Vanishing Cities

Jack Kerouac had it. Raymond Carver didn’t.
Vincent van Gogh had it. Piet Mondrian didn’t.
Miles Davis had it. Kenny G. didn’t.
Aretha Franklin has it. Michael Bolton doesn’t.
Iris Ortiz has it. And most of what I see getting published in the US these days doesn’t.
What Iris has in common with roughly half of the other artists I mentioned is duende. Federico Garcia Lorca took an entire essay to try to loosely define it. It isn’t easily translatable into English, but passion, soul, and angst (as the German’s applied it to art) are not too far off.
Keats, Shelley, Byron, and the Romantics in general were loaded with duende. But we now live in a time when aesthetic form is considered more important than artistic vision, when sentences are not supposed to be interesting, striking, or memorable; they’re supposed to be clean and competent and leave no aftertaste. More and more I read short stories in literary magazines that seem to me, not to be short stories at all, but long observations. Nothing happens. Emotions have been refined out of the sentences; we’re supposed to get our recommended allowance in a little package at the end. And in the end we’re often left with scenes of mundane dialogue and paragraphs of self-centered introspection. I often wonder what I was supposed to get out of the story and why, in this country, the bland has so thoroughly triumphed over the passionate, why form is so much more admirable than vision, why, when an avid reader of literary fiction is left confused, the story is considered a paragon of subtlety although it has had very, very little to say—even after it’s been studied and explained, even after we all GET it. *It* often turns out to be a trivial recognition.
Iris does not write long observations, she writes stories, stories rooted in characters. And she does it in her second language. In “Gazelle,” a mother runs screaming into her children’s bedroom and climbs out the window, fully prepared to leap to her death. In “Cousins Ablaze” a young woman burns herself into a town’s memory: In Iris’s words, “A ball of orange flashes across the horizon—radiant, like a sunset at noon. A trail of long hair followed the orange vision.” The young woman dies, self-immolated, but her hair miraculously survives—both in Iris’s story and in the history it was based on. In “Wash Day” we are taken through jungle to a river in Puerto Rico where the women do laundry and hurl themselves from dizzying heights into the water. In “What Kind of Mother,” a loving mother, overwhelmed by caring for three young children, one suffering from severe birth defects, smashes her daughter against a wall in a moment of rage and frustration. In another story, Iris tells us what an empty well might feel if it had feelings: cold, damp, a longing to be filled. Raymond Carver might have been able to come up with such a comparison, but he never would have admitted it in print.
I was in workshop with Iris three times in the last two years, and I have to admit, I miss her, her passionate stories, her duende.

I first read Black Tickets nearly 20 years ago and for me, as a young writer, stories such as “Gemcrack” bordered on revelatory. I don’t think I’d ever before encountered a style quite like the one I saw there—heightened prose but with considerably more polish than other practitioners of heightened prose—say Jack Kerouac or Henry Miller—had managed to pull off. I was not surprised to discover that Jayne Anne began as a poet since it was the language of Black Tickets that attracted me first and foremost
In addition to the exquisitely crafted sentences, Phillips performs a rare feat: She not only writes in several distinct styles, she has mastered them all. Most stylists—authors known for their lyrical power—have a single signature way of writing. Phillips, however, displays an impressive command of vernacular, heightened prose, naturalism, and maybe one or two varieties of writing that fall somewhere in between.
While I have new admiration for stories such as “Gemcrack,” I was nearly flattened by “El Paso.” The imagery, the lyricism tempered by vernacular, the rhythm—as palpable as handholds in a rock face—the dialogue, and the vortical ending (forgive the neologism, but I can’t think of anything else that fits) fuse seamlessly. Here’s an exemplary sentence: “The light rolling now, leaked into the dark, ripples the skin of the dark and flies fly up in loose knots; low slow buzz in corners yellowed and pulled out by the light that rolls across the surfaces of things in yellow blocks.” The reader sees the light as almost solid, the dark filling corners, sees the knotty flight patterns of flies, hears their lethargic buzz, and consequently feels the dusty melancholy and intimated squalor of this room.
Perhaps the most stunning verbal performance in “El Paso” belongs to Rita, who says “Them stars are just holes in the sky after all. And while I’m sleeping in that hot bed, everything I ever thought of having falls into em.” In two sentences we experience most of the despair that so often accompanies existence, a despair that Hemingway, with the sharpness of an unexpected blow, staggered us with in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Another admirable aspect of this sentence is the way it inverts the trite use of stars as symbols of beauty, so that we have a visceral experience of the futility that is like a bed of ash Rita has slept on her whole life. A brief confessional from Rita’s boyfriend, Dude, is also illuminating: “By noon those days I was a walking fever … and since I first saw her I come into the heat the place the heat like a bitch dog and lived with it.” As in Rita’s quote, the off grammar makes the writing more specific (to both to character and place), more intimate, less bookish, more real. The deliberate omission of commas makes Dude’s words more urgent and brings the reader closer to Dude’s inner turmoil—we’re just about in his guts. The repetition of “heat” works toward the same effect but also marks the metamorphosis from weatherly heat to body heat—all buildup for Dude’s declaration of resignation: “and [I] lived with it.” The lines in this story, in their compactness, in the way their small openings admit the reader to much larger interiors, in their vividness, tend to have more in common with poetry, which heightens the dramatic intensity of the story.
Like Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle, Black Tickets was a classic the same year it was published, a book that in and of itself is certain to guarantee Phillips’s place as one America’s most distinguished writers.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out – “anything that flies on anything that moves” – a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

