The Last Twentieth Century Book Club &#8212; The Revealer

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

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Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post The Making of a Moonie appeared first on The Revealer.

The Second To Last Twentieth Century Book Club

kh1242 — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 11:25:09 +0000

By Don Jolly

It’s just a short walk from the campus of Baylor University to the Waco Hilton, but in Texas, in the summer, even ten minutes in the sun can leave you with a sweat-soaked shirt. When the white bearded man offered me a ride, I took it.

The Last Twentieth Century Book Club: Guide to Survival

This was last summer, and I was away from New York to give a paper on Marty Rathbun, Scientology’s Martin Luther, at CESNUR – the annual conference given by the Center for Studies on New Religions and the International Society for the Study of New Religions. The attendees were, as per usual, an eclectic mix of scholars, adherents of new religions and miscellaneous eccentrics. The man with the white beard who offered me a lift fell solidly into the third category. He’d been wandering from session to session all morning, passing out photocopied leaflets containing the “truth” about the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. He wasn’t a typical Moonie –nor was he an anti-cult crusader. As his rental S.U.V. swung beneath Interstate Highway 35, he explained his mission.

Moon’s Unification Church was, he said, in trouble. Its present leadership was spiritually dangerous — and it was all Korea’s fault.

Koreans, he continued, were uniquely unsuited for leadership. In the literature he handed me, page after page of tight-packed printing explained that members of the Church must abandoned the hierarchical “LEADER-CENTERED UC/UM” (the “UM” standing for “Unification Movement”) and “DEMAND and FACILITATE the creation of a 100%-MEMBER-CENTERED UC/UM[.]” In other words, he was another Luther – or at least another Lutheran. The theses he handed me concluded with a two-page coda about how Korean men have the smallest penises in the world.

“I remember an American brother who worked with me at the News World newspaper in the late 1970s,” he wrote, proving he was with the Unification Church during its moneyed heyday at the close of the last century, when their holdings in publication and real estate were fast expanding. This colleague, the pamphlet said, “strongly suspected his Korean wife was having a lesbian sex, since she’d inexplicably, essentially abandoned him, supposedly to do ‘UC-work’ in Korea.” Lesbianism was common in Korean women, the text said, because Korean men could offer only meager sexual satisfaction. “The desperate Korean reality is that they can get blessed relief from scissoring that’s woefully absent from their matrimonial duty of pygmy-penile coitus,” it concluded.

When we arrived at the hotel, I thanked my new companion for the lift, and asked him for a card – some way to contact him. He explained that he was under constant surveillance, and laid out a complicated scheme for getting in touch that I have since forgotten. I liked the guy, and admired his willingness to disparage an entire nation’s genitals in service of his cause. We shook hands, and I went inside to get cleaned up before the barbeque reception scheduled for that evening. When I got out of the shower, my column on Salem Kirban’s Guide to Survival was live on the Revealer website.

I’ve been writing The Last Twentieth Century Book Club for two years. Starting in September, I’ll be writing something else. For its readers, I suppose, the Club must read like a series of enthusiastic book reports. I hope that, without having said it outright, it’s clear that the books and records and videos covered by this column aren’t just a matter of scholarly interest for me. I love them all and, like every great affection, it’s gotten me in trouble.

Many of these columns have been written on the road. Almost all of them (this one included) have assumed their final shape far past the deadline set by my indefatigable editor, Kali Handelman. For this penultimate entry, she has agreed to let me ruminate on the last few years as I have seen them.

The Last Twentieth Century Book Club: Speak Out!

I wrote my first piece on Salem Kirban in the lobby of the Waco Hilton, waiting for my room to become available. The second one, I hacked together in a rental car, driving from LosAngeles to San Diego, with a stopover for serious revisions in San Clemente. I was travelling with my brother Max, taking in the religious sights of the American West: Cliven Bundy’s embattled Nevada ranch, the abandoned pleasure grounds outside Las Vegas where Barack Obama prepped for his televised debates against Mitt Romney, the supposed grave of Billy the Kid and, of course, the Yorba Linda Water District. My interviews with Kirban’s children were conducted in a heroin hotel in Hollywood, an unairconditioned box where Max lay, sweating, trying to avoid the junky who’d passed out on the stairs outside our door.

I remember sitting on the edge of the bed in that room, with the window open, watching the sun go down across a tangled sprawl of roofs and palm trees. There, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder, I met Dawn Frick – one of Kirban’s daughters. She lives north of Spokane.

Her father was a kind of popular prophet, a novelist and pamphleteer of the rapture. In the early 1970s, his novel, 666 was something of a bestseller within the Christian marketplace. Later rapture novels, notably the Left Behind series, owe a lot to him. As the sun sank lower and lower, I asked Dawn about her father’s theology, and about the various ways he marketed and sold his books. I asked her about her childhood fear of the coming rapture, and the reign of the Anti-Christ, and she answered capably. But she told me more than that – more than I’ve printed.

Salem Kirban’s childhood had a lonely streak, she told me. His father died when the boy was two. As a result, Kirban spent some time at a “home for fatherless boys” before heading off to boarding school. Throughout, however, he remained close to his mother. “He was her little boy,” Dawn told me. “She used to sing to him: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”

This instilled a fierce love of family in the young author. Later, that same love would propel him to Vietnam at the height of its midcentury conflict and, ultimately, convince him that the end of time was fast approaching. By that impulse he would win his fame. But the way Dawn put it still sticks with me. I hear it every time I hear the tune.

By the time I was finished with my interview, the streetlights were humming and the sky above Los Angeles was a starless black. Max took the single bed, while I stretched out on the floor. The junky on the stairs was snoring. The day’s incidents began to fade, as I eyeballed the speckled ceiling. Like cold water, my own loneliness seeped in.

The Last Twentieth Century Book Club: Orson Welles’ The Life of Christ

The next day, Max and I went South, and I tried to write something comprehensible about the end of the world, Salem Kirban and the melancholy of an old folk song. I wasn’t sure if I was saving something beautiful or destroying it. Thankfully, however, I was also far enough past deadline that there was little point in settling the matter. When it was done, I swam in the Pacific – and got sunburned so bad that I couldn’t lie down comfortably for a week.

For scholars, “religion” is by and large a term of art. It can refer to certain definitive rituals and group affiliations, of course – but at its edge, in religion’s generative spaces, the category becomes hopelessly tangled with the private impulses and eccentricities of genius. Kirban ended up clipping prophetic items from newspapers, making holy writ out of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Christian pop-star Carman imagined a world where secular success and evangelical righteousness were the same thing, to somewhat incoherent result. The works featured in the Book Club, I’ve come to realize, are often models of reality accepted (either fervently, unconsciously or both) by only a few. Sometimes these models simply become out of date: “Speak Out” is a curiosity, for instance, because its model of the “teenager” is no longer widely accepted by American culture at large. Sometimes, as in the case of Kirban and the white bearded man with the Korean penis obsession, the world they offer is simply too idiosyncratic to spread far. This literature has loneliness at its core.

I spent a few days last November in Bloomington, Indiana. There, paralyzed by the pain of broken tooth whose injury had hit the nerve, I dragged myself from my hotel room to the special collections department of Indiana University’s library to sift through the private correspondence of Orson Welles. I was trying to piece together all the information I could on a biography of Christ he never put to film, in preparation for last December’s column.

Welles died in the same year I was born. I knew him, then, from a few histories, a few books of interviews – and, of course, his films. The University’s collection of ephemera was something else entirely – it was life, in all its chaos, its important unimportance, or at least a record closer to it than any I had seen before. In those memos and notes and affectionate bills you could see money, and boredom, and family and work all wound together and sloppily compiled. From that, I produced my summary. From the life of Welles emerged the story of Welles – from his notes on Christ, I constructed a conception of my own.

The Last Twentieth Century Book Club: Area 51: The Alien Interview

The whole twentieth century is now being streamlined and explained, its thorny patches smoothed to narrative. Most of the subjects of the Book Club, having achieved only modest success, are on the point of disappearing. There will be new Martin Luthers, and new Catholics too, as our great and terrible century invents itself. I realize that this is all within the accepted mechanism of history, of course. Still, to me, this course of life seems dreadfully sad. Very few people achieve the fame required for a Midwestern library to save their trash.

I spent my nights in Indiana watching the snow, and listening to Bob Lazar explain the method by which flying saucers fly. When I first got started as a writer, I figured I’d make my mark in science fiction. This was around 2003, I think – I was in high school, and most of my SF reading was confined to the years before I was born: Herbert, Edgar Pangborn, et cetera.

I wrote my first full-length story a few weeks after my fifteenth birthday. The plot, as I recall, concerned the crew of a rocket ship who discovered the rotten and impossibly dense body of God floating somewhere between Saturn and Neptune. I no longer know what the astronauts did with it, or how the corpse was described. I do remember that my stern and unflappable protagonists recognized the deity immediately, and with a certainty that seemed, to them, indistinguishable from madness. These spacemen were, like myself at the time, nominal and uncritical atheists, defined by their intense addiction to a slightly science fictionalized version of Internet porn. In the end, they were so unnerved by their unwelcome faith that they made a kamikaze run on God, sacrificing themselves and their rocket in an attempt to blow apart divinity. It was a real piece of shit, and I loved it.

With great ceremony, I packed the 12 typewritten pages of my story in a manila envelope and dispatched it to the Hoboken, New Jersey P.O. box belonging to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. About two weeks later, I received my first rejection letter. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a second science fiction story, about a tasteless and functionally illiterate magazine editor who I allowed to live for about three pages before cracking the Earth in half with an arbitrary comet. From there, my course was set. I was first published a year later, when one of my Dungeons & Dragons traps was printed in the back matter of an unpopular comic book.

The Last Twentieth Century Book Club: Carman Part 2

Last month, Penthouse magazine ran one of my stories, making me exactly as successful an author as Kilgore Trout, the Cigarette Smoking Man from the X-Files – and, in my head at least, most of the subjects I’ve discussed in The Last Twentieth Century Book Club.

I’m pretty sure I know what happens next.

But that doesn’t mean I’m particularly happy about it.

***

You can read earlier installments of The Last Twentieth Century Book Club here:

Our Glorious Brothers

Jazz Goes to Church

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post The Second To Last Twentieth Century Book Club appeared first on The Revealer.

Our Glorious Brothers

kh1242 — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 11:30:40 +0000

By Don Jolly

“You don’t fuck with Coca-Cola.”

— Unnamed American Serviceman

The woods were deep, the crowd was tense, and there would be no concert.

The Lakeland Acres picnic ground was located a few miles outside of Peekskill, New York. Tensions between the east coast leftists who spent their summers there and the town’s conservative locals had been simmering for years. In 1948, the picnic grounds had played host to a concert by the singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. Two kids from Peekskill had pelted the stage with apples, and were quickly ejected from the show. About a year later, in the August of 1949, Robeson had returned, along with folk singers Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the historical novelist Howard Fast. The would-be concert goers found themselves surrounded by a mob of small-town anti-communists, ostensibly a “patriotic parade” organized by Peekskill’s veterans association. The only trail leading in and out of Lakeland Acres was blocked by “about 300” protestors, Fast reported to the A.C.L.U., cutting off the majority of visitors from the stage. A “handful” – Howard Fast included – were trapped inside.

“There were twenty-five or thirty of us, I suppose,” he recalled in his 1991 autobiography, Being Red. “We ran up on the entrance, and as we appeared [the protesters] poured onto us from the road, at least a hundred of them with billies and brass knuckles and rocks and clenched fists.” The violence lasted for hours, with the concert-goers suffering most of the day’s injuries. In the chaos of the melee, Fast took command. “I had agreed to be chairman [of the concert],” he wrote, in his autobiography, “and it seemed that this was the kind of concert we would have, not with Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger singing their lovely tunes of America, but with a special music that had played its music out in Germany and Italy.” Chin music, in other words.

The confrontation lasted for hours. Books and chairs were burned. The police were dispatched. A wild concert usher, photographed just feet from Fast, sunk a knife into a young veteran on the protestor’s side. Soon after, Fast claimed that the stabbing was nothing but a frame-up – an attempt to discredit his virtuous side. In Being Red, he recalls the real tactic that stopped the men of Peekskill dead:

“We began to sing,” he wrote. “They saw a line of bloody, ragged men, standing with their arms locked, standing calmly and singing in a kind of inspired chorus, and they stopped. They couldn’t understand us.”

On September 11^th 1949, the communist newspaper The Daily Worker warned that Peekskill was proof of a “carefully organized effort to impose police state terrorism in the U.S.A.”

Fast agreed.

In the aftermath of the concert, signs were posted around the town: “Wake up America. Peekskill did!”

***

Accounts vary, of course. Our only memory of the event is a copy of a copy of a copy, a story transmitted by partisans and propagandists whose earliest accounts have long since vanished. By leaning the various interests against each other, however, a rough picture of the insurrection begins to emerge.

In the year 167 B.C.E., in ancient Judea, the Seleucid ruler of the land, Antiochus IV, decreed the religious tenants of then-contemporary Judaism illegal. In its place, he proposed an alternate system of observance. For years, Jewish life had been undergoing a process of Hellenization, adopting societal practices and social mores drawn from the culture of Greece and evangelized by Alexander the Great. These changes were either tolerated or embraced by the people of Judea, until that decisive year – 167.

Scholar Jonathan Goldstein has proposed that Antiochus’ denial of Torah may have been an attempt at social control modeled on the Roman suppression of Bacchanalia. Antiochus may have claimed that Biblical Judaism was an unnatural offshoot of a more agreeable theology – a protean, polytheistic cult with a significant military following.

