the inmate's journal : spring fragrance xii

two months and three men’s books and no evolution later, juan asked me to preach on the topic of suffering.  because spring had two services, you had to stand up and say the same thing twice, which i thought qualified me to speak about pain.  because spring was hip, it had free coffee and laptop hookups, so as i approached the pulpit, the people were contentedly sipping and doing net worth projections.  it felt like an office with pews.

 

i stood behind the democratic pulpit in my non-threatening clothes, looking at the 500 faces looking at their screens.  i thought of being honest —

 

um.  i don’t really know much about suffering because i was born into the middle classes and think i’m hungry when i haven’t had a tub of häagen-dazs for four hours.  so i’m not really sure why i was asked to talk to you about suffering today, other than because juan preaches all the time and obviously doesn’t have anything to say, and anybody else who’s let behind the pulpit is smart enough to not pretend they know anything about it.

 

but i have to fill 13 minutes, so here goes.

 

suffering is the new death.  nobody dies anymore, they just suffer and then they get put into family albums.  death died at the same time as patriarchy and reason and europe and nature and reality.  it was kind of a mass cult suicide—like jim jones, but it was all metaphysical.  so since nobody believes in death because it doesn’t happen except on tv and the internet, we’ve got to believe in something and all that’s left is suffering.  but whereas death was worth believing in because it ended life and life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, suffering isn’t really worth believing in because it doesn’t end life but it just is life.  so with just life left to believe in … well, i think that’s suffering.  and the funny thing is everyone’s trying to increase the average lifespan so we have even longer to suffer and longer for everyone to complain about how much they’re suffering and longer to take pills to complicate the suffering and longer to watch other people suffer on tv.  it’s like we didn’t know what to make of death, so we just scanned it and made it a .jpg on our screensaver slideshow, but suffering … suffering we’re in love with.

 

i don’t want to sound too grand since sounding grand died along with death, but this shift from death to suffering must be a gender thing because these days everything’s a gender thing.  i mean, look:  men and death, men and death, men and death; women and suffering, women and suffering, women and suffering.  get it?  men were totally about killing bodies, but women are totally about accepting pain.  the nice thing about the male way is that when it’s over it's over but with the female way you’re still alive but in a lot of pain.  but i think i said something like that already … who cares—as they taught us in preaching class, it never hurts to repeat an important point twice.  although in this case maybe it does.

 

if i had lived when people believed in death, i would have dreamt of heaven and purity and sacrifice.  but since i’m alive at a time when people believe in suffering, i dream of thai massages and sheer blonde color-correcting mousse and breast implants.  i used to dream of sex, now i dream of love.  at least sex was possible.  but we all know that progress is a wonderful thing which is why we’re here and what christianity is all about and i think that’s why we can all sit on these wonderful pews organizing tomorrow’s schedule and fantasizing about net worth and talk about suffering and not have a clue what we’re talking about.

 

who’s to blame for all this?  technology, naturally.  but since we made technology and god made us, we can blame god.  it doesn’t matter that god’s dead—it helps actually, as someone once said that that’s what the dead are for … to blame.  anyway, if we can’t blame the dead, there’s only technology and that’s like blaming your cat—it’s only fun for a second.

 

so i’d like to end my little meditation with a prayer.

 

dear dead god—

 

thanks for making us so we could make technology so technology could kill death so we could simply suffer.

 

amen.

 

oh, and thanks for education so that i can make arguments like this.

 

amen again.

 

 

but i didn’t preach this.  instead i told stories about brutality and oppression that i had read about in harpers, stories that made the people feel something akin to pity and suppressed guilt; i quoted the learned who had produced handy aphorisms about the nature of affliction that made the people think briefly that reason could alleviate grief instead of packaged goods, and i brought jesus into it since he was into betrayal and nails so that his absent father in heaven could pretend to understand human misery.

 

and i suppose some of the people paid some attention some of the time.  but it felt like an infinite distance from the sermon on the mount and golgotha, so i refused a dinner invitation and walked the 30 kilometers downtown, through meadows of fastfood chicken and fields of speed; heavymetal cars sang to me as i carried the cross of myself on the empty sidewalks and i thanked them for sharing their passing happiness.   

 

in the back of a parked car juan and a board member were necking; spanish nothings seeped through the metal and animal moans painted hieroglyphics on the glass.  i thought of the gin man and jesus and faith at the bottom of life.  a streetcar waited for me and i hopped on and sat in the dirty sun.  at the back juan and sister gooch were naked and laughing; the father was on their lips, the son in their eyes, the spirit in their rumps.  the people around me began singing, maybe there’s a god above and all i really learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you … and i joined in, happy to be part of a community that sang.  i returned to my apartment building and on the foyer floor juan and ferrelyn were vigorously copulating—waves and whimpers, fleshy fugue.

 

religion had taken off its clothes and love was everywhere.