the inmate's journal : spring fragrance vi

i feel as if the lord is calling us to pray.

 

no one chose to disagree.

 

i know we’ve been focusing on the challenges god has given us this past week and perhaps the lord is leading us to pray for a particular challenge, maybe even one that hasn’t been expressed, but i feel as if we should first ask for his help before we just jump right in and decide on our own what to do … that we should be open to his leading.

 

there were vague nods and vaguer murmurs of assent.  the people, in the spiritual realms at least, were compliant.  friday nights were their opportunity to get spiritually naked and let ferrelyn wash them with linen words, before they returned to the world and again dressed in their hard identities.

 

judas, perhaps you can lead us.

 

me?

 

but i was new.  i was young.  i was still recovering from the assembly.  i preferred a vicarious spirituality.  god had given me the role of observer.  what if i confessed my love for ferrelyn?  i had absolutely nothing to say.  sure, i said.  sure, i had to say.

 

dear jesus.  {long pause}  dear jesus.  jesus.  {long pause}  you know it’s been one of those weeks.  one of those weeks that just feels like … like … like, one of those weeks.  ferrelyn has told us that these weeks aren’t just those weeks but all the weeks and we can’t really expect anything else and that life’s kind of, well, futile.  but as she also told us, you’re there to sit beside us on the bench of futility and be the kind of jesus you were born to be and i guess by being that helping us to be the kind of people we were born to be.  which maybe we can’t help being otherwise, but that’s all whatever, because, who knows?  maybe you do, which is nice.  i guess.  so, anyway, we really don’t know what to pray about and i certainly don’t have a clue, which is sort of obvious, so if you could tell us or at least tell ferrelyn, since she seems to have more dual citizenship than the rest of us, that would be good.  we’ll wait.  thanks.  {long pause}  amen.

 

that was beautiful judas, ferrelyn whispered to me, smiling through a drizzle of tears.

 and so the people prayed and their words entered the rusty airwaves leading upwards to heaven’s mailroom, where savage editors born on day two translated the commoditized pleas for god’s primitive mind.

as friday became threaded to friday and a quilt of unheard prayers was sewn, i realized ferrelyn wasn’t so much someone who prayed as a bubble who carried the prayers of others.  she was a liquid bridge from the solid worlds of wall, madison, and sunset to the gaseous world of god.  if she burst as she rose higher, clawed by the lower angels, always hungry for human prayers and hardly pure, she never let on - for any pains she suffered were hid below her gentleness.  she was a compost, transforming the cruelties of daily life into tranquil meaninglessness.  she was a beeswax candle, scrubbing the air.  she was my pretty bubble, a spheric airy standard i longed for, but could never attain.

 

i know the virtual world - that impossible conglomerate of tv, web, mags, and movies, porn and pics and pucks - teaches us that there are certain standards of beauty we should desire.  some conglomerate of breasts and eyes.  ferrelyn conformed to none of these, being squat and lumpish, motley with strawy hair, with indeterminate breasts and maudlin eyes … but i desired her more than a ménage à trois with my ex-organist and sister gooch.

 

i tried to venture into the erotic domain with her after a particularly emotional friday evening when all of us, even the lawyer, genuinely believed we were living selfishly and were going to reduce our greed and gluttony to levels the third world might respect.  ferrelyn drove me home, weeping gently as she confessed her week’s avarice at the corner store; we sat outside my apartment complex and talked about jesus’ love and forgiveness and i knew that if there were a moment in the history of lust that spirit and flesh were one, this was it.

 

i ran my hand from her shoulder to her knee, then underneath her skirt up to the counsel of her panties.  after a few moments of silence and unrequited groping, i glanced up; her eyes were closed, hands clasped between her breasts. 

 

what are you doing?

 

praying for you.

 

praying for me for what?

 

that you will love the lord as you promised tonight.

 

can’t i love the lord and love you?

 

you must love the lord more than me.

 

can’t i love the lord more than you by touching him through you?

 

judas.  are you truly feeling the lord now?

 

yes.

 

the lord is not where your hand is.

 

but hasn’t it been said that the lord is in the burning bush?

 

the lord may be, but your hand doesn’t belong there.

 

how do you know my hand doesn’t belong?