Whatever the truth of his proposed reforms, the plan was a disaster. Important ritual observances were outlawed, holy writings burned. On December 6^th, according to Goldstein, the “abomination of desolation” was installed in the Temple at Jerusalem. This, he speculates, was “a framework containing three meteorites representing the three gods of the imposed cult.” Or it may have been a statue of Jupiter.

Around this time, a Jewish patriarch named Mattathias (who may or may not have been nicknamed “Maccabaeus”) whipped his family and other sympathetic Jews into open rebellion against the Seleucids. Using guerilla tactics (such as fighting on the Sabbath), Mattathias’ insurrection harried Judea’s rulers for years. In 165, Mattathias died, and leadership of his rebellion passed to his sons: Jonnan, Simon, Eleazer, Jonathan and Judas – whose surname was certainly “Maccabaeus.” It meant something roughly equivalent to “hammer.”

These brothers, the Hasmoneans, eventually won a degree of religious independence for Judea. For a short time, their family ruled as both priest and king.

Roughly fifty years later, a propagandistic account of the brothers’ rebellion and the establishment of their subsequent dynasty was composed to shore up the right of rulership possessed by the priest-king Alexander Jannaeus. It is this heroic, militaristic and pro-Hasmonean text which survives today as the apocryphal book of First Maccabees. By design, it casts Judas and his relatives in the best possible light – noting their skill in battle, their priestly background and, above all, their unshakeable piety. Whatever truth it contained failed to win security for the Hasmoneans. Rome conquered Judea, time passed. New messiahs came along.

Shortly after the composition of First Maccabees an alternate account was written, threaded through with miracles and predicated on a firm belief in the resurrection. It survives today as the book of Second Maccabees. In its rendering, Judas alone is treated as a figure of respect. His brothers are dismissed as untrustworthy or wicked.

There were other versions. The story survived.

***

Howard Fast released My Glorious Brothers, his thirteenth novel, in 1948. In it, he provided his own take on the story of the Maccabees. The revolt, Fast explained, was “the first modern struggle for freedom,” a conflict that “laid a pattern for [the] many movements that followed.” His book was well received.

“Whatever is good in the telling [of this story],” Fast explained, “I owe to the people who march through these pages, those wonderful people of old who, out of their religion, their way of life and their love for their land, forged that splendid maxim that resistance to tyranny is the truest obedience to God.”

In a letter to Daily Worker, quibbling with some points in their review of Brothers, Fast expanded on this point. “All who fought in freedom’s cause, since first man began, are our brothers,” he said. “All, whether they fought against slavery, serfdom or capitalism, lifted a brick for that eventual socialist structure which all of mankind will achieve.”

Howard Fast was, by the late 1940s, a highly visible and massively successful American writer. His books focused, for the most part, on dramatizing a liberalized version of American history. In 1943, he took this approach to one of his country’s founding fathers. Citizen Tom Paine remains one his most popular works – and one of his most reprinted. During the war, the state department even reprinted it in a number of foreign languages, distributing Fast’s novel as a propaganda tool.

In 1944, he tackled the narrative of an ex-slave named Gideon Jackson in Freedom Road. In 1947’s Clarkton, Fast described the various pressures at work in a labor strike (“To understand Clarkton is to understand the responsibility of the American dream,” said the dust jacket of its first edition). He was reviewed in Newsweek, the Atlantic, and the New York Times.

My Glorious Brothers earned more than his usual share of garlands. The book “outstrips anything Fast has ever done,” wrote Edmund Fuller, in the Saturday Review. “I have felt him to be guilty, usually, of oversimplification,” continued the critic. My Glorious Brothers, however, featured passages of real “complexity and penetration.”

Fast, in his autobiography, saw this reception as a political necessity. “To trash a novel about the Jewish struggle for freedom in 1948 was,” he wrote, “a little sticky.”

In less than a year, he would be in Peekskill.

***

It is no longer 1948. We can trash the book now.

My Glorious Brothers is a deeply credulous novel. From its central premise, equating the Maccabean revolt with Fast’s utopian ideals, the book proceeds to sketch a world divided between clear and definable absolutes of political morality. The Syrians and the Romans, in Fast’s conception, were slave societies, predicated on the bondage of the human spirit. His militant Jews, driven by a single, simple maxim (“once we were slaves in the land of Egypt”), represent the inverse – a classless society of infinite liberty, patience, and respect.

His Maccabees are, for the most part, idealized American revolutionaries equipped with smocks, sandals and pocket editions of the Communist Manifesto. In Brothers, the ambiguous title of “Maccabee” becomes a political designation, a Marxist modification of such Biblical “judges” as Samson and Samuel.

“There is only one Maccabee,” Fast wrote, in the voice of the Roman Legate Lentulus Silanus. Although this office is, in some respects, one of leadership and power, “the lowliest beggar can halt him, dispute with him and talk to him as an equal.” And why not? For Fast’s imagined Jews, God is so abstract a concept that readers come to understand it as less of a deity than an ideal of human liberation.

An early passage depicts Lentulus questioning Simon, the last surviving son of Mattathias, as to his peoples’ religious system:

“And is it true,” the Roman asked, “that in your Temple here on the hill, there is no God that a man can see?”

Simon answered in the affirmative. To the Roman, who Fast depicts as wholly concerned with the weight and measure of strength, this answer is beyond comprehension. He mistakes Simon’s intelligence for superiority. “What do you worship Simon Maccabeus, what do you respect?” he asks. “In all the world are there no other men of worth than the Jews?”

Simon’s answer is whispered. “All men are of worth,” he says. “Of equal worth.”

These brave pronouncements litter the novel, and again and again Fast depicts those who oppose them as too dense and evil to understand what they mean. The courage of his protagonists soon becomes a fraud – a papery approximation of idealism that never admits the reality of any view of things beyond itself. The human drama between Fast’s “glorious brothers” falls flat as well – collapsing into the kind of masculine voodoo and melodramatic Freudianism that Charlton Heston would have really sunk his teeth into had he been tapped for a film adaptation.

Fuller, in his Saturday Review notice, compliments Fast on his treatment of the origin of anti-Semitism – a historical evil that, the book implies, came about as a result of various oppressor classes’ inability to grasp the full-measure of Judaism’s commitment to liberty and the rights of men. It’s a complimentary idea – but nowhere near a legitimate theory of human behavior.

“So persistent and diabolical is this strange and flagrant Jewish democracy that one must look upon it as a disease from which no land is immune,” Lentulus concludes, in Brothers’ final section.

Alexander Jannaeus would be glad to hear it.

***

Fast was a Jew himself, although his family was never particularly observant. For him, the political was the ultimate expression of human life. My Glorious Brothers, then, freely substitutes the difficult zeal of its subjects with something that seemed more reasonable to Fast. Politics were, for him, a kind of religion – the ultimate arbiter determining a person’s relationship to humanity and each individual’s responsibilities to the universe at

Fast joined up, officially, with the Communist Party of the United States in 1943. He was living in New York, and the war was on. The whole town was painted red. Most of his comrades, however, drifted away from the party in less than a decade. Fast remained until 1956 – a decision that lead to his imprisonment for contempt of congress, forced him to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy and won him the Stalin Peace Prize for 1953.

“When, even for a moment, the tissue of lies and slander erected between this land of ours and the Soviet Union […] is brushed aside, we see […] a monumental force for the peace of mankind,” he said, in his acceptance speech. He amplified these comments in his first autobiographical book, The Naked God, published in 1957. To Fast, from 1943 to 1956, the Communist Party and the Soviet Union represented “an edifice dedicated singularly and irrevocably to the ending of all war, injustice, hunger and suffering – and to the goal of the brotherhood of man.” His commitment to the cause was beyond ardent – it was millennial.

Like his Maccabees, Fast seemed to exist in world where “good” and “right” were certainties. People either “understood” them, or they didn’t. To him, the whole world was either saved or doomed.

***

During the war, Fast was employed by the Office of War Information, or O.W.I.. Part of his job was scripting Voice of America broadcasts – multi-lingual propaganda transmissions intended for friendly ears across the lines. Fast “had something the no one else in America had,” he recalled, in Being Red. “A voice into that dark, sad land of occupied Europe, and each day as I tapped it out, my skin would prickle.”

“Even today, forty-eight years later, my eyes fill with tears at that wonderful line: This is the Voice of America,” he continued. “This is the voice of mankind’s hope and salvation, the voice of my wonderful, beautiful country, which will put an end to fascism and remake the world.”

Howard Fast may have been a communist for thirteen years, but he was an American for life. His literary output, from Citizen Tom Paine to the Immigrants series that defined his later years, sparkles with articulate patriotism. Before the end of the Second World War, it may be assumed, there were many American patriots who were communists as well – especially among the artistic and theatrical types staffing the O.W.I. Fast was just more vocal and intransigent than they were.

Fast’s rhetoric may be high-flown, but his actions were largely practical. In 1953, for instance, Fast was called to appear before a senate subcommittee investigating communist infiltration at the Voice of America. Face to jowl with Wisconsin’s honorable Joseph McCarthy, Fast found himself afflicted with an acute amnesia. He forgot practically everything – except the text of the Fifth Amendment.

“Did you do any work for the Voice of America, the VOA?” McCarthy asked at one point.

“You mean the OWI?” Fast inquired.

“No, the Voice of America, the VOA?”

“I can’t seem to remember any,” the author said.

***

In the 1950s, when his communism became scandalous, Fast found himself blacklisted from his usual publishing houses. The situation didn’t keep him out of the game for long. His most famous novel, Spartacus, was written in 1951 and, initially, self-published. Like My Glorious Brothers, it was a tale of ancient warfare preoccupied with the struggle between “freedom” and bondage. Unlike Brothers, it was made into a highly successful Kirk Douglas vehicle.

“Howard Fast is rich,” wrote Ken Gross in a profile for People Weekly in 1991. But “not filthy rich, like the plutocrats he has denounced in such left-leaning novels as Freedom Road and Spartacus,” he clarified. “[Fast] just has a portfolio of a million or two.”

“Government bonds,” the old author told him. “Not a penny in unearned wealth. Just the sweat of my own labor and some Treasury notes.” His ideal life, Fast continued, would have been spent “on the third floor of a tenement in a run-down neighborhood, surrounded by left-wing lunatics.” Sadly, his exit from the communist party – and his considerable financial success – made such a dream impossible. A life of affluence and minor celebrity was, he concluded, a “form of exile,” the pain of which was eased by the occasional visit from William F. Buckley Jr. They were neighbors.

My Glorious Brothers was, in many ways, the perfect successor to the ancient text that served as its model and inspiration. In it, Fast reconfigured some version of the past to fit a millennial model of the future – proposing a world where redemption can be won by the proper skirmishes in the proper order. His recollection of Peekskill is practically a sequel. And so it goes, on and on – violence becomes righteousness becomes history, then violence again.

Fast may have seen himself as a revolutionary, or an artist, or a public intellectual. But a significant portion of his output is propaganda, pure and unconscious – the writing of a man whose political commitments are deep, bold, and uncomplicated by nuance. America may never have a more honest voice.

An elderly woman, who saw him in action at the picnic ground that night in 1949, provides us with perhaps the clearest portrait of the author. “Don’t you go and say anything bad about Howard Fast,” she demanded. He’d been in thick of it – and he’d done more than sing. According to his witness:

“I saw him … with a Coke bottle in each hand, fighting back.”

***

You can read earlier installments of The Last Twentieth Century Book Club here:

Jazz Goes to Church

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Our Glorious Brothers appeared first on The Revealer.

Jazz Goes to Church

kh1242 — Tue, 26 May 2015 11:56:34 +0000

Interior from The Lutheran

By Don Jolly

They met in the late forties, in high school, in Pennsylvania. She sang, he played the flute. Jack Herrera and Bettie Jane Stotlemyer were married in 1952. He went into the Army that same year.

Little more than a decade later, at the height of Jack’s artistic fame, his biography became a minor point of interest for the press. “I play clarinet, sax, oboe, flute bassoon and string bass,” he told the Washington Post in 1966. “I was with dance bands and had by own combos up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest.

“I played carnivals and fairs, did club work all over and was in the orchestra pit at the Roxy in New York. Once I was a side man with Billy May.”

In the Army, Jack “was made an artillery officer,” the Post continued. He “went to Korea, where he was wounded.” Then, he was “transferred to the 89^th Army Band at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.” It was there, in 1954, that he and Bettie’s first daughter, Lynda, was born.

Last week, I spoke with their youngest, Pam Stilton, on the telephone. She lives in Virginia. “I remember we went down to the Korean War Memorial when it opened [in 1986],” she told me. “Have you seen the memorial?”

When I was a kid, my parents and I took a night tour of Washington D.C. The memorial was one of our stops, and I remember it. I remember bedraggled soldiers, cast in metal, walking across a lawn, looking anxiously at one another. Each was illuminated by a spotlight hidden in the grass, and either these lights were strong enough to kill the stars or it was overcast or just not paying attention. The sky was black.

It was raining, and I remember the drops of water sliding down the faces of the statues, shot-through with white and the brakelight red.

It must have been overcast.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s beautiful,” she continued. “It’s a troupe of soldiers with their garb on – rain jackets, helmets – and they’re looking at each other as they’re walking through a rice patty. As you walk through the memorial, you feel like you are part of a unit. It’s beautiful.

