This is the largest piece that was cut from the Heavens story. Bits of it are still in there, but most of it isn't. I think I'm going to send it out soon. See if I can't get it published somewhere after all the work. Weird to think I started this thing a year ago.
For the other posted pieces of this story, check the 'heavens' tab at the bottom of the post or in the sidebar.
She took PJ's hand and just like that we were going to Chicago, we were facing our destiny head-on, we were nearing the garden, the city of the air scraping the sky, endless Atlantis submerged and balanced and bent before the Cloud Gate that hovered at its edge. Traveling independently or in groups, together or alone, in cars or in buses, in planes or on the backs of trains, we made our way over the miles and the highway lines all the way down through the concentric rings to the dark, dead heart that lay silent in the center.
Pulled across blank streets and endless railroad ties, as the city, the hermetic waves of it, flashed by in time to a secret kind of melody to the lumbering, ancient rhythm of rubber on concrete. And everywhere, everywhere were cubes, squares, rectangles, all manner of obtuse angles divided and subdivided and placed one within the other in a dizzying endless array of mazes, a labyrinth of geometry and geology across the entire shape of the land. Trees and rock and history all subsumed and recast as that neverending layering of cubes, stretched and strangled and tangled one through the other until they emerged at the top like kitchen knives stabbing the sky, shimmering halfway between the ground and destiny before they gradually erased themselves, fading away and disappearing into the mist that swung off the lake like an empty mirror. We knew that it was different from other cities, that it had died once in fire and was reborn only to be killed again and again like Prometheus every winter. The wind whistling through wide thoroughfares and tiny breakways, buried under a clogging plaque of snow and ice and mood disorders, the city in need of an angioplasty to clear its clogged arteries, strained veins and depressed capillaries.
Along the way we decided that America was a lie.
Its vast empty spaces, its fruited plains, its aching central myth, all of it a lie that rested on the backs of Indian labor, sickness, death and ethnic cleansing. We discussed this in our little groups, strung out across the empty miles, jumping on cell phones and text messages to explain our ideas to the other cars, the other buses, the solitary riders in empty traincars, engaging in a distended, unraveling debate that bounced across the road from three or four us to the next three or four and onwards and onwards. See it was like this, America with its streets paved in gold and its revolutionary past was a kind of heaven, it always had been and always would be. It was a rumor of prosperity, of a city on a hill, of a beacon of hope, of the last best hope for all mankind that called the miserable forward to its supposedly empty shores that teamed with the blank dead ghosts of generations of natives screaming their woe. It was a rumor of perfectibility, a rumor of a heaven right here on Earth that spread through the nations of Europe one by one and then on to China, Japan, South America, Mexico and onwards. America, founded once by mercenaries and again by religious extremists and it was pulled between those two poles ever since, between the profit motive, blind greed, angry explosive ambition, and a wider kind of spiritual salvation that wormed its way through its witch trials, its great awakenings, its public crusades against itself, its working ethics, its wars, its traveling preachers with sacred harps, its slave gospel and shaped notes, its simultaneous hatred and embrace of all those foreign and other, its monkey trials, its purges westward, its elections, etc etc etc and on into the burning crystalline night full of flaming, kissing clouds and ice-bound stars that rotated in a silent, wet kind of pre-dawn contemplating their own birth.
These two instincts in America, the mercenary and the puritanical, the greed and the salvation, the twin obsessions of sex and the death, found themselves combined finally in that central, load-bearing pillar of the American Dream--the protestant work ethic. The desperate desire to prove oneself saved, to prove oneself worthy of heaven by finding Earthly success, a sure sign of God's smile, of his favor, of his free pass right into heaven. It didn't matter what you did as long as followed rules, amassed a wide pile of wealth and scorned the poor pigeons and sparrows and squirrels that did not or could not or would not work for the clouds. After all, the first two things the Pilgrams built in this New World of theirs was a church and a prison and that seemed to say it all to us: salvation or punishment. It sounded to us, here at the end of it all with the whole thing falling to bits, our voices drifting over the humming frequencies and the spinning pavement, it sounded to us like the worst kind of false heaven, like the new Jerusalem descending from the clouds, luring tourists and emigrants to leave their families and face the xenophonia of those who arrived before them, to face Ellis Island, their names changed, their faces erased, to rot away in some ethnic ghetto watching their children lose personality and language and honor, dreaming in desperate sepiatones of their life back, back in the Old World.
