If all goes as planned, these next few blog entries will prove precursors to getting back to the writing of my novel, The First Voice (“Voice”). Depending on the way my existential winds blow, however, it may remain unfinished. Thus, I thought I’d use this entry as an opportunity at least to present a piece of what has been written. I do so because as it happens, Elfredge Bettisdatter, Voice’s protagonist, has traveled a spiritual path nearly identical to mine. A while back she had occasion to review this journey one fine afternoon while riding the subway from the 14th Street stop in lower Manhattan up to St. John the Divine:

For this trip under the island, Elfredge opted for the express train. Maybe I’ll even walk from 96th. Dad would be so pleased I’m going to a church on Sunday. Religion had played a major role in her childhood. Weekly attendance at Sunday school and Sunday services was mandatory. No comics until afterward so we’d be in a proper frame of mind. Each night the family gathered for devotions, and then bedtime songs and prayers. Now I lay me. Way scary. Summers brought Bible school and Bible camp. Epiphany was her favorite church holiday. Come to think of it, that might have more to do with Joyce than the Magi. Still, my favorite participants in the Christmas story were those three wise men. Maybe I should take a closer look at Zoroastrianism.

Elfredge grew up across the street from the Lutheran Church she and her family attended. God’s House. Specifically, God the Father. The church was never locked, and she would often stop by on the way home for a quick audience. The glowing red light above the altar informed her that God was “in.”

If anyone had asked, Elfredge would have said that she pictured God the Father as He was depicted on Michelangelo’s ceiling or in William Blake’s illustrations. If she stopped to think about it though, Elfredge realized that, in her mind’s eye, the presence she felt was a great brooding dragon draped over the altar. Upon hearing her enter the sanctuary, He would open the monocular eye facing her and readjust His giant head ever so slightly for the best viewing angle. He never spoke, only listened, and for that reason these encounters were, for the most part, dissatisfying. Even so, she usually felt somewhat better simply for having articulated her wishes, couched, always of course, in terms of doing His will for her life. She envied her Catholic friends who were permitted to ask for specifics without qualification.

As for the other members of the Trinity, for many years she had the feeling that the Holy Ghost awaited her somewhere. She also somehow knew that before any such encounter could occur she first had to come to terms with Jesus Christ, and she found the whole Son of God thing troublesome. She had tried desperately to believe. Christ, however, turned a deaf ear to her entreaties to come into her heart. For a while, she would only recite the first and last parts of the Apostle’s Creed, remaining silent during the middle section. She wanted to avoid committing blasphemy just in case Jesus being the Son of God and all was true. She lacked the strength of character to decline to be confirmed, and would have totally understood had God seen fit to strike her down by lightning rather than permit her to take her first communion. I believe. Help my unbelief! Afterward, whenever possible she would cut out of church just before that part of the service.

Belief or no, Good Friday had a profound effect on her. 3:00 p.m. It is finished. The temple curtain. Torn asunder. The cross on the altar draped in black. God in all Three Persons dead. Black Saturday. On Easter Sunday, Elfredge would sit in the balcony by herself, and look down upon the communion of saints in their Easter finery and she would have fleeting sensations of what it meant to be a member of the Body of Christ, a communicant. Then the first shaft of sunlight would beam through the stained glass window behind the altar, the brass choir would sound, and the congregation would rise as one. A person would have to be dead to fail to thrill as the worshippers began to sing in glorious four part, descanted, harmony, “Christ the Lord has risen today, Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, lay, ay, loo, oo, ya.” Pooh-pooh Lake Wobegon all you want but Garrison himself has waxed poetic about singing with Lutherans. Even then, faith eluded Elfredge, and the exhilaration of the moment gave way to feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Eventually, belief in a Creator God went by the wayside, and, finally, Elfredge gave up the Holy Ghost. On off days, she might echo Gloucester. We are as flies to wanton boys; they kill us for their sport. Overall, though, she viewed the human race as an evolutionary anomaly. A fluke of the universe. The Number 3 screeched into the 96th Station, and Elfredge returned to the material plane.