“So my father and I are walking through, and he says, ‘This really takes me back; I lost so many friends.’

“I reminded my father, ‘Dad, you never served in Korea.’

“In his mind he was completely convinced that he had seen – what do call it? –‘action’. All he did was play clarinet in the Army band.”

Jack couldn’t have been wounded, she explained. His postings were all musical. His unit wasn’t even the 89^th, as the Post had reported – it was the 49^th. “There was a little confusion on my father’s part,” said Pam.

“In the last five years of his life, he suffered from dementia… After leaving D.C. in the 60s, he went out to California and really embraced the whole bohemian lifestyle. He got immersed in the various movements, including drinking, group sex, couple swapping, and drugs,” Pam said. “It was at this time that he began to come up with a different history.”

***

In 1956, according to the Post, Herrera felt himself compelled. “I simply knew I should go into the ministry,” he told them. Jack attended the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg. It was there, in 1958, that Herrera performed his first worship service with the accompaniment of jazz.

“It was the first time the school had done anything like that,” he told The Washingtonian magazine, nine years later. “There were some dissenters, of course, but generally reaction was very good.”

Herrera’s experiment was only a small part of the nascent “sacred jazz” movement. For the next decade, many prominent jazz musicians produced music predicated on Christian themes, sometimes even performing it in churches. Churches, meanwhile, turned to jazz musicians for novelty – the music, many believed, had the potential to keep worship “current.”

“If the church is going to meet the needs of young people, it must recognize the fact that ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ is not a very real part of our contemporary society,” said Ed Summerlin, a talented clarinetist and saxophone player, in a statement on the matter to Downbeat magazine.

In 1959, while studying music at North Texas State College, Summerlin learned that his newborn daughter, Mary Jo, was suffering from a congenital heart defect. On the night she died, January 27^th, 1959, Summerlin met the Reverend Bill Slack Jr., of the First Methodist Church in Denton. They became fast friends. Slack suggested that Summerlin might put his grief to music, in the form of church service.

Summerlin’s jazz setting for John Wesley’s liturgy was premiered at the Perkins Chapel of Southern Methodist University in May of that same year. Ecclesia issued an L.P. version shortly thereafter. Downbeat gave it four and half stars.

***

In 1955, the Herrera family moved to Paradise, Pennsylvania, where Jack was given his first parish. They moved around over the next decade, ranging as far afield as Texas. At one point, Herrera had a parish in Battle Creek, Michigan. “They were there for several years and loved it,” Pam Stilton told me. “I have letters from members of the congregation, including several from the ladies groups, who loved him and my mother.

“He was the best shoulder to cry on; the best person to talk to about spiritual things… He gave incredible services,” she told me. At home, however, Jack was more distant. “My sister always said, ‘he was a father to everyone in the congregation but me.’”

“My mother took being a pastor’s wife very, very seriously,” Pam recalled. Jack took it seriously, too. He expected Bettie to maintain a certain tightness of appearance at all times. “She could only wear high-necked black, brown or navy-blue dresses,” said Stilton. “She had to act a certain way. If she didn’t, he’d become very angry.”

“At this point in his pastoral career, he was beginning to have affairs,” Pam continued. “Looking back, [my mother] said ‘I knew it, but I didn’t want to see it.’ People would pull her aside and say, ‘Bettie, this is what’s going on.’”

“You must remember that for women in any church – past, present or future,” Pam said, “screwing the pastor is the ultimate screw. You’re screwing somebody next to God.”

***

In July of 1966, the Herrera family moved to Washington, D.C., where Jack had been hired as an assistant pastor at Luther Place Memorial Church. Luther Place was a popular and progressive institution located in Thomas Circle, across the street from National City Christian Church, where President Johnson attended services.

A couple enters Luther Place (The Lutheran)

“Luther Place Church in Washington D.C., probably hasn’t changed much in appearance since it was built in 1873,” wrote the religious journalist William A. Harper in 1967, for The Lutheran magazine. “It has an almost medieval look, with its spires and steeples […] but its surroundings have changed a lot.” Massive apartment buildings were springing up on its surrounding blocks. Herrera, as “pastor for community missions,” was brought on to help evangelize to them – and to other aimless souls.

“In the mile radius around Luther Place, there are some 73,000 people living in high– rise buildings, and only 4 or 5 percent go to church,” Herrera told the Post that year. “These are people who are trying to purchase a special kind of privacy and seeming independence. Some seek the appearance of a certain type of sophistication – the Pepsi-generation bit.” To reach them, Herrera figured, the church would have to be sophisticated, too.

Jack ministered to the people in the high rises, whom he referred to, in print, as “cliff-dwellers.” On Sunday afternoons at one, he led a series of contemporary worship services, assisted by a trio of musicians he’d met at an Eleventh 11th Street night club called, the Bohemian Caverns. There was was Gene Rush on piano, Steve Novosel on bass, and Jimmy Hopps on drums – the Trio E.S.P. Jack preached; they played.

Harper, attended one of their services in 1967. “If you want to take part in a happening on Sunday afternoon, you don’t have to go to DuPont Circle or to a ‘be in’ at P Street Beach,” he wrote. “Just stop by Luther Place at 1 p.m.”

Harper observed about 150 people filling the pews of the grand old place. “Some were casually dressed,” he said. “Men without ties and some with beards, a few girls in miniskirts.” Eventually, the Trio began to play its prelude. “They made the church come alive with harmonious but jarring sounds.

“It was, as they say, cool.”

***

By the mid–sixties, sacred jazz was at the peak of its public prominence. Duke Ellington was in the midst of performing his “sacred concerts,” the first of which had premiered at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral in 1965. In these special performances, Ellington gave voice to his personal religious convictions through jazz.

“In this program, you may hear a wide variety of statements without words,” Ellington wrote, in the program note for his Grace Cathedral premiere. “I think you should know that if it is a phrase with six tones, it symbolizes the six syllables in the first four words of the Bible, ‘In the beginning God.” This is “our theme,” he continued. “We say it many times … many ways. “

In 1966, Ebony magazine printed a story on the sacred jazz phenomenon. They called it “Jazz Goes to Church.”

“The ability to play good jazz is a gift from God,” said the pianist Mary Lou Williams, to Ebony. “This music is based on spirituals – it’s our only original American art form – and should be played everywhere, including church.” Still, she acknowledged, things could go wrong.

“Jazz must be honest,” Williams continued, “and the artist who attempts to play it must believe in what he’s doing or he will find his insincerity reflected in his music. If it’s played without the right inner feeling, especially in a church, it just won’t come off.”

There were other dangers, too. For a time, Christian conservatives and jazz-scene atheists found themselves united in disdain. Some of the faithful felt that jazz was too grimy, that it has a “profane and worldly character.” The latter quotation comes the Vatican, which officially banned the use of the jazz mass in 1967. The year before, Ellington had tried to play a sacred concert in his hometown of Washington, D.C., only to be publically rebuked by the city’s Baptist Ministers Conference. Ellington “is opposed to what the church stands for,” said a spokesman for the conference in Jet magazine, that December. His “night club playing” and the “worldly” nature of his music were cited as special concerns.

“If I was a dishwasher or a waiter in a nightclub, does that mean I couldn’t join their church?” Ellington asked, rhetorically. “What’s the matter, doesn’t God accept sinners anymore?”

***

His experiences in nightclubs and bars, Herrera told the Post, had given him “a tremendous knowledge of life – something a minister today has to have if he is to go out to the people at the wells of life.”

After all, “that’s what our Lord did.”

While trawling D.C.’s nightlife, Jack made friends with a man named Tony Taylor. Taylor owned and operated the Bohemian Caverns, the club where Herrera had met the Trio E.S.P..

“Tony was the one who encouraged him to reach out to the community of lost souls by going to strip clubs,” Pam Stilton told me. “When it started, they would have a real kind of ministry at bars or in the streets, but eventually – there was no ministry.”

The nightclub owner exerted a noticeable influence on Herrera, encouraging him to push his “bohemian” inclinations farther and farther. By 1967, things were at a breaking point. Jack was “always looking at pornography, always going to strip clubs,” Pam said. “His drive became so strong, it was taking over his life. Finally, the church said, ‘That’s it; you’re out of here.’”

“He didn’t walk out,” she clarified. “He was asked to go.”

In November of 1967, Father Jack Herrera and the Trio E.S.P. took their act on the road. Herrera and Trio found themselves in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, offering an “experience in contemporary jazz worship” to interested college students.

The Daily Mail from Hagerstown, Maryland sent someone to cover the event. “At 8 p.m. the hall was full,” wrote the reporter, “but the speaker failed to appear. Rev. Herrera did not appear until 8:45, by which time half the congregation had gone home.” The few who stayed enjoyed themselves.

“Pastor Herrera sat on a stool holding a clarinet and a microphone and carried on a dialogue with the congregation,” said The Daily Mail. “A contemporary prayer was accompanied by the pianist and drummer playing the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday.’”

Shortly thereafter, Jack left his family. He moved to California. Bettie and the girls had to fend for themselves.

***

In 1968, Herrera and his trio, with Tony Taylor serving as producer, released an L.P. with the Enterprise imprint of Atlantic Records. It was one of Herrera’s contemporary services, recorded live. They called it “Jazz Goes to Church.”

“These are the days of the miniskirt, megaton, macro-riot and Mayan,” wrote Taylor, in its liner notes. “They present new problems that demand new answers,” he said. “There’s no room for phonies anymore, especially over the long haul.”

What was needed was honestly, of the style Mary Lou Williams had demanded in 1966. With that in mind, said the producer, “I want to introduce one of the very honest and genuine men I have had the pleasure of being associated with for the last year or so: The Reverend Jack Herrera.”

Herrera, Taylor explained, had lived a textured and highly variable life. He was “a man who has seen life in some of its more basic and debased forms.” This experience, according to Taylor, “caused [Herrera] to seek out a reservoir of love within himself to help fill the void of love he found in the lives of others.”

“It is my contention that what has resulted is a liberated kind of religious experience that applies itself to today,” wrote the producer.

It didn’t set the world on fire.

***

Pam Stilton was born in 1965. She was too young to personally remember life at Luther Place or her father’s last years in the ministry. “Once he left my sister and me, he completely separated from us. He became immersed in this other lifestyle.”

When Herrera moved to California, he began running with a particularly high-dollar crowd of musicians, artists and democratic politicians. While he visited family back East frequently, he spent most his time with relatives of his second wife. “He was […] in Virginia, staying on a farm for a week or two,” Pam told me, but he’d only spend “a couple of hours” out of each visit with Bettie’s girls.

“We lost our father,” she concluded.

Herrera bragged about hanging around with Linda Ronstadt and Jerry Brown. For a time, he lived in a San Francisco warehouse that had been converted into a kind of urban commune. Over the next few decades, Jack pursued a career in public service. He went on to serve the State of California, first as the Director of its Department of Veteran’s Affairs and then its Department of Mental Health Services.

He offered no financial assistance to Bettie’s girls. Still, they were successful. Pam spent a decade in the advertising industry. Working for DDB Needham (then the second largest agency in the world) she advanced from secretarial position to Vice President and Director of Traffic Services. Today, she owns and operates an award-winning boarding facility for dogs and cats.

Bettie and her daughters were “like the three musketeers,” Pam told me. She lived with Bettie 44 years, and when her mother died, Pam said, it was “in the loving arms of her daughters.”

Things were rockier with Jack. “At the time he left, he said that he had to do what was right for him,” Pam explained.. “Every time I hear that comment – ‘I have to be true to myself’ — on T.V. or whatever – I want to scream. I’m sorry, that’s bullshit.”

***

The voice of Jack Herrera, on “Jazz Goes to Church,” is clear and clean. Its charisma is a matter of precision.

His sermon began, “How interesting it is in a world today with much sophistication and affluence, that we no longer as persons and people of God are able to knit our souls together with anyone.”

Cover of The Lutheran, 1967

“This is an age of technological change,” he continued. “And I’m sure all of you have heard, time and time again, that it is a deeply impersonal world […] The real question, it seems to me, is: are there any more persons who care? Is there a friend who thinks enough of me to relate himself to me in some visible fashion, so that his soul is knit to me? When we consider, then, this great fact of life, we recognize that we must establish ‘covenantal relationships.’”

“Now that’s Old Testament,” said Herrera. “Some say, ‘well , that’s Jewish,’, well, that’s good! We love Jews, we love Anglicans, we love Presbyterians, Lutherans, we love each other. We love negroes. We’re all God’s children.”

Regardless of race, creed or type, the Reverend explained, we must love one another as God loved the descendants of Abraham.

“God said to the people of Israel: ‘I will love you in a steadfast love’ – in the Hebrew, the word is ‘chesed.’” The old term meant, “steadfast, never–changing, always dependable,” Herrera explained. The modern world had made such changeless love a rarity.

“If you will note on the bulletin for today, there is a prayer,” Herrera continued. “That prayer suggests what we have become.”

He delivered it, colloquially:

“Father of men — You who call us as children to live for one another, we confess that we live for ourselves – and who will not agree with me, here? – for our own good first – and who will dare not to agree? – and then only for the good of others.

“We have become so anxious for ourselves that we lose sight of others. We scarcely care for those whom we know – and isn’t that true? – and much less for those whom we do not know.

In sum: “We cultivate relationships for what we can get out of them.”

“Y’know, I don’t see people demonstrating for excellence,” he mused, later in the sermon. I don’t see them demonstrating for higher virtue,” he concluded. “If anyone wants to demonstrate, let’s demonstrate for love!”

