The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

Milton Rokeach's 1964 classic, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, has been reprinted by New York Revew of Books Classics. It comes with a pedestrian foreward by Rick Moody, and a mea culpa afterword of sorts that Rokeach wrote a couple of years before he died. The premise of Rokeach's two year experiment is to the challenge the primitive (foundational from the perspective of the Self) belief of three men who all think they are the Christ/God. Rokeach believed that the cognitive dissonance created by confronting this primitive belief might point a pathway towards altering the delusions of the psychotic.

There are great laughs a-plenty, and hilarity reminiscent of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In fact, it would be difficult to dismiss intertextuality if Kesey hadn't been composing his novel at the same time Rokeach was still running his experiment. But the laughs prove a guilty pleasure, and the pathos that is mostly borne out of the experimenters interference in the lives of the three Christs offers no catharsis. Rokeach understood this twenty-two years after the fact in his Afterword. The experiment was a failure. Primitive delusions were merely exchanged for other primitive delusions. The Virgin Mary was deposed by a Yeti Woman. The ethical lapses that are glaring to the sensitive reader, but not, apparently, to Rokeach at the time, pile up one on the other until you wonder who is the real Dr. Dung (the youngest Christ, Leon Gabor, after altering his Christ delusion, however impermanently, starts referring himself as Dr. Dung).

But it is Leon Gabor who propels the narrative forward to the bitter end. Despite his delusion, there is still a moral center buried under all those psychotic defenses. He alone of the Christs knows what Rokeach is doing is wrong. He alone speaks far truer than he knows when he calls Rokeach the High Priest Caiaphas. Rokeach glosses it, hearing everything with his tape recorder, but never understanding. To those outside Christ was fond of speaking in parables.

Idle Thoughts

• Helen knew herself to be a whore, but neither the Argives nor the Trojans believed her.

• Moses Maimonides wouldn't accept money for being a Torah sage, saying the prophets and sages were hewers of wood and drawers of water and that was how they got their living. Maimonides himself was in pharmaceuticals.

• Lady Liberty's Las Vegas doppleganger has a postage stamp. Botox was used to eliminate the old whore's verdigris. Another argument for iconism in meaningless abstractions.

• Gas at four bucks a gallon. An apocalypse for the consumer! Today I laughed at a woman driving a Hummer. I made sure she saw me.

• Walt Disney has eight times as many Facebook friends as Jesus.

• There are hardly any people in the Georgics. They all went to hell with Virgil.






• Listened to a couple of hayseeds who will be suckled cradle to grave on the government teat prattle on about fiscal responsibility. A couple of parricides.

• Led Zeppelin IV is still one of my favorite album covers. It has Cain with his bundle of thorns and The Hermit (would that it were from the Marseille Tarot!). The world and the proper response to it.

The Pause that Refreshes

"On the outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket. A few old cars in the trashstrewn parking lot. They left the cart in the lot and walked the littered aisles. In the produce section in the bottom of the bins they found a few ancient runner beans and what looked to have once been apricots, long dried to wrinkled effigies of themselves. The boy followed behind. They pushed out throught the rear door. In the alleyway behind the store a few shopping carts, all badly rusted. They went back through the store again looking for another cart but there were none. By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.

What is it, Papa?

It's a treat. For You.

What is it.

Here. Sit down.

He slipped the boy's knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said.

The boy took the can. It's bubbly he said.

Go ahead.

He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking about it. It's really good, he said.

Yes, it is.

You have some, Papa.

I want you to drink it.

You have some.

He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let's just sit here.

It's because I wont ever get to drink another one, isn't it?

Ever's a long time."

Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

A Wilderness of Mirrors

What you are most afraid of is losing your-self in such a place. The neuroscientists say there is no self. They say the self is a figment of synapses and neurons, environment and genetics. Smart fellows to say there is no self, yet still silly to puff themselves up with the conceit that they are actually saying anything. The self that is born of human generation is useless - little more than the personality we attribute to a dog. This is how Celine can say Love is the infinite placed within the grasp of poodles. This self that attaches to a person through his consumer activities, the 'work' he does, the education he has acquired (for most, this is essentially a trade school education - designed to get them out in the world and making money, hence we differentiate little between the Phd-ed Bio-engineer and the little tart who went College to be a Beauty Consultant) is the life of the self that Christ asked us to leave behind and follow him. Almost all of us are whores though. We wait for advent of a propitious time of year for the throwing over of things that we ought not do or desire in the first place. We delude ourselves. We are little puppies who pretend to forget their bones until they want to chew on them again. This is the self the neuroscientists mean.

But the true self that is born not of human generation is incapable of such self delusion. It sees its fellows preening in the wilderness of mirrors. lording it over others with the impestuousity of a child, preening like a little organ-grinder monkey. This self cannot envy these hominids, debased as the day they wandered out of Africa, or Cain slunk off after murdering his brother. The self of the neuroscientists is the one that plays to the crowd in the funhouse mirror. The mimicking and aping of TV shows and insipid self-actualization books, 'management' techniques, NETWORKING. Those who put their faith in the immortality project of homo economicus must necessarily perish without any reference to a self that is before God. Like those in the deepest pits of Dante's hell their names will not pass on in the upper worlds. Unlike those in Inferno, they'll die incapable of any shame that their self can't rationalize away.

Jumper

They'll spend most of their time in the weathering yard on a bow perch. You give them four to six feet of leash (you learn to tie the falconer's knot real quick - controlling the bird with gloved hand and tying the leash to the bow perch with the other). This is their world for a week or two: They've fed on your gauntlet; now they must jump to it for the priviledge. The first jumps are little more than a foot or two - a nightmarish void for a hawk that not a few days ago was soaring hundreds of feet above field and wood. This is where you laugh at them. They'll bob and weave and crane out to try the snatch the tidbit so as you'd think they couldn't fly at all. Sometimes they do the splits. But once that first jump is done you can move out relatively quickly until you get to the end of the leash. Then jumping will no longer suffice.

The Sellout

The first time they eat in your possession is on your gloved hand. A day or two is normal, but five or six gets to be nervewracking. They stand there on your glove and you work a piece of beef or chicken up through fingers and thumb with your ungloved hand. You wiggle the meat around, brush it up against their talons. Eyes drift down, but the head is still looking at you. This can go on for a long time. It's boring at first, then you think you're starving the hawk. You get a little panicky. Maybe you cheat- pick off a little piece of chicken and rub it along their beak to give them just a taste. You never look them in the eye. It is a sign of moral superiority and they know it. But your goal is always to get them to sell out. You'll proceed no further if you don't get them to bend over, expose the back of their neck to you, and eat off your gloved hand. A hawk is down with a field mouse in a dusky field at the edge of a wood in late summer. A Great Horned Owl comes swooping out of the trees...puff of feathers, it is over quick. This is what the blood remembers when the hawk bends over and exposes the back of his neck. They have nightmares about it.

Manning the Hawk

They come off the trap with the posture of a miniature dragon. God do they hate you. You get them home, put jesses and anklets on them, attach to these with a swivelled leash, and make them stand on your gauntleted fist. Their greatest virtue is that they detest homo sapiens, not to mention the few remnant humans. They will drop and hang upside down like a bat, or bate - try to fly away with four feet of leash before they drop and hang again. You disgust them, and you can't blame them. They'll do anything to get away from you. This goes on for however long it takes for them to stand there without bating...usually a day or two. In Medieval times and somewhat beyond they used to have waking parties for hawks. Falconers believed that you could not let the hawk sleep until it was manned, or inured, to your presence. We are much more enlightened these days, and have no illusion of inducing Stockholm Syndrome in our subjects. In the evening they go into the dark mews, and they have nightmares about you.