 

the lord will take your hand away.

the inmate's journal : spring fragrance v

the similarities between the father of christianity and the mother of my heart were striking.  neither worried.  both were plain and had disciples.  jesus wept, so did ferrelyn.  like jesus, ferrelyn tactfully sidestepped the question of materialism:  there were two realms—that of the markets, that of christ—if the two met at all, it was only in the kingdom of words, where all things meet, where enmity caresses love, and friendship and death cuddle.  but as i looked around the assorted crew of ferrelyn’s cell group, these struggling aspirants who managed the bankruptcies and babies of our world, i asked - what has happened to jesus’ exhortation to leave the worrying to god?  these people, who had no visible reason to worry, whose anxieties were frequently as severe as misplaced shampoo bottles, worried as if worry were pleasure’s strange liturgy.

 

copulating comrades.  hear my theory of the worrying secure, who worry about their investments and cats and lattes, about their armpit products and livers, about minty floss and the choreography of every sexual position.  hear it, and tell it to the scholars in the arcane halls, text it to your friends.

 

jesus - and ferrelyn, by extension - lived close to death, so close to death that for them life and death were indistinguishable:  the line separating them not a fact but a word, not a wall but a view.  this christ, this quest, lived in death, as death was not for them the death of life but a prerequisite for living.  death sat on the throne of each second of their lives, it was the heart of their movement, their voice of love.  but these little christs and quests surrounding them, these christians and questions, these safety specialists, these professionals dedicated to prolonging life at whatever cost, filled death’s hole with fear-denying gadgets, risk-loathing merchandise, stood wobbling on the junkheap of their fear and called their wobbling life.  they substituted false fears for the true fear and in so doing could never confront fear or death or themselves or life or anything.

another formula for the mathematically inclined—

it’s true, righteous accusers—i was not like christ or quest, but one of their pathetic followers.  not only this, i was worse—because on top of their routine anxieties, i was also anxious about my anxiety and anxious that i should be more like ms quest but knew i couldn’t but thought i needed to be if i ever were to reduce my stress and be worthy of my lord and savior and the anxiety about the distance between how things were and how things ought to be was so immeasurable that i frequently fell into negative mathematical reveries so severe i got bronchitis.

 

regardless, jesus could help.  ferrelyn said it was so, so it must be so.  someone like that couldn’t lie.  someone like that rose above the rest of us like a balloon above a flock of screaming children.  she stood outside the caged crowd, but didn’t scorn them like some old testament prophet; instead, she was like some eternally patient hr consultant who chastised but never fired you.  how tender the rebuke of the modern messiah.  how sweet her thorns and crown.

 

she began talking.  a purr at first, a divine striptease.  a voice that intimated being tucked under a duvet by mary after a weekend in hell.  come, sweet virgin, tuck me in and calm me down.  take away these visions of the night.

 

life is difficult.  you’ve all had difficult weeks.  jesus tells us that our father didn’t place us on this earth for comfort but to carry whatever burden he has chosen to give us.  some of us are asked to carry the burden of justice or leadership, others of television, still others of children or dishtowels.  paul tells us that the body requires each part to function, that the eye is not more important than the hand, the foot than the tongue, but that we require all parts working in concert for god to be praised.  sometimes i know i’m tempted to think juan’s role is more important than mine, or mine than emily’s.  and sometimes i fail.  but we all know in our hearts that whatever role has been given to us, whether we are regarded highly in the world’s eyes or ignored, whatever our wealth, whatever our lot, our lives are difficult.

 

ferrelyn paused for the significance of our collective irrelevance and inescapable hardship to drip onto the limestone of our minds, forming potholes, caves, and gorges each of us intuitively and quickly decided it would be best to leave unexplored.

^[1] Whereby A=anxiety, F=fear of death, pd=products in deathhole, HI=household income, de=daily envies.  Those who wish a detailed explanation may refer to my article, “Cosine and Anxiety” in Spiritual Mathematics (CVXI:11 2007), frequently available at www.spiritusmathematicus.org for a fee wholly proportional to your net worth. 

the inmate's journal : spring fragrance iv

as foreplay, the people talked about their problems.  problems so distinct in the history of human civilization vast industries are devoted to recording and complicating them.  problems whereby children and parents are collegial negotiators on power’s platforms, both equally inept.  problems of suv intelligence.  problems slightly higher than the angels.  problems not unrelated to the disputes in quantum mechanics.  problems once the prerogative of dictators and titans.  problems requiring collaborative and transglobal infrastructures of post-strategic operations.  problems, ah, dear clouds and roses, tender problems of the middle classes, the middling aspiration of the world.