Why hadn’t anybody thought of it before?

***

At one point, Pam told me, “My father swore […] that he was one of the people in Pompeii when the eruption happened.”

“He completely embraced reincarnation,” she continued. But only for a little while.

Jack Herrera died on August 16, 2010. One week prior to his death, he had his last phone conversation with Pam. He wanted “forgiveness”, she said, “for his selfish actions.”

“He said, ‘I love you, and I need you forgive me. I cannot die unless you forgive me for everything I did to you.’”

Over the years, Jack and Pam had often been at loggerheads. He hadn’t felt guilty about what he’d done in Washington and afterwards. It was all necessary, he thought.

“We were both very stubborn,” Pam explained. “We both wanted to be right, and when you want that, you lose a lot of time.”.

“It is my deepest regret that I lost so much time with him,” she said. “We could have been friends and shared more of life together.”

Her voice, distant on the phone line, began to crack. “I told him, ‘of course I forgive you. I forgave you years ago. We may not have had a relationship here on earth, but we will see each other again.”

“I needed to know what he really believed and was overjoyed when he professed his faith. He believed in Jesus.”

One week later, he died.

“He donated his body to science, of course,” Pam chuckled.

***

Jazz, as Mary Lou Williams observed, began in the church. In truth, it never really left. Today, jazz continues to be used in services – albeit with far less controversy than in the 1960s. The press, for the most part, still treats “sacred jazz” as an innovative incongruity.

Duke Ellington may have played in churches, acknowledged a writer for the Atlantic in 2013, but “what’s different now is that churches of varying perspectives and racial identities” have undertaken “a strategy of using jazz to attract disaffected believers.”

Presumably, the Pepsi-generation remains elusive.

The very idea of “sacred jazz” as a movement or a subculture implies that most jazz is identifiably “secular.” This is more than a matter of semantics. The story of “sacred jazz” is, really, the story of watchmen walking the high walls of American religion, attempting to keep its contents tight and well defined.

In this, Jack Herrera’s work at Luther Place was more than a little like the work of the Baptist Minister’s Conference in that same city. Both needed “jazz” to be one thing and “religion” another. For the Baptists, this had to do with keeping something wild and threatening out of the tabernacle. Herrera, by contrast, wanted to let the wilderness in – he just wanted, very badly, to be the doorman.

“Wisdom is something that man partially enjoys,” wrote Ellington, in his program note for his first sacred concert in 1965. “God has total understanding.

“There are some people who speak in one language and some who speak many languages.

“Every man prays in his own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.”

***

At the close of his sermon on “Jazz Goes to Church,” Herrera’s voice drops a register. He grows serious.

“What kind of a brother are you to anyone?” he asks.

“Do you believe in God?

“Do you accept this story as one that is filled with meaning?

“Are you only concerned with yourself first, then others?

“If so, that which happened to Saul may well happen to you.

“And if you don’t remember what happened, read the Bible! You’ll see.

“When one falls out of love with God and his fellow man, only death waits for him – eternal.”

Amen.

Herrera in his later years.

***

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Jazz Goes to Church appeared first on The Revealer.

Area 51: The Alien Interview

kh1242 — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 14:51:16 +0000

By Don Jolly

“black is space

well, sometimes”

— Sun Ra

Area 51: The Alien Interview is an 86-minute “documentary,” first released on VHS tape in 1997 by a small film producer and distributor called Rocket Pictures. It starts like this:

Fade in on a New Mexico highway, stretching to the horizon across a landscape of level sand. Enter actor Steven Williams (Fox Mulder’s angry informant from the second season of The X-Files). He’s wearing a tan leather jacket, buttoned up. His expression is grave.

“Interest in U.F.O.s and Area 51 is at an all time high,” he says, to the camera. “Last year a highly rated T.V. special and best selling home video purported to show an actual autopsy of an alien being from the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash of 1947.” Williams takes a breath and paces away. The camera tracks him, framing the man against low mountains. “Many people, and even some experts, believe that autopsy footage was genuine,” he says.

“If that was indeed the body of an alien being from another world, could the footage in this program be the first hard, visual evidence of an actual living and breathing alien being? An alien being communicating in an interview with a highly covert arm of the U.S. government?”

Steven Williams

The shot moves close. Williams fills the screen. “If the footage we’re about to show you is genuine,” he says, “then this could very well be the most important video in the history of mankind.”

The tape makes you wait for half an hour before showing the actual “interview.” In the interim, it builds suspense: cutting from talking heads to military stock footage to bargain basement “reenactments” of extraterrestrial encounters.

Finally, the reveal is made — a puppet, clearly.

“Genuine” can be a complicated word.

***

On December 10th, 1946, a Curtiss Commando C46 took off from the El Toro marine base in San Diego, headed for Seattle’s Sand Point Naval Air Station. All in all, it held 32 men — 29 marine privates and three crew. Like the C46s used for marine transport, it was unpressurized. It flew low.

A storm kicked up. At 4:13 that afternoon, the aircraft’s pilot made radio contact with a Civil Aeronautics Administration station in Toledo, Washington. The C46’s wings were icing up, he said.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Rainier, the plane went down. Snow on the mountains and rain in the valleys stymied the first round of search parties. By February 1947, the military’s effort to find their missing vessel and its men was winding down. Desperate, the families of the dead marines pooled their money into a cash reward, payable to anyone who could locate the wreck — five thousand dollars. By Summer, it was still available.

Kenneth Arnold was 32 that year. He had his own business and a private plane. The former was Great Western Fire Control Supply, the latter a Callair A-2, a twin-engine craft Popular Mechanics had dubbed “the Mountain Dodger.” On June 24th, Arnold took his A-2 out from Chehalis, Washington, headed for a job in Yakima. On the way, he spent an hour scouring the peak of Mount Rainier, searching for the vanished transport.

He didn’t find it, but he did find something. According to next day’s issue of Portland’s East Oregonian newspaper, Arnold “sighted nine saucer-like aircraft flying in formation,” while circling above the mountain. They were, continued the Oregonian, “extremely bright — as if they were nickel plated — and flying at an immense rate of speed […] about 1200 miles an hour.”

“It seemed impossible,” Arnold told the paper, “but there it is — I must believe my eyes.”

Kenneth Arnold

The pilot’s “saucer-like aircraft” were soon buffed and blunted by their tumble through the national press. By the end of the year, “flying saucers” had arrived on the American scene. Anomalous, almost supernaturally “advanced” aircraft filled the country’s skies, screens and souls. It was a phenomenon perfectly calibrated to its historical moment. Extraterrestrials and advanced aircraft had been zipping across the covers of pulp magazines and through the panels of comic strips since the 1930s, and theosophists had been receiving revelation from other planets in various forms since the 1880s. After 1947, Arnold’s “bright” saucers found their way into the center of both discourses.

According to one of its founders, the strange genius Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, modern Theosophy is a religious philosophy predicated on advancing “the Universal Brotherhood of

Humanity” through engagement with scriptures originating in a wide variety of traditions, with a special emphasis on the “Brahmanical, Buddhist and Zoroastrian.” Blavatsky, along with former seeker Henry Steel Olcott, founded their Theosophical Society in 1875, while living in New York. Together, they did much to advance knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist thinking in the West, setting the stage for the explosion of experimental religious collage that would come to characterize America’s twentieth century. In 1888, Blavatsky produced her most significant work: The Secret Doctrine, a three-volume summary of the wisdom she claimed to have received from a secret order of spiritual masters. Her teachers, she claimed, were human beings that had perfected their souls by traveling between many bodies, achieving almost divine mastery of morality, spirituality and, implicitly, the physical sciences. For the most part, Blavatsky located these elevated beings in Tibet. Several of their orders, however, were operative on the planet Venus. In 1912 Theosophist Charles Leadbetter elaborated the concept of these extraterrestrial “Lords of the Flame” by positing that the masters dwelling off-planet were, in fact, the highest ranking.

In 1953 George Adamski, the founder of a spiritual order heavily influenced by theosophy, published The Flying Saucers Have Landed, with co-author Desmond Leslie. In it, Blavatsky’s ascended masters become Adamski’s “space brothers,” a race of enlightened Venusians in command of fantastic spiritual technology. While some of these “brothers” were earthmen of remarkable religious accomplishment in the manner of Blavatsky’s “Lords,” The Flying Saucers Have Landed vastly expanded the scope of this conception. Life on Earth, argued Adamski and Leslie, began in the stars.

“Venus,” they wrote “is ‘Home of the Gods.’ From Venus in the year BC 18, 617,841 came the first vehicle out of space to alight on our planet.” At that time, human beings were little more than apes. “Evolution had gone so far but could go no farther,” they said. “And so from our nearest neighbor came the greatest of Venus, ‘the Sanat Kumara’, ‘The Lord of the Flame’, the highly perfected humans from an older branch of the planetary family.” It was this august group which elevated humankind above the animals, providing prototypes of every world mythology in the process.

As the twentieth century wore on, a great array of “U.F.O. Religions,” organized and otherwise, sprouted from the wet soil. Some, like Raëlism or George King’s Aetherius Society, were recognizably “religious,” and thus concerned with the production of canonical doctrines or the organization of church hierarchies. For the most part, however, U.F.O. religion is defined by the religion of U.F.O.s — the vast, contradictory and heterogeneous enterprise of investigating and analyzing flying saucers and their tributary phenomenon. At the core of this activity, the basic conceptions of Blavatsky and Adamski remain, filling out the interior of Arnold’s mystery aircraft as surely as he had noted their “nickel plated” skin.

In general, the alien beings at the heart of U.F.O. culture are held to be technologically superior to human beings, and often spiritually superior as well. Their hand is seen in legend and history; their spaceships have been spotted in the prophet Ezekiel’s majestic image of God’s chariot-throne and in the Hindu writings revered by Blavatsky. Often, their unearthly influence is responsible for raising humanity from the evolutionary muck. Just as often, the aliens seem terribly concerned with the human race’s yearn for suicide. That flying saucers first appeared in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb has seemed significant to many in the U.F.O. community.

Saucer culture, in other words, provides a space for rumination about humanity’s spiritual beginnings and its relationship with superior beings. Often, it functions as a coat of science-fictional paint, disguising the “religious” mechanisms implicit in speculation about the moral fate of humankind and its relationship to a larger cosmos. Its prophets murmur in paperback books, and chant of their abductions on late-night radio.

Occasionally, they issue videocassettes.

***

The night of May 23rd, 1997, found Art Bell in unsually high spirits.

“It is going to be a ve-r-r-ry interesting morning,” he said, addressing his listeners. For Bell, the original host of the paranormal call-in and interview show “Coast to Coast A.M.”, they numbered in the millions. That night, he said, would feature an appearance by a very special guest — a guest with no last name. “The mysterious ‘Victor.’”

Victor, Bell explained, “claims he smuggled a video — out of Area 51 — of an interrogation, of a questioning, of an actual alien.” The experience had made him paranoid. “Victor will be using a voice changer,” said Bell. “As you can imagine … he does not want his, uh, voice recognized.”

Later in the program, Victor appeared, his voice a growl of static.

Victor

“I cannot say, specifically, how I came into possession of this tape,” he said, to the A.M. airwaves. The general circumstances surrounding the acquisition, however, were institutional. “Area 51 is now defunct as an operating location for the government’s alien program,” he said. As part of relocating its resources, Area 51‘s analogue records were digitized en masse — placing highly secure files, temporarily, in less secure locations. Victor snagged the interview and then delivered it (for a fee) to a small film and television production company called Rocket Pictures. Area 51: The Alien Interview was released later that year.

On “Coast to Coast,” Victor seemed flummoxed by his dealings with Rocket. They demanded too much of him, he said. Too much time, too much disclosure. They couldn’t stick to a schedule to save their lives. He took similar exception to Bell. Their conversation was tense and argumentative.

At one point, however, the informant grew emotional. Although determined to keep his involvement (or lack of involvement) with military’s “alien program” obscure, Victor did admit to, at one point, meeting an extraterrestrial in person — although he refused to specify where and when the event occurred. “What did you feel when you were in its presence?” Bell asked. “Can you describe that at all?”

Victor paused. He took few rough breaths, almost panting, then spoke: “I suppose I felt sorrow. I felt anger. I, like everyone who has ever come into contact with these beings, felt an intense presence within me that was utterly foreign to my experience before that time.” He paused again.

“I must say that this has changed me,” he said. “It-it has had an effect that I did not choose.” Bell changed the subject.

“The video, of course, is incredible,” he said, directing his listeners to view still frame excerpts on the “Coast to Coast” website. More incredible still was the religious context Victor provided for it. The aliens, he said, were only representatively biological: their bodies, as pure mechanisms, were non-functional. To the beings themselves, the physical form was only a “vessel” — inseparable from any other external technology, and as easily exited as hatchback car. Humans were the same way, he implied: pure spirit, though largely unaware of it. They can trade their vessels, too.

The beings in government holding suffered from chronic illness, he continued. The one depicted in the Interview had recently died. “I believe that these beings cannot be harmed by us in any significant way,” Victor explained. “But at the same time I believe they are setting us with a sort of test… I don’t want to make too many religious allusions, but for some reason … my mind keeps coming back to the story of Jesus.”

The similarity, he told Bell, went farther.. “I believe […] these beings have been here before, and the program that they are performing upon the human race is as old as the human race — certainly as old as consciousness.”