In part, this conclusion of flukedom comes from there simply being too many shared “plot points” among the hundreds, if not thousands, of “one true religion(s)” that have come and gone from the beginning of human sapience. I include here a couple from the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditons. For instance, imagine my surprise a few years back, when, as a near lifelong admirer of Leonard Cohen, I learned that for Muslims, the story of Isaac is the story of Ishmael.

For those of you unfamiliar with matters religious, the big three patriarchal religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) share Abraham as The Patriarch. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Yahweh, in return for Abraham’s agreement to worship Him as the one and only true God, entered into a covenant with Abraham promising that he would be the father of nations. Well, the years went by and Abraham and his wife Sarah remained childless. Eventually, Sarah, seeing as how Yahweh was preventing her from conceiving, gave her Egyptian slave-girl Hagar to Abraham as a wife. Hagar and Abraham, who was 86 at the time, had a son named Ishmael. Fourteen years later, Sarah conceived and bore Isaac.

The Hebrew Bible contains an account of Yahweh’s command that Abraham offer Isaac as a burnt sacrifice. Just as Abraham, in his unwavering obedience, begins the downward sweep of the axe to kill Isaac, Yahweh stayed his hand and provided instead a sacrificial ram that just happened (wink, wink) to have caught his horns in a thicket. Isaac went on to become the progenitor of the Jewish nation, and, by extension the Christian “nation” through Jesus (assuming His mother Mary’s lineage, like that of her husband Joseph, can be traced back to King David).

With the birth of Isaac, Sarah made Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael off into the desert where they would have died of thirst but for Yahweh a/k/a Allah’s intervention. The Koran also contains a section chronicling Allah’s command for Abraham to offer his oldest son as a sacrifice. Thus, Muslims maintain this son was Ishmael. Moreover, Muslims believe the name “Isaac” was inserted into the Hebrew Bible at a later date, and therefore represents corrupted text. Ishmael went on to become an expert with the bow (according to Genesis) and the progenitor of the nation of Islam.

And how many of you know that Muslims, too, await the second coming of Jesus Christ? Indeed, I still remember the first time I read the section addressing this belief in Wikipedia. I was blown away. The section as it appears today has been reworked somewhat, but I still have a copy in my notes of the Wiki entry which read as follows:

The mainstream Islamic view of the second coming maintains that Jesus was replaced by a duplicate who looked like Jesus, and that it was the duplicate who was crucified while the real Jesus was lifted up to Heaven by God, where he is waiting to descend during the “last days” when corruption and perversity are rife on Earth. He will then wage a battle against the false Messiah or Dajjal, break the cross, kill swine and call all humanity to Islam.

I realize that two examples or two hundred examples of “both sides can’t be right” will fail to persuade most of you that maybe as far as religions go we humans made it all up in the first place. Even I, who can state unequivocally that I believe ours is a random, indifferent universe, still find myself at times imploring a God in whom I no longer believe to make it so my brother is no longer dead.

Besides, proving or disproving God’s existence begs the question. Think about it. Whether God exists is neither here nor there. Let’s say at some point the Hubble telescope (or the Very Large Array) manages to zero in at the precise location of the creation of this universe and the pictures of the swirling cosmos that gets sent back to earth looks remarkably like an old guy with a long white beard. So what? So what unless God knows we exist and does indeed take a personal interest in each of our individual lives. If God has no plans for us or will to be done, then whether or not there is a God doesn’t much matter in our little corner of the universe. And if that’s the case, well, to borrow a line from Joni Mitchell, it all comes down to us.

cko
December 3, 2009

“[A]nd therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” John Donne

The Author’s Preface

“Hello. My name is Kris, and I’m an alcoholic.” I can’t remember when, exactly, I first said those words at an AA meeting. It would have been sometime after the Ides of March, 1975, a day that will live in “famy.” It was on the Ides of March, 1975, that I first crossed the threshold of Hazelden. I was 20 years old. (It was the 70s and if you could go over and get killed in Viet Nam you damn well could drink and vote at home, so the legal age for both changed to 18 the summer of 1973.) I had spent the last year and a half attending classes by day, cooking part-time at Pumpernik’s Deli, and drinking until I blacked out nearly every night.

