By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I used to ask myself a question which, though I now know my choice, continues to nibble at me like mice in the basement of my psyche. The question was this: If I had the opportunity to live the life of every human being who ever existed – one by one – would I? I test my memory, twisting road that it now is, and find that back in the old days I would have said Yes.
Well, my mind was in tumult then, a mixture of good intentions and bad results; heated idealism both public and private interrupted by lost weekends and horny pilgrimages in search of the Eldorado of Pussy; blunt honesty and cunning, recurring self-deceit – the general good cop, bad cop in my soul – all in a whirlpool of heightened emotion, I believe I would, I shouted, I would have taken them all on if it meant I could have slept with every beautiful woman who ever lived every time she had sex in her whole life (because I would have lived the lives of all their lovers); if I could have scored the winning goal or touchdown in every single sports event ever played; if I could have been the executioner of every scoundrel who deserved it, including myself. You get the picture –
– well, that’d be pretty decent, right?
It would be worth all the rubbish, all the standing in line, getting rejected, getting fired from crappy jobs, munching on ‘shit sandwiches’ and having to put more shit in my sandwich to compensate for not having enough bread…
But then I started thinking of all the plane crashes (dying the death of every soul aboard), a thousand more burnings at the stake (religious martyrdom), and all the deaths of the Holocaust and Bubonic Plague victims combined.
Nope, not worth it. So goodbye Brigitte Bardot, Nefertiti, Theodora, Mona Lisa.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Ah…but to have written the last scene of Hamlet, poured myself a glass of ale and said, That’s it then. Well done, lad. To have walked the streets with my disciples as they greeted me with Good morning, Jesus. How are you today, Mr. Christ? To have thought the thoughts of Leonardo di Vinci and Michelangelo as they created the universes they knew out of the fabric of their minds and the mastery of eye and hand.
Now I know: I wouldn’t do any of that.
For the past few nights I have been reading a book about Sir Francis Walsingham, the spymaster of Elizabeth I. It describes his terrible time in Paris as a low-paid and much put upon ambassador when he was a young man – and when The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre occurred in late August 1572. To try to digest a detailed account of this: the cold-blooded treachery of Catherine de Medici, the insane bloodlust of the murderers tearing their victims limb from limb (Catholics slaughtering Huguenots), the ecstatic madness of the mob – all in the name of a ‘loving God’ – filled me with such loathing and disgust that I experienced, for about the millionth time, a flash of insight into just how vicious and stupid most religions really are. Or, if not the ideas embedded in the ‘Faith’ itself, certainly the obscene and ghastly interpretations and subsequent behavior that their followers repeatedly display.
As for Saint Bartholomew himself, here is an interesting passage from Stephen Budiansky’s book:
It was the eve of the feast day of Saint Bartholomew:
Bartholomew, who had the distinction in the Gospels of being enumerated
among the Apostles of Jesus and then never being mentioned again; though later
tradition had it that he met his end by being flayed alive, and so the more
enthusiastic martyrologists of the Catholic Church were ever wont to depict him
carrying his own skin.
Try to imagine that: a skeleton walking around carrying a stack of his own hide like dirty clothes on route to the laundromat. Ah, the price of martyrdom!
So maybe indeed it is not the Soul Food recipe written in the scripture but simply the assholes who take it and run with it is where the fault lies and where blame should be assigned. Anyway, it is too much for me to stomach.
And this animosity toward any and all forms of the organized Church is countered-balanced (and here is where the confusion starts and ends) by the side of me which, at splendid, privileged moments, seems able to rise above all that and peek through ever-so-brief rips in the sky that reveal the Great Beyond. You know what it’s like? It’s like having to eat 10,000 pounds of excrement in order to be served one steak dinner cooked to perfection. I used to think it would be worth it to endure all the hardships and diabolical situations just to savor the Eureka “I have found it” moments and Road to Damascus revelations; I no longer do.
When you live in a world where – veteran of hard truths that one becomes – you learn to prefer the early morning dreams, those still nocturnal assignations of love long gone, and try to linger in sleep just a little longer, even as the need to get up and pee gradually rules you like a tyrant – when that kind of night music beguiles more than Sallow Day – you realize that part of you has already passed from the earth even as you live, then you really do start to believe in ghosts.
It’s a bit like Joni Mitchell’s song “The Circle Game” and Judy Collins’ “Both Sides Now.” Quaint old ‘60s stuff but still better than anything they blare at you these days.