Bell interjected. “What you’re saying might lead some to believe that they are, in fact, the architect of the human race,” he said. “Is that…?”

“‘Architects’ is not a term that I would use, but in the sense that you mean it I believe I would agree, yes.”

Like Adamski, Victor’s aliens are far superior to human beings both spiritually and technologically. Like Blavatsky’s masters, their spirits travel easily from body to body — their “vessels” being an historically nonspecific riff on reincarnation. Although Victor is vague on the exact year, his ascended masters are responsible for igniting the human flame in our pre-conscious ancestors.

Victor’s religious claims grow darker on the tape of The Alien Interview itself. Appearing with his face in shadow and his voice still electronically disguised, the informant discloses a world of secrecy and stupidity; of revelation disguised.

The alien, Victor explained, has been voluntarily speaking to covert elements of the military since 1989. Its degree of spiritual and scientific advancement, however, makes these interviews seem more like a judgment than a boon.

“The physicists and engineers are, frankly, frustrated,” said Victor. “Possibly concepts are getting lost because all the information has to come through a telepath, but also it may be that the bulk of their scientific knowledge is just too advanced to be translated into our primitive conceptual framework. It’s analogous to a human scientist [trying] to translate quantum mechanics into the grunts and screeches of a chimpanzee.”

The mismatch was demoralizing. “There’s a high attrition rate for scientists in the program,” he continued. “You’d think they’d be energized by the challenge, but a lot of them take the ego deflation very hard.”

The being, he said, was unable to differentiate between the spirit and technology. For it, the concepts were united. For human beings, only its “spiritual concepts” could be easily comprehended. It was a fact that brought Victor no comfort.

“You’re not going to have much luck making your dog understand calculus,” he said. “But if you pet him on the head and say ‘good dog’ aren’t you communicating spiritually? And doesn’t the animal control officer say ‘good dog’ when he comes to put some poor stray to sleep?” The aliens, Victor implied, were making some obtuse judgment of the human soul. “When you’re dealing with beings whose intellect is so far beyond your own, I don’t think it’s safe to assume they have your best interests at heart,” he said.

Further complicating matters is the government of the United States, under whose auspices the alien interviews have been conducted. “The government’s motive is control,” Victor explained. “The people at the top of this program are intellectually very average. They’re not capable of making proper use of what’s been handed to them, but they have no intention of letting anyone else ever get a chance to solve the puzzle.” The result has been, apparently, disastrous. Whatever transcendence the beings might have offered ended up shredded by human ignorance, their “vessels” dying, one-by-one, in an unlit bunker in Nevada.

In 2008, Rocket conducted a follow-up interview with Victor for the Interview’s DVD release. In it, the disguised informant expanded on his theme of human failure. “My contempt for the viewers of [this] documentary over the last eleven years knows no bounds,” he said. “They’ve been like children, mocking it or, on the other hand, credulously accepting it with no attempt to evaluate the material on its own merits or to discover any new material to support or debunk it!” Again, the revelation had fallen on deaf ears. Now, he implied, it was already too late. “The end” was coming.

The interviewer from Rocket was taken aback. “So, what you’re saying is that the biblical end times are upon us?” he asked.

“It’s rather childish to call them biblical,” said Victor, “the Bible is just a smokescreen […] a deliberate misinformation campaign started by those who first encountered the aliens and first kept that knowledge to themselves.”

By the end, he’s babbling. “My head is a beehive,” he says. “Aprés moi, le déluge, le déluge solaire.” In part, it’s a quote often attributed to Louis the XV: “After me, the deluge.”

***

The tape Victor claims to have snuck out of Area 51 is about twelve minutes long. It consists of a single, unmoving shot of a dark interrogation room containing a metal table, a shadowy man in the foreground and a scattering of electronic equipment. It has no audio. In a spotlight at the center left of frame, bobs the bulbous face of the creature. Its movements are slight at first — almost avian. As the silent interview continues, however, the being begins to wretch, spasming uncontrollably. Instantly, it’s surrounded by doctors. One of them jams a flashlight in its small jaws.

End of footage.

It’s a hoax, of course. Victor’s acting is little better than the alien’s puppetry, and Rocket’s lack of tact and production value does little to convince viewers of the Interview’s veracity. Still, there is something “genuine” about the tape — an expression of modern woe and anxiety. In The Alien Interview, paranoia suffocates Blavatsky’s hopeful esotericism, point by point. Victor’s “space brothers” are punished for their enlightenment; their wisdom wasted on stiff-necked thugs, credulous believers and unthinking bureaucrats. The spiritual achievements of Victor’s beings serve only to remind him, and his viewers, of their degradations. His apocalypse comes with no millennium attached, no promise of rebirth — just final violence, as the aliens put right the mistake they made in trusting humankind with some portion of divinity.

It’s a straight-to-video philosophy, and fitting for the final years of the twentieth century. Here, behind time-codes and distortions, is a portrait of God in 1997. Beaten and sickly, it beams its truth to uninterested Air Force personnel, whose interest extends only to engineering principles of flying saucers. All revelations classified.

***

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Area 51: The Alien Interview appeared first on The Revealer.

Hell on Earth

kh1242 — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 11:09:04 +0000

Screenshot from “Doom”

By Don Jolly

On December 9th, 1993, Senator Joseph Lieberman laid out an ultimatum to the videogame industry. He and fellow Democrat Senator Herbert Kohl were disturbed by the increasingly violent content of games, and had brought its representatives to Washington to discuss regulation. “The best thing you can do, not only for this country but for yourselves, is to self regulate,” Lieberman said. “Unless [you] people draw some lines, the sense that [America is] out of control is gonna lead to genuine threats to our freedom — which nobody wants to see.”

That night, as the hour ticked from 11:59 to midnight in the Central time zone, a group of game developers called id Software uploaded a chunk of “shareware” levels from their newest project to a fileserver owned by the University of Wisconsin. The server could accommodate 125 simultaneous users — impressive for its day. That night, it clocked over ten thousand. Everyone with an internet connection wanted a taste of id’s new game.

It was called Doom. “Out of control” is a good way to describe it.

id Software, 1994

***

In 2014, the American videogame industry pulled in around $13.1 billion dollars in sales. Its biggest success, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, placed each player in the role of a futuristic soldier, the game’s point-of-view resting comfortably behind his eyes, with a gun bobbing in the right-bottom corner of the screen. This genre, the “first person shooter,” or F.P.S., has dominated videogame sales and culture for more than two decades. Doom was where it all began.

There had been first person games before — some of the most successful, like the World War Two themed Wolfenstein 3D, had even been produced by id. But Doom was something else. In it, for the first time, players could navigate a wholly 3D world, running up stairs and through mazes and across pits of toxic waste, seeing everything exactly as they would through the eyes of their digital avatar.

The plot was simple. Players take on the role of an unnamed space marine in an indeterminate future, banished to the moons of Mars for striking a superior officer. Once there, a teleportation experiment goes awry — releasing demons from hell in the futuristic complex. “As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear

animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors,” concludes the readme file[1] packaged with the original game. “They know you’re here. There’s no turning back now.”

In practice, Doom is an exercise in reflexes and the conservation of resources. You travel through the increasingly surreal corridors of the Martian base, collecting weapons, including a shotgun, a rocket launcher and several types of energy rifle. Grotesque demonic monsters block your path, requiring speedy movement and accurate shooting to defeat them. Ammunition, health and armor are scarce, and every encounter is a gambit on the part of the player — a challenge to survive each combat while expending a minimum of supplies.

Aesthetically, the game draws on anarchic 1980s science fiction and horror films, soaking every spare patch of floor in blood and brains and entrails. Its soundtrack, composed by sound designer Bobby Prince, approximates Metallica as closely as the hardware of the early nineties could allow.

Doom was a legitimate phenomenon — totally unconcerned with the kind of restraint and forbearance Senator Lieberman wanted for its fledgling industry. In fact, id Software didn’t care much for the industry either. Doom was released, at least partially, for free. Its first chunk of levels were uploaded as “shareware,” free to play and copy. If you liked them, more were available — directly from Id. The developers didn’t scrape and bow for press coverage, nor did they advertise. Doom was its own advertisement — and loose on the nascent Internet, it went “viral.” Nothing had ever done so before.

At the time, the success of Doom seemed to presage a new way of doing business. “Profits from the Underground,” a profile of the company which appeared in Forbes magazine shortly after Doom’s release, speculated that id’s ridiculous profit-margin on Doom made “Microsoft look like a second-rate company.” Their revenue, the piece estimated, was in excess of ten million dollars — with practically no overhead. The American mainstream took notice. Doom was optioned for a film adaptation. Microsoft used a version of the game to demonstrate the multimedia capabilities of the then-upcoming Windows operating system. The answering machine at the id offices was inundated with opportunities. “If you are calling to discuss some great idea you have on how you can make money with our product, please press five now,” it said.

***

In 1994, the science fiction writer Dafydd ab Hugh was presented with an odd assignment. “My then literary agent was overly fond of assigning me to sundry media books, especially Star Trek books,” he told me, over e-mail, when I reached out to him this year. Pocket Books had just gotten the rights to produce a series of novels based on Doom, and ab Hugh was given the commission.

“The deadline was […] crazy,” he continued. “Three weeks from dead start to finished novel for each book […] I couldn’t possibly do it alone.” He reached out to he friend and fellow science fiction author Brad Linaweaver, whose alternate history novel Moon of Ice had been given positive notices by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and William F. Buckley Jr.. Together, they turned out four novels based on id’s bestselling game: Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky and Endgame. The result was, at the very least, a titanic work of literary embellishment. Doom’s story had already been stretched thin by the few paragraphs in its readme file.

John Carmack, the programmer responsible for creating Doom’s convincingly three-dimensional graphics, minced no words on the subject. “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie, he said. “[I]t’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

Given the task of filling four paperbacks guided only by a sub-pornographic plot, ab Hugh and Linaweaver felt empowered to explore ideas of their own. “We managed to turn in our manuscripts more or less on time, after which the editors underwent the grinding digestive process to remove as much true innovation as they could,” ab Hugh recalls. “Fortunately, the short turn-around precluded wholesale destruction.”

What survived is beautifully strange: a stream-of-consciousness sequence of gory action, sci-fi philosophizing and parodic nods to the original game, all rendered in prose so affectingly weird that it catches in your brain like a winter cough. Some examples:

— “No time for family background, keep him focused on how and why he became a cybermummy”

— “Old term; this guy’s in his thirties! Virtual Reality; we call it burfing now.”

— “The end of the foot fluffed out like bell-bottom pants, like my grandparents wore, like on The Brady Bunch. God, I was glad they didn’t live to see the monsters kill their children.”

Near the end of their second volume, ab Hugh and Linaweaver get reflective. “Jeez,” says their marine protagonist, “it’s like a sci-fi James Joyce.”

The story of the novels is an adventure; a cosmic odyssey undertaken by a pair of United States marines: Corporal Flynn “Fly” Taggart and Private First Class Arlene Sanders. In the first book, Knee Deep in the Dead, the pair fight their way out of the game’s demon-haunted Martian moons, only to find themselves within striking distance of Earth. The second volume, Hell on Earth, finds Flynn and Arlene back on their home planet, struggling to survive in a post apocalyptic world where demons — and willing human collaborators — have attained complete control. At this point, things take an unexpected turn.

The opening chapters of Hell on Earth track Fly and Arlene as they return to Earth via homemade rocket, landing somewhere in Utah. After a chapter of hopeless wandering, the pair spot Salt Lake City in the distance with its lights are still on. Somebody human, they figure, might still be in charge. Demons, however, aren’t their only concern.

“She was silent for a hundred paces; then she cleared her throat. ‘Fly, I have to confess something to you. Again.‘

‘Anytime.’

‘I sort of have a problem with the Mormon Church,’ she said.”

***

As Hell on Earth proceeds, Arlene’s suspicions about Mormonism become the novel’s central theme. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ab Hugh and Linaweaver inform us, was one of the few institutions in America that openly resisted the demonic invasion. For the most part, they say, the United States “has been co-opted by the demons,” with institutions from Hollywood to the I.R.S. to the D.E.A. capitulating to demonic demands.

Prior to the war, the book continues, Mormons across America had been preparing to survive on their own, without depending on unreliable institutions. Mormons, we are told, “have a strong survivalist streak,” stockpiling foodstuffs and munitions. What’s more, they were engaged in a vast, if benign, conspiracy prior to the invasion — working their way into posts at “the FBI, in the various armed services, in the CIA, even in NASA” as a bulwark against persecution as a religious minority. While perhaps a liability in different circumstances, this paranoid and fiercely independent vision of Mormonism is exactly what Hell on Earth’s Marine protagonists require. For them, Mormons are “ideal allies against a literal demonic invasion.” About halfway through the novel, Taggart and Sanders are joined by a Mormon sniper named Albert Gallatin. His theological sparring with Arlene enlivens the proceedings considerably.

In one passage near the conclusion, Albert & Arlene debate the causes of the invasion. “‘I think we’re all sinners,” Albert says. “We all deserve to die and be damned; we earned that fate when we disobeyed the Lord. Which is why we need the Savior. I take responsibility for the blood on my hands, even if I let him wash it clean.”

Arlene disagrees. “We have a difference there, my friend … I blame God,” she says. “My only regret is that I won’t meet God when I have a rocket launcher,

“You can’t blow up God, Arlene,” Albert adds.