Then, one night, I lost my bosses’ wife’s car. I had taken it home because buses were iffy on Sunday mornings. The Deli had a busy weekend breakfast crowd. I would do the prep and cook 400+ omelets or plates of scrambled eggs (highly recommend pastrami, onion, and egges) each weekend morning with a debilitating hangover. I remember going downstairs and getting in the car on Saturday night. I had decided to go stay with a friend who lived closer to the deli. My last memory of that night was getting in the car. I woke up the next morning back in my own bed with the car key in my pocket and no car. Oops. To this day I have no idea what occurred that night. My boss found the car a few days later at the St. Paul impound lot with two bent wheels on the passenger side.

Sometime that next week, I went to student health services and spoke with a counselor. I explained about how I might be an alcoholic. We went through the twenty questions. I answered “yes” to nearly all of them. When we finished, she reached down, opened one of her desk drawers and came up with a list of treatment centers. She asked me, “Where would you like to go?” (This was Minnesota, remember.) How I knew about Hazelden, I’m not entirely sure, but it was on the list. A couple weeks later, on March 15, 1975 — after passing out and missing last call the night before and drinking a double scotch at the Oak Room Grill (Cutty Sark was the bar scotch for 60 cents a shot) — my brother John and best friend Judi — the two who had been most instrumental in keeping me alive — drove me out to Hazelden. Talk about coming full circle. it was on March 16, 1973 that I had gone to my first bar and experienced my first black out.

During my first individual session, my counselor asked me what brought me to Hazelden. I somewhat flippantly remarked that I knew I could make it as an alcoholic, so I thought I’d see what being sober was like. She looked at me over her glasses and announced that I had “failed as an alcoholic the moment [I had] walked through those doors.” That pronouncement, as much as anything else, has kept me relatively sober since then. Over the next ten years I had a couple of one night slips and a couple bouts of dabbling with a drink here and there over a period of a few weeks, but I’ve not had a drink since the May, 1985.) I have continued, however, to struggle with addictions of one sort or another throughout my life – most notably, my nearly 30-year addiction to nicotine. Two-and-a-half years ago, I stuck the needle in my arm, again, metaphorically speaking, of course. I loaded World of Warcraft (WOW) on my newly acquired Lenovo X61 Tablet PC, created my avatar, a human Paladin named “Elfredge” (female)(mining/blacksmithing), and started my 10-day free trial.

If only I could embrace the notion that 13 or so billion years ago someone or something uttered what amounted to “Let there be light” — or performed one of the other equivalent actions as reported by other religious, philosophic, or scientific entities to explain the beginning of this, our universe — thereby causing the precise series of events that led me to the Best Buy just off I-40 in Albuquerque, New Mexico where I acquired the software containing the virtual world of Azeroth. In other words, if only I could believe that everything since the beginning of this timespace universe has occurred according to the laws of the unified field theory. Then I could simply accept WOW as a wonderful gift from the universe. Because truly, just as I once would have been content to drink myself to death, or, as I have nearly done, smoke myself to death, I stand content to play myself to death.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) (everything is, after all, relative), I believe that our universe operates on what has been labeled the “uncertainty principle” in quantum physics. I will not attempt to offer an explanation of the principle here. Suffice that God does indeed throw dice (metaphorically speaking, of course). In my mind, the uncertainty principle accounts for humans having free will which means that I, as a human being, have a choice to do something other than exist enveloped in the mind-numbing bliss generated by playing my massively multiplayer online role playing game (“MMORPG”). This belief that I am neither victim nor puppet of some higher or natural law has led to my decision, time, and time again, to stop playing WOW to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

And why do I keep going back to the game? Well, that’s easy. I’m an addict. (Assuming I’m right about free will versus predetermination.) Even so, why not play, if it makes me happy and isn’t hurting anyone else? Just surrender to the addiction and enjoy? At the moment, as I await a call that I have a donor for a new lung or lungs, it can be said it sort of sucks to be me. Ay, there’s the rub, as my favorite Dane is/was wont to say. [Actually Hamlet has fallen out of favor lately. He’s a whiner.] In the first place, I wrote, without thinking, “anyone else,” in the previous sentence. Somewhere, then, deep down, I must believe that playing WOW is hurtful to me. At least “bad,” “wrong,” okay, “immoral” rather than what I might – perhaps even “would” — like to believe, “amoral.” If I believed playing was amoral, I wouldn’t feel bad about playing all the time, but I am unable to deny that while playing to the exclusion of everything else on the one hand is as close to nirvana as I’ll probably get in this lifetime, it also causes a sensation in the pit of my stomach, the place where I’m supposed to feel bad when I’m doing something “wrong.”