 

and the tv producer says	there is no greater god than tv.  in the beginning was tv and in the end there will be tv and we producers are squashed in the middle like the holes in donuts, producing so you can consume.  i am become speed, the accelerator of worlds, so you, my suns and fruit-jellies, can burst forth in dreams.
and the politician says	i got an a+ and first class honors in eructation from the university of oxensword.  without my veiled brutishness you’d all be killing each other.  god is behind it all.  the burden of uniting nature and divinity, coupled with the lack of job security, makes me adulterous and manipulative.  that’s the way it is, let us pray.
and the lawyer says	the law is the law.  i am praised less than i should be.  i sprinkle the law with sugar and all i ask for in exchange is money.  money is the law and i am the sugar but the people think i am the money.  all is mixed up and the people think i am responsible.  for this, i overcharge them.
and the entrepreneurs say	we are bespooked on all sides by scorpions.  tomorrow is our today and the praise of hope is on our backs.  the banks don’t like us.
and the middle managers say	we are the banks who don’t like you but it’s not our fault we don’t like you because if we stop not liking you we’ll get fired or, worse, demoted, and we’ll have to use some of our savings and, worse, our reputations will suffer and, anyway, risk has to be managed or the world will collapse and we’re the managers of risk and you’re the risk.
and the housewives say	you’re all aimless meteors around the star of our mocked vocations.  we suckle the past and are acquainted with dish towels.  our towels are mismatched with our men.  we have never been to spain.  we aren’t sodomized readily.  we sob into our pillows and don’t know why.

 

and what did my soft gingham shaman say?  did she have worries?  was anxiety her middle name?  had the tentacles of technology crushed and slimed her?  which thoughts dripped from the stalactites of her mind and could they drip in mine?  what brought her to this troupe of mortgagees to listen to their privileged complaints in silence?  why was my pew companion mute in the midst of such moaning?  did a vocation remain in this post-hamlet world that justified her hideous detachment and could i be her sensitive apprentice?  what crack in suburban mediocrity had she crawled through?  as i sat across from her i didn’t know.  all i knew was that her name was ferrelyn quest and she was pious.

 

the pious don’t think the way the rest of us do.  they have different dreams.  love treads on the pathways of their souls, but leaves neither imprint nor refuse.  with the rest of us, when love’s through with us, our paths are mangled as a subway suicide, littered as los angeles, and soiled as a hostel toilet.  the pious are born in smoke and shadows at the world’s unvisited edge.  the rest of us are born in general hospitals to the tune of laughtracks.

 

ms quest, long before she was ms quest, was a babe in piety’s nurseries, wet with nothing but the bog of holiness.  there she woke each morning, staring at the bars of flesh, knowing god was as far away as truth.  she was a person to chain yourself to and die, as she dragged you mercilessly to heaven’s eternal stairs.

 

i imagined working with andrew lloyd webber on his last jesus musical—

 

ms quest,

you are my quest.

to be like you, to see like you,

to become my very best—

this is what i want to do;

but since my parents and me and their parents and their cousins and my aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers and friends and dogs and cats and goldfish are all such a mess,

how i’m going to be like you …

i don’t have a clue,

ms quest.

 

you are a kind of song who doesn’t need to sing as you yourself are sung.

you are the kind of car that doesn’t need a garage, you are your garage.

you are the type of soil that retains its worms.

you aren’t unlike those billboards on the highway to alaska.

i imagine when you’re in the bathtub

you don’t think the kinds of thoughts other people do.

            i imagine that your sweat and other outputs

are sweeter than free tickets to the playoffs.

you are my couscous, my radish, my non-gmo tomato.

you are the bedrock of the country of my sighs.

ms ms ms ms … be my mrs. quest.

 

how else could i respond to someone so unaffected by the world’s priorities?  the only two legitimate responses were murder and love, but we murdered jesus and have been paying for it ever since - so, i reasoned, ferrelyn, his clear successor, must be loved. 

the inmate's journal : spring fragrance iii

on my first sunday back at spring fragrance, i sat soaking up the sanity.  everyone was dressed minimally in undergraduate degrees and didn’t show their breasts.  the people knew more than seventeen words, some of which had three or more syllables.  objective, strategy, india, segmentation, takeover.  the organist looked vaguely like my mother and didn’t consciously provoke my lust.  no one groped me.  no one cared about my soul.  doves twitted fashionably at appropriate distances, affirming lifestyles and conjugal procreation and mr. clean and organic instant porridge.  this was religion at its innocuous adaptable best.  it’s what’s kept the church in business all these godforsaken millennia.