***

Linaweaver and ab Hugh were quick to announce their agnosticism in our correspondence. “Neither of us is Mormon, aspires to become Mormon [or] has read the book of Mormon,” ab Hugh said. They included the Mormon in Hell on Earth, they said, out of a combination of personal interests and narrative practicalities.

“Mormons are prepared for survival, and in a geographically defensible location,” said Linaweaver. They just made sense as “a last hold-out against enemies invading the United States, whether the enemies were human or not.”

Ab Hugh contributed the idea of a Mormon conspiracy, drawing on G. Gordon Liddy’s autobiography, Will, where Liddy complains about being hindered by a “Mormon Mafia” at the F.B.I.. In Hell on Earth’s context, however, the collusion is a help — a moment of pragmatic resistance to the wickedness of the mainstream. “I love putting very religious characters into my writings,” ab Hugh continued. “It gives them a transcendental source of inner strength and […] it annoys the heck out of liberals.”

Politically, ab Hugh and Linaweaver are best charted on libertarian end of the American right. “Dafydd and I are both odd ducks in the entertainment field because we are not part of the Liberal Democrat Mindset,” Linaweaver wrote to me. “Whereas Dafydd is more optimistic in the short run, I’m more pessimistic.” Both are skeptical of mass institutions — especially governmental ones.

“I see the future as an explosion of freedom,” ab Hugh wrote, to me. In the future, he continued, “I see the demise of transnational institutions [such as] corporations, political bodies [and] NGOs, followed by the collapse of nationalism [and] regionalism.” In the end, he said, we will be left with “small and temporary social bonds, often renegotiated.” Before that, presumably, will be years of trial and trouble.

The Mormonism of the Doom novels is, at first glance, bizarre. But in context, it makes a certain romantic sense. Playing Doom is actively engaging in a fantasy of armed, masculine independence. It’s easy to see in the gunfighting, of course — but just as active in the conservation of resources in which such combats are ensconced. In Doom there are no allies, no friends. The player, seeing through his or her character’s eyes, must learn self reliance if they are to advance. The Doom novels stretch this concept as far as it can possibly go — until the ideas of self-reliance and rugged survivability are expanded into the religious and the political. All roads lead to ab Hugh and Linaweaver’s post-apocalyptic Salt Lake City, and its isolated community of believers; An idealized enclave of America under siege. God and first person shooters make strange bedfellows, but ab Hugh and Linaweaver make them into a natural fit — even if one of their main characters wants to blow up God with a rocket propelled grenade.

On December 10th, 1993, Doom fired the first salvo of the Internet’s attack on traditional methods of media distribution, promotion and monetization. Senator Lieberman may have succeeded in getting the videogame industry to settle on a universal rating system (Doom 2, released in 1994, received its very first “Mature”) but Doom proved that the balance of power had shifted. The world of the digital was elusive, it announced, and could be neither predicted nor contained. Doom spread because it was allowed to, given away for free. It stayed around because its themes, while simple, were enduringly appealing and exquisitely communicated: the world is out to get you, trust yourself. Keep your weapons loaded.

“Maybe [Joseph Smith] was a madman,” Linaweaver wrote to me, “but we made the character Albert eminently sane, and one of our heroes.” It was an interesting bit of storytelling, sure — but in 1994, when he co-wrote Hell on Earth, the Internet was metastasizing, day-by-day. The future was in flux, and full of possibility.

It was a good hour for madmen — especially in licensed paperbacks.

***

[1] A “readme” is a file containing information about the other files in an archive or directory that is often distributed with computer software.

***

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Hell on Earth appeared first on The Revealer.

Helps for the Scrupulous

kh1242 — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 16:55:50 +0000

By Don Jolly

“Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.”

– Stefan Zweig, 1942

My friend called before sunrise. “You gotta do me a favor,” he said.

“Take the spare key I gave you and walk the six blocks to my apartment. Enter by the backyard steps to get to the laundry room. There, on the shelf next to dog food and spare diapers, there’s a metal bowl full of change and cigarette lighters. That’s where I keep my spare key. I need you to bring it to me —I’m in midtown, and illegally parked. If I don’t move the car, they’re going to tow it. Don’t worry about waking anyone.”

“What happened?”

“They picked my pocket. I’ll explain when you get here. Thanks, man.”

Outside, the sky was lightening grey. The snow had turned to freezing rain just after midnight, hiding the steps and streets of Brooklyn beneath inches of white crust.

I did as I was told.

***

“This book is intended for people who have become paralyzed by a fear of sin,” I read.

It was seven a.m., and the worst crowds of the morning commute had not yet arrived. With my friend’s car key bulging in my coat pocket, I sat on the end seat of an empty row of an uptown train, thumbing through a small, green paperback. Helps for the Scrupulous, by Russel M. Abata — c.ss.r, s.t.d. It was a Catholic book, its author a Redemptionist priest.

Certain people “react excessively to all sin, and even to what might look like sin,” he wrote. Such people are called “scrupulous,” Abata explained. “Sin haunts them.”

“They are haunted by past sins. They are haunted with present temptations and decisions. They are haunted about their future and what is to become of them. No amount of reassurance seems capable of setting them at ease.”

I stopped reading, holding my place with a cold thumb. 34th street had arrived outside the window. Yawning, I watched the growing throngs exchange, and felt my mind lope, unbalanced, into some version of its daytime consciousness.

My eye rested on a girl in a green scarf, fidgeting across the platform. I winced, recalling the life of a tenth-grade cuckold. Beside her, a man in a brown-banded hat held me in a serious gaze — aware, somehow, of my looming deadlines. A sour pile of derelicts boarded the train, cackling about my student loans. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling lousy and found-out.

The doors closed with a chirping “ding.” As we pulled into the unlit tunnel, I returned to the book.

“Somewhere inside of the [scrupulous man] are the screams and warnings of teachers and parents about fire and burning, snakes and rats, thirst and hunger,” Abata continued. For the scrupulous, the fears of childhood had congealed into unending anxiety. Those afflicted constantly check and re-check their actions for spiritual error until, inevitably, it is found. “After a while,” the priest continued, the sufferer of scruples “has accused himself of so many serious sins that he has backed himself into a corner. He can hardly make a move until he has been assured many times over that it is alright.” This constant need for validation makes the scrupulous person into a difficulty for their friends, a trial for their family and terror for their confessors.

Helps offers no cure. “It is hoped that this book will be like a first aid kit,” wrote Abata, at the close of this introduction. “It should be kept handy and consulted as needed.”

The scrupulous, he observes, are prone to crisis.

***

I arrived at the skyscraper on Madison Avenue at just past eight o’clock. My friend met me in the lobby.

“Thank you so much,” he said. “C’mon, let’s move the car.”

“My wife is gone, right now. She’s out at a teacher’s convention in Orlando with the kids and I would’ve gone too, except the office has me rewiring pretty much all the electronics on the fifth floor. I’ve been staying up late, banging it out, getting by on that Indian speed I told you about. Most nights I don’t go home.

“Yesterday, I decided to try my luck at a tourist bar a few blocks away. I do good there — maybe 60/40 — and last night was going really well. I met this group of nurses — not student nurses but, like, established. They were from Philadelphia. We started dancing or whatever, and there was this one girl — this woman — like forty, blonde hair — total MILF. We start making out and she’s — she’s into it. Just, crazy. Wanna see a picture?”

He handed me his phone as we trudged along the avenue. She was attractive.

“Her husband’s been fired from his job four times in last five years,” he said.

I handed back the phone.

“Anyway, we’re making out and her friends start getting mad — they want her to leave. And one of them is real difficult — she keeps saying, like, ‘oh you have kids! you’re married! What are you doing?’ So we have to get away from her.

“By then — it must have been three or four in the morning — everybody was drunk. I suggested that we go outside and get some air. We did — and we tried to get back to her hotel, but she was so drunk we couldn’t find it. We must have stopped in at three, maybe four. I don’t really remember.

“It was around then that I noticed my car key was missing. I’d left my jacket on a stool at the bar, back when we were dancing, but I always keep my key in a special pocket under the lining — behind a zipper and everything. Somebody just opened it right up.

“I thought about going back to the bar to look for it, but somehow we meet back up with her friends — and the negative girl is asleep. The rest of us, two girls and two guys, go up to one of their rooms and — start.”

By this time, we had arrived at the car. It had already accrued a ticket, costing my friend one-hundred and twenty dollars. He groused about this as we drove to a parking garage.

“What happened then?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said. “Nothing. We all just kinda — yeah. We were all pretty tired.”

It was not the answer I was expecting.

“That’s the nice thing about it,” he explained. “With twenty year-olds its all bullshit — you lie to them, they lie to you. Last night, it was all people with kids and jobs. We just went to bed.”

My friend and I dropped off the car. On the way back to his office, he again handed me his telephone. “She keeps texting me,” he added, sunnily. “Check it out.”

“I need to feel you again,” said the phone.

***

His work was highly technical, his office a maze of server racks and switcher boxes and thick, rainbow cords of wire. I was given the tour.

The place was undergoing an overhaul. Whole floors of my friend’s building were empty save for chairs and cubicles — most purchased a year ago, under old management, and made redundant by the new regime. “Sales just got moved to Jersey City entirely,” he told me, as we walked through a large, dim chamber of bare desks. “It took over a million to outfit the conference rooms on the next floor.”

My friend was unsentimental about the change. “It is what it is,” he said. “Plus, now that we’re redoing everything I have a chance to fix some systems I’ve been putting off for years. It’s amazing what we can do with automation now.”

“See this?” he asked me, holding up a square plastic doodad crawling with blue lights and empty sockets. “This can do all the same work as one of those big switcher racks I showed you on the fourth floor. All you have to do is get it up on the Ethernet and — BAM! — six-hundred connections are now one. Much easier to trouble shoot.”

The tour ended with a cup of coffee, which we brought up to one of my friend’s costly but abandoned conference rooms. “There it is,” he said. “That’s what I do all day.”

Our talks were often concerned with the professional differences between us. For my friend, the idea of writing for a living was misty and inexact. It relied too much on language, and language, he thought, could never be reliable.

For my part, I was mystified by the practical realities of engineering — and in awe of my friend’s capacity to master and construct complex networks of devices. “It just has to work,” he said, but I never quite believed him. Failure, I still believe, is analogue.

“How about you?” my friend inquired, after a long pause.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you do?”

***

Helps For The Scrupulous falls, roughly, into the genre of “self-help.” In it, Abata details several (presumably fictionalized) case histories of scruples — asking the reader to identify with the biography that suits them best. “Bruce,” we are told, “is preoccupied with the sins he has committed and those he might commit.” He “was his mother’s favorite […] in front of her, he was an angel.” But “away from her, he was someone else.”

“Jean,” Abata wrote, “is over-worried about harming and even killing people.” She “continually washes her hands while cooking,” compulsively “rechecks the gas” before leaving the house and cleans her dishes with nervous exactitude. “Jean,” the priest explained, “is a lady.” Her concern for propriety has become a painful repression.

“Timothy” is eaten alive by the guilt of acquiring money unlawfully. Now retired, he sanctions himself for not working harder — and for committing a minor variety of insurance fraud. “Ann” is haunted by “the first time [she] touched herself impurely,” when she was fifteen. Her fear kept her from confessing the problem properly, and the secret has become painful and ingrown. “Michael” has begun to doubt God’s capacity to forgive.

The essential problem shared by all these personalities, according to Abata, is an extreme form of moral inflexibility. To err is human, he says, and as such humans are “accountable only for what [they] know and are able to accomplish.” Living a life entirely free from sin is impossible. Some feelings — especially sexual ones — are simply beyond an individual’s capacity to control. “Denial of sex only makes matters worse,” wrote the priest. It compels the scrupulous person to see a part of him or her self as “bad.”

“Obviously, that cannot be healthy,” he concludes.

Abata’s analysis has a decidedly psychological bent. Scruples, in his construction, are largely a mental disease dressed up in a religious aesthetic. Still, he notes, the torments of the scrupulous are not beyond the sight of God. “No one is scraping the bottom of the barrel more than you,” he wrote, to his suffering audience, in Helps’ final chapter. “You are being crucified by your guilt and excessive need to make everything perfect. [In] trying to love and trust under those conditions — even if only out of fear — you are actually being heroic.”

His advice in a crisis? Assure yourself you are “NOT GUILTY,” and “DO NOT ARGUE” with the resultant compulsion to examine and reexamine the situation. Accept yourself without examination. That, he says, will win some degree of peace.

Additional assistance may be found, the priest continued,in “a doctor’s prescription of some calming tranquilizers.”

***

“Scruples may be from God,” wrote the theologian Fredrick William Faber, in his Growth in Holiness, Or, The Progress of the Spiritual Life, first published in 1855. “God may permit us to fall into them for various reasons. Sometimes it is to prepare us for the office of directing souls […] sometimes it is an exterior trial, or what mystics call a purgation of the spirit; and their use is one while to wean us from an excessive attachment to spiritual sweetness and the extraordinary favors of God.”

Scruples, he continued, “let us have our purgatory on earth.” They are a tactical denial of the “the gratuitous light” that comes from God’s approval. “It was under this subtraction that St. Bonaventure would not say mass, and [that] St. Ignatius refused to eat,” Faber points out. It was for this reason that “St. Augustine, as he tells us in his Confessions, was so teased with scruples about his natural pleasure in eating and drinking.”

Scruples were not always holy, Faber acknowledged. More often than not they could be traced to the trickery of the Devil, or some defect of the body or soul. Confirmed cases of divine scruples were, the priest admitted, exceedingly rare. Still, scruples were not to be taken lightly. Their soil could bear the seeds of sainthood.