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Christian – though [the] God [I no longer believe in] knows I tried to believe, to have faith, in my younger days. In those days, I had a fascination with the unforgiveable sin, first introduced to me as the topic of a Sunday sermon based on Christ’s declaration in Matthew 12: 31-32 (NRSV):

Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

I remember endeavoring to learn what word or words might constitute this sin. (As a young pup I took things quite literally – still do actually. It was a sad day when I finally understood that “not every sentence is a contract.” That knowledge, however, has made life much less painful and confusing.) I was fascinated by the idea that with a word, I had the power to condemn myself to eternal damnation. Sometimes I wondered if, in possession of this knowledge, I would have the courage and perversity to say it and be done with it. Other times, I recall having some concern I would utter the word or words by mistake.

Over the ensuing years I became acquainted with Faust and the notion of selling one’s soul, but that is different because it involves a “boutique” unforgiveable sin not a sin out there for just anybody to commit. Then there is Huck’s “and then says to myself, ‘Alright, then, I’ll go to Hell’.” (It is this decision that puts Huck right up there as one of my most admired people.) And there’s Ahab. But even their sins, as bold as they are, were sins against Yahweh, not the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t until I read The Faerie Queene as a graduate student in my late 20s that I found a satisfactory answer to the question –in part because, as I’ve just now realized, I had forgotten the unforgivable sin was a speaking sin against the Holy Ghost. To Spenser, the unforgiveable sin was to despair to the point of suicide. That explanation served me in good stead for many years. Lately, however, and to bring it around to the subject at hand, my addiction to WOW, I’ve been having second thoughts.

Go to any 12-step program meeting of whatever ilk, AA, NA, Al-Anon, COA, CODA, OA, GA, and one soon learns that “denial” is “more than just a river in Egypt.” Unlike many alcoholics, it took me almost no time at all to accept that I was an alcoholic. After all, what better excuse to drink? Of course I drank, that’s what alcoholics do. Once in treatment, however, I went a day without drinking, and then another, and then another, and I kept waking up. Eventually, I had to admit it was unnecessary to drink to live. After that, I pretty much had to accept drinking was a matter of choice – indeed almost everything in life involves some sort of choice. Moreover– gasp! — I am responsible for the choices I make. It wasn’t a rotten childhood, or a genetic predisposition, or any of a number of other excuses I used to keep drinking. It was a choice I made. But that’s where things start to get insidious. At a certain point, choice moves beyond choice to “rationalization.” And, at a certain point, the words we tell ourselves to justify our actions or inactions, to dissolve that pit in our stomachs, can, I submit, amount to speaking against the “Holy Spirit.” Rationalization, then, is the unforgiveable sin.

It’s a disease, and the ultimate denial is non-denial. The game’s, not the play’s, the thing. And oh, it catches my conscience so. And so, just for today, this hour, this minute, right now, I write through the desire, the urge to double click the WOW icon, type in my password and start merrily killing everything in sight (Well, not everything. “There are no honor points in killing guards” – but people do it, oh yes they do.) And why not simply succumb? Because I believe there is a qualitative difference between playing a video game and reading a book and, for that matter, writing a poem or performing some other creative act than reading a book. (And I mean qualitative, not just quantitative, and I know the difference because I went to college in the 70s and we got to take cool classes like Marxism for credit. “Production is immediate consumption.” (Come to think of it, in high school, I had a large poster of Karl Marx on my bedroom wall, along with Moshe Dyan. What’s that all about, Alfie?) Semper Fi.

