So, after a bit, Penner’s mother says, “What had the cardinal done to the cowbird?”
They were comforted only after I showed them Luther’s letter to the freebee press. “It’s where you end up that counts, sane and settled,” his father said, “but some of those ideas were pretty good really,” a certain disappointment showing in his voice.
I shall relate the next part of Penner’s story with some reluctance, since I have misgivings about my own part in it, but I feel that honesty with respect to the historical record requires me to fess up. My concern for Luther’s whereabouts had drawn, as it naturally might, a favorable response from his family, and after several visits I was able to offer my services, not exactly as a private eye, but as a worried friend, to help locate him, and inquire as to his condition and state of mind. I pointed out that I had performed certain services for Luther in the past, and was quite willing to do so again. With this intention, then, I was allowed access to Luther’s boyhood room, where, with no difficulty at all, I found journals and letters in a desk drawer, as if waiting for me, just as I had retrieved two, formatted like account books, from his former landlady. These freshly discovered treasures I took away with me to peruse at length, and, as the reader will surmise, I have based much of this study on their remarkable contents.
Here, I found, early on, the difference between the pure and the transcendental revenge spelled out in no uncertain terms. What surprised me was the major source for the method of its achievement, since Penner had said not a word about this part of his reading. One could see how a pure revenge might be achieved, so that its victim might remain in ignorance of—not his plight, certainly, of which he would, no doubt, be painfully aware—but its cause. It is well known, for instance, that those who come suddenly into undeserved wealth by winning the lottery or growing seven feet tall are frequently ruined by it. They become the object of thieving sycophants, predatory agents, packs of hungry relatives. They invest unwisely, quit their jobs, reject former friends, overspend, take to drugs or loose women, permit their character to be corrupted, and end—so much for good luck—in the gutter, alone and unmourned. Fairy tales are fond of achieving the same results by granting wishes to greedy people. Thus the general “kill with kindness” principle can be confidently embraced. Supply the jealous with fragile treasures. In front of the envious flaunt advantage. By means of overindulgence and generosity, by encouraging stupid endeavors, by feeding the fat and offering another drink to a drunk, much damage can be discreetly done. Unconsciously unwanted, a child receives Liebestod for a lifetime.
Penner reports that he had heard of a woman whose rich sister had been seduced by a painter unhappy at home and momentarily on the prowl; and how she had captured the painter for herself (with great economy getting even with her sister, whose wealth she envied), then succeeding to second-wifehood by repairing the painter’s sexual insufficiencies; and in that way, then, she had proceeded to become his muse as well as his wife and mistress; but an evil muse, praising his weaknesses and poohpoohing his strengths, surrounding him with her poisonous worship, while encouraging his for her breasts, which he drew and redrew, nippled and renippled, as if in a whirlpool of narrowing attention, since that’s the way worship invariably goes, until his work was ruined and his career destroyed—all unbeknownst.
No … understanding—even obtaining—the property of “purity” for one’s revenge was not a problem. What surprised me was the discovery that Penner had painstakingly pored over Dr. Goebbels’ Diaries, which had been published with some scandal and fanfare. The lesson that he drew from them became central, if not essential, to the achievement of Transcendental Retribution. Goebbels was a professional liar. His ministry was a ministry of deception. The delicious irony was that Goebbels himself became both deceiver and deceivee. He fell for his own line—hook and sinker. This was a kind of “eureka” for young Penner. Of course Joseph Smith (“Joseph Smith!” Penner’s journal exclaims) didn’t receive the Book of Mormon as he claimed, “on gold! plates! and in Palmyra, New York! for Pete’s sake!” Nor had Mohammad, nor Moses, nor any other glory guy, taken Allah’s dictation, or found the Tablets of the Law by climbing to a mountaintop and seeing them leaning against a rock. But the liar who lies long enough, the liar who wants his lie to be the truth, the liar who sees belief in other people’s faces, for whom his lie is honey to their ears, is eventually a believer too, sincere as sunshine, clean as stream, faithful, too, as old clubfoot was, to his hope-filled falsehoods, and to Adolf Hitler.
