magical thinking. 

All this hardly bears mentioning except that a couple of days ago, a 'senior Iranian cleric" Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, pronounced that very soon a massive earthquake will devastate the city of Teheran and that the earthquake will be caused by "women who do not dress modestly. [Such women] lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." There's a chain of logic for you. A guy catches a glimpse of a lock of hair, or, god forbid, a bit of bosom, and boom -- earthquake.  But it's not his fault -- it's that his natural chastity has been compromised by them there female blandishments. Delilah all over again. Forget the movement of tectonic plates. The energy released in earthquakes isn't caused by subduction. It's ankles.The senior Iranian cleric has not correctly grasped the meaning of the demotic phrase, "the earth moved."

Sedighi is a boob and is even more presumptuous and illogical than Pat and Jerry. The earthquake hasn't even occurred and he's already blaming it on the outfits. He's launched a pre-emptive strike on post hoc. His is a fallacy so monumentally illogical that hasn't yet earned a name.     

It's instructive that Shakespeare, writing before the age of reason and before the scientific revolution, offered a full debate on the subject. In King Lear, Gloucester takes the traditional view. Eclipses, like hurricanes, are filled with meaning. Gloucester does not hold with reason or with the logic that he calls "the wisdom of nature."

"These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason, and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father... We have seen the best of our time:  machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves." 

Gloucester's bastard son Edmund dismisses tradition and argues scientifically and rationally.   

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune -- often the surfeit of our own behavior -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing." 

Gloucester is, in our terms, superstitious and simple, but he's also orthodox and reverent. Edmund is realistic and rational, but he is also as loathsome a villain as Shakespeare ever created. Shakespeare is a late medieval writer, which is why he should not necessarily be looked to for moral advice but rather for great poetry, great stories, and aesthetic bliss.

Meanwhile, the "excellent foppery of the world" has become the province of fundamentalists of all stripes. 

The Chosen Zebra

Ordinarily, I'm skeptical when supernatural images magically appear on everyday objects. To me, such manifestations are perfectly explicable run-of-the-mill instances of pareidolia.  [Pareidolia:  the tendency, inherent in the human brain, to discover patterns (e.g. faces) in random markings.]  No matter how intently I peer and squint, I simply cannot find the blessed virgin and her child in the Ritz cracker. Nor in the stump of that felled yew in Donegal nor in the water stain on the Samoan wall nor on the broken storm window in Jesup, Georgia and certainly not in the miraculous bird dropping on the rear view mirror of a pickup in Bryant, Texas. Not even in the revered and legendary 1978 Mexican tortilla. I am also willing to confess that although I haven't seen it with my own eyes, I remain unpersuaded by the internationally-celebrated image of Jesus in the partially-eaten toasted cheese sandwich that is reported to have sold on Ebay for $28,000 and is now framed and publicly exhibited in the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino of Hollywood, Florida, where it amuses the agnostics and wows the credulous.

In my conception, if the Ancient of Days had wanted to impress an image of his very own filius unigenitus or of JC's tender and mild mom on breadstick or bagel, cornbread or challah, he would have the made the representation clear and distinct -- certainly not subject to dispute or interpretation or doubt or skepticism. That's the way the Big Guy in the sky should operate when he's at the top of his omnipotent game.

Which brings me to the illustration above, where, when you point and click, you will encounter in sharp detail a  complete and perfect menorah incontrovertibly etched, this Hanukkah season, on the port side of a zebra. No ifs, ands, buts, or pareidolia.

Why a zebra, a creature not mentioned in the Holy Book?  Well, once again, the L-rd moves in mysterious ways. If He chooses a zebra, who are We to question his mighty decision?

Moreover, there's absolutely no question but that His menorah on a zebra beats His Jesus on a toasted cheese sandwich all to heck.

Just sayin'. 

Unless perhaps the Lord of Hosts uses photoshop?

Sons of Ham, Sons of Japheth

In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of a New England abolitionist, has married a slave owner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia.  Here's what she sees. Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted.

"All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of cotton, bearing the downy wealth of the South, stretched out a boundless ocean of green, spotted with white, like the foam of the wave.  Soon returning in grand march from the fields, came the negroes, poising on their heads immense baskets, brimming with the light and flaky cotton. Little children looking very much like walking semicolons, toddled along, balancing their baskets also, with an air of self-importance and pride. Eulalia recollected all the horrible stories she had heard of negro insurrections, and thought what an awful thing it was to be at the mercy of so many slaves, on that lonely plantation. When she saw her husband going out among them, and they closed round, shutting him in as with a thick cloud, she asked herself if her were really safe. They gathered around him, eager to get within reach of his hand, the sound of his voice, the glance of his kind, protecting, yet commanding eye. More like a father welcomed by his children than a king greeted by his subjects, he stood, the centre of that sable ring. She had never seen him look so handsome, so noble, so good. As she looked at her husband, standing in their midst, the representative of the fair sons of Japheth, wearing on his brow the signet of a loftier, nobler destiny, every lineament and feature expressive of intellect and power, and then at each of that dark, lowly throng, she felt a conviction that freedom, in its proudest latitude, education with its most exalted privileges, could never make them equal to him. She never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate. Do the hundreds and thousands buried in the black coal-pits and wretched dens of Great Britain, who have never heard, in their living graves, of the God who created, the Saviour who redeemed them, pass their sunless lives in greater comfort or fuller enjoyment."

