“Aww,” I said.
There was a silence. I was so happy and relieved to hear from him, I had to keep myself from talking. Then he said: “I missed you, Samantha.”
“I missed you, too, God.”
His voice brightened. “I got a job, though.”
“Did you? That’s wonderful! Doing what?”
“Hurling fireballs at the angels of Olagon.”
“Hey, there’s a growing field.”
I heard his breathing for a long moment. “They called me a pansy,” he said then.
“The punks who threw the rock.”
“Yeah. They were leaning against a car, and they started saying things. They called me a pussy. They said I walked funny.”
“I’m sorry that happened,” I said.
“So I shouted, ‘Rauss, Scheisskopf!’ And they threw the rock.”
I wanted to say something, though I had nothing to say. Sometimes, with God, I found myself falling in love with the tenderness and authority in my own voice, and hoping he would say something with which I could sympathize.
“That’s German,” he said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, then slapped myself on the forehead for an idiot.
“I knew a German lady once. She taught me.”
“Oh?” said I, casually gagging with excitement.
“She taught me songs, and how to do a somersault. I can do a somersault. She built blocks with me. I think—” He stopped. I held my breath. He held his breath. Then we held each other’s breath—the silence seemed to go on that long. “I think, maybe, she taught me how to use the potty, I’m not sure. I don’t remember. She went away when I was three or so. She married a guy.”
I thought of Bert then, as it happens. Little Bert smiling, crying, talking, laughing, loving with his whole body, investing his whole body in those portions of the world he loves. What, then, if that body were stripped away from him? I thought of Michael, wrestling his way into me, tearing aside my maidenhead like a curtain. What then if behind the curtain was just a darkness in the shape of a human, a holy emptiness into which life could be tossed like a coin into a wishing well, and yet find no flesh, no hand to hand you back the wish. And then again—then again, if we were to reach into that hole, that absence, if we were to grasp some old humanity by the lapels and haul it back into being, what cancers, also, what sufferings, shames and pains would we haul back with it. It is easier, I think, to sing the praises of the flesh into that eternal nothing, to sing and raise our virginity like a policeman’s hand. Oh, my cunt, my forgotten orchid, it is easier, far easier to mourn you, far easier, still, never to remember …
These thoughts were interrupted by a tiny voice over the phone, a little voice singing as if in the distance, hollow over the phone as if it were at the bottom of a well.
“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles. Uuuuber aaaalles …”
“Oh hon?”
I creep, I creep from the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. I see Arthur lying on the couch, his legs extending from under the raised tent of the newspaper.
“Oh hon? Oh hon?”
I creep, I creep, my hands trembling, remembering God as he was that day he did not kill Judy Honegger. I believe in nothing now, it occurs to me. It occurs to me—quite suddenly—that that is it: that is the light, the little candle burning at the bottom of the darkness of my bourgeois existence. That, finally, was the Poet’s gift in the Roman graveyard: Negative capability. “To follow the Tao is simple,” says Lao Tse. “You need only give up all your opinions.” Deep down, that candle of unbelief is burning, unnoticed, forcibly unnoticed even by me lest I extinguish it with a frightened hand. But I will not extinguish it; I will cup my hands around it; I will fan it when I can; I believe in nothing; I will believe in nothing; I will dump this cup of coffee on Arthur’s head.
But as I approach the couch, I have another flash of recognition. That is: I notice the newspaper that Arthur is holding is upside down, that the headline, which stretches in two lines full across the top of the page—odd for a Saturday—the headline reads: “.ecnaifeD swoV abuC .tsetorP steivoS .augaraciN fO ograbmE sredrO tnediserP”
“Oh hon?” says Arthur.
Holding the coffee mug in one hand, I reach out with the other and tear the paper away.
There is Arthur. He is wearing his sunglasses upside down. A pencil is sticking out of his ear.
“Or,” he says, “we can stay home and eat each other out until we croak.”
I lean back on my hip, and sip some coffee, considering.
Five
My Search For God. By Samantha Clementine.
