So: what’s left, if I choose to release (sorry, if I choose to acknowledge that I have already released) those things? Philosophy! And it’s that energy, that mind-spirit, that gods-consciousness that can keep me from violence, separated from both pain and pleasure, hold me to my purpose, not worrying about what Avidius Cassius is doing or what Martius Verus is doing but what Marcus Aurelius is doing, accepting everything that happens as coming from the same source that I myself come from, whatever that is, and waiting for death with a cheerful but not overeager mind and not compulsively buying more books to distract myself or keeping track of what Galicians actually make time to sit down and have dinner with me when I’m in town (even if I told them weeks in advance and never heard back).
Because even if I quit my job tomorrow and just started reading full-time, there’s no way I would ever finish! I have bought my last book. I accept that. I’m not even going to try to guess which was the last book I bought, or worry about whether it’s the sort of book I would have chosen as the Last Book to Buy if I’d thought about it in advance. So if death is just a dissolution of the elements that every living being is made of, and elements are always changing, why should I be afraid to change again? That’s like being afraid of Tuesday because yesterday was Monday. That’s just life, and nature, and nothing is evil that is in harmony with life, so it straight up does not matter whether Matidia’s will has anything in it for me or not, or how heavy the denarius is or isn’t, or whatever. Even if I never read another book, I’m still a person with intrinsic value, and later I’ll be a river.
This in Carnuntum. Anyway, I’m probably going to delete this later.
CHAPTER 8 Evelyn Waugh and the Opposite of Communion
For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If you then, being but men, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!
—Luke 11:10–13
Evelyn Waugh’s eldest son, Auberon, once told the following story about his father in his autobiography, Will This Do?: Just after the end of World War II, Evelyn’s wife managed to get her hand on three bananas despite fresh fruit being nigh unavailable.
Neither I, my sister Teresa, nor my sister Margaret had ever eaten a banana throughout the war … but we had heard all about them as the most delicious taste in the world.… The great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All three were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three. A child’s sense of justice may be defective in many respects, and egocentric at the best of times, but it is no less intense for either. By any standards, he had done wrong. It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him, but he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment.
I think of this story often, which seems over-the-top even for Evelyn Waugh, and how unpleasant the dish must have seemed by at least the second bite: a sort of raw bananas Foster, the sugar grainy and undissolved, the cream slopping everywhere, the sheer size of the thing, the unrelenting monotony of a mouthful of wet banana. The story has everything: joyless dessert-eating, public enforcement of family discipline, excess without taste, banana peels, the showiness of hoarding pleasure. Sad English childhoods always sound like caricatures of themselves, yet they’re somehow all true. It doesn’t matter if the inheritance is tasteless and unappetizing; a child knows his rights and objects to watching a tasteless banana that is rightfully his go to his father all the same. “If a brother or a sister is naked and without food and one of you says to them, Depart in peace, be warmed and filled, but do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit them? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:15–17). A child might not know what a banana tastes like, and a child might suffer for the longing of it just the same.
COMMUNION: Take bread, and bless it, and break it, and give it to the disciples.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Take bananas, and peel them, and stack them, and hoard them.
COMMUNION: Say, Take, eat, this is my body.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Find the most unprocurable cream. Find the most heavily rationed sugar. Commit the act of pouring in a stinting age.
COMMUNION: Take a cup, and give thanks, and give it to the disciples.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Take a bite. Swallow a wince at the flavor of soft and spreading banana undercut by milkfat and the sharp grains of sugar. Maintain eye contact with your children as you do.
COMMUNION: Say, Drink, you, all of it, for this is my blood shed for the remission of your sins.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Point out the obvious about the banana. Point out what the banana does and does not represent.
COMMUNION: Say to them also, I will not drink from now on of the fruit of this vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.
ANTI-COMMUNION: Remember that you are eating three bananas swimming in cream on a plate. The odds that some of the cream has run out onto the table and even onto your lap are high, possibly inevitable. Continue the heavy work of chewing and swallowing. This is a meal that can only ever happen once, but reenacted a thousand times in memory.
There are meals that require repetition and there are meals that cannot bear it. And of course you have to know that you are hungry before you can ask your father for bread. But it’s not enough to know that you are hungry; you also have to know that others have hungered before you and found the common solution named bread, and that bread is plentiful and readily available for you, that bread is digestible and wholesome and a ready answer to hunger; you have to know what hunger is, and what bread is and the difference between a loaf of bread and a rock that is shaped like a loaf of bread, though they may look and feel the same in the hand.