Red-Tail Hawks

They get bored, moody, resentful. The negative anthropomorphisms apply, the positive ones don't. They never liked you. They never liked anyone except their mate, and when you trap them by definition they haven't had one yet. They run off their young months before Arcturus sinks on their first summer. They get electrocuted, shocked, hit by cars, and shot by dumbasses. If you free loft them in their mews they bounce off the wall when they hear you coming - sometimes damaging tail feathers. They projectile shit, mutes it is called, and you get sick of warning people not to stand behind them. Throw them in the direction of the tallest tree and they'll land on a fencepost. They'll make a fool of you in front of your friends, land on your head, try to kill your dog. It's sublime watching them soar, but there are the times they run along the ground with all the ignominy of a dirt farm chicken. They sleep with their heads craned back into their wings, looking almost headless. They can't see any better than us in the dark, but watching them like that you know they don't dream. They have nightmares.

Eight Dead in Mazar-i-Sharif

The fifth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell was generally reserved by the great Dante Alighieri for politicians. So it is not apparently aesthetically consistent that I consign the Reverend Terry Jones of the Christian Dove World Outreach Center in Jacksonville, Florida to that blasted place. I admit that it is purely an emotional response. The image of the Malebranche using their tines to keep the Reverend submerged in boiling black pitch has me positively awash in seratonin - I blush lest this betrays me on the threshold of psychopathology - and I even imagine that in heaven I will commission Gustave Dore to make an engraving of the scene.

The cause of the grief in Mazir-i-Sharif was the belated news (Good Morning Afghanistan is not on the twenty-four hour news cycle) that Reverend Jones, after much dallying, publicity mongering, faux handwringing - and probably a concluding circle jerk with his congregation - did, finally, burn a Koran. Yes, it is America, and he does have the right to burn all the Korans he wants to. But in doing so Jones betrayed two words in the name of his church - Christian and Outreach - and revealed himself to be another Prince of the Air - no less so than the Afghan 'insurgent' who masterminded the Mazar-i-Sharif riotous attack. Just another asshole hijacking religion for quasi-political purposes.

Kierkegard's essay The Crowd is Untruth presents an apparent paradox when considered alongside Christ's injunction that where two or three are gathered in his name, "There I am." But it is only apparent. Terry Jones did not gather his flock in Christ's name. The megalomaniac can never be alone before Christ, which one must be, even in a crowd. Jones first allegiance is the crowd. It is the same crowd that Apollonius of Tyana riled up. It is the crowd that shouted 'Crucify him!" It is the crowd that seeks out a mirror of its own violent heart and finds it on talk radio, Fox News, apostate Presbyters and Priests, Reverends, Imams, terrorists - Princes of the Air one and all. Hot air with the stink of death on it.

But here we are only concerned with the crowd that Reverend Jones plays before and not that of the Afghan insurgent. For how is it possible to remove the speck from your brother's eye when you have a knot of wood shaped like a monocle in your own? To listen to an Islamophobe with their rantings about Wars of Civilisation and Sharia Law coming to America and 9/11 Mosques you'd think that Mohammed had just left Mecca for Medina sometime during the Carter Administration. A hysterical lot, the lot of them, and hence a dangerous crowd. But as I sit dreaming of Reverend Jones boiling in black pitch in the fifth bolgia of the eighth circle of hell, I recall that back in Canto Four or Five(?) in the first circle of hell, Dante seeing the shade of Saladin. That the great Muslim Caliph should share limbo with other 'righteous pagans' foundational to Western Civilisation like Socrates and Aristotle is testimony to how degraded Christian generousity of Spirit has become. Dante lived in far greater temporal and spatial proximity to the great expansionary era of Islam and he marched in the Third Crusade, yet he could place Saladin on the rim of Hell while consigning several Popes and many of his fellow Florentines and their descendants farther into the abyss. The view he took was sub specie aeternitatis, which, pretty much by definition, is untenable when two or three gather to ape the discourse of the twenty-four news cycle. For the immediate man, the world will always be a scary place.