I suspected, then, that Luther Penner had absented himself from his home and town and little circle, from Harriet’s expressionless ardor and self-serving attentions, hence from me and from his recent past, in order to remake his nature; for if Luther Penner wanted to revenge himself upon the world, how better to do it than to corrupt that world’s consciousness and mislead its mind with a fresh religion, straight from the shop, perhaps with a bit of tradition for reassurance, a touch of the exotic for excitement, a whiff of novelty to suggest to all those sheepish feet that at last there was before them a new path.
Luther Penner, I thought, is somewhere sewing robes, and getting guruized. Then his social awkwardness, bad teeth, and poor complexion, his stoop, his shuffle, his oddly forceful, overly candid glance, would be an advantage. If the beautiful are believed to be stupid, the handsome are thought to be anything but saintly. Lucky for Socrates he had thyroid eyes. What, I wondered, would Luther be preparing? from where would his inspiration come? how would he save mankind? what must we do to deserve the gift of his word, his wisdom?
Every pitchman, huckster, con artist, liar, joker, pol, great Satan and his hench-imps, needs someone to pitch to, to imp with, those gullible ears and empty heads and greedy hearts eager for the grifter’s whisper … eager for the love of Lucifer … to lick their private fears, bestir their lusts.
So: secret revenges are secret when not felt to be requitals by their victim, who lives with a limp he learns to take for granted; and they become transcendental when even the inflictor is in ignorance of the nature of his deed. Such as the passing on of stupid ideas. Such as the sincere creation of illusions, no longer lies, but falsehoods served on porcelain and eaten with sterling.
Yet … what had the cardinal done to the cowbird? how come the cuckoo was offended? What was the cause, in Luther’s case, of so general a grudge? A little schoolboy bullying could not account for it. His family seemed in no way to blame. What could explain Penner’s profound sense of being wronged, wronged by Nature? Might it be the recognition, in himself, of a disparity between ambition and ability so great as to seem a natal punishment; the perception of a distance between wish and satisfaction so common and so painful and so vast that Luther Penner could accept it for Everyman, represent it, be the modest plain one on their behalf, holy and lowly, one more time: appear to give comfort to the meek, who will not—in truth—inherit the earth, only breathe its dust and eat its dirt, die and go into its ground. Unless …
Then an unsigned letter arrived in the mail for me, postmarked Gahanna, Ohio. Penner must have received some information about my inquiries. The note accused me of being nosy to no good purpose, and a few other things best left unreported. Months of silence followed.
When I heard of Luther Penner again, he had changed his name to Romulus. Simply Romulus. He was preaching a new paganism based upon the idea of multiplying sacred objects through certain rigorously formal acts of devotion, and in this way conquering the secular world. Eight hundred objects: scarfs, pans, potted plants, three chairs, several windowpanes, a staircase, ferris wheel, wooden canoe, similar items, had so far been rescued, and had had holiness conferred upon them. I gathered from a few scattered news reports, mostly snide and condescending in tone, that there were degrees of purity in this ancient, now revived, theology, as well as levels of worldly removal, and that even a used soup can had been elevated already a dozen steps toward rare.
His followers said they felt like magicians an
d gods because they had become capable of creating objects of spiritual devotion out of the most ordinary things: a puddle, for instance, which had to be replenished, a spoon and a shoe, a dill pickle but not yet its jar. One woman, who was otherwise average to an extraordinary degree, had been given, through Romulus’ ministrations, a sacred ankle. He was, the reporter smirked, working to ennoble other parts. And one day, in the distant future, the world would resemble a museum full of priceless and useless and adorable things—icons of the ordinary: sand and snails and lipsticks—each equal in the sight of one another, even corncobs and slop pails, divinities like the divan upon which Romulus nightly reclined.