As the nineteenth century advanced into the twentieth, Catholicism’s theological authorities began backing away from this noble model of scrupulosity. God, as dictated the fashion of the day, was more of a kind redeemer than a punishing judge, and the willful withholding of Love began to be viewed as unnecessarily cruel.

What’s more, psychology had begun sniffing around the obsessive behaviors of the scrupulous — claiming more and more of their suffering for the unconscious mind. Bit by bit, potential sainthood became a nervous disorder. The Second Vatican Council (which lasted from 1962 to 1965) served as a final tipping point. Afterwards, scruples became, at their most respectable, a deformation of pride. Their treatment was surrendered, bloodlessly, to medical science.

In 1972, four years before the publication of Helps For the Scrupulous, an edition of writings by the neurosurgeon John F. Fulton was issued, under the title The Frontal Lobes and Human Behavior. One case it detailed centered on a woman wracked with doubts about her grievous sins and the anger they had inspired in the Holy Ghost. Fulton supplied her with only a local anesthetic, and asked that she made careful report of her condition as he cut into her brain. She remained conscious, and talkative.

“The obsession persisted after a radical cut on one side,” wrote Fulton. “It continued as cuts were gradually made on the opposite side until finally when they reached […] the fibres of the medial ventral quadrant.” At this point, something extraordinary occurred:

“The patient’s obsession dramatically disappeared. When once again interrogated about her worries concerning the Holy Ghost, she responded euphorically, “Oh, I don’t believe in the Holy Ghost any more.’”

Helps For The Scrupulous is a point on a continuum of decline. In it, Abata does not debate the findings of the psychologists and agrees with them that the origin of scruples is, for the most part, defects in the unconscious emanating from childhood. Still, in a small way, Helps seeks to imbue the struggles of its scrupulous readership with spiritual weight and small measure of dignity. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, even this was out of fashion.

***

I sat with my friend, in the empty room, and explained all of this as best I could, illustrating my points by referring to Abata’s paperback, which I had, by that time, extensively annotated and underlined.

He paused when I was finished.

“That is — without a doubt — the dumbest problem I have ever heard,” he said.

We walked together to the lobby, and he thanked me for delivering his key.

***

After leaving the office, I went for a long and aimless walk. Eventually, I arrived before the side entrance of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Work on the old hall’s restoration, still ongoing as of this writing, had surrounded its facade with a maze of plywood and dense lattices of black aluminum. I stepped between them, climbed the steps, and went inside.

It was a quiet. The cathedral’s floors were polished to a mirror-shine and its pews were lacquered crimson, shady and unoccupied. Overhead, stone shot from stone — a riot of dark solidity. Stained glass gleamed above the organ.

My fellow congregants were, for the most part, workman. Their rubber soles squeaked on the stone as they hauled materials around the Sanctuary, dodging their bright orange machines and ducking in and out of their curtains of plastic. The few unpaid visitors to the place moved like ghosts from shrine to shrine, tracing the walls that ran out from the Bronze Door.

I sat for while at the end of an empty pew, facing a facsimile of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. St. Luke supposedly painted its original, still in Poland, on a hunk of table borrowed from the house of Christ and Mary.

I tried to write, and failed. I dove into my phone instead, sending pictures of the shrine to a girl in Boston.

She did not “need to feel me again.” In fact, she did not seem to “feel me” at all. Despondent, I stood up, and tried to wring some meaning from the icon.

Around the Madonna, portraits of its patrons, champions and stewards had been arranged. They were fat and bearded and bald to a man. Their clear eyes, earnest and comical, stared out of a timeline of successive costumes. I longed to be counted among those holy dorks, to see my name etched into an identifying plaque of gold. I wished to find, within the lonely accident of living, some shards of a superior world. I’d trade in pain and terror for that, I thought.

By then, it was early afternoon, and I was hungry. I left the cathedral and returned to my neighborhood by subway, where I stopped for corn beef sandwich on rye with extra mustard.

***

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Helps for the Scrupulous appeared first on The Revealer.

Religion in H.P. Lovecraft

kh1242 — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 11:33:33 +0000

By Don Jolly

By Don Jolly

Originally published in the August 21, 2013 issue of The Revealer, reposting now as the latest installment of The Last Twentieth Century Book Club.

Tomorrow, August 22nd, Providence, Rhode Island will play host to this year’s Necronomicon, the “largest gathering of Lovecraft devotees ever,” according to its website, with amusements in proportion to its population. There will be games, parties, scholarly papers, panel discussions: all in the ill-fitting and antique name of Lovecraft, Howard Phillips — author of “weird fiction.” It might be suggested that Lovecraft himself, now 123, grace the event with a personal appearance — a back table at McCormick and Schmick’s, perhaps — just for the chance to raise a glass of chilled water (he was a lifelong teetotaler) with a roomful of appreciative readers, and reflect on a life well lived.

It is an unlikely scenario. Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer and malnutrition in 1937, after a year of constant pain. More importantly, however, the scene of a grave-ghoul disturbing a living revel has already been used by Lovecraft, in one of his first finished tales, 1921’s “The Outsider.” At the age of 125 or 150, such repetition might be taken as chiasmus. At 123 it just seems desperate.

Desperation is a word that comes to mind in discussing the “religion” of Lovecraft. It’s a tempting topic, given that the tales which have won his enduring fame are, essentially, concerned with invented divinities, “holy” texts, and the complications of ritual. Yet their author was a vocal and argumentative atheist. Popular wisdom has it that Lovecraft’s philosophy of religion, to the extent that it existed, was an uncomplicated negative, and the “religious” features of his stories function as a kind of burlesque.

I agree with this position up to a point. In Lovecraft’s most popular stories, the religious element is often shallow. However, “religion,” as a category was, for Lovecraft, a constant source of speculation and concern. This is well attested by his essays and correspondence on the topic (many of which have been helpfully collected in S.T. Johsi’s 2010 volume Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft) as well as in elements of his poetry. Taking these sources together, it is possible to sketch Lovecraft’s personal religious philosophy with some nuance. Doing so, one discovers the unexpected: a hint of melancholy longing. Lovecraft may have been “against” religion, but his opposition was neither painless nor uncomplicated.

Lovecraft’s most complete articulation of his religious philosophy comes in his 1922 “Confession of Unfaith,” first published in the amateur paper The Liberal, in which his work made numerous appearances. In his “Confession,” Lovecraft traces the development of his atheism and defines it, somewhat thornily, as a valid philosophical position. Sunday school, Lovecraft reflects, had no more validity for him than Santa Claus. His exposure to the myths and legends of antiquity, however, had a far more profound effect. According to Lovecraft:

When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a half- sincere belief in the old gods and Nature-spirits… Once I firmly thought I beheld some of these sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks; a kind of “religious experience” as true in its way as the subjective ecstasies of any Christian. If a Christian tells me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen the hoofed Pan and the sisters of the Hesperian Phaëthusa.

This passage reveals a great deal about Lovecraft’s concept of religion – the use of “religious experience,” and “subjective ecstasies,” gives away the game. Whether he was a direct reader of William James or not, Lovecraft inherited a number of assumptions from the phenomenology of religion – most notably, the elevation of private experience as religion’s principle building block. Lovecraft’s experience is, however, more guardedly sensual, hence his dismissal of Christian “feelings” in favor of his own pagan “sight.” Ultimately, Lovecraft rejects his visions of Pan as the work of imagination – a kind of waking dream.

Dreaming is perhaps the most prominent theme in Lovecraft’s writing, threading easily through his philosophical investigations, his correspondence and his fiction. It is no accident that a large percentage of his weird tales are categorized as “dreamland” tales, taking place in a strange and fantastic slumberland sketched most clearly by his 1927 private novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Too, it is also no accident that the divide between Lovecraft’s dreamlands and the “reality” of his fiction is so porous. Place names are transposed between one world and the other, characters are shared, and, often, stories originally presented as occurring in the “waking” world (albeit in the distant past) are often recast by Lovecraft, in later works, as part of his dream cycle. The line between real and dream, in Lovecraft’s weird fiction, is blurred. As, indeed, it was for the author himself. As Lovecraft expresses in a 1918 letter to his longtime correspondent Maurice Winter Moe:

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake—whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. I admit that I am very much interested in the relation I bear to the things about me— the time relation, the space relation, and the causative relation. I desire to know approximately what my life is in terms of history—human, terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; what my magnitude may be in terms of extension,—terrestrial, solar,and cosmical; and above all, what may be my manner of linkage to the general system.

For Lovecraft, there are two types of experience: the dream and the real, the appearance and the actual. One is externally generated, the other an internal or “subjective” fancy. Lovecraft’s desire to differentiate the two is overpowering – precisely because, for him, the categories are nearly impossible to differentiate.

Just as Lovecraft inherits his concept of internal, private experience from James and the phenomenologists, he adopts a position on the origin of religion directly drawn from early anthropologists of religion, most visibly E.B. Tylor, for whom religion was an attempt, by early man, to comprehend the experiential challenges of dreaming and the existential challenge of death. In Lovecraft’s seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the author investigates the origin of his particular obsession: cosmic fear, or the fear of the unknown which rests at the heart of his preferred genre. This type of fear, is, according to Lovecraft, “coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it.” He goes on to explain that both cosmic fear and the essential religious feeling are generated as a response to “the phenomena of dreaming,” which “helped to build the notions of an unknown or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduct toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.”

This placement of religion’s generative moment in dreaming specifically and, more generally in the psychological condition of “savage dawn-life,” reflects Tylor’s model plainly. Both hinge on, essentially, the misinterpretation of experience: dreams are taken for “reality,” because, for primitive man, the distinction between the two is non-existent and the phenomenological experience of them is, essentially, the same. It is this tension, in Tylor, which produces the dual worlds of the material and spiritual. So too for Lovecraft, although for him the contested nature of the real is not restricted to “primitive” man.

Distinguishing the dream from the real was an ongoing challenge for Lovecraft, a matter of vigilance and concern. As he explains it in his “Confession of Unfaith”:

The seeker of truth for its own sake is chained to no conventional system, but always shapes his philosophical opinions upon what seems to him the best evidence at hand. Changes, therefore, are constantly possible; and occur whenever new or revalued evidence makes them logical.

For Lovecraft there is an obligation to be current–to stay ahead of contested dream-reality with the most effective tools. The process is unsentimental, and most importantly, completely conditioned by its historical moment. As he later elucidated in a 1932 letter to his fellow writer Robert Ervin Howard, Lovecraft’s atheism is the result of the best evidence available to him.7 In the early 1930s Lovecraft saw no better supported position than atheism–which does not, it should be noted, preclude the idea that atheism may be supplanted in the future by an alternate system, or the notion that in a previous historical moment atheism may not have been inevitable.

The best evidenced argument was a central moral obligation for Lovecraft, and often, a disappointing one. For example, in a 1929 letter to his correspondent Woodburn Harris, Lovecraft expresses “a profound intellectual distaste” in adopting “the main points of relativity.” There is evidence that Lovecraft’s atheism may have been, in some ways, similarly distasteful for the author.

This is best demonstrated by Lovecraft’s sentimental association with the England of the 18th century, including its religion. This nostalgia permeated the author’s life to such a degree that he held it as one of the three central tenants of his character in his famous letter on the subject to Rheinhart Kleiner in March of 1920 (the other two were “love of the strange” and “love of scientific truth and abstract logic”). Lovecraft signed many letters as a subject of the Queen, and openly stated that the American Revolution was a mistake. He took long trips to seek out Georgian architecture, and spoke reverently of evening walks in the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, where the aging buildings allowed him to imagine himself back in glorious colonial New England. His longest poem, 1918’s “Old Christmas,” features an idyllic depiction of a Christmas night in 18th century England – including a reverent and inspiring Church scene⁴:

Within the church a fervent sermon rings,
and the full choir a pious anthem sings;
The rural choristers chant loud and strong,
And have in spirit what they lack in song.
The black-gowned chaplain, modest of wit,
Reads the wise precepts other parsons writ;
No laurels for himself he seeks to gain,
But gives his flock the best his books contain.

It is tempting, in this selection, to view the parson as a sarcastic jab at religious demagogues. However, this read ignores the basic structure of “Old Christmas,” where the failures of “ye modern throng” are answered with enviable achievements of Lovecraft’s preferred antiquity. In this context, the parson’s deference to the “wise precepts” of others is a positive — rather than grandstanding. This authority figure is content to trust “the best” information available to him. Just as Lovecraft followed the physicist of his age into relativity, so does Lovecraft’s parson follow his intellectual superiors. “Old Christmas,” then, may be taken as a nostalgic work with a specific valence: it mourns the loss of an earlier period when religious belief was possible.

Lovecraft never directly labels his atheism as transitory, and the matter is certainly not helped by his passionate defenses of atheism in letters Lovecraft wrote to his religious correspondents. However, adopting a view of Lovecraft’s atheism as historically constituted and, hence, conceivably changeable, explains several references, such as those in “Old Christmas,” which confound a purely adversarial reading.

Lovecraft’s concept of religion, in summary, is one founded on experience: the experience of the real, which originates outside of man, and the experience of dream, which has an internal point of origin. The navigation of these categories is, for Lovecraft, the central challenge of living–and a task which must be met with the most robust intellectual frames on hand, no matter what one’s sentimental preference. This view positions religion as doubly important to Lovecraft: first, it has importance as a sister field of inquiry to his beloved “cosmic horror.” Second, it has importance as a historical construction of reality: a potential “best response” from another era.

