by W. E. Gutman
In the hovel where he is cared for, the boy drifts between excruciating awareness and merciful stupor. Eternal night draws near. He will soon be free. Outside, mumbling incoherently, a madwoman, bedraggled, froth caking the corners of her mouth, exchanges stones and insults with vagrants who taunt her. Hoping to squeeze the last traces of pity from a parade of self-absorbed passers-by, an armless, legless man wriggles his way toward some unknown destination like a grub on a sizzling sidewalk. Crying with studied constancy and resonance, a beggar exposes a newborn at her naked left breast.
Feral dogs, traumatized by hunger, rejection and loneliness, respond to a friendly whistle or the offer of a caress with sidelong glances filled with sadness, mistrust, fear. Head low, tail tucked between their legs, panting, they have surrendered to forces heretofore unimagined, now braved with stoic resignation. They do not have the energy to bark.
In the distance, standing legs wide apart for maximum balance in the shade of a big old tree, a policeman stares catatonically in the void to stay cool, conserve energy, perhaps to guard against the incongruity that surrounds him.
On the street corner, near the Ashmodai Hotel where I spent the night, a man beckons. “Anything you want, man: Dope? Girls? Young kids? Name your pleasure.”
I describe him to the policeman but the officer, dressed like a Gilbert and Sullivan admiral, stares at me blankly, his eyes-half shut. He waves me off as if he were shooing away a fly. It’s nearly lunch-time. In the noonday heat even duty takes a siesta.
THIRTEEN
The dreaded day had arrived. A week had passed and I had given nary a thought to Yossi’s deadline, less yet to the consequences of my decision, which I had made without wavering when he first called on me to enshrine a mindless convention. It’s not that I begrudged the custom or questioned its origins or doubted the sincerity of those who lived by it. I didn’t really give a damn. What I resented was the high-handed assertion that, owing an accident in pedigree, I was somehow duty-bound to serve as a vehicle for its perpetuation.
“Have you reached a decision?” Yossi asked in his best bureaucratic timbre. All eyes were on me, glowing like cold, implacable searchlights of anticipation.
“I have.”
“Well?”
“Well, my answer is no. It’s a non-negotiable issue. I’m sorry. I’m not big on tradition. Never was. Tradition has a way of trapping people into a never-ending cycle of reflex behavior that may have a numbing effect on the drudgery of life but does nothing to relieve it. In attempting to homogenize human conduct, tradition also has the regrettable habit of ignoring, nay, of writing off, the individual. Man’s happiness and freedom depend on his ability to dominate his environment -- or to escape from it when it suffocates him.”
“Only God is free. Man is not,” someone shouted from the back of the room.
“How convenient. Look, I’m in no mood to argue. Please find someone else or wait until providence delivers a fresh recruit. I may have a tribal link to the clan but I share none of its principles or convictions. No offense intended.”
“Tradition is like a ring,” Yossi offered with didactic pomposity. “It is complete within itself, all-encompassing, self-defining, unbroken. It embodies the totality of a people’s selfhood, it...”
“I don’t wish to be regarded as a member of a group I didn’t join.”
“But you did. Are you forgetting your heredity?”
“I’m the victim of circumstances beyond my control.”
Yossi snarled.
My father smiled. He understood, appreciated satire. He recognized in the firmness of my stance the synthesis of his principles and the manifestation of his teachings.
“Traditions set people apart,” I said. “Zealots forget that there are other ‘rings’ and that those who wear them may have a different understanding of selfhood, not to mention, uh, the restrictive nature of circumference.”
“Traditions must be nurtured so that they remain whole, undiluted,” Yossi hollered, “so they foster unity, provide inspiration, ensure tranquility.”
“I can only wear one ring at a time.”
“What about the inspirational and conciliatory nature of tradition? What about the serenity it imparts on those who embrace it body and soul? What about its capacity to spread harmony and peace?”
“Spread peace, you say? Are you naïve or blind? Do you really believe that maintaining a tradition prevents even family members from bickering, from showing off their monumental capacity for tribal rancor and discord?”
Yossi blinked. “What do you mean?”
*
I was all too happy to oblige, to savor, in advance, the unease my words would produce.