You must be able to imagine your own father hungering. Let us further imagine that your father has only ever hungered and thirsted after righteousness, see Matthew 5:6, and has no concept of bread hunger, in which case you have to learn the language of bread and explain it to him, and hope he will be able to compare it to his own hungers. You must trust that your father can tell the difference between a loaf of bread and a stone. You must trust that your father will not say, Depart in peace, be well and filled, but does not give you the things that are needed for the body. There are many conditions to be met before anyone might ask and hope to receive.
Now at the start of his ministry Christ was led into the wilderness by the Spirit where he met the devil, and in those days he ate nothing. For forty days he was led by the Spirit and met the devil and ate nothing and went about in the wilderness, so afterward he was hungry. At this same time was his Father in heaven, where they neither hunger nor thirst, nor does the sun strike them nor any scorching heat. And the devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread,” by doing so inviting the son to play the father and to give himself his own inheritance; by doing so inviting him to name the terms of his own hunger; by doing so inviting him to take a selfish meal that did not concern itself with the hunger of others or the needment of their bodies. At which Christ referred to Deuteronomy: God humbled you and caused you to hunger, then fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. To which the devil had no answer.
The order of operations, then, is this: In order to hunger, you must be beloved of God and in need of humility. If you hunger, it is for the purpose of being fed. What you eat is beyond your knowledge and your father’s knowledge. The purpose of food is to sustain and increase the love of God, whatever your earthly father eats or de
clines to eat in front of us. I first began to be a man when I asked myself why it was that I was not a man; I first knew I was hungry when I saw food set before me and asked whose it was.
Anyone who hopes for bananas in wartime runs the risk of learning the following: that there are no bananas to be had; that there were never any bananas to begin with; that all bananas had ever been was a collective fantasy brought on by the deprivations of war; that your mother will fail to find any bananas; that you will have to compete with your sisters for the bananas; that your father will exchange the banana for the experience of watching him eat the banana, with or without cream and sugar; that your father will model substitutionary atonement and bear himself your hunger in his body, Christus Victor, paternal satisfaction, and eat the bananas in front of you. For such reasons and more a child might not ask for bread at all but instead say, I’m not hungry, I ate before I got here.
INTERLUDE VIII Jacob and the Angel Wrasslin’ Till Noon at Least
Version One
Jacob arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok. He took them, sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had. Then Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when the man saw that he did not prevail against him, he touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as he wrestled with him. And he said, “Let me go, for the day breaks.”
But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me!”
So the man said to him, “What is your name?”
He said, “Jacob.”
And the man said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
Then Jacob asked, saying, “Tell me your name, I pray.”
And he said, “Why is it that you ask about my name?” And he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” Just as he crossed over Peniel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip.
Version Two
Jacob said, “You guys go on ahead, I’ll catch up in a second,” and pretended to be looking for something until everyone else dropped out of sight. Then all of a sudden he was wrestling.
“I feel like we just skipped something,” Jacob said to the man suddenly wrapped around him. But the man said nothing, just kept wrestling.
“Okay,” Jacob said. “I guess this is not the talking kind of wrestling?” Still no answer.
Eventually the sun came up, which means there were at least eight or nine hours of solid, speechless wrestling before that, which, yikes, and at which point the man said, “Stop hitting yourself.”
What else was there for Jacob to answer? “Stop hitting yourself.”
The man considered it. “I’ll stop hitting you if you stop hitting yourself.”
So Jacob shut up and kept wrestling. I don’t know wrestling maneuvers. Let’s say his next move was a pile driver.
“Asshole,” the angel said, sweating.
“You’re the asshole,” Jacob answered.
“Let me go,” the angel said, “for the day breaks.”
“Oh, now we’re talking?” Jacob said (still wrestling. Picture a lot of dynamic action, the kind that lends itself well to short, snappy dialogue). “All night long it’s sudden and unprompted wordless wrestling with you, but once it starts affecting your schedule, then it’s all, ‘Oh, hath the day risen, time to be moving along, if it suits you.’ Well, it isn’t convenient, and it don’t suit me, so prepare yourself to wrassle till noon at least, guy.”
And the angel took that moment to press a finger lightly across the socket of Jacob’s hip, which was just entirely too much, and Jacob lost it.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck fuck, I need a minute.” He stepped back, collapsed into a sort of half crouch, and wrapped his arms around his knees.
“I’m sorry,” the angel said after a pause.
“I didn’t say fuck you,” Jacob said. “I was just saying fuck. I wasn’t expecting that.”
“I wasn’t expecting it, either.”
“Not really the same thing,” Jacob said without looking up, “given that it wasn’t your hip.”
The angel sat down next to him. (But not too close.) “Would you like a blessing?”
