The Tears of Things

The Friend

The Twin, 2003. Acrylic and pen on Arches paper with collage.

I always called him Jesus. He always called me Sonny.
--Robert Duvall, The Apostle

by Jerome du Bois

The recent news about The Gospel of Judas sent some internet searchers to a piece I posted on Christmas Eve, 2004, The Gospel of Judas Thomas The Twin Of Jesus of Nazareth, about the artwork above. This painting is a palimpsest of a concrete poem I composed years ago, and which I finally published here.

Both artworks reflect the belief that whatever Jesus was, we can be too. He told us so. He showed us so. The Kingdom of God is within you. But I call this Kingdom, Humankind. Each and every living one. Everybody counts or nobody counts.

As for the truly evil people among us, they also count, in the sense they shall be called to account by the good people. I say they're beyond redemption. But for the rest of us --we imperfect, broken vessels, many times mistaken, sometimes unintentionally cruel-- for us, the Torah says that redemption was established before the foundation of the world.

Whether God presides over us or not, we still have to save each other, I say. Jesus of Nazareth made the greatest attempt to show us how; but back then people were even more power-hungry, envious, jealous and cruel than they are these days, so they killed him in the most protracted and painful way yet invented.

The rest is history, with his passage running through it like a red-gold thread woven of his blood and soul. When they divided up his bloody robe at the foot of the cross, it was a metaphor for the different factions piecing off the action from the crucifixion. They've simply been using him, in myriad ways, since he died. The Gospel of Judas is a prime example of such primitive spin. No way would the Jesus I know say to any listener, "Only to you do I impart this secret knowledge." Crap. He was mystifying all right --but he mystified in public. As for the eventually dominant denominations --when they tried to turn him into God they ruined him. I know from my own experiences that as long as I accepted Jesus as Christ, I lived in a world of pressure and pain, which eventually sheared into schism. Christ occluded Jesus. I couldn't see him at all clearly.

Now, everything I say here is formally heretical, and none of what I say here is original. How could it be? Jesus is probably the most thought-about human in history, and reductions of his extravagant personality have been adopted and adapted, corrupted and exapted, by thousands of agenda-driven congregations down the years. Plus millions of unchurched individuals carry their own personal Jesus around inside their heads --and naturally, and just as importantly, their hearts as well. Again, I'm no different here. I left the Christian churches behind when I realized that too many self-important people were only getting in the way of my ongoing wrestling with this human angel.

Today Jesus rides into Jerusalem to his death for about the 1,973rd time. So I thought I would pay my respects to a person I never met, but whom I've alternately loved and hated, cursed and embraced, and certainly studied on, for almost twenty-seven years. What is he to me now? Among other things, he is a constant reminder of how cruel humans can be to one another. (Every time I look over, I see the holes in his wrists.) But better than that --look at the title of this posting. This invisible man taught me a lot, some of which I will share after the jump. But not as an essay. More like a pastiche --including reflections, quotations, sudden asides, aphorisms, even song lyrics-- as thoughts occur to friends in conversation on the road. Come on along with us if you're interested.

* * *
According to Harold Bloom, I am a member of the American Religion. If so, I'm on the fringe, though I can agree with the core of the excerpt below. From his book of the same name:

One of the grand myths of the American Religion is the restoration of the Primitive Church, which probably never existed. The Southern Baptists in some sense take as their paradigm an interval about which the New Testament tells us almost nothing, the forty days the Disciples went about in the company of Jesus after his resurrection. I think that not only Baptists but all adherents of the American Religion, whatever their denomination, quest for that condition. When they speak, sing, pray about walking with Jesus, they mean neither the man on the road to eventual crucifixtion nor the ascended God, but rather the Jesus who walked and lived with his Disciples again for forty days and forty nights. . . . The largest heresy among all those that constitute the American Religion is this most implicit and profoundly poetic of all heresies: the American walks alone with Jesus in a perpetually expanded interval founded upon the forty days' sojourn of the risen Son of Man.

Walking on the same common ground, side by side. Not one bowing down before the other. Breaking bread at the same table, and relating each other's lives.

* * *
When I first left the faith, I used to say to myself that if anybody asked where I put Jesus in my life, I would imagine him taking a prominent place on my Mental Moral Board of Directors. That sounds so cold to me now. But then, I was very angry at him for a long time.

* * *
I'm a Darwinian of the Dennett school --no god made us, The AllGoRhythm did-- but I consider atheists arrogant. "Brights," too. Who says they get to settle the issue? I'm more sympathetic to Tiplerians (the Omega Point Theory and the Singularity). There is a spiritual world, whose lineaments we still barely see. Energy cannot be destroyed. (Jesus is on that Mainline. Tell him what you want. Why don't you call him up and tell him what you want?) I believe the dead have been evolving right along with the living. This strange belief in no way interferes with my reason. That's the strength of the human mind, with its capacity for endless and obsessive reflection, and its ability to deal out of an infinite deck of alternatives and imaginary scenarios, with reason as the arbiter, like a master juggler --or the ultimate slingshot, I think Dennett called this development.

I've read every book Dennett has written, and many of his journal articles. He is my intellectual hero. But when I was reading his new book, Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon, I had to keep looking at the title page to see if this was really written by the same man. It was awkward and kludgy and embarrassingly dismissive, and pocked with hurried conclusions based on a few sloppy interviews. Ye gods! I says to myself, he done dropped his spanner; it looks like the Great Engineer has finally found a subject to confound him. And ironically enough, it turns out to be religion.

That oughta tell ya somethin.

* * *
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High.
--Psalms 82:6.

* * *
John Hiatt:

I will try, and I will stumble,
But I will fly, He told me so.
Proud and high or low and humble,
Many miles before I go.
Many miles before I go.

And again:

Like babes we come whining
For some forgotten sin
Surprised to be shining
Just like diamonds in the wind

Every facet so perfect
And every cut the proper size
When we find ourselves staring in God's golden eyes
We find ourselves staring in God's golden eyes.

* * *
Talk about being ahead of your time. Maybe he came too soon, but maybe they needed to see such a vivid contrast to their own barbaric behavior --and thank God he did. (Maybe he saw the future shadow of Muhammad, and came to thwart him in advance.)

* * *
A pop note: Returned alien abductees as examples of mini-resurrections. I don't mean to be crass, and I'm not being facetious. Right now I'll assume they are merely fantastic. From what little I know, some abductees have wonderful experiences; but most of them suffer terrible tortures and suffering. Why would they bear these crosses and immerse themselves in these vivid nightmares? To me they represent a quietly desperate hope of playing a part in breaking the chain of evil by becoming scapegoats, sharpened by an American challenge: if He can work that divine loop, why can't I?

* * *
It just hit me that perhaps The Passion of the Christ --that one long bloody sustained note-- was Mel Gibson's churlish attempt to outdo and overshadow Martin Scorsese's far more subtle and heretical The Last Temptation of Christ. I will never see Gibson's movie, but I soaked up enough from the media blitz to get the general idea. I think the main story begins in Gesthemane. That means that, for the purpose of the story, Jesus just follows the prewritten script; he needs no personality, no evolving awareness, no series of conflicts and obstacles to overcome. That's over. C'est la denoument. Nothing is required of him but sheer endurance and total obedience. He's completed his mission and he's on the track to his inevitable doom. There are over six billion people living in the world right now, and apparently Mel Gibson made sure Jesus took at least one hit for each one. In this movie Jesus is just the perfected pharmakos, the sacrificial lamb, staked-out and moving down the bloody rail to the shredder. A golden robot and soon-to-be celestial cliché. A holy zero. C'est la vie, c'est la morte.

Now, with all this religion talk this week, I decided to re-view Last Temptation. What a difference --even though it contains some similarly gruesome scenes as Gibson's movie. The movie begins with Jesus being clawed at by the Holy Spirit and saying when it's over: "God loves me. I know He loves me. I want Him to stop." In the next scene we see him making singletrees for crucifixes for the Romans. He's the only carpenter in Nazareth who will. He carries one to the execution ground while wearing his nail belt; then he helpfully holds the piece of wood steady as the Roman soldier drives a big spike through it and some poor Zealot's feet. Blood spurts into his eye. "I want to crucify all His Messiahs," Jesus tells us in voiceover. Clearly, the Chosen One has a long road of learning who he is ahead of him, and the movie shows him confronting, time after time, what tradition calls temptations, but many of these were just the complications delivered by life and other people's egos and ambitions. Like ol' Mel.

Who wants to hang out with Superman, anyway? Much less follow him?

* * *
If You Pray, Pray Standing.

* * *
Some notes about that concrete poem, The Gospel of Thomas. Formally it's merely permutation, elementary and mechanical. But permutation is a garden of serendipity, as here. In retrospect a no-brainer, and maybe ten million people have already noticed what happens when you start with IJESUS and run the I through the algorithm. But maybe not.

Anyway, it really began when I read that I and J used to be the same letter. That got my brain buzzing. I wrote them down. Then I thought of ways of tangling JEROME and JESUS with the I. Nah. Too complicated. Simplify, reduce . . . Fiddle, fiddle . . . aha! Voila.

Notice on the left --Lift The Stone-- the words rise along with the letter J repeating itself until --voila-- at the top, the I --in a complementary color-- revealed.

Now follow the red I as it splits the other word, moving through time and space like a believer exploring who this other person is, and what they --the US on the right-- the relationship itself-- ought to be. Sometimes that relationship is institutional, in buildings of wood and stone. At the end, at bottom, the I splits the US as soon as they reach the same level. You love Jesus, but you are not completely defined by him. In fact just the opposite. In this last line--Je suis-- I am-- you, having brought him back down from cross and crown and Heaven, completely absorb and redefine him. Even his name is gone --but only because he is inside you. Eucharist.

* * *
Roseanne Cash, from "The Wheel:"

Take up the hearts you came to heal,
Put down your dagger and your shield;
You need hide nothing now from me.
I see the essence of the man.
I stand before you as a friend.
The truth moves through us, even as we sleep.

* * *
Some notes on the painting.

Why The Twin for a title? The best answer: as the journey progresses, and the conversation flows, and mutual knowledge and affection blossom, the two become one, the I and J fuse again, but with the I becoming fully enfleshed. I Am. The only trace of the J is the color green, the color of life.

Another, much darker interpretation I bring up only in light of the ridiculous DaVinci Code juggernaut, and its attendant conspiracies. Again, it's simplicity itself, although horrible: Judas Thomas, not Jesus, was the one hanging on Golgotha. Three days later, Jesus comes out of hiding in his cave. Not my Jesus. He'd condemn, and probably kick the ass of, anybody who would propose such a disgusting deceit. I thought of it, of course, while composing the piece; but I refuse to acknowledge it, and condemn it as well.

Instead, look in the mirror: My God --It's Me.

Now look at the overall painting. The neat double-rank of I-forms, like pillars, simultaneously stand tall, march and oscillate, and better embody the notion of the self moving through the time and space of the Jesus/Christian experience than the concrete poem does. And the two I-forms which merge completely appear at the beginning --a fresh green shoot-- and just before the end of this passage, when the believer, an integrated personality, finally believes in himself --and part of himself is thanks to his sojourn with Jesus.

* * *
Bloom again:

Awareness, centered on the self, is faith for the American Religion. Emerson, writing in his journal in 1831, gave his nation one of its prime statements of its spiritual predilictions:

Remember, then, were not the words that made your blood run cold, that brought the blood to your cheeks, that made you tremble or delighted you --did they not sound to you as old as yourself? Was it not truth that you knew before, or do you ever expect to be moved from the pulpit or from man by anything but plain truth? Never. It is God in you that responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of another.

My Jesus didn't utter everything attributed to him, I say. Or I could say that I won't put certain words into his mouth. As I wrote above, we all --I admit it, anyway-- must reduce this extravagant and overwhelming personality, and not be intimidated by all the baggage around him. But I do listen for his voice in the world.

The voice of my wise, long-suffering friend, no longer a man of sorrow, but still acquainted with grief, and on intimate terms with the tears of things.

Posted by Jerome at April 9, 2006 01:00 AM | TrackBack