After God did not kill Judy Honegger, I became angry and guilty at once. Angry because I had fallen on my knees in St. Thomas’ Cathedral, mewling and whining and pleading like the coward I am. And guilty because it had worked, and if I rebelled now, God might take it all back again.
I was caught in a bind, because the point was: If God had not killed Judy, then God had. If God was innocent, God was guilty, if you get my drift. If I was indebted to God for saving me from God, then the God to whom I was indebted was not the sort of God to whom I wished to be. And it’s no good talking about free will either. Whatever free will Judy Honegger had had was in a little pool in the gutter of 102nd street. Not that Judy meant much to me, but when a violinist gets killed, somebody has to take the fall.
More than anything, I think—or think now—it was humanity I was looking for, connection in aspiration, voices raised together in holy song. Whatever experience of the mystic I had had—in session with Blumenthal sometimes, sometimes on the hotline, sometimes, especially that one time after Jake’s party, in bed with Arthur, in Rome—had all depended on connection, human connection. And if humans connect in religious circumstances—what then?
Now, my parents are Episcopalian. We went to church on Easter and Christmas. The whole business was so hypocritical and ridiculous that the religion had died on me like an old man on top of a whore, and I was determined to squirm out from under the dead weight.
So when Arthur and I returned from Rome, I began attending Catholic services, dragging myself out of bed on Sundays to sit in the eerie draught of the voluminous St. Elmo’s Cathedral. I followed the liturgy, reveling in the guilty thrill of a new creed—though Catholicism, God knows, is not all that different from the other, which maybe added to the kick: it was like changing sides in an internecine feud. I invested the symbolism with my soul, hoping to bring it to life without losing my sense of the world, without placing all my bets on heaven or eternity. I developed, that is to say, a theory:
The Father, if I recall it rightly, was Being; Jesus was Consciousness; the Holy Ghost was the world created by the interaction of the two. Each person of Godhead was necessary: Being, eternally creative, had to make consciousness by its own laws (“And God so loved the world …” I was riddled with biblical quotations.); Consciousness, by necessity, by the fact of its perception, created the big HG, which, in turn, transformed God and Free Will and Eternity into realities. When faced with Pure Being, Consciousness, by necessity, I say, saw God. This was the meaning of Moses at the Burning Bush: faced with a vision of the true nature of being as Life-Fertility-Space (The Bush) coexisting forever with Death-Destruction-Time (El Flamo), Moses immediately demanded that its voice (God) proclaim its name (I AM). In other words (words), Being, faced with Consciousness, developed an I. Professor Clementine, in her book My Secret Loves, notes that this theme is echoed in the Bhagavad Gita, no matter how you pronounce it, when Vishnu shows Arjuna his true self as Life-Death-Space-Time united, and Arjuna begs him to assume the form of Vishnu again. Einstein also had something to say on this subject, but I forget what.
This was wonderful! I was a Catholic!
I went to confession.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost …”
“It’s been 25 years since my last confession.”
“Hit the highlights.”
“Uh, anal intercourse with a duck playing the kazoo.”
“Do three Our Fathers, four Hail Mary’s, six choruses of ‘Fascinating Rhythm,’ a buck and wing, and jump up and down swinging a rubber chicken over your head, crying ‘Garçon, garçon, où est le château?’”
I lapsed.
One Saturday, I went to see Lansky. Elizabeth let me in. Lansky was pacing back and forth across the room with the Times in his hand. The Supreme Court had just decided that it was all right to strip-search high school students as long as you beat them senseless first. It was the “reasonable torment” criterion. Lansky slapped the paper with the back of his hand.
“My God,” he shouted. “These people are Nazis.”
“Lansky,” I said, “I want to become a Jew.”
“Hold this,” said Lansky angrily. He pushed the newspaper into my hand. “Now slap it with the back of your hand and shout, ‘My God, these people are Nazis!’”
I slapped the paper and it flew up into the air, scattered and fluttered down in a hundred pieces like a Brobdingnagian snowfall.
A page of the business section landed on Lansky’s head, folding down over his ears like a shawl.
He sighed. “Have you tried the Unitarians?”