But Kay, the leader of us all, the one who encouraged us in these kinds of conversations, who drove us forward to challenge new heavens, heavens we had never dared imagine before, Kay comes over the phone, her voice crackling and fading in and out at the whims of the the cell signal, that tells us that America yes, America might be a heaven but it was the only one that had ever actually paid off for anyone. Not all people, not the original inhabitants, not those forcibly imported, or those who wound up settling in the wrong mountains, on the wrong plains that prosperity avoided. But it was the only heaven she could think that had actually delivered on its promise for some people. They had come to America and found a better life, free of the tangled old webs of hierarchy, nobility, blood lines, castes, no longer bound to the Earth but free to travel where they wished, to where they might. Free to find new names and raise their children to new goals. Undoubtedly the Jews had a found a better life here then they had ever had in Germany, in Russia, as they fled centuries of persecution, of pograms, to find a new home. And America had fractured the old governments, forever invalidating the belief that kings, lords, dukes, earls had descended from the clouds, were destined by God to rule, were the representatives of heaven. America had destroyed that mandate of heaven, it had done some of our work for us. And it alone had reintroduced republicanism to the western world, had replaced a divinely ordained, orderly system of control that lasted for lifetimes with a chaotic, freewheeling form of government that ideally was supposed to embrace everything that made us human: disorder, disagreement, rapid change, desire, conflicting ideas and opinions and philosophies and it attempted to find not the perfect, not the truth, not the ultimate way forward but a swampy kind of middle ground that lay between these poles, a terminally fractured, endlessly divisive, partisan canyon that separated and combined us again and again.
We were surprised to hear Kay say all this, surprised because she had always been so critical of all heavens, so demanding that things be messy and confusing but ultimately human. We didn't know what to make of it. Craig actually scoffed. "That was America," she said over the phone, "and that was a place where she wanted to live."
And there we were pulling right into it--sharing stories and singing Motown songs and eating gas station twinkies with a dozen supermarket bags tied up full of little crosses. Pulling into the hallowed, hollow capitol of the ancient nation of the Midwest. Canaries and cannibals hung suspended over everything. It rose up gradually in slower and slower relief like a god-scaled tombstone to the flat and empty plane, the flat and empty meadowlands and the flat and empty suburban halo that each ringed it in turn. We wondered if this too was the view of the settling pioneers, of the dead and dying natives, of the Potawatomis, of the Miami, the Sauk, and the Fox people, of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable as he sat in his wooden cabin, seeing in the empty landscape only an unending stream of potentialities, of possibilities that rippled and stretched off like a filmstrip into the vast gleaming future, seeing the unrealized spires and unimagined grid that would rise up all around them, dreaming their dreams of dominance, alienation, and commerce.
Showing posts with label heavens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heavens. Show all posts
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Protest, Pt. 3
Finally, finally, finally reaching the end of this. So close it burns! Hard to believe I started this back in late December. I'm afraid I am not prolific. At all. Below is an excerpt.
Here's the other posted parts of it: A Protest against Heavens, Pt. 1, Pt. 2.
The light seemed filtered down here, sterile and harsh as it shone down through the trees and illuminated us. A group of young Muslims arrived and stood giggling at us before one courageously stepped up to debate PJ. He looked studious, vaguely handsome, with wire-frame glasses and a light wisp of a beard. He wore a blue, short-sleeve button-up shirt with khakis and started telling us about Jannah, the afterlife in Eden that awaits. Perpetual fruits and perpetual shade inside eight gates, each level divided a hundred degrees. The end of righteousness, without hurt, sorrow, fear or shame — where every wish is fulfilled. Exquisite banquets served in priceless vessels by immortal youths. And beneath it all flow rivers. He told us that in Islam there is no original sin, everyone is pure until their own actions condemn them. We liked that. He told us that all children go to heaven, no baptism required, and we agreed that this was indeed a good and a fair rule. But when he started telling us about the 72 virgins that awaited martyrs and didn't that sound good, well, PJ couldn't hold back any more.