Lazar and Yanosh had had yet another heated discussion the other night. They always seem to be at each other’s throats. Each begrudges the other’s opinions with a passion only clashing egos, not scholarship or reason, can inflame. Their quarrels are petty, volcanic and generally brief but apt to re-ignite at the slightest provocation. The two have turned ideological ranting into a form of dialectic perpetual motion. Round and round they go, holding on for dear life to their cherished positions but, predictably, getting nowhere.
“Surely, friendly disagreements are bound to arise in a close-knit community,” Yossi intervened.
True. But instead of letting go or striving for a middle ground, their tempestuous squabble, with “left” versus “right,” not fact versus opinion at the center of their quarrel, nearly ended in a fistfight. I had offered to referee and enlisted Néné Jan and Uncle Johnny as alternate arbiters. Yanosh and Lazar agreed, secretly hoping that three mediators would deliver contrasting verdicts resulting in a “draw,” thus allowing the antagonists to adhere to their respective positions and declare victory. Closed minds are not interested in right or wrong. All they seek is support for their views and beliefs. Lazar and Yanosh are the type of men who cling to their opinions -- reality be damned.
“So, Lazar,” asked Néné Jan, “what is this all about?” Lazar obliged, sounding off with more vehemence than common sense.
“Well,” Néné Jan offered cautiously, “I think you may have a point.”
“Just a doggone minute,” Yanosh fumed. “Why don’t you hear me out before surrendering to Lazar?”
“You’re right,” said Néné Jan. “By all means, proceed.”
Pontificating, as is his style, Yanosh told his side of the story.
“You know what,” said Néné Jan, “on second thought, I think Yanosh may be on to something.”
“Hold it,” I intervened. “How can both Yanosh and Lazar be right?”
Uncle Johnny, who had listened quietly, placed a conciliatory hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and proclaimed, as if delivering a pithy court summation:
“Tell you what, you’re right too.”
I was baffled but said nothing. I felt that Uncle Johnny had let me and the two rivals down, that his ambivalent verdict was a monument of vacillation and frivolity. Anxious to make peace, he did the truth a disservice. Or so I thought. I was wrong. As I reviewed the doctrinal differences that so diametrically and pointlessly divide Lazar and Yanosh, I also pondered my uncle’s Solomonic ruling. Drawing from Zen, to which I turn when western dogmatism gets in the way, I suddenly apprehended Johnny’s awesome and disarming wisdom. I then examined my own “convictions,” and found them to be less than firm or unfailing. Depending on the issues, I allow them to oscillate from pole to pole. Those who seek the truth, I keep telling myself, are infinitely closer to it than those who claim to have found it. In so doing, I grant myself the right to change my mind as often as it takes to find it.
Sometimes, the only way to understand and acknowledge the scope of a problem is to confront it with an open mind. This is something that Yanosh and Lazar doggedly refuse to do. They’d rather cling to their convictions than risk being proven wrong. They stopped searching. They’ve wrapped themselves in the security blanket of fixed ideas, shut the door tight again
st the very light of knowledge, and they won’t let anyone pry it open. Néné Jan is open-minded and generous but he dithers. Only Johnny, with years of legal experience behind him, makes the connection between apparent truth and incontrovertible fact.
Right like wrong, is what the self perceives. What we see is seldom shaped by irrefutable reality or truth but by conditioning. Often, what we choose to believe is born from an unwillingness to go beyond the obvious. Inflexible ideas are the offspring of intellectual sloth. Yet it seems as if everything is still defined more by form than substance -- radicalism vs. conformity, pious traditionalism vs. dissolute nonconformity. Time has come to shake off absurd labels in describing people’s proclivities. Instead, we need to acknowledge our humanity and our ambivalence. The brain is composed of two hemispheres: the right and the left. We also possess a vestigial reptilian brain that often takes over and is apt to subvert reason. In order to attain anything approaching enlightenment, one must first forsake the dualities of “me” and “them,” “conservative” and “liberal,” interior and exterior, small and large, good and bad, delusion and fact, life and death, being and nothingness.