Now, the Unitarians, there is no question, have the best music: Mozart, Luther, the Vedas, anything so long as it swings. They also have the best sermon titles. “The Triumph of Walt Whitman,” “The Holographic God,” “I Am Afraid,” etc. Also, the preacher is allowed to use the word “lover.” “… more sympathetic to your husband or wife or lover,” he will say. Very promising, all in all.
The problem was symbolism for me—or the lack of it. Around this time, I had started to read a lot of the works of Joseph Campbell—swallowing them like pills I was actually—and Joe—or, as he is known in academic circles, Big Joe, or even the Joester—has much to say on this subject. Symbols, it turns out—bread and wine, resurrection, burning bushes—are neither important in themselves, worthy of worship in themselves, nor needful of theoretical interpretation or explication. Symbols are living representations of the indescribable thing. Thus Big Joe, as I understand him. In other words, you don’t have to actually believe in the transubstantiation of bread and wine, or to interpret it as, say, the guilt feast of the body of the slaughtered father-son: the thing is to feel it, to experience it, through the way it acts upon the network of your personality, as—well, as something that cannot be said in any other terms. Here is the leap of experience across the river of which the water-shy horse of theory is incapable. Symbols—metaphors, parables—are the key. (“He will open up his mouth in parables and utter things kept secret since the world was made …” Isaiah. “I got a million of ’em.” Durante.)
All this I say because, for a month or so, with the Unitarians, my pilgrim heart found a resting place. The big church on 85th Street, with its enormous windows letting light in through the clinging vines. The hymns—“Morning Has Broken”; God, I love that hymn—the kindly, intelligent minister with his halting authority, the impression he gave that he would only guide you by the light of his own uncertainty—all this filled me with a sense, not of peace, but of nobility, of the nobility of not knowing, of declaring myself a searcher, of humility in the face of eternity, and yet the assurance of my right to inhabit this corner of it. In other words, if I had been fashioned to have a religion, an organized religion, I would have been a Unitarian.
But I was not so fashioned. The symbols got me—the lack of them—even the symbols that somehow symbolized the absence of symbols. I would climb the stairs to the broad, open doors of the church, and as the minister shook my hand—he always remembered my name; I’ve forgotten his: Goodwin, I think—as he shook my hand, I would look up at the pillars flanking the door and note ruefully that they were in fact pilasters, made of white plaster and capable of supporting nothing. The ivy climbing up the wall was newly planted and, when I went inside, the cross above the altar—a vague representation of a cross made with gold wire—proclaimed its inadequacy. Where was the plaster Jesus? His grotesque agony, his blood, his pain? If the only religion you can stomach is not a religion at all—then why bother?
I would sit behind some blue-haired dame whose family had been and would be Unitarians since and until Emerson admitted he had erred; I would listen to Goodwin, Godwin, Woodwind torture himself from the pulpit over even the symbols of nomenclature—“God, or, if you prefer, eternity, or, if you prefer, that for which we have no name …” (And what then: do you look up to the sky, with your arms spread, grunting, “Uh. Uh.”?); I would stand behind the blue-haired saint and sing and I would feel refreshed, noble, inspired in mind—but not swept away, connected; for what was I to be connected to? What of flesh was there for me to pull out of the great blackness of eternity that had opened before me when God had not killed Judy Honegger? Was I suddenly to fall to my knees and cry, “Yes! Yes! God is a strand of blue hair! I see all!” There was no bush for me to set ablaze, no flame for me to light it with.
Still, I clung to the church as if it were a piece of driftwood on the open sea. Membership Sunday approached—in late February, I think—when newcomers declared themselves a part of the church in a simple, unsymbolic ceremony. Those interested had to schedule an interview with Nudnick and I did so.
I sat in front of his desk, wearing a pleated, plaid skirt no less, crossing my legs this way, crossing them that. He was so young—and good-looking in a boyish way, too. His eyes so sympathetic. But he was still a preacher, and I could not help but think of hiking my skirt to my waist and shouting, “How about some of this? Hubba hubba!”—an urge which comes over me during all my dealings with men of the cloth.
“So you’re a poet!” he said, smiling kindly. “We love to bring creative people into our community.” When I only smiled, and clutched my hands together to keep them from straying to my skirt, he offered: “The church paper frequently publishes verse.”