***

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Religion in H.P. Lovecraft appeared first on The Revealer.

Orson Welles’ The Life of Christ

kh1242 — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 13:10:29 +0000

Orson Welles

By Don Jolly

It’s 1945. He’s speaking on the radio. “Carnival isn’t a religious observance, but it is fundamentally the celebration of a religious people,” he says. That world-famous baritone.

“Wherever money changers have taken over, carnival is no more. Wherever work is so hard that a holiday means a rest instead of a good time, carnival is only a word for a tent show. You have to save up for carnival. You have to save something of yourself out of the business year. You have to play hard at carnival — not in contest with anybody, not for points in a score — carnival calls for the aimless exuberance of childhood. And if you never felt like dancing around and making a fool of yourself in a funny hat you won’t know what I’m talking about and you won’t care.”

“In carnival,” he concluded, “you don’t need liquor to help you forget you’re growing old. You’re too busy remembering what it was like when you were young.”

He’s thirty. America is almost through with him.

It’s 1942. March. The world is on fire, whole cities kindling the red disaster of the second world war. He is in Rio, lashing together an ambitious film about the carnival for RKO Pictures and The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, an outfit designed to counter fascist propaganda in Central and South America. Along with a ragtag Hollywood crew, he has been soaking up the heat of Brazil — the taste of it, the smell, the feel. The rhythm of the Samba. The derelict poetry of the favelas, where the lenses of his cameras linger uncomfortably on Rio’s castaways: the destitute, the derelict and the dark-skinned. One of his crewman is already grousing in private, corresponding with the studio back home. “Nobody wants to look at a bunch of niggers,” he says.

Orson Welles in Brazil

Things are beginning to break down. The footage from the carnival, captured by any means necessary throughout the four-day event, is a mess. Parts of it need to be re-staged. His other film at the time, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 chronicle of a once-wealthy mid-western family, is weeks away from a disastrous test screening. The audience will hate it. The studio will take control. His memos from South America, increasingly desperate, will be ignored. It is the beginning of the end for him in Hollywood. It has been less than a decade since he was the great white hope of the American stage, an audacious actor and director emboldened by new deal policies to construct a theater of the common man. On radio, he had a rare authority. When he claimed that men from mars had landed in New Jersey, America believed him.

Brazil. Alone, in some stolen moment, he puts two lines to paper: “Nothing has ever been too good for the public,” he writes. “Nothing has ever been good enough for the public.”

***

July, 1940. He is in Hollywood, meeting in secret with his cinematographer, Greg Toland, and a handful of actors. The studio wants to make a big to-do about the first day of shooting, set for August first, so he figures it’s best to get started early — and avoid any potential public embarrassment. At this point, he’s still a theater director, yet to make his mark in motion pictures. The scene is simple: a crowd of men, reporters, smoking in an unlit screening room. Behind them, the light of a projector strings white wires in the haze.

He pushes his actors hard, just as he had on stage. In the finished product, their lines lay atop each other, single threads emerging from a cacophony of voices: “That’s it… Well, seventy years in a man’s life… That’s a lot to try to get into a newsreel! It’s a good show, Thompson. But it needs an angle… Wait a minute! What were Kane’s last words? Do you remember, boys?”

It worked.

August. The shooting of Citizen Kane begins in earnest. There is much to do — too much. His cast needs their salaries settled, plus plane tickets and final schedules. Parts of the score have to be commissioned, recorded and approved. And there is, regrettably, “the Mankiewicz situation.” Herman Mankiewicz, his co-writer, is fuming about a quotation Louella Parsons has printed in her Hollywood gossip column, appearing in Hearst newspapers across the country. She makes it sound like Mankiewicz is being denied his proper credit. Handling the matter requires delicacy.

Then, there is film itself. He and Toland are shooting in a wholly new way, making up the rules as they go along, building hitherto unseen depth into the cinematic frame.

He is twenty-five. He barely sleeps.

August 30th. In the midst of the chaos, he writes a letter, and has it dispatched to a handful of America’s top churchmen. Copies are dispatched to a Methodist bishop and an Episcopalian reverend, both in New York. He hits the Northern Baptist Convention in Cadillac, Michigan, along with the Southern Baptists in Nashville. He reaches the Presbyterians in Philadelphia, and a Catholic philosopher in Washington D.C..

“I am planning a motion picture of the life of Christ,” he says. “And I take the liberty of asking you for advice.”

It is because I am strongly aware of my problem in handling this tremendous theme that I take the privilege of addressing you. I wish to do nothing which could incur the displeasure of any Christian church. In fact, I am convinced that a film which created controversy would not have the special validity I wish to achieve […] I would like to take the camera into a real pastoral American setting — to tell the story with simple American folk, not with actors.

My intention would be to present the story with no interpretation — with dialogue only as it occurs in the scriptures — not as any sort of stunt, or even as a paraphrase. The actual face of Christ would never be represented and the personality of Christ would remain, by the nature of the storytelling, unstated.

“The idea is only in the preliminary stages,” he concludes, to all of them at once. “You are the first to hear of it. I would greatly appreciate some indication of your attitude.”

“Sincerely Yours,

Orson Welles”

***

Orson Welles never finished his Life of Christ — or his Heart of Darkness, or his Don Quixote or his epic Brazilian film, It’s All True. Today, twenty-eight years after his death, Welles is remembered as much for his dreams and drafts as the movies, plays and radio programs he actually completed. He died fat and bleeding money, his final feature role a voiceover part in an animated Transformers movie co-starring Leonard Nimoy and Judd Nelson.

Religion, and Welles’ reverence for the story of Christ, never made it to the screen in an elaborate form. All that remains of it are a few puckish asides.

In his 1946 thriller The Stranger, Welles plays a Joseph Mengele-type named Franz Kindler; a devious Nazi hiding out as a teacher in a Connecticut prep school. In the film’s opening scenes, Kindler is tracked down by a former subordinate, who hopes to deliver a “message from the all-highest.”

“You mean —” Welles starts, eyes manic. Hitler?

“I mean God,” the lackey answers, his voice tremulous with conviction.

Kindler relaxes. Then, coldly, murders the little man.

Orson Welles in Brazil

In the 1949 British film The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed, Welles plays the enigmatic arch-criminal Harry Lime, opposite his old friend Joseph Cotten, a veteran of Kane and Welles’ 1930s work with the Federal Theater Project, as the hero Holly Martins.

In one of film’s most arresting scenes, the two ride a Ferris wheel together, looking down on the people of Vienna as Lime preaches a satanic gospel, defending the act of stealing medical supplies for sale on the black market.

“You used to believe in God,” spits Holly.

“I still do believe in God, old man,” Lime answers, smoothly. “I believe in God and mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here.”

A pause to consider the crowd below. “Poor devils.”

***

In California, RKO has arranged a public screening of Welles’ follow-up to Kane, his mid-western period piece The Magnificent Ambersons. They place it at the back of a double-bill with the enthusiastic Naval-propaganda musical, The Fleet’s In!

It’s a cheap fix, designed to kill the picture and sever the studio’s relationship with Welles, the expensive, uncooperative “genius.” It works.

The audience’s comment cards are a record near-unanimous disdain. “It stinks,” one reads. “Too dark — too slow, and too mixed up.”

“We do not need trouble pictures, especially now. Make pictures to make us forget, not remember.”

“It should be shelved as a crime to take people’s well-earned money for such artistic trash.”

In Brazil, Welles is fleshing out another element of his picture, to run alongside the carnival. He is obsessed with the true story of the jangadeiros, four poor fishermen who sailed from Fortaleza to Rio in the fall of 1941 to protest their profession’s exploitation by ship owners and the government. Under the law, fishermen lacked the benefits granted to unionized professions, including pensions and social security. What’s more, their profits were heavily tithed by the owners of their sailing ships — called jangadas. As much as a half of fisherman’s daily catch would go to them.

The jangadeiros, led by a plainspoken fisherman called Jacaré, covered more than a thousand miles of water in two-months time, unaided by modern navigational equipment. They arrived in Rio in November, to a grand reception. Brazil’s President, Getúlio Vargas, reformed the fishing industry at their suggestion.

Orson Welles in Brazil

Welles had met the jangadeiros in person. His ambition was to recreate their journey on film, starring the real men involved. By June his relationship with RKO, strained and singed by events such as the Ambersons screening, had all but collapsed. Welles hardly notices. He is in Fortaleza, catching fishermen on film.

The director’s approach is methodical. He shoots the beaches. The waves. A wedding. The men and women at their daily work. He shoots baskets being woven. Boats being carried to the water by lithe, brown bodies. He catches resonant images of wide-skies and bright seas, blazing in thirty-five millimeter grey. Off camera, he talks openly of his faith in God. It’s the best footage of his career.

May, 1942. Welles is re-staging his version of the jangadeiros arrival in Rio. The sea is troubled. As the jaganda makes its way into the bay, a surge of water overturns it, and the fishermen are scattered. Jacaré, their leader, tries to swim for shore. He drowns.

In the next day’s issue of Aino De Noite, a Brazilian newspaper, Welles is all but accused of murder. “They should have stayed on their own sand dunes, in their small houses made of Carnauba straw,” reads the editorial. “They should have stayed there, far away, as jangadeiros, in the land of Itacema, without ever meeting Orson Welles.”

***

September, 1940. Responses start to arrive at Welles’ office from the churchmen.

E.J. Millington, writing from the Northern Baptist Convention, takes great pleasure in dismissing his idea. “My opinion of your proposition is definitely and I think unchangeably unfavorable,” he writes:

“The production of such a picture as you speak of would require a delicacy of taste and a depth of understanding which are not ordinarily associated with the motion picture industry and its actors… Your suggestion, therefor, is distinctly unwelcome to me and I should be very happy if the idea were allowed to die before it is full born.”

William Barrow Pugh, writing from the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church, is star-struck. “It would seem to me that if any one could do what you set forth in your letter, it would be yourself,” he says, to Welles.

The Episcopalians are optimistic, the Southern Baptists supportive, the Lutherans skeptical. “I am very far from any anti-Semitic thoughts in my own heart,” writes F. H. Knubel, on United Lutheran Church letterhead. Still, “in the moving picture King of Kings the high priest uttered a startling statement that he alone of his people was responsible for the death of Jesus… This was naturally introduced so that there would be no objection from the Jewish sources of the present day, but this introduction of an unjustifiable sentence destroyed for me the value of the picture.”

The longest response comes courtesy of Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, at the Catholic University in Washington. Sheen is also a radio personality. He hosts a program called The Catholic Hour, and will continue to do so for the next decade, before moving on to television. The only way Welles would “incur the displeasure of the Church,” he writes, “is by presenting Christ in any other way than what He is, namely, the Son of God.”

There are several other “difficulties” in Welles’ project, Sheen says. The divinity of Christ would, of course, be difficult to capture on film — “though I can see how the new technique of photography might make some compensations.”

Welles proposed “pastoral” setting is, in the Monsignor’s opinion, too strange. It threatens to make the life of Christ “unreal.” What’s more, “the Jewish background of Christ” cannot be avoided. “There is no escape from the historical fact that the Gospels do represent him as being rejected by his people,” argues Sheen.

October 3rd, 1940. Welles pens his response to the Catholic. It is lengthy, an uncharacteristically humble. “I hasten to assure you that I have never conceived of this project in other terms than as a perpetuation of Christ as true God and true Man,” writes Welles.

“From the artist’s point of view (from mine, at least, speaking as an artist) there is no purpose in attempting the story of Christ unless Christ is presented as God, and unless his miracles are as an intrinsic a part of the story as they are in the Bible. The transference to an unremote period does not infer the reinterpretation of the story, the modernization of the theme nor the elimination of miraculous events…

A miracle was no less miraculous in Galilee than it is in Texas but centuries (at least for many of us who contemplate his story) have invested the world in which Christ lived with the gauzy unreality of a fable… Even the humblest figures in a modern representation of the story of Christ seems god-like and hopelessly mythological…

Welles thanks Sheen profusely for his comments, and expresses a desire that their conversation continue. He struggles with his thoughts, apologizing for their lack of specificity. “I want to make a motion picture of the Story of Christ for everybody,” he says. “Not just those who know it to be true.”

***

Isaac Woodard

It is February, 1946. A young, black man named Isaac Woodard, hours after being honorably discharged from the United States Army, is beaten in Aiken, South Carolina for mildly offending the driver of Greyhound bus. One officer in particular whips him about the head with a billy club so savagely that when Woodward awakens the next morning, in jail, he discovers that he cannot see.

The cops hit him up for money, and then drop him at veteran’s hospital, where his story elicits little sympathy. He is advised to join a blind school. Later, he takes his case to the NAACP, who do everything they can to publicize the matter. They want the officer responsible for Woodard’s blinding found, and charged.

A few months later, Orson Welles, then trying his luck at political commentary for radio, comes on the air in a somber mood. He reads from Woodard’s affidavit on the beating. Then he tells a story — a joke he claims to have been told that morning at a twenty-four hour diner. “I’m going to repeat it, but not for your amusement,” he says, to the airwaves. “I earnestly hope that nobody listening will laugh.”

The joke concerns a white traveler who finds himself in a southern town where all the hotels are full. “In desperation,” says Welles, “he applied at a negro hotel where he was accepted with the proviso that he had to share a double room with another guest.” The night passed, and the man woke in the morning and attