I sat down just now to pull some images for a review of Werneck – Wretchmond, a recent curatorial conspiracy between Danger Poeira and Yeovillain made of sprung clockwork and quantum-mechanical malfunctions, and I happened upon the image above. The image itself is quotidian, but the description silenced me. It reads:

God, if I speak my love to you in fear of hell, incinerate me in it;
if I speak my love to you in hope of heaven, close it in my face.
But if I speak to you simply because you exist, cease withholding from me your neverending beauty.
—Rabi’a al-Adawiyya

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Marcus emptied food scraps into the composter and raised his eyes. “Master,” he asked, “why do we make the soil?”

The old man nodded patiently. “The soil outside is not natural. It is made of the dust and smoke of humanity. Lead, mercury, arsenic: these are the spoor of humanity. To us this is unclean. Making soil is a ritual of devotion in the service of nature.”

The old man absently cracked a knuckle. “The water outside is not natural. It is full of the piss of humanity, and carries the drugs and poisons from which humanity is made. Every animal, every plant that drinks this water cannot fail to take on the smell of humanity. To us this is unclean. Making water is a ritual of devotion in the service of nature.”

The old man held out a basket to catch the leaves. “The tea outside is not natural. Bees carry pollen from engineered plants and spread it promiscuously. The children carry the signature of the maker, as if the engineer had mated with the plant. To us this is unclean. Growing tea is a ritual of devotion in the service of nature.”

The old man made a vague gesture of blessing toward the lights overhead. “The sky outside is not natural. The light of the sun is bent by the farts and exhalations of humanity. Every sight, every sound is twisted and rendered unclean. Making air, making light: These are rituals of devotion in the service of nature.”

Their hands full of pots and cups, master and disciple walked together toward the meditation hall. After a moment’s thought the old man said, “We drink tea to make ourselves mindful. Only within ourselves can we find wilderness. Drinking tea is a ritual of devotion in remembrance of this.”

Marcus held out a hand and forced the old man to pause. “But master,” he said. “Is it not true that by speaking to you I alter the wilderness within? Is it then not the case that this wilderness also bears the imprint of humanity?”

The old man grinned broadly and resumed his walk. “That, my son, is the essence of faith.”

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Let’s talk about this. I was born in New York City on December 7, 1924. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on my seventeenth birthday. I joined the Army when I turned eighteen. I lost the bottom half of my left leg when I was nineteen, in the Battle of Anzio. I was back in Rome two years later, after the liberation. I wore my pants leg pinned up. I would no more wear a false foot than I would a false mustache or a false nose. People can take me as I am.

Italy was like anywhere else. After the war factories tried to diversify out of war machines into everyday civilian stuff: canoes, bicycles, tent poles. I even got a precision-machined racing crutch from Caproni (who had made bombers for lots of people including Mussolini), but they went back to making planes exclusively after that.

My wife was a Roman girl. She kept the books for her father’s auto shop and left early each day in time to cook me meals that would have made an emperor weep. (Both the job and the evening meals were unusual for the time. Most Roman wives in those days spent their time manufacturing children and midday meals.) I knew exactly how good I had it: work, a little free time, a loving wife, delicious food.

When we were still childless after a couple of years I was secretly thankful. I was fearful of change and wanted things to stay exactly as they were. I suppose that satisfaction must be a sin. Perhaps it’s a form of pride. I should have talked to our priest and gotten straight with God. You have to be ready to accept whatever He throws at you. You have to be light on your feet (or in my case, foot). But I was in a complacent state of sin so when cancer took my Caterina I went straight to hell.

I spent the first two weeks crying. A little crying would have been fine. Italians are supposed to be emotional, right? But my crying went beyond that. I ended up in the hospital with a needle in my arm, just to keep my fluids up.

The doctors turned me over to my in-laws and I drove them away with rages. A little rage–like a little crying–would have been fine. But I was loud, mean and violent. Caterina’s brother Sandro finally slapped me so his mother wouldn’t have to, and they all hunched their shoulders and slowly walked away. I couldn’t blame them.

My employers had granted, and extended, and re-extended compassionate leaves but eventually they also ran out of patience, so I spent every day alone in my apartment with endless cheap Sardinian vodka. I used to stare at the vulture on the label and watch the glass fill itself and empty itself, over and over again, all day long. My hair turned white in six months. Am I too old to travel to Sardinia now? I want to find the distillery and piss on the walls.

When the money went out I took to sleeping rough. I wasn’t the only one-legged veteran on the street, but I may have been the only one from the winning side. I was a skeleton. I stank. I stole. I ate garbage.

I was standing in front of the Trinità dei Monti in the pouring rain. I was hopping on one foot, waving my crutch at the sky. Even Job never stooped to hopping. I cursed God. I cursed the devil. I cursed the earth. I cursed the sky. A bolt of lightning struck my crutch and ran through my body and straight down the Spanish Steps. My clothes caught fire. I fell on my face.

When lightning passes through your body it leaves a trail of cooked meat from where it enters to where it exits. It’s just a roll of the dice whether anything vital gets roasted. In my case I have quarter-sized stigmata on my right palm and the soul of my left foot. Did I say my left foot? When I woke up, naked and smoking at the edge of the piazza, I found that my last remaining possession, my beautiful Caproni crutch, was melted and shriveled. My left foot was itching worse than anything I had felt before. I staggered to my feet.

The rain had stopped. A thin crowd flowed through the piazza. No one looked at me or even turned their heads. I waved my arms and got no reaction from anyone. I jumped in front of a little old nonna. She crashed into me, knocked us both down and her artichokes rolled all over the street. Three passersby helped her up and re-packed her bags for her. She limped off crying.

I walked off in the direction of my old neighborhood, dragging my burned foot to subdue the itch. I raised my hand to everyone I passed, just to see whether anyone would wave back. I had heard stories, on troop ships, of cities in China and India where madness is venerated and the mad are ignored out of respect. Perhaps Rome had a similar tradition? As I walked past a shop where I had often bought clothes, I decided to step inside and test the limits of this phenomenon. No one acknowledged me as I entered. No one questioned me as I selected underwear, socks and a suit. No one protested when I walked out the door wearing my stolen merchandise. The pattern repeated all the way down the street as I stole shoes, a hat and an umbrella. I had to serve myself at the ice cream shop, and the kid working there didn’t meet my eyes even when I accidentally brushed against his uniform and left a green pistachio smear.

In my itchy new clothes I stood on the sidewalk outside our old building and looked up at the windows of our former apartment. No tears this time, and the lightning had burned the alcohol from my body. I just stood there, all dried out. Then I turned and began to walk toward the sea.

In Civitavecchia I walked unimpeded and seemingly unobserved aboard a ship bound for Dover. I spent the voyage in an unused stateroom which grew filthier by the day, unvisited by the service staff. I sat at a different table each night, eating from the plates of my companions and leaving their wineglasses well alone.

In Dover I boarded a ship bound for New York and repeated this performance. By the time we arrived I had eaten enough bland sole and roast beef for a lifetime. I walked straight to my childhood corner cafe and ate an entire plate of bucatini out from under a fat uncle. I drank his mineral water and set off in search of companionship. I recognized a few of the older whores on the street. They were girls I grew up with but none of them gave me a first–let alone second–look, so I walked further uptown.

A copper-haired woman with bloodshot eyes was dining alone at a sidewalk table. With trembling fingers she dug a pill bottle out of her purse. I sat down beside her and put my hand on her thigh. She dry-swallowed her pill and twisted her hip so my hand rode up but she didn’t look at me or otherwise acknowledge my presence. We sat that way for a long time. Finally she dropped some money on the table and stood up. I watched the line of her back and fell into step behind her.

She stumbled around the corner and into the middle of the next block, scratched at her building’s front-door lock until it opened and slipped through without looking back. I squeezed through the last few inches and followed her shaky progress up four flights of stairs. Her door looked like a door: scraped and carved and with dents all over the bottom quarter. She rested her forehead against it for a moment. Then she found her key and opened the door.

We went straight to bed. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the ceiling as I lifted her skirt and fumbled with her stockings and girdle. She breathed evenly all the way through. I might as well not have been there at all. When we finished she sat up, turned her back and swallowed another pill. With her legs hanging off the bed, she slowly slumped until her head hit the pillow. I let myself out. She had never once looked at me.

All through that fall I made myself at home in the city. I drank tea with millionaires and borrowed their clothes. I slept beside socialites and watched them in the bath. I spat in the vodka at a communist conclave and I pissed in the punch at a banker’s ball. Late one evening in a restaurant on Mulberry closed to everyone but a single lonely gangster, I pulled his pistol from his pocket and set it on the table between us. Then I dipped my finger in his Barolo and drew the sign of the cross on his forehead. He dabbed his lips with his napkin, left the restaurant, walked a mile straight west and drowned himself in the Hudson.