Immediately, as my heart sank, my mind rose to the occasion and began to compose:
I saw a ginko leaf
Upon the sidewalk
Gleaming in the sun after a little rain.
Oh, curling globes of greenery,
What richness in your muted pales
Communes so with the soul of man
In unproclaimed theolatry?
“Actually,” I said, trying not to laugh, not to hurt the poor thing, “I was more interested in your charitable work, your food-for-the-hungry program. I wanted to join your Contemporary Issues Committee, and I can probably do some of the signs for your Tuna Casseroles For Peace Day demonstration. Also, you mentioned during the announcements that you needed someone to collect articles for the study group on Nicaragua and I can’t,” I said, shaking my head, laughing even as my eyes filled. “I simply can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Godbole smiled at me and nodded. “I know, Samantha,” he said quietly. “I know you can’t. But I appreciate your trying.”
I couldn’t speak. I made a gesture of defeat with my hand.
“If there ever comes a time, though,” said Goodguy, “we’re here.”
I nodded. I stood.
“You’re a nice man,” I said.
Goodbye shrugged. “Each personality is its own path into the infinite. I would never try to interpose myself between a fellow mortal and eternity.”
I smiled. “Hubba hubba,” I said.
So, of course, it was Zen. What else? I came upon it in Campbell first, but within a week, I had gone through Suzuki, and a few other motorcycles. I went and attended a few sessions of sesshin at the East Side Zendo and Racquet Club and spoke with the roshi Ono Yokisonyu, or whatever he was called. He invited me to join the meditants arranged on their thin mats, thin cushions under their bums, their legs crossed, ankles on thighs, eyes half closed. He taught me how to count my breaths to ten, to concentrate on nothing but my breath. I sat and arranged myself, yanking my ankles up
.
Zen seemed suited to me because it is the belief in direct experience. It is both too complex and too simple to explain but basically it is to religion what therapy or analysis is to your own understanding of your problems. It cannot be told, it can only happen. There are no beliefs, no tenets; only the breath, counting the breath, following the breath.
When you sit in the lotus position, eyelids drooping, the mind goes blank. It is an experience like darkness, or a silent phone after someone has hung up. You breathe in a fairly complicated fashion, pressing in with your abdomen, and soon your flesh begins to tingle, and you feel a rush of pleasure—or, at least, I did. I became afraid—I could feel, like a lump of lead in my head, the resistance to letting go completely. I understood where the Devil in literature had got his trickster nature as my mind devised a thousand strategems to keep my concentration from my breath alone. I would breathe and become intensely aware, and would think, “I am intensely aware,” losing it, and think, “Don’t think that,” losing it and then “Don’t even think that,” losing it, and then, “I’ve lost it,” losing it again. My resistance to release was like a circle of logic from which the only way to break through is to leap the circumference—leap in slow motion, following the breath. I grabbed the breath and held on. Satan, unable to trick me, now cracked the surface of hell and released my demons. Terrible images arose in my mind: my mother with an erection approaching my father on his knees; myself biting off my brother’s balls, and my brother was Arthur, then Dr. Blumenthal; the plaster of my face cracking to reveal my mother beneath. I garnered my courage, grabbed hold of the breath, held on.
The images lifted. Blackness. Solid. Pure. My vagina was suffused with heat, with moisture. The lips between my legs seemed to be parting like a door, at once inviting and wonderful, and dark and terrifying. Suddenly, it was not just my vagina, but my whole body; and not sexual in the usual sense, but libidinous, total, useless, playful—this tingling, clownish pleasure everywhere. Suddenly, a car honked on the street outside and it was part of my being. Suddenly, my head reached into heaven. Suddenly, my anus loosened and extended into the earth. Suddenly, a muscle in my thigh tore and I screamed so loudly that the others around me awoke and old Yokisonyu rushed to me with his chin sagging in wonder, crying, “Kensho? Kensho?” and I cried, “Doctor! Doctor! Aaaah!” and was lifted under the arms and carried out to the vestibule where I lay groaning until Arthur came for me.
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