Hey, it's good to be a slave. Apparently. "Tender and affectionate????

I was aware that there were anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novels, designed to showcase the glories of slavery, but I had never read one. The Planter's Northern Bride is supposedly one of the best of the genre. It has the power to make you despair for the intelligence of the entire human race. Some samples:

"Merry voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil...."

"The joyful songs and exhilarating laughter of our slaves...."

"The negro has an intense appreciation of beauty and grace, and feels the influence of mental superiority."

"You will see the negro, not as he is at the North, an isolated, degraded being, without caste or respectability, a single black line running through a web of whiteness, but surrounded with the socialities of life, and though doomed to labour, yet free from the cares and anxieties that rest so heavily on us."

Here are the words that Caroline Hentz puts in the mouth of one of Eulalia's slaves. 

"I tell you what, Crissy, when de nigger have good massa and good miss, dey well off. When dey have bad massa and missis, dey bad off. Talk 'bout us being on a 'quality with white folks, no such ting. De Lord never made us look like dem. We mustn't be angry wid de Lord, for all dat: He knows best, I 'spise. Look a'me, black as de chimney back, -- dey, white as snow; what great, big, thick, ugly lips I got, -- dere's look jist like roses. Den dis black sheep head, what de Lord make dat for?  Dey got putey, soft, long hair, just like de silk ribbons. Now look at dat big long heel, will you?" added Judy, putting out her bare foot in the moonshine, giggling and shaking;  "who ever saw de white lady with sich a heel as dat?  I do wonder what the Lord made us nigger for? I spect de white dust gin out, and he had to take de black."

Slavery deformed society.  Arguments in support of slavery deformed the intellect. The attempt to find supernatural sanction for slavery perverted religion. Slavery incapacitated the slaveholding states. One hundred and fifty years after slavery, they have still not caught up and they are still pulling the country down.

Does Caroline Hentz believe the words that she puts on paper?  I believe she does. I believe that she makes these observations and arguments with total sincerity. I also believe that the kind of utterances to which she gives vent, though no longer respectable, no longer made in public, are not dead but continue to appear in VFW halls, in bowling alleys, in union halls, and in truck stops all over the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Our Lady of Internal Combustion

I stopped at one of those highway gas-station convenience stores a few weeks ago, searching for some invigorating M&Ms. I couldn't find them, but I said to myself, this is America and I'm an American, and if there's one thing I know it's that there are going to be M&Ms somewhere in this quickstop. I poked around a little more and sure enough, just a little out of the way, there they were -- five different kinds of M&Ms. I went for the classic multi-colored ones. Am I the kind of person who's going to experiment with peanut butter M&Ms?  It wouldn't be me. 

But I'm off the point, which is, that when you're a native of the place, you know more or less what to expect. You're not likely to be taken by surprise very often. But every once in a while, something hits you right between the eyes, and you say, where the heck am I? I had such an experience today when I read a flyer from the West Fairlee Center Church, which is right over there on Middlebrook Road, not more than three or four miles from where we live.

I have no quarrel with the "Old Fashioned Community Hymn Sing" on July 12 or the "Shape Note Singing" on August 2 -- that's exactly what I would expect from a church in West Fairlee Center. I'm a little puzzled by the "Blessing of the Animals" on July 19, but then I remembered St. Francis, in some ways my favorite saint, and I remembered that he preached to the birds and that when he was dying, he thanked his donkey and (this is a bit hard to believe but what the heck) his donkey wept. So I'm OK with blessing the animals, although I myself would feel hypocritical blessing the particular animals that I was preparing to transubstantiate into lambchops or hamburger.

But what makes me feel like a stranger in a strange land is the event that is scheduled for August 9 -- the "Blessing of the ATV's" (sic). ATVs, for those of you who don't know, are "all-terrain vehicles," and are very useful if you're out on the range in the vast West patrolling miles and miles of barbed-wire fence, but which in the crowded East are used mostly for "recreation," which seems to involve tearing up private land (someone else's private land, that is) or government land, making a whole lot of noise, and sometimes driving underage and illegally, and much too fast, on our usually peaceful "unimproved" dirt roads. No mufflers, no insurance, no license.

So what's with "the blessing of the ATVs?"

St. Francis has become the patron saint of environmentalists. Is "the blessing of the ATVs" supposed to be a rejoinder to St. F and to ecological thinking? Are we experiencing a Christian sanction of anti-environmentalism?  Or have these back-country bible churches long been blessing tractors and balers and pickups and backhoes, and I've just not noticed?

WTF is going on? Am I in the America I know and understand?  Why am I feeling vertiginous? 

Would St. Francis have thanked his ATV?  And if he did, would his ATV have wept?