The world had really been holy once, with deities, in effect, who dwelt in ditches and shrouded peaks. There were divinities identified with the winds in the trees, the water in rivers, the smell of hay in the hayloft on a warm fall day, for both mayflies in clouds and crowds of flowers, so why not for a bent or broken nail? for a toy, or vase, or windowpane—each and all looked at in a special way, a way that (though there was a recipe for this sort of gazing only regulars of the religion might receive) rendered them priceless, yes, beyond price and pricing, made them rich in their benign individuality, rich in their resonance, rich in the richness of their multitudinous properties, full to the brim with Being—in short, infinite, and infinitely soi.
Salvation, I learned in a letter from a friend living in Columbus, Ohio, where the cult had holed up, was to be achieved when, like Boy Scouts accumulating merit badges, you had sanctified a sufficient portion of your local world. Everything was to be—and would be—saved. Romulus had seen Juno, he said, in her nightdress, lonely as a broken broom straw, waiting for her Godman to return from the office, night drawing on like a finger through mist: mist, finger, act of drawing, night—divinities in their own small right. No less than the whitebud in bud like a fountain when its shower has begun to shower.
You, whoever “you” were, would be saved, it appeared, only when someone saved you by paying a saving attention. Under a lamp. Some sort of light? The light of a devoted eye? Here sexual problems rose—they always do—because the breast with its tempting suckle center was not to be eyed and prized as a source of solace or stimulation, but for its curvature, its design, its iconographic history, and this was a dish more easily ordered than eaten. Nudity was practiced (rumor said) so as to produce a matter-of-fact state regarding the body which could then become contemplative, detached, and redemptive.
I had to be seriously puzzled. I possessed the briefest, most scattered bits of news, fragments of this philosophy drifted to me like ash; and I could only make guesses based upon a past I increasingly feared was deceptive. Did Penner now pretend to believe that the world was a work of art? since simply being seen would alter nothing in sight’s subject—that was one virtue of vision, unlike tasting gazing didn’t take a bite—it could only alter the attitude of the perceiver to what was being perceived. Though of course Bishop Berkeley, whom we must all hold in the highest esteem, believed quite otherwise: esse est percipi, he said—well—wrote. The principle is too silly to be said.
It occurred to me that to deprive objects of their instrumentality was to destroy their essence. It meant Penner was turning the world upside down: taking revenge by rendering the useful useless and the useless valuable.
Nor could I resolve the rather regular recurrence of urination as a revenge. Was this new cult going to make chamber music, as Joyce’s poems did, one level of meaning getting even with another?
Suppose Penner had been adopted? Would that explain his predilection for role reversals, for multiple guises, for passing himself off, or his periodic regressions? Never being what he seemed. Or was he just pretending to be pretending?
Again, I heard nothing from or about him for a long time. My own researches were hit-and-miss and mostly intermittent. I interviewed Aunt Spatz again with ambiguous results. I wasn’t in the neighborhood when Luther was born, she said. He’s got to be someone’s natural child, didn’t I think? she guessed. Luther bore no likeness to his parents, but that often happened, didn’t it, she offered. Had he, as a child, often wet his bed? Not that she knew, though it wouldn’t have surprised her, Aunt Spatz answered, admitting that much.
Claude Hoch, whom I returned to as well, admitted that after his humiliation, he had done some angry research on the expression “piss on you.” And while he was telling me the obvious, and calling Luther Penner a coward for substituting for Claude’s limb Claude’s innocent and hapless desk—and did I catch the symbolism of the drawer?—my thoughts wandered a bit until they encountered, vividly reenacted, Penner’s gesture: the slowly lifted leg.
Principal McDill, no longer in that capacity, had little to add. Luther Penner was the sort of sniveling little squit who brought out the worse in people. Penner was, he thought, a born provocateur.
I obtained, from Harriet Hamlin Garland, of all people, further, and later, notebooks. These I received through the mail after a few preliminary inquiries and not a little haggling over their price. Some entries did not deal entirely kindly with me. As I had feared. Penner had sensed some skepticism. For me, he wrote, the cock had crowed half a dozen times. Then he ungenerously added: “until its throat grew raw with roosterizing.” Had he heard about and remembered one of my public jokes?