See the rest of the article here: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9963-focus-hegemony-and-its-dilemmas-part-1

I was surprised at how caustic and downright hostile Henry David was toward the pyramids (and the pharaohs). Here’s what he has to say in WALDEN: “As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

For once, I can’t agree with him though the pyramids may be the greatest monuments in history to the wealth gap.

Plato’s Gospel
by Vincent Czyz

“I become holy by initiation. The Lord [Jesus] reveals the Mysteries. He marks the worshipper with His seal …” —Clement of Alexandria, from The Protreptikos (Exhortation to the Greeks), ca 190 AD.

Here in America, Darwin is on the ropes again. After winning round after round since the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925, he’s facing thoroughly revived opponents—adversaries who are taking fewer standing eight-counts and getting in a few licks of their own. In 2005, for example, 11 parents in Dover, PA who resented having their children taught Creationism (repackaged as “intelligent design”), brought suit against the school board in what has been touted as a second Monkey Trial. Dr. Ken Miller, a professor at Brown University and the author of the biology book that agreed with evolution—the book that the parents wanted their children to use—stated on the witness stand that he believes God created the universe. Considering that Dr. Miller was a witness for the plaintiffs, it’s a small miracle they won.

A survey conducted in 2006 by political scientist Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University showed that only 14 percent of American adults consider evolution “definitely true” while roughly a third believe it to be “absolutely false.” Out of a sampler of 34 countries, only Turkey was less accepting of Darwin’s theories, while in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, and France, better than 80 percent of the adults questioned sided with Darwin. Perhaps more disquieting is the fact that 20 years ago about seven percent of U.S. adults were uncertain about evolution; that number has since tripled.

The uniquely American aspect to this resurgence of religious fundamentalism is reiterated by a chart showing the relationship of wealth to religious belief republished in the June 2, 2010 opinion section of by the New York Times (“Why Is America Religious?”), which demonstrates that the “the wealthier a country is, the less important religion is to that country. The one exception: The United States.” As USA Today pointed out (June 3, 2004), the “religion gap” is the “leading edge of the ‘culture war’ that has polarized American politics, reshaped the coalitions that make up the Democratic and Republican parties and influenced the appeals their presidential candidates are making.”

A somewhat medieval mentality, it seems, still holds significant sway in the world’s most powerful nation. If ‘medieval’ seems too close to hyperbole, recall Pat Robertson’s remark about Haiti and its “pact with the Devil” in the wake of the earthquake that hit the island. If you’re inclined to dismiss Robertson as a marginal political player, consider Ronald Reagan, who openly wondered whether Armageddon—in the form of a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union—was going to occur on his watch. Or take the Bush White House, which in 2003 had to deny claims trumpeted by a BBC television program that Bush bragged to Palestine’s President Abbas, “God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did …” When it comes to credibility, Abbas and the BBC are probably safer bets. We are dealing after all with a man who, in his nationally televised debate with John Kerry, said, “I pray over my decisions,” including the one to invade Iraq. Reagan and Bush (a millennialist more by implication than admission) are not alone. According to the 2008 documentary “Waiting for Armageddon,” 20 million Americans believe we are now living in the End Times. Among these End Timers is Sarah Palin, the Republican front-runner for 2010.