Late that November I saw the copper-haired woman again. She was clear-eyed and sure-footed, visibly pregnant and brightening the entire block. I placed myself in the center of the sidewalk, straightened my tie and lifted my hat. She wrinkled her brow, shrugged as if to herself, turned around and walked the other way.

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I have always viewed Gravity’s Rainbow as a big stack of comic books on a rainy afternoon: Buncha good stories in there.

You can view the Bible the same way: Buncha good stories about dozens of generations (43 according to luke 3:23:38, but there are lots of different canonical counts) of interrelated families, all the way back to jump.

That would be a decent way to compile a book of stories: Start 43 or so generations BCE, follow a matrilineal or patrilineal line, and tell one story per generation all the way up to the present: 150-ish stories, related by birth.

I haven’t ever cared much about writing stories set before 1200 CE, but maybe I should keep my eyes open for a way in.

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Way off topic, but I want to get this logged someplace public:

Two weeks ago, some fraudster with a Pasadena address added himself to our U.S. Bank FlexPerks Visa account. The card’s fraud department noticed this and froze our account without notifying us. When our card started being rejected by everyone we phoned up, closed the old cards and got new cards.

This morning, we phoned up the card’s automated system and it rejected our ZIP code and phone numbers. Ugh, fraud on the new cards as well?

After fifteen or twenty minutes on hold, this is how the U.S. Bank fraud people explained our new problem:

When we reported the previous fraud, they fixed it in the card system but not in the main back-end system. When the two systems reconciled, the main system added the fraudster back to our card account—onto our new cards!

Thanks for your honesty, U.S. Bank, but we still closed our accounts. If you like, we can recommend some security ninjas who can close those holes for you.

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Every year, just after midnight on December 6th, Saint Nicholas visits every home on earth.¹ Every child receives three small chocolate candies.² Every adult receives punishment for the sins he or she has committed during the year. That is why we call Saint Nicholas Day “The Day of Atonement.”

In January, Mike Anderson bought a chicken-processing plant and continued to pay his mostly-Mexican workforce minimum wage. He thought this was more than fair. On December 6th Nicholas turned the factory into a worker-owned cooperative and hired Mike as janitor. He sold Mike’s home and used the proceeds to buy one-speed bicycles for the workers’ children.

In April, Jenny Evans’ neighbor bought an enormous new truck. In June Jenny bought one to match. On December 6th Nicholas sold both trucks and used the proceeds to buy 79,997 packets of kohlrabi seeds and two Matchbox cars. He gave the seeds to Jenny and her neighbor and the Matchbox cars to some kids on the next block.

In July, Chris Green ate beef every day all month. On December 6th Nicholas placed him and his family in a one-year indenture to a strict but kind farmer outside Belur in Karnataka. The children don’t seem to mind the work, or the lentils.

In October, Mandy Johnson got drunk and slept with her best friend’s husband. On December 6th Nicholas sat that one out. He figured it was basically self-punishing.

On December 6th, Nicholas impaled Dave Williams on a spit, and placed the spit over a charcoal fire. We will not speak of the reason why. Neither the spit nor the fire has proved fatal. We imagine Dave will hang onto life until next Saint Nicholas Day. Perhaps he will behave differently next year.

¹Nicholas is one of the largest landowners in Zurich. It is speculated that he may store his vast currency reserves under a mountain there.

²These candies are manufactured using chocolate raised on Nicholas’ plantations in Côte D’ivoire by freed child-slaves and processed in factories fueled by the burning souls of the slavemasters.

_{Image via Wikimedia Commons}

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Our whole family moved from St. Paul to Dundas in 2007 in an effort to get out into the country. It ended up (and we should have known this) that we were moving to the “recent country” rather than “current country,” since our house was new construction, part of a development built on what fifteen minutes earlier had been a not-bad soybean field producing beans that were shipped two hundred miles to be turned into hormone- and drug-amended kibble that was shipped the same two hundred miles back to some bioengineered hog-alikes that live within smelling distance of our new two-and-a-half story. Mmm, bionic bacon.

From way up in the aluminum-and-fiberglass cottonwood-replica cell-phone tower just beyond our property line in back, I can sight down on those robo-hogs through the scope of my M40A5 with the scrimshaw full-sleeve antelope-scapula stock-inlays my buddy Keith did for me six or seven years ago. I haven’t let loose on the hogs yet because I’m trying to be a good neighbor but believe me the scope makes their flanks look like I’m eyeball-up with the broad side of the Hoover Dam. Can’t see heads or tails.