Many entries puzzled me. Penner had made a list of local churches, with jots, but why? The Saint Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, for instance, and the note, Holy Ghost Headquarters. Or the Apostolic Pentecostal home Bible study center, then the exclamation: a book, a sacred! book! Or the Prince of Peace Baptist, then in parentheses, with a question mark, the words (Serene Queen?). The Vedanta Society. The Church of God International (sounds like a business, he wrote). The Saint Bartholomew, the John Knox, the Saint Mark’s, Saint Monica, the Saint Marcus United Church of Christ. Then underlined, Lighthouse Free Methodist. The Exciting First Baptist, fully graded choirs and orchestra. The Ethical Society, humanist of the year award (there’s a thought!). First Assembly of God. The Korean Presbyterian (really?). The Fellowship Church, its purpose—to know God, its mission—to make Him known (motto?). And the Emerson Chapel, “laughter holding both his sides.” Church of God Sabbatarian, the Concord Baptist, sun worship. And the Church of the Open Door (should be).
Finally, from Columbus, the tragic news came. The Society of Salvators (as it was now called) had been attacked by a gang of thugs, and Luther Penner had been killed by a blow which had toppled him over a railing. His Society had apparently managed to accumulate funds sufficient to buy a small abandoned Catholic church in one of Columbus’ central slums. Members then began (using a mumbo jumbo I can only guess at) unnecessarily desanctifying the building (a priest had unfrocked it already, it was the custom) in order—when sufficiently secular—that it could be revivified, but now for pagan and polytheistic purposes. This program had been under way for some days, and news of the procedure and its aims had leaked out. Salvators of Serene Peace (as they called themselves) had gathered in the ex-choir of the ex-church to undefile a modest art-glass window depicting the previously blessed Virgin, in her customary blue robe, standing on a cream-colored cloud and gazing adoringly upward at still more sky, when a gang of Irish-type toughs (so early reports indicated) broke in swinging lumber, and in the melée Luther had been struck or pushed over a railing onto the chancel floor. Early indications were that his injury was a broken neck, not a bat in the back as might have been supposed.
I do not find Luther Penner’s legacy to lie in the Serene Queen Salvation Society, which, as Romulus, he founded and, indeed, gave his life for, although it continues to grow in the slow small way of lichens over rock, empowered by the myth of a real Romulus and an unreal Remus, and gaining its little ground despite the enmity which attached itself to the group after the accident like the stink a skunk may spray on a dog (when one might have expected some sympathy, some understanding); nor, I think, can it be identified with Harriet Hamlin Garland’s o
rganization, now ensconced in Missouri, Colorado, and lower Wyoming, though more or less in constant movement (since her doctrines tend to have their greatest impact on first hearing, when their repulsive character is most strongly felt, most abundantly cheered). Instead, I believe Luther Penner presented us with a mordant yet magnificent metaphysics: life perceived not simply as if it were lived amid a maelstrom of conflicting and competing myths, but as if it were dressed up in illusions deliberately designed by those who have been previously misguided, and who are now getting even as only secret enemies secretly can. How many in one’s own home or neighborhood—to examine a small sample—have been betrayed by isms and ologies of one sort or other, have given money to nutcase causes, and squandered much of the precious time of their lives in vain spiritual pursuits?
I have no doubt that had Romulus lived, he would have sanctified the secular in a new way, produced an appropriate text, and, whether his vision was accurate or not, I believe his example, his doctrines, would have given many lost people something to follow, as well as the feeling of being found. The meek, like the sacristan who serves his church, elevated by sharing Penner’s vision of the beauty and possible purity of all things, will understand their value and find their vindication. I am reminded of the venerable philosopher Immanuel Kant, so high-minded a man he didn’t dare put on a hat, and his worship of the Ding an sich. I expect my Columbus researches will reveal to me the nature of those rites whereby even a stained soul might be bleached back to virtue and accorded its whiteness again. A convert told the press that, following the attack, she knelt where Luther lay so soft and pale he looked like lather.
Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Page 26