"That right there is exactly what we are talking about!" he said. "That, that's what rationalizes murder, it gives madmen righteousness, it justifies the unjustifiable, sir. It gives the highest ideals to the lowest crime--"
Craig stepped up behind him and PJ shut his mouth. We began to worry that this was about to become another situation, another South Will Rise Again. "You kill for god and you get on the fast track to heaven? That's no kind of heaven I'd ever want to see."
"No, you see, that's not what I meant, it is a place for legitimate martyrs," the guy said. "Mohammed says that those who commit suicide are forbidden to even smell heaven."
"And yet the doctrine gets stretched, it gets bent," PJ said.
"If suicides never get to smell heaven," said Crag, "then why have so many committed suicide in the name of jihad, in the name of Allah, hoping to gain his favor?"
"It is a perversion of my religion. They have been lied to."
"Exactly!" Craig waved his arms. "The entire history of heaven is a lie, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Missionary work, the Jihads. All of it, its all a manipulation."
"No, I--"
"You promise someone that death is not the end and you open up a door to all kinds of disaster for them to walk right through. For instance--"
"You're not letting me--"
"For instance, for instance I think it was maybe Christoph Luxenberg maybe. He argued that the word huri, the word that you think means 'wide-eyed virgins' or some other horseshit, huri actually means, get this, it means white grapes. It means virgins in Arabic, sure, whatever, yeah, but its a misread from the original Aramaic. They're found all the time in Christian descriptions of heaven--pure white grapes."
"That is just---"
"So these," Craig started laughing, "these suicide bombers are going to be expecting beautiful women, a whole universe of women to pleasure them, and all they'll be getting are some shitty fucking grapes!"
The poor guy was redfaced and stood there watching Craig laugh at him.
"Listen, I--" PJ started.
"More importantly, they won't even get grapes. All they'll get is a mouth full of dirt poured on their charred remains after they're tossed like pigs into an unmarked hole in the ground. Now get the fuck out of my face," Craig said and flicked his cigarette at the guy. We were startled, aghast, this was not how we operated. We had known Craig to be angry, abrasive, arrogant, self-righteous even, but never like this. He was compromising our message, he was generating backlash. We were worried the Muslim guy would punch Craig in the face but he just said a prayer and left.
Here's the other posted parts of it: A Protest against Heavens, Pt. 1, Pt. 2.
The light seemed filtered down here, sterile and harsh as it shone down through the trees and illuminated us. A group of young Muslims arrived and stood giggling at us before one courageously stepped up to debate PJ. He looked studious, vaguely handsome, with wire-frame glasses and a light wisp of a beard. He wore a blue, short-sleeve button-up shirt with khakis and started telling us about Jannah, the afterlife in Eden that awaits. Perpetual fruits and perpetual shade inside eight gates, each level divided a hundred degrees. The end of righteousness, without hurt, sorrow, fear or shame — where every wish is fulfilled. Exquisite banquets served in priceless vessels by immortal youths. And beneath it all flow rivers. He told us that in Islam there is no original sin, everyone is pure until their own actions condemn them. We liked that. He told us that all children go to heaven, no baptism required, and we agreed that this was indeed a good and a fair rule. But when he started telling us about the 72 virgins that awaited martyrs and didn't that sound good, well, PJ couldn't hold back any more.
"That right there is exactly what we are talking about!" he said. "That, that's what rationalizes murder, it gives madmen righteousness, it justifies the unjustifiable, sir. It gives the highest ideals to the lowest crime--"
Craig stepped up behind him and PJ shut his mouth. We began to worry that this was about to become another situation, another South Will Rise Again. "You kill for god and you get on the fast track to heaven? That's no kind of heaven I'd ever want to see."
"No, you see, that's not what I meant, it is a place for legitimate martyrs," the guy said. "Mohammed says that those who commit suicide are forbidden to even smell heaven."
"And yet the doctrine gets stretched, it gets bent," PJ said.
"If suicides never get to smell heaven," said Crag, "then why have so many committed suicide in the name of jihad, in the name of Allah, hoping to gain his favor?"
"It is a perversion of my religion. They have been lied to."
"Exactly!" Craig waved his arms. "The entire history of heaven is a lie, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Missionary work, the Jihads. All of it, its all a manipulation."