Anyway, my first “episode,” as my wife calls them, happened about two months after we moved in, in late August or early September. She had taken the kids to go see her aunt and uncle in Detroit Lakes, and I woke up feeling better than I had ever felt in my whole life. I made myself some toast and eggs, and by the time the moon was going down that night I had finished a very fine wattle-and-daub shell around our whole house by using brush growing down by the riverbank and mud and clay from under the brush. Basically it was like a very smooth dome or Dan Aykroyd’s forehead. It was nice and dark in there. Cool and quiet. Our dog Heifer even liked it. She curled up between the shell and the house and went right to sleep.

When Sunny and the kids got home the next morning I was all excited to show it off, standing out front with a big smile on my face. Sunny didn’t even get out. She just turned the truck around and drove off. Her brother and a bunch of his buddies showed up around six that evening with a radio and a couple cases of beer and took the whole shell apart while I watched. When the phone rang it was Sunny asking me to make a doctor’s appointment for myself. I told her I’d think about it and hung up.

The next time was a few weeks later after school had started. Between breakfast and lunch I had all the sod up and rolled into grassmen (like snowmen) standing in ranks all over the yard, with little stick arms waving hello. When the kids got off the bus they smiled and waved back. But Sunny didn’t even come home from work. She just sent her friend Angie over to pick up the kids. I went inside and made up our bedroom to look like a Mongolian tent, with canvas I unstitched from a bunch of surplus sails and jackets I had in the basement, and big flat cushions made out of the sectional, and lynx pelts (from old hunting trips) on the floor. I even made yogurt. Then I drank some vodka and tried to think like a Mongol.

When the cops showed up I was taking a bath in the river. I don’t think they liked my fur hat.

Sunny and the cops stuck me in a hospital in Burnsville on a 24-hour hold. I thought that was tawdry. You never expect to end up in the bin in a suburb that was still new when you were a kid. Bins ought to be in the middle of the city or on top of a hill in a small town someplace. The suburbs are just undignified.

When I got out Sunny handed me a duffel bag and told me to get myself together. I hitchhiked home and built myself a soddie on the south side of the house facing the Morgans. Sunny and the Morgans didn’t think much of it but the kids liked it and brought me corn stalks and pumpkins and gourds and stuff to decorate with. Heifer split her time between the house and the soddie. I thought that was very fair of her.

When Don Morgan caught me pissing on his back fence (where else was I going to piss?) he hosted an all-neighborhood party with schnapps and chickens he rotisseried on that big stainless grill he has. Partygoers took down the soddie and patched over the lawn, and then stood around drinking and not letting me back in my own yard. That was tough.

I had to wait until mid-December before there was enough snow-pack to build a proper igloo. It was warm in there! The streetlights and the light through the windows from my kids watching TV came through the snow blocks more than I would have thought. It was fun to sleep in a glowing room.

What I should have thought of (and this is why igloos are not a Minnesota thing) was that mud season starts in late February. As far as I could tell, a soddie wouldn’t have been any good in mud season either. I ended up feeling like a mad old saint in a medieval story with no roof over his head and no solid ground under his feet. All I had to do was wait for a miracle.

I got my miracle in mid-April when the ground dried out, the weather turned and crocus came up everywhere! Minnesota never gets a proper spring, so this one must have been just for me! I built myself a platform up a willow overlooking the river. Half the time I sat up there thinking like a heron and half the time I sat down by the river thinking like a frog. The kids came by every day and I tried to help them think like me. I was touched by their loyalty. I’m sure their mother didn’t know.

In June a man moved into my house who I infer must be Sunny’s boyfriend. I guess I can see where she’s coming from. And he’s not too careful about locking the house. So far I’ve managed to get my bible, my gun and a couple months’ worth of canned food. I’m grateful to him as far as it goes: Now I’ve got something to read. I sit up there thinking like Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, and waiting for a sign.

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My friend Nathan and I went to see Keller Williams at the Varsity last night. I like Keller’s music, but the main draw is that he always looks like the world’s happiest eleven-year-old. It’s worth the price of admission to see him take such joy in his craft. Thanks, man!

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My next Untold Tale is “The Red Leech.” Cursory leech-research turned up this astonishing post: Leeches in Creation Mythology

One of the post’s citations is this:

“then did he become a leech-like clot; then did (Allah) make and fashion (him) in due proportion. And of him He made two sexes, male and female.” (Quran 75: 37-39)

We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; leeches to leeches, clots to clots.

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My wife and I have been taking Eudemox off-label as a mood synchronizer. Fortunately her moods seem to be dominant, otherwise I’d be dragging her down down down.

It’s a pretty electrifying exercise. Do you have somebody you’d trust with each other’s emotions?

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