I’m still unsure who to believe, all those angels of print and screen who are ticked God gave humans, but not them, free will, or Calvin and his categories of the elect, the damned, and the preterites who are damned simply because they are not meant to be saved. I’d like to believe we have free will, but the ironist in me suspects that the notion God needs to damn a whole class of people just so certain others can feel special is the more likely scenario. Of course this presupposes the existence of God. Take that presupposition out of the equation and what’s left is a universe that either operates according to a set of laws (even if the “unified theory” continues to elude), or is some random conglomerate of matter and energy.

Two isolated (and admittedly minor) events in my life caused me at one point to contemplate whether it really is futile to try to outmaneuver an inexorable fate that has been correctly predicted. The first incident occurred sometime in the year 2000 when I saw my first picture of a PT Cruiser. I simply had to have one. I went shopping, but, early on, supply exceeded demand. By the time supply caught up with demand, and I was once again in the market for a new vehicle, I chose practicality over visceral response and purchased a Wintergreen Subaru Outback (beige interior) instead. Fast forward to 2007, where, for a few months, I exchanged the Subaru for a well-loved-but-too-small-to-accommodate-my-oxygen-tank 1999 green Mazda Miata convertible (beige interior). Unfortunately I was pretty sure it was incapable of getting me safely to LA where I needed to go to see my beloved brother. Enter the newly designed Scion xB. It reminded me of the mini-hearse Harold built in the movie Harold and Maude, only Teal. Blue neon interior lights. I loved it. I priced it. I slept on it. On the way back to the Toyota dealership to buy it, I took a detour into the Chrysler dealership where I found a Tangerine Pearl PT Cruiser Touring Edition with power moon roof, YES Essentials® cloth low-back bucket seats, pastel pebble beige interior, and body-color spoiler. I bought it instead of the Scion. A few weeks later, I spotted a Teal Scion xB driving down the street. I distinctly remember saying to myself, “Self, they’re driving my car.” (I think in inclusive language, grammar be damned.) And then I realized I meant what I had just said. I really did want the Scion. So why had I bought the PT? Was I destined to own a PT? Did I really have a choice? Even knowing then what I know now, I’m unsure whether I could have left the dealership that day and driven the extra mile down the road to Toyota.

The second incident also began in the year 2000. Darcy and I were in the midst of designing the residence we later built just behind the Biopark here in Albuquerque. We had a rule that served us in good stead during this time. We called it the “Ick” rule. If either of us was categorically opposed to anything in connection with the planning, construction, or furnishing of the house, all either one of us had to say was: “That’s an Ick.” End of discussion. The only challenge ever raised with respect to the “Ick” rule occurred during the design phase when Darcy wanted to have a bay window in what would be her office. I invoked the Ick rule. She countered it was in her space. I stood firm, and she agreed to a design modification whereby the window would be built out like a bay window so there would be ample shelf space for cat beds, but it would be squared as opposed to angled with no side windows.
Last year Darcy’s Mom, Margaret, decided to move to a senior facility, and we decided to purchase her home because it was a single story. My space in our old house was a wonderful loft on the second floor called the “Aerie,” but I hadn’t been able to use it in literally years given the effort required to climb the stairs. When Margaret first bought the house in which we presently reside, she performed some fairly extensive renovations (including building the addition that has been transformed into Walking Raven Central). The living room looks east onto a park and then onto a view of the Sandia Mountains. To optimize her view, she added, . . . wait for it, . . . a bay window. (Hey, I’ve mellowed somewhat over the years.) Was I fated all along to have a bay window?

Still unconvinced? Well, how about this one. I started law school in 1983. Shortly thereafter, I attended some sort of mock trial event presided over by Justice Mary Coon Walters. Justice Walters was the first woman appointed as a Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court. I thought she was way cool and remember saying to myself, “Self, I’m going to work for her someday.” Three years later, Justice Walters sat down at her desk, arranged the resumes of the prospective law clerks she’d interviewed according to class rank, and started making calls. She moved down the list until Jana accepted her first offer and continued on down the list until I accepted the second.

I’ve just finished reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. In each book, after a hero is given a quest s/he must go consult the oracle in the attic. The role of prophesy, at least in “Western” art and literature certainly suggests free will is an illusion. Moreover, even if the hero is told that the outcome of a prophesy is evitable, I’ve been unable to come up with, or be directed to, an example where a prophesy has been thwarted or gone unfulfilled. (Although one “quest-ending” continues to trouble me. Frodo put on the Ring.) The same holds true with quest literature, except we’re often informed that the back-story involves other wannabe heroes who have tried and failed. I’d like it if my destiny included finishing my novel, The First Voice, since that means my number won’t come up until I finish it. In the meantime, I continue to listen for that voice in my head that signals I may have just been given a glimpse into my future, keeping in mind, of course, that inherent in oracular prophesies is they are understood only after the fact.

2:50 p.m., Tuesday, September 10, 2002

Okay, how to proceed from here. If I write these pages in cursive pen to paper, folks will have a difficult time reading them. So, I would need to translate into typewritten pages. I don’t have time for such nonsense, but perhaps Christine would consent to do so. I could also dictate, but again transcription impediments. Christine, again. Besides, while there may not be a lot of difference between pen to paper and keyboard to screen, I think there may be more of a difference between voice to tape. I don’t know why exactly but it’s a filter thing. To write or type, the words must form written symbols. No need for such translation with speech until a later time.

I can see one major difference right now between cursive and type. I make a number of errors when typing that I would not make writing, which does interrupt the flow of thought. By how much though, I’m not sure. I am, after all, capable, though not as much as before, of “holding that thought.” For the moment, I guess I’m inclined to type, unless I see a great difference between the two. I will however continue alternating for a bit to see if there’s a real qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) difference. It is nice, though, to use my retractable fountain pen. It writes smooth and silent.

I awoke to rain this morning. The sky was almost uniformly gray with no blue sky or sunshine in sight. It’s brightening now, with some cloud definition. The rain stopped a while back. Sigh. It was dark enough the street lights came on in the middle of the afternoon. I need to put more descriptive passages in the novel. Or do I? Are they just filler, or do they serve a function? Well, they probably set the atmosphere the writer wishes to convey to the audience. But, if one writes that it rains, then what else is needed? Well, rain is different with respect, for instance, to intensity and duration. If one of the goals of writing is to create an almost cinemagraphic effect; i.e., to enable the reader to see the action of the book with the mind’s eye, then perhaps it’s important, but only if one wants to have the reader’s eye more attuned to the writer’s eye. So, one can say, “it is raining,” and the reader can pick what kind of rain. The conditions. Would it be possible to write around the rain such that the conditions are suggested by the action, though not described? Implicit vs. explicit surroundings. But that supposes that the conditions of the surrounding are somehow informed by the action. How stupid is that? It’s raining, therefore one acts in such and such a way, when, indeed, one could act in such and such a way whether it is raining or not.

I know there is a convention where the surrounding conditions are written to reflect the inner weather of a character. I don’t want to do that. I will write of murder in the sunshine. But that’s sort of unnatural, too, since murder seldom occurs in the sunshine. If most murders are “red ball” murders (passion killing) or manslaughter, are we as human beings more passionate or more careless in the dark? Or is [it] that as a general rule more drug and/or alcohol use and abuse occurs at night? So, it is not necessarily human nature to kill, but human nature somehow altered by chemicals. And what, if anything, can be inferred from that?

My blinds are closed, thereby preventing me from looking west. I think the sun has broken through. Heavy, heavy sigh. But, would living where it rains more really make a difference on who I am? Are there rain people or sun people or snow people? Well, there’s SAD, but not everyone suffers from it. Assuming one doesn’t, then what, if any, difference does it make except in terms of personal preference? I almost wrote, “what, if anything,” which would then be followed by “makes a difference.” It appears the two sentences have the same meaning. Aesthetically, I prefer, “[w]hat, if any difference . . .”. But they are the same because “it” and “thing” are synonymous. I wish I’d been sober for my logic class. I wish I’d taken linguistics. I wish I understood the language of mathematics and music. But choices must be made. Time is more finite for me than for others. First things first. Write the book. Then decide where to go from there . . .

End, 3:35 p.m.

12:47 p.m., Friday, May 22, 2009

“And so it goes.”