What others have come to grasp intuitively can never become ours unless we come to understand it through our own mental efforts. Each of us has a different way of reaching the same destination. There isn’t just one road and not everyone is fit to travel the same course. By limiting our journey to a single trail, we may be leading ourselves astray.
*
“I fail to see what an insignificant family dispute has to do with anything,” Yossi exclaimed.
“Next thing you’ll tell me is that wrangling senselessly to protect an opinion is also a family tradition that deserves protection.”
“Mock us all you want. You think you’re better than us because you can read and write and have traveled the world. Wasn’t it the Rebbe Herschel the Pious of Vilnius who called heretics ‘those who pride themselves in their superiority to conventional views,’” Yossi snapped.
“Not exactly. It was ‘the eccentric prince of paradox,’ the notorious Jew-hater, the Catholic apologist, G.K. Chesterton. And he was wrong. Heretics are freethinking people who question accepted doctrine and faith-based ‘truths,’ and have the courage to examine the validity of their own beliefs and, if need be, to reject them. They do not go around peddling borrowed superficialities. Pelagius, the 6th century thinker was not a heretic. He believed in the original innocence of man. He did not buy into the ignoble “original sin” concept which asserts that a newborn who dies un-baptized will go straight to hell. He said, ‘Who can be so impious as to deny an infant of any age, the common redemption of the human race?’ Galileo was not a heretic but a man who saw a truth that contradicted conventional wisdom. Giordano Bruno was not a heretic. He died an early martyr for rationalism and modern scientific ideas. Peruse the long list of ‘heretics,’ ancient and modern, and you will find an inventory of the greatest minds that ever lived. Ignorance, of which idle knowledge is the most egregious aspect, is the root cause of friction among men. We should all be more interested in truth than in conditional peacemaking.”
“Your attitude saddens and offends us. The council of elders will deliberate and decide your fate: Silence or banishment. May the Heavenly Father have mercy on your soul.”
“The world has no need of a “heavenly” father. We are cosmic orphans. We need real flesh and blood parents to teach us how to defend ourselves against the tyranny of rigid ideas.”
I sought my father’s eyes and nodded at him with gratitude. I saw pride in his eyes. My mother turned to him and whispered what I had learned to read on her lips, “Look at the son I gave you.” My father, conceding with humility that his role in my procreation had been negligible, nodded at her in return with a smile.
The others looked at me with scorn. All but Lucy, who had shit in her bloomers and been rushed to the bathroom, and Tante Yetta, who had dozed off in anticipation of a sonnet by her beloved Néné Jan. Yanosh scrubbed his hands with renewed vehemence. My grandfather buffed his chrome-plated pistol, bringing it up to his face to see if the silvery sheen of the barrel reflected his likeness. Helen was furiously pounding plums into a pulp in her big copper vat. Rocking back and forth in her chair, lost in a self-induced trance, Meema fought her demons with incoherent incantations peppered with threats and Judgment Day curses. Lazar talked to his kitten. Néné Buby and Tante Fanny were deep into a game of mah-jongg. My grandmother, who hadn’t bothered to follow the proceedings, was deep into an early chapter of A Tale From Bali, by Vicki Baum. In the dark eyes of my cousin Amos, pretty and graceful as a girl when he was a mere child, I saw the inconsolable grief of a man, now passed his prime, who paid a high price for his love of lithe, muscular, sexually well endowed young men. Looking for attention, Fabian drowned in a deluge of tears that ceased when my aunt Mary, still cradling her dolls, offered him kind words. Abraham, for the first time since we had met, smiled at me openly and with manifest tenderness.
FOURTEEN
“The council of elders met yesterday evening. We deliberated late into the night. With several votes for, several against and four abstentions, we decided to offer you one last chance to reconsider and accept the post of clan leader which, upon completion, will earn you a seat in the council and full voting privileges. What do you say?”
“My esteemed uncle, I stand before you, helpless, castrated by your intransigence. What choices are you offering me? Either I submit to your will or I suffer the consequences. There is no middle ground. We cannot barter, haggle, negotiate, compromise. It’s your way or no way, isn’t it?”
“You don’t understand,” said Yossi in a tone simulating affability.
“Oh, I understand far more than you give me credit for. But since we’re on the subject of misreading or misjudging -- another ploy to exploit the last vestiges of hesitancy that I may still harbor -- let me entertain you for the last time with an incident none of you has yet had the pleasure to lament. And let’s see if you find it instructive enough to relent and let me be. O.K.?”
Yossi shrugged. Néné Buby gobbled like a turkey and blinked several times, overcome by a sudden fit of Tourette’s. Meema, scowling, waved an impatient hand.
“Pfft! This boy’s always been full of tall tales. Do we have to listen to yet another one of his grotesque yarns?”
Someone in the back of the room, my grandmother, I think, intervened.
“Damn right, let him speak.”
Yossi arched his eyebrows and sighed. “Go ahead if you must.”
*
Must? Hell, I “must” nothing. I knew I was wasting my time, squandering my mental energy. Yossi and his flunkies see things their own way. Rituals, traditions, ceremonials, however absurd they seem to an uninvolved observer are as vital to them as is the “smell of napalm in the morning” to a flag-waving lieutenant-colonel who gets his jollies sauntering through a hail of exploding mortar shells. It's the manna that sustains them. I shouldn’t have to justify myself. These people speak an alien dialect and our brains are wired differently. It takes a leap of logic and extraordinary courage to reject customs that were drummed into us since childhood; and some people simply can't or won’t part with them. They’re not really interested in pursuing a dialogue in which give-and-take and fair play lead to rational discourse and, perhaps, a meeting of the minds. All they want is to mulishly follow the stream of a conversation they are having in their own head to its ultimate doctrinaire conclusion.
*
“In open societies,” I began, drawing from a store of memories, “freedom of conscience and an independent press are both an asset and a guarantor of democracy. In other parts of the world, an outspoken press is viewed as a threat to oligarchies and other deeply entrenched power structures. This attitude creates a self-view by the press that predisposes it to timidity and, often, to inaction. Publishers, indebted to their advertisers and sponsors for their precious revenues, are loath to antagonize them. Journalists
, afraid they might lose their job or their neck, probe less deeply than they should. Empowered by the elite, beholden to them, governments add insult to injury either by pretending not to know or by sacrificing the messenger. I’ve always believed and publicly stated that a nation that controls or restrains its media, or fosters a climate of fear and intimidation that cows it into self-censorship -- or silence -- is a nation of thugs.”
“Yes, so?”
“So I said so again, loudly and clearly not long ago, following a drive-by gangland-style massacre that claimed five lives and scorched the soul of a quaint and skittish Central American village habituated to intermittent violence and accustomed to looking the other way.
“Five people. Was it an accident? Was it vengeance? Were they victims of mistaken identity? Were they felled in a drunken rapture, as one report alleged, by giddy fans celebrating a soccer victory? Or were they targeted for assassination in a drug deal gone awry? Speculation was rife. When the smoke lifted, dozens of spent AK-47, 40mm- and 9mm-caliber shells lay on the ground, silent accessories in a drama that began and ended with lightning speed in the rain after dusk. The spent shells offered few clues. Everyone is armed in these parts and firing weapons in the air to ring in the New Year, make merry, cheer a wedding party, exult the birth of a male heir or just blow off steam is as sacred a ritual as kissing and drenching with tears the feet of the local patron saint whose garishly painted effigy, carved in wood, is paraded during the annual all-Saints procession.”
“Where is this leading to?”
“I’ll tell you. There’s nothing like a community that hurriedly mops up the blood, plugs up the bullet-riddled walls with cement and seals its collective lips in a terror-driven reflex to sharpen fear and blunt one’s sense of well-being. Nothing like a craven and dimwitted constabulary (the murderers got away and the leads grew cold) to cast grave doubt on the probity of the local cops and resurrect rumors of criminal collusion. Nothing like a timid, controlled press (one paper buried the story on page 56; another on page 75; when contacted, the other two mainstream rags declined to talk about the case) to reflect on a society’s health and moral fiber. Nothing like yet another senseless crime in a region long overwhelmed by lawlessness, traumatized by the greed, arrogance and ineptitude of successive regimes, and disgraced by the ceaseless suffering of its people, to explain that peace and prosperity are but a distant dream.”