I have a much admired old friend and fellow writer who, judging from the limited contact we now have, has pretty much decided against enduring my growing cynicism and vulgar outbursts and no doubt thinks I have deteriorated or, worse, settled. Settled for a convenient escape hatch into the comforting cocoon of hating almost everything and everyone. One of the reasons for this is that late in life I have become both a student of history and a history teacher. And to my astonishment and supreme chagrin, I see history for what it is: an endless pack of lies punctuated by merciless blood-letting, conquest without morality, systematic genocide, slavery, and concubinage imposed in the aftermath, justified by another pack of lies. This is history: a rogue’s gallery of tyrants declaring (and maybe even believing) themselves to be gods, getting up in the morning to take a prodigious dump on the heads and faces of hapless citizens that they should be protecting but instead are taxing and conscripting to fight their wars for them – and all this with vociferous cheerleading from an equally corrupt and rapacious Church. This is history.
So why do I love history? Not for its lessons (there are none except that it will keep repeating itself because the basic character prototype of the homo sapien never changes) but because of the amazing array of players, this proscenium of infamy and brutality, which results in a fantastic fugue of terrific narratives, and I confess to loving great stories – the more sordid the better. For if you apply the same ‘fly-on-the-wall’ principles of modern ‘gotcha’ journalism, you soon realize that guys like Caesar and Napoleon were just people. Most of the time they were occupied with ordinary things that all the rest of us do: scratching our behinds and picking the scabs off our faces and plucking green gilberts from our nostrils. When they weren’t figuring out ways to conquer and murder as many people as possible, that was pretty much ‘a day in the life’.
In the case of Napoleon Bonaparte and Salvadore Dali, it was a matter of wondering who would be fucking their wives that night. Alexander the Great was gay before they ever invented the term. Achilles liked to blow Patroclus. Martin Luther liked shit and James Joyce loved for his wife to smell his farts. It made Hemingway’s dick hard when he killed a beautiful animal (from a rifle distance) and then would rhapsodize about what a glorious ritual full of grace it had been.
And if you still admire – or even love – these great pillars of history, it is a better form of admiration and love than before. It’s the love that comes from recognizing the human condition for what it really is, and finding ways to revere things anyway. It is love, as the Russians say, ‘not because of, but in spite of.’ I get off on history, not by remembering the dates of ‘important’ battles or the names of kings and popes, but by trying to teleport myself back into the times and hardcore days of when these people actually lived, by entering their world street by street, and trying to fill in the scope of the canvas with precise paint and accurate assessment of life: imagined symmetry in fact played out in a bewildering and fractured Picasso-like rendition of faces which reveal human truth by dint of endless asymmetrical variations on the imagined original. The death masks of Adam and Eve brought to life by modern technology and computer-generated simulation. Why, Good God, he looks just like Sam down at the Guzzler’s Tavern and she is the spitting image of my Aunt Mary.
The bankrupt masters of the human house. Nothing is as it seems, and yet this is what there is. To me it represents an irresistible paradox. None of them were ever what we have been taught they were, and therein lies my obsessive fascination with them.
For yes, yes, yes, I would like to have been inside the thought-corridors of Chidiock Tichbourne as he penned “My life is but a frost of cares” in the Tower of London the night before his grisly execution of drawing-and-quartering. But would I have wanted to stand before the cackling mob at the foot of the scaffold fanning out in a raucous and vulgar array, just before my own agonizing mutilation – hearing the ejaculatory jubilation of all who were watching as I was being castrated? No, I wouldn’t.
Think about your own life. How many magic moments do you really experience amid the mounds and mountains of time spent doing the same tedious things (sitting on the toilet, waiting at traffic lights, clamped onto chairs in doctors offices) Are they worth it? In terms of my own life, I would probably still say Yes, but if you asked me if I would do it all again, I would answer with a provisional Probably as long as I would have the prerogative of changing about half of it. Otherwise: No, the hell with it.
My ‘magic moments’ have been exhilarating – and I try with all my might to believe them to be epiphanies – but that’s all they were. Moments. Women I remember on golden afternoons and rain-swept evenings still live there, but in bubbles of the past – the same kinds of roads and rooms where one might hope to find Mary Magdalene and Marilyn Monroe. All fantasies based on ghosts who once invited me – appeared to beckon me, I might say with more accuracy – to their inner chambers but now seem to say, as in Eliot’s poem about Prufrock, “That’s not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”
The Church says, Ignore all this. What is happening now, or what happened in the past – none of that is important unless you use it to redeem yourself in the eyes of The Lord God Almighty, and in order to do that you must accept your station in life, the soul-nourishing crumbs that God has so benevolently bestowed on you. And if you are miserable and suffering, and if life seems unfair, take heed of the words of the priest: God is testing you. And if you pass the test, you will enjoy all the fruits on offer in a deadening paradise, a pantheon of golden angels flying stiffly through the frozen purity of celestial air.
Walsingham himself was a highly-educated Puritan who circulated in a world of Renaissance men and women; his profession became that of learning to read them as if their souls were open windows breathing in the confessions of the wind, or closet doors, always slightly ajar if one looked closely enough, revealing the smelly garments hanging within. A chronicler of the times wrote of him:
To him faces spake as much as tongues, and their countenances
were indexes of their hearts. He would so beset men with questions, and
draw them on, and pick it out of them by piecemeals, that they
discovered themselves whether they answered or were silent. . . . He
waited on men’s souls with his eye, discerning their secret hearts through
their transparent faces.
So here was a fascinating man who could be sociable, articulate, and even witty, as he – in his mind – already saw you standing on a scaffold which he had made erected for you by a court of law following his own meticulous investigation of your crimes and misdemeanors. He must have become a frightening figure for those under scrutiny of his watchful and all-comprehending eye. How did he feel about those he dispatched?
Who knows? But Walingham always knew when you were guilty.
He was a Puritan. Read on:
Walsingham’s fellow Puritans railed against the evils of the theater;
“lascivious writhing,” “bawdy fables gathered from idolatrous heathen poets”;
“the cause of sin is plays,” said one Puritan preacher, with the smug certainty of
ignorance that made Puritan preachers ever so tiresome. Walsingham, seeing the
possibilities of advancing the Protestant cause through plays with patriotic and
historical themes, created a company of actors, the Queen’s Men, under the
direct patronage, and control, of the Crown. When the prim London authorities
tried to limit the new troupe’s performances, Walsingham calmly remonstrated
with them, and got his way.
It’s a good thing that Queen Elizabeth was a fan of the theater, because if the Puritans had had their way, we would never have heard of Shakespeare, Marlowe or Jonson. This, much in the same way that the Greek Olympics were put on hold for a thousand years because Christians decided that they glorified paganism.
More from the Walsingham book:
The Puritans’ direct-pipeline-to-God self-righteousness was an affront in
itself. One especially earnest, or foolhardy, Puritan dared deliver to the Queen a
book reproving her Majesty for her frequent habit, in her not infrequent
moments of anger, of blasphemously swearing: swearing “by that abominable
idol the Mass, and often and grievously by God, and by Christ, and by many
parts of his glorified body, and by saints, troth, and other forbidden things.” An
impressive repertoire of oaths, popish and profane: it scandalized the Puritans
and perfectly summed up what the Queen felt about the place of religion, which
was once a week, orderly, decorous, every Sunday, a piece of smoothly working
social machinery ordained by God through the sovereign to an obedient people
and that was the end of it. The Queen disliked and distrusted evangelical fervor,
was constantly vexed by the endless theological disputes over “trifles,” was
simply bored by the tedious issues of church administration, so keen a contrast
with her quick interest in affairs of state.
Pardon me for saying so but stuff like this, plus accounts of the St. Bartholomew Day massacre – the one showing the murderous antics of the Catholics and the other the stuffy, starchy and insufferable aridity of the more zealous Protestants (Puritans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, etc) and what you end up with is a religious freak show put on by the most scurrilous pack of murderous morons you could possibly imagine. And don’t get me started talking about Islam, another great blast of flatulence.
I remember sitting at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous (the judge sent me there after my third DUI ( ‘Driving Under the Influence’) arrest and hearing a guy say: ‘Religion is for people who are afraid of going to Hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.” Now at age 75 (76 in May) I still allow myself two ‘beer nights’, and I have stayed out of trouble for years. But I remember a lot of that stuff from AA. (“My mind is a bad neighborhood. I should never go there alone.” And – “EGO = Easing God Out.” And ‘Alcoholism is the only disease that keeps telling you that you haven’t got it.”
Those guys kept me laughing, and I learned a lot from them. They didn’t call God ‘God’ – they called him ‘HP’ (Higher Power).
When I was a kid, my folks always admonished me about what would happen on Judgment Day if I wasn’t good. I tried to imagine everybody who ever lived standing in line waiting for their moment with God, that critical long-feared, long-awaited confrontation when a mighty countenance (looking a lot like a portrait of Sir Francis Walsingham) looked down at me, His peerless and all-knowing eyes affixing me with a Prosecuting Attorney’s frosty gaze, stern, impassive, endlessly decisive.
Then, after a suspended moment in God-time, maybe a million years in human time, He would speak:
You thought you had me fooled, didn’t you, you little cunt? GUARDS!!! Take this bum straight to Hell!
And I would probably reply, in my impish, snotty, but strangely brave way: Sir, I do not recognize the authority of this court!!
And like the decadent, but weirdly optimistic cavalier that I am, I would put up a small struggle as they dragged me away – just for show – while wondering what kind of whores they had in Hell.
As always, chock full of lusty illusions and looking for love in all the wrong places.
Judy Collins. “Both Sides Now”