 

but even mediocrity has its aberrations and as my baptist buttocks warmed the baptist bench, i noticed something strange about the woman beside me.  she didn’t smell like management and tax returns.  dressed in heaven and nineteenth century gingham, she seemed to exist outside spring’s bulk fragrance like a lilac bush at the edge of a mall parking lot.  she exuded the disturbing and distinctive energy of a true believer, rare among mortals, rare even among gods.  she sat while the host of homeowners and homeowners-in-training stood around her singing onward christian babies … she sat and did not sing.  she closed her eyes, wrapped in the god in herself - sweet well and mirror - who never lets us down.

 

as i listened distractedly to the forgettable 13-minute sermon, she nodded and intermittently whispered yes yes, as if macloo’s words had meaning for anyone but addictive consumers visiting god’s temple for their weekly injection of easy atonement.  and as the service drew to its tidy close and like mingled with like and affirmation stung the air, as the pews emptied and thoughts of lunch turned to lunch and the excitement waiting in monday’s office, i surreptitiously studied the woman next to me, deep in prayer, sucking on another world.  she was lumpy, but in a squeezable sort of way.  small, with a face that might have been pretty if she chose to spend time on it.  strawberry-blonde hair, hands folded on themselves in a gentle intimacy.  fashion, makeup, product, convention seemed absent.

 

the pew, designed for 12 fit citizens, had held 13.  as she and i were the only ones left and neither of us had moved, we sat, hips nestled into each other’s on this long log of god.  she presumably hadn’t moved because she was oblivious to my presence; i hadn’t moved, neither from oblivion nor any bold and lecherous intent, but from fear.  i was afraid that moving might shatter her containment, a focused inwardness so taut and tranquil it required preservation.  to be displayed prominently in some museum of mystic art - millions of guests, addicted to externality and speed, could come and view the weird creatures from spirit’s retired kingdom.  but i also didn’t move because i was paralyzed by the presence of the divine.

 

a few kalpas passed.  presidents and continents rose and fell.  languages became headlines and were forgotten.  love wore its thousand masks a billion times a billion times and every time it hurt.  at the end of it all, she opened her eyes, turned to me as if nothing had happened and said,

 

welcome to spring fragrance.

 

i blushed.

 

i don’t remember seeing you here before.

 

she spoke so normally, about normal things, as if she were human.  i stammered something barely intelligible about diapers and god and macroeconomics.  she put her hand lightly on my arm.  would you like to belong to our cell group?

 

i didn’t know what a cell group was, but i knew i wanted to belong.

 

it met on friday nights and the 10 adults with their 21 children left their magazine homes and crawled across weary expressways in convoys of privilege to arrive for fellowship, to justify their lives.  there was the luncheon meat of middle management, a mighty politician bound by beef and certitude, anachronistic housewives wrapped in spinach, visionary and carnivorous entrepreneurs, all pedigreed by homes and gardens and the denial of flies; and babies, always babies, coddled clones.

 

we met in one of their plastic homes and warmed our souls with chitchat about the challenging weeks we had all survived - weeks crammed with the demands of those called to consume.  lights lay around the room, exuding lack of character.  thick carpets spoke of peace and art of emptiness.  a producer to the left of me, a developer to the right, there i was, stuck in the middle of a designer couch, thinking vaguely of sister gooch and her broken springs, wondering how it was possible to think of sister gooch vaguely.  but the beauty of spring fragrance’s culture, its glory and hell, was its ability to diffuse the world’s intensities into an acceptable risotto, bounded by recently laundered napkins, an expense account, sprigs of parsley, and an ikea catalogue.

the inmate's journal : spring fragrance ii

spring fragrance was run by a little battalion of very ordained or ordained or nearly ordained or i’m-not-very-special-because-i’m-not-nearly-ordained ministers.  since baptists don’t have cardinals and archbishops and bishops and priests and scum and popes, they have to invent informal hierarchies.  which raises the question every one of us must consider in the deepest composts of our hearts - is it better to go the catholic way, with its nail-and-hammer hierarchies, or the baptist way, with its we-don’t-have-a-hierarchy-but-there’s-one-hiding-in-the-baptismal-tank sort of approach.

 

this isn’t just a question of religion, it’s a question of life.  is it better to get married or work out your venom without legal sanction?  better to have clear reporting structures or some kind of free-for-all network management?  everywhere, everywhere, we have these questions … and the church, mired in the constipation of history, has struggled long and hard on the toilet of time to relieve itself of an answer.  we would do well to learn from our ancestor in the art of pushing and groaning and peer into the ceramic bowl of …

 

perhaps it’s time to return to our story.