"No, I--"
"You promise someone that death is not the end and you open up a door to all kinds of disaster for them to walk right through. For instance--"
"You're not letting me--"
"For instance, for instance I think it was maybe Christoph Luxenberg maybe. He argued that the word huri, the word that you think means 'wide-eyed virgins' or some other horseshit, huri actually means, get this, it means white grapes. It means virgins in Arabic, sure, whatever, yeah, but its a misread from the original Aramaic. They're found all the time in Christian descriptions of heaven--pure white grapes."
"That is just---"
"So these," Craig started laughing, "these suicide bombers are going to be expecting beautiful women, a whole universe of women to pleasure them, and all they'll be getting are some shitty fucking grapes!"
The poor guy was redfaced and stood there watching Craig laugh at him.
"Listen, I--" PJ started.
"More importantly, they won't even get grapes. All they'll get is a mouth full of dirt poured on their charred remains after they're tossed like pigs into an unmarked hole in the ground. Now get the fuck out of my face," Craig said and flicked his cigarette at the guy. We were startled, aghast, this was not how we operated. We had known Craig to be angry, abrasive, arrogant, self-righteous even, but never like this. He was compromising our message, he was generating backlash. We were worried the Muslim guy would punch Craig in the face but he just said a prayer and left.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Protest, pt 2
So yeah, there's no way this story is getting finished before the Illinois primaries, but I am making some progress. Below is an excerpt.
Here's the first part of it: A Protest against Heavens.
And that was how we, all of us, wound up spending our spring break not in Panama City, not in Key West or Tijuana or Prague or even home with our dear, loving parents—no, no, that was how we, all of us, got roped into spending our spring break in Kay’s room slowly gluing together 4,000 popsicle sticks into tiny crosses. It was maybe the best spring break of our lives.
She had pushed her bed up against the wall and was sleeping at PJ’s so that there was more floor space in which to turn her bedroom into a factory. A tiny cross factory. And there we were, all sitting Indian style in a semi-circle around a miniature mountain of popsicle sticks. We called it Mt. Zion and laughed because it was ironic and irony is funny, we thought. We passed around the four glue guns we had between us and listened to Patti Smith on our stereo, dear sweet Patti Smith, as she screamed her fucking heart out 30 years ago, and we agreed with her when she sang “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Oh man did we ever agree with her because Patti dearest was on our side and we were on hers. She was against heavens and so were we.
We slowly dismantled Mt. Zion, whittling it down and passing it through our hands, through our hot glue, reforming and recombining it and casually turning it from a mountain in our center into a crater around our perimeter. The crosses piled up around the corners of the room and leaned upright against the walls as they dried, becoming what we could only imagine was a military graveyard dedicated to the sacrifices of patriotic gnomes in some tiny, forgotten woodland war. They were spilling out of plastic bags, crunching under our feet when we got up to go to the bathroom or to step outside for a cigarette. They were beautiful and Patti serenaded them with our confused rage.
Splinters were a problem and so was Craig, who would only show up half the time and then usually not sit in a circle with the rest of us. We agreed that his productivity was low and his attitude was worse. He pulled Kay away for private conversation in the hall which we could never hear, even though we paused Patti to try to hear better, paused her just as her band was coagulating into a cathartic climax of noise and words and ideas. This rankled PJ, whose face was healing quiet nicely by this point, but we couldn’t tell if he was disturbed by Craig or by our silencing of his music.
Here's the first part of it: A Protest against Heavens.
And that was how we, all of us, wound up spending our spring break not in Panama City, not in Key West or Tijuana or Prague or even home with our dear, loving parents—no, no, that was how we, all of us, got roped into spending our spring break in Kay’s room slowly gluing together 4,000 popsicle sticks into tiny crosses. It was maybe the best spring break of our lives.
She had pushed her bed up against the wall and was sleeping at PJ’s so that there was more floor space in which to turn her bedroom into a factory. A tiny cross factory. And there we were, all sitting Indian style in a semi-circle around a miniature mountain of popsicle sticks. We called it Mt. Zion and laughed because it was ironic and irony is funny, we thought. We passed around the four glue guns we had between us and listened to Patti Smith on our stereo, dear sweet Patti Smith, as she screamed her fucking heart out 30 years ago, and we agreed with her when she sang “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Oh man did we ever agree with her because Patti dearest was on our side and we were on hers. She was against heavens and so were we.
We slowly dismantled Mt. Zion, whittling it down and passing it through our hands, through our hot glue, reforming and recombining it and casually turning it from a mountain in our center into a crater around our perimeter. The crosses piled up around the corners of the room and leaned upright against the walls as they dried, becoming what we could only imagine was a military graveyard dedicated to the sacrifices of patriotic gnomes in some tiny, forgotten woodland war. They were spilling out of plastic bags, crunching under our feet when we got up to go to the bathroom or to step outside for a cigarette. They were beautiful and Patti serenaded them with our confused rage.
Splinters were a problem and so was Craig, who would only show up half the time and then usually not sit in a circle with the rest of us. We agreed that his productivity was low and his attitude was worse. He pulled Kay away for private conversation in the hall which we could never hear, even though we paused Patti to try to hear better, paused her just as her band was coagulating into a cathartic climax of noise and words and ideas. This rankled PJ, whose face was healing quiet nicely by this point, but we couldn’t tell if he was disturbed by Craig or by our silencing of his music.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
A Protest against Heavens
Started before Christmas but haven't made any progress since then. Hoping a blog post will encourage me to to work on it some more. Let's at least try to finish this before the Illinois primary election, shall we? VanBuren4Prez 08!
May I present ... something I'm working on:
We had plotted, planned and prepared for months and now, here beneath a brown-paper kind of sky, we had finally arranged it: a protest against heavens. All different kinds of heavens, big, little, tall or short, religious or secular, corporate, cloudy, Christian, corporeal or even childhood fantasy. It didn’t matter to us, we wanted to bring them all down, we wanted to see their fluttering and torn shards ground down into the dust and the dirt.
“Heavens,” we would say. “Heavens are making our life into a special kind of hell.”
But this didn’t seem to satisfy anyone, not them, not us, especially not the nuns. They would mutter and shake their heads, maybe walk away, maybe take a pamphlet but none of them ever really seemed to understand. None of them really seemed to get it. So we would try harder with the next one, and even harder with the next.
“We are not against religion or faith as such,” we would say. “We are not against moral codes or better ways of living. We are simply against the concept of Heaven, any heaven, all heavens. They have tied our eyes, and bound our hands for too long now. They have made our history into a wasteland of promises!” But again the same reaction, the head shake and the dirty mutter that drifted past us like dust up into the brown and empty air.
The whole thing had been Kay’s idea and she was the first one to admit that it wasn’t working.
“This isn’t working,” she said to Lauren, but everyone heard her and everyone agreed. The people were starting to be less confused and more angry, threatening us with bodily harm. One guy even threatened to prove to PJ that heaven really existed, by sending him there with his shotgun. Craig, tall and lanky and always with that evil smirk, stepped up behind PJ.
“PJ,” he whispered too loudly, keeping his deserted eyes focused on the guy just past PJ’s shoulder. “PJ, tell him that you won’t get to heaven no matter how hard he kills you. As a nonbeliever, it’s hell or nothing for you, buddy.”
PJ started to open to his mouth and we couldn’t tell if he was going to repeat what Craig had said to the guy, even though he obvious heard it already, or if he was going to tell Craig to shut the fuck up. Before a single word slid out between PJ’s teeth, the guy pulled back his fist and punched him right in the mouth. A dozen of us ran up screaming and yelling, holding the guy back and shielding PJ and feeling panicked, excited, good and self-righteous.
“You did it,” we told the guy as he struggled against our hands and arms as they wrapped around him and hauled him away. “You just proved our point. If it hadn’t been for heavens you wouldn’t be angry. If it hasn’t been for heavens you wouldn’t have tried to strike a stranger. If it weren’t for heavens we wouldn’t be hauling you away and stealing your wallet while you can’t do anything about it, sir.” We pulled into an alley and 10 of us beat the shit out of him and took his wallet.
They were only 14 bucks and a library card inside, which we used to get PJ some pain-relievers, an ice-pack and a copy of The Idiot’s Guide to Sex that he would never have to return.
So when Kay finally admitted that “This isn’t working,” we all agreed with her. She scheduled an immediate strategy session in her room early the next day. PJ’s lip was cut and swollen but he hadn’t lost any teeth.
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