“Obviously I would like a blessing,” Jacob said. “I’d also appreciate an explanation and an apology, but I’ll take a blessing, too.”
“Okay. What’s your name?”
“Fuck you. What’s your name?” Then: “Sorry. That was reflexive.”
“It’s fine,” the angel said, “but I still can’t answer it.”
“Jacob, J-A-C-O-B.”
“Not anymore it’s not,” the angel said, and then for the next part imagine that Jacob said, The shit are you talking about, it’s not? at the same time the angel said, this time in a real serious voice, because by this time he’d caught his breath from all the wrestling, “Now you are Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men and prevailed.”
“The shit are you talking about, it’s not?” Israel said again after a moment’s pause. “Asshole. Asshole! You show up, mid-night, mid-wrestle, without a word of explanation or set of rules to agree on, and then you—do that—and then you promise to bless me and instead pull a bush-league stunt like taking my name out of my mouth.”
“I don’t know,” the angel said. “Do you mean when I touched you on the hip socket? I’ve never done that before. I didn’t know how else to get you to stop wrestling. Does it hurt?”
“We just wrestled for nine hours. Everything hurts.” Israel shifted in his seat. “I should say, everything but that hurts. You, you show up, and you fight me, and then you touch me, and now I have a different name I’m going to have to explain to everyone.”
“All of those are excellent points,” the angel said. “I rather wish I had not touched you on the hip socket, either, for my own reasons.”
Then Israel asked, saying, “Tell me your name, I pray.”
And he said, “Why is it that you ask about my name?”
“You’re not the only one who can name things,” Israel said.
“I never said I was the only one who can name things,” the angel said. “But I’m not authorized to answer that particular question. Do you want to name something?”
“Yeah, I want to fucking name something,” Israel said. “Obviously I want to do that.”
“You can name this,” the angel said, gesturing toward the rock they’d spent the night wrestling on top of.
“You changed my name for the rest of my life and I get to name a rock?”
And the angel just spread out his hands in response.
“Fuck this,” Israel said, hauling himself up awkwardly on his left leg. “Fuck this, fuck you, fuck this rock—Peniel, by the way, short for ‘God has once again failed to kill me;’ fuck Peniel, fuck daybreak, fuck blessings.” Then: “Touch it again.”
The angel hesitated. “I’m not authorized to do that.”
“I’m not asking you to do it professionally. I’m asking you. I want you to do it again; I want to test a theory, and I’m asking you to do me one-half of a small favor after a series of real unnecessary dick moves.”
I don’t happen to know what the angel did next, whether he touched it again or he didn’t. Either way, Israel started walking across Peniel shortly thereafter, sun shining on his forehead, heading directly toward Jabbok, trying to think of an explanation for everyone.
CHAPTER 9 Mary and Martha and Jesus and the Dishes
Now it happened as they went that Jesus entered a certain village; and a certain woman named Martha welcomed Him. And she had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard His word. But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Therefore tell he
r to help me.”
And Jesus answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”
—Luke 10:38–42
Now it happened that the dishwasher was broken, and that I tried starting it but it kept making that thwumpa-thwumpa sound instead of turning over, so I just left the dishes in the sink. I don’t know if you needed them for dinner. I would have washed them myself, but they never seem to get as clean as when you do them—probably because I do a purposefully half-hearted job of scrubbing in order to get you to do it without asking me for help.
Also, I’ve noticed that the house is out of toilet paper, but instead of buying more I plan on tearing little strips of paper towels and layering them carefully over the old toilet paper roll (which I will not throw away). I will do this indefinitely until you buy more toilet paper.
And I hit START on the load of clothes that were sitting in the dryer, which were already finished drying, but which I did not wish to fold; this way when you get home it will sound like they have just finished drying when it buzzes, and you will be the one to fold them.
I have intentionally lowered my standard of living so that when you say things like “This place is a mess,” rather than acknowledge the implicit request for acknowledgment or respect or help I can simply grunt, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and not having to do anything, knowing that eventually you will do all the work necessary to make yourself happy.
Now, either one imagines Martha in the middle of serving when she asks this question, possibly elbow-deep in a sinkful of dishes, trying to wipe a flyaway strand of hair off her forehead with a sweaty elbow, in which case being informed that she’s troubled “about many things” is both rude and self-evident. One might rather imagine the question coming up throughout the course of an ordinary day, a request to compare and rank their respective vocations without the immediate emergency of having nothing to eat lunch with. But one thing is certain: it is illegal, according to God, for women to wash dishes. Someone else is going to have to do it.
Something That May Shock and Discredit You Page 8