 

rev. dr. juan d. macloo was senior pastor and team leader and lead democrat and chief nice guy and executive bouncer of spring.  he wore his titles loose.  none of this rev. weal stuff, stuck in the hole of the holy of holies, living metaphor for god’s distance.  macloo was a living metaphor for friendly jesus, an up-close and just-like-you jesus:  you can call me juan … just call me juan.  he mingled with the people and talked about their dinner plans as if they were the marrow of spirituality.  and indeed, for these people, they were.

 

as the adults religiously maintained 1.7 children/household, 2.2 strollers/child, and 943.87 toys/stroller, you might think children were scarce.  but no, inquisitive friends, they weren’t!  with 1000 adults and none of them claiming to enjoy double dildos or fisting and all of them married or dreaming of marriage or telling themselves they were dreaming of marriage, that makes … let’s see—i told you i wasn’t a mathematician— … uh … 500 couples minus 100 who aren’t yet couples minus 20 who are doing in vitro minus 20 who are freaks and don’t want kids times 1.7 … and that’s … wait, open excel … go to cell xfd1048576 just because it’s there … enter in =500-100-20-20*1.7 … 346 … wait … i need brackets … where? … how do i put them in?  … f2 … fuckmicrosoft … oh … there it is … type type enter … 612.  612 bloody crapping fucking children in spring fragrance’s nurseries!  enough diapers to build a skyscraper in detroit.  enough shit to build a stairway to heaven.

 

in fact, in the senior nursery for 13-month-olds with particular aptitude (there were whole basements of specially attributed nurseries) was a large sign which the parents found humorous.  it was a quote from 1 corinthians—

 

i show you a mystery;

we shall not all sleep,

but we shall all be changed.

 

baptist wit.

 

oh babies!  vats and vats of them.  here was hope.  forget the promise of another world.  forget the cross and nothing.  babies come from the cross of sex and the nothing of the womb and babies are this world:  the mirror of our happy virtue, the promise that the future might not be like us.  jesus, let me tell you brothers and sisters, wears a diaper; if he doesn’t, there's no faith or hope.

 

all those pictures on the cross … the lord and savior of mankind is wearing a diaper!  a sign!  didn’t jesus himself say that unless you become like a little child, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven?  and wasn’t jesus jesus because he perfectly modeled everything he said, not like the rest of us for whom words and actions are compartments separated by our survival instinct and false sense of superiority?  and isn’t this why he was murdered by society before he was yanked into the sophistication and pomposity of adulthood … for continuing to believe in the innocence most of us crucify in ourselves as soon as we intuit its maintenance costs?  as dostoevsky taught us, the messiah has always been an idiot, the messiah will always get killed.

 

yet, then, when i was young and easy under the babel boughs, lost in the garden, innocence was still the symbol of the world order i lived in and the order of dreams.  the horizontal bar of pragmatism and nails, the vertical bar stretching to the ideals that surge like mites in our minds.

 

except for its basements, spring fragrance wasn’t a big church physically, so the 1000 had to be streamed into two services:  one at 9:30 for the vibrant and self-proclaimed cool, and one at 11:00 for the staid and self-proclaimed orthodox.  nevertheless, that’s still 306 babies per service, so you did tend to trip over them going to the washroom, find them playing in urinals, open a bible to the apocalypse—three babies fighting; they’d drop on you from ceilings like malevolent spiders; you’d sit down on what was a surprisingly comfortable pew and realize it was a kid.  nevertheless, they were frilled and suited and sentimentalized and neutered and murdered according to the programmatic dictates of rev. spock.  thank the manuals.

 

onward christian babies, marching as to cash,

with the smile of jesus on the middle class.

christ, the loyal bastard, leads the bourgeois way;

where our greedy actions contradict everything we say.

 

refrain:

onward christian babies, marching as to cash,

with the smile of jesus on the middle class.

 

at the sign of reality our entitled parents protest;

on then, christian babies, to kill that thief and pest!

our foundations quiver at the thought of truth;

we’ll kill it with our suburbs, jesus, and vermouth.

            (refrain) 

 

like a mighty virus moves through the internet;

babies, we’re destroying from our basinets.

we are so divided, spiteful, mad, afraid,

that we need religion as a friendly masquerade.

(refrain) 

 

bums and blacks may perish, islam and china cease,

but our rsps constantly will increase.

the evil east cannot against our security prevail;

we’ve got bombs and reputations—these things never fail.

(refrain) 

 

onward, then, ye babies, join our happy rap,

blend with ours your diapers in our middling crap.

we’ll grow up—sort of—accumulating things

and, like our parents, never understand a thing.

(refrain)