And let’s not forget the Left Behind series, 16 volumes of pulp fiction about the Rapture authored by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. The books have sold some 70 million copies; at one time roughly one in eight Americans was reading them. “Scholars reconstructing the popular history of the first years of the 21st century … will have to grapple with the phenomenon of Left Behind,” writes David Gates in the May 24, 2004 issue of Newsweek. It should come as no surprise that, as Gates reports, “many critics of the series see a resonance between its apocalyptic scenario and the born-again President Bush’s apocalyptic rhetoric and confrontational Mideast policies.”

It was in this atmosphere of religious recidivism that I began writing The Christ Mosaic, a novel based on the suspicion among a number of religion scholars that the Christ of the Gospels is not a historical figure. I don’t remotely propose to prove that in the space of this essay; rather, I’d like to present what I hope is persuasive evidence that the Gospels are quite clearly a species of fiction—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Moreover, the author of Mark, at least, never intended his work to be understood by educated readers as literally true.

There are plenty of enigmatic passages in the Bible, but three in particular lend themselves to unraveling ulterior motives written into the Scriptures: Why is a blind man healed outside of Jericho named after one of Plato’s most famous dialogues? Why does Jesus send a multitude of demons into a herd of 2,000 pigs? And why are the first words of another blind man healed by Jesus, “I see men like trees, walking”? If these questions are answered objectively and plausibly, it becomes clear that Mark is both more and less than a faithful recording of events as they happened.

Any attempt to answer these questions, however, brings us to our first obstacle, and it’s nearly insurmountable: We in the 21st century really can’t imagine the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean) of the first century AD. The vast majority of us today don’t speak Aramaic (the supposed language of Jesus) or ancient Hebrew; we haven’t read the Gospels in the Koine Greek in which they were written. Moreover, most of us have no concept whatsoever of the religious milieu in which the Gospel writers lived, and even scholars can reconstruct it only vaguely for us. In short we’ve lost the calibrations on our compass.

So before getting to our questions, we need an impression of the ancient Levant’s spiritual mindset … a brief biography of the Greco-Egyptian God Serapis is a good place to start. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, Alexander’s generals divided up his empire; Ptolemy got Egypt and took Alexandria as his capital. Faced with ruling an Egyptian population and a large number of transplanted Greeks, Ptolemy needed a way to unite his subjects. Settling on worship as the most effective way to get everyone pulling in the same direction, Ptolemy created a composite god: Serapis. Serapis was the husband of the Egyptian goddess Isis, just as the Egyptian god Osiris had been. And Serapis’s animal was the divine bull, Apis—as was Osiris’s. (The name Serapis is a fusion of Osiris-Apis.) Whenever Serapis was depicted, however, the likeness was of a bearded, curly-haired Greek. Like Zeus, Serapis was the ruler of the gods, and like Dionysos, he was a fertility god.

Ptolemy’s god was created purely out of political expediency (although as we will see, the religion Serapis presided over was not). Today, except in the case of a very small, fringe cult, this would be unthinkable—you just don’t go around mixing and matching gods. In the first-century Levant and in centuries previous, however, it was not only acceptable, it was routine. The Mystery religions, of which the cult of Serapis was one, were classic examples of this sort of syncretism. In Asia Minor the Greek goddess Artemis was grafted onto the cult of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele and stood at the center of the Ephesian Mysteries. The Pythagorean Mysteries took the Mysteries of Osiris and replaced the Egyptian god with a Greek one—Dionysos, who evolved into Dionysos Zagreus, the divine figure worshipped in numerous Mystery cults. His dual name reflected that fact he was also a composite of two gods, but the minor figure of Zagreus (who is slain and resurrected) was almost completely assimilated by the more prominent god.

This syncretism worked on a local level as well; a city-state often chose a god who already had a strong following to head up their Mysteries. The Eleusian Mysteries near Athens, for example, venerated Demeter and her daughter Kore (also known as Persephone, who was the mother of Zagreus). Using a familiar god as the front man—or woman—was a simple but effective way of gaining converts to an alien religion or to a newly created one. (We can see a vestige of this practice in car interiors: the plastic Jesus sometimes glued to the dash often has blond hair, fair skin, and blue eyes, which, had Jesus lived, is hardly likely.)

Ptolemy’s strategy worked brilliantly. Serapis became enormously popular, and the cult spread well beyond Egypt; the Serapeum in Alexandria, destroyed by fanatical Christians in 385 AD, is thought to have been one of the finest edifices of the ancient world.

It’s interesting to note that when Christianity first took hold in Egypt, early church members venerated Serapis and Jesus equally.[1] Once again, we need to bear in mind that syncretism was the way of the ancient world, and practices unimaginable today were common enough when Christianity was in its infancy.

So far the Mysteries have merely been mentioned, but we really can’t begin to understand the ancient Levant without at least a basic understanding of these Cults. Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, dug up the oldest of Christianity’s roots—the worship of a god who dies only to be resurrected—and followed it to its elemental source: the cyclical death and rebirth of plant life. It is as simple as it is ingenious: the turning of the seasons. Drawing upon examples from hundreds of cultures and peoples as divergent as African huntsmen and German peasants, Native Americans and Welsh farmers, Frazer proved fairly conclusively that a broad range of religions all reflected the death of the Earth in fall and winter and its rebirth in spring.

The Mysteries are the clearest embodiment of this truth. The high priest was the hierophant (“one who reveals sacred things”). “Secrecy,” according to Walter Burkert in Greek Religion, “was radical” and an essential element.[2] An initiate into the cults was called a mystes. The root, tied to the Greek verb myein, means to close or to shut. It’s often conjectured this is because initiates had to keep their mouths closed about the ceremonies, but they hadn’t participated in the central ceremonies yet. Perhaps a more likely explanation for “shut” to be at the root of mystes is that before a mystes become an epopt (a witness), their eyes were closed—spiritually speaking. Because of the secrecy clause, a great deal of information about the exact nature and practices of the Mysteries has been lost, but Burkert identifies an agrarian aspect as among the most important. Not surprisingly, Demeter (goddess of grain) and Dionysus (god of wine and fertility) were two of the most important Mystery deities.

Another key element, Burkert notes, “is the aspect of myth: mysteries are accompanied by tales—some of which may be secret hieroi logoi—mostly telling of suffering gods.” Joseph Campbell agrees: “[T]he principle of divine life is symbolized as a divine individual (Dumuzi-Adonis-Attis-Dionysos-Christ) …”[3] Life, in the form of the god, will suffer, die, and be reborn.

We also know that the initiation rites, purification ceremonies, and processions culminated in a final drama, the purpose of which was to bring the initiate face to face with God. Aristotle, drily detached as ever, puts it this way, “It is not necessary for the initiated to learn anything, but to receive impressions and to be put in a certain frame of mind.” Plato was well acquainted with the Mysteries but, respecting their vow of silence, made comparisons to them rather than writing about them directly: “[W]e philosophers followed in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed …”[4] Here, raising philosophy to the status of a divine experience, he likens it to initiation into the Mysteries.

Christianity’s connection to the Mysteries, honestly, is no longer much of a mystery. Campbell, for example, citing the work of Jane Harrison, doesn’t even bother to argue the issue—it’s too obvious. He points out that “numerous elements” included in the heritage of “the mysteries of Demeter and the Orphics … were passed on to Christianity—most obviously in the myths and rites of the Virgin and the Mass.”[5] (You may have noticed that Campbell included Christ in his list of Mysteries deities cited above).

The great Roman orator Cicero, who died in 43 BC, actually criticized Mystery celebrants for taking their rites too literally: “Is anybody so mad,” he wrote, “as to believe that the food he eats is actually a god?”[6] I mention Cicero not to detract from belief in the Eucharist, but to point out that well before Christ was born, a nearly identical rite had already been firmly established. The fact is, Cicero was no enemy of the Mysteries; far from it. But he believed in a symbolic interpretation of the rites, not a literal one. In De Legibus, (II, xiv, 36), he has nothing but praise for the Greek Mysteries, saying that through them “We have gained the understanding not only to live happily but also to die with better hope.”

To continue reading, go to http://logosjournal.com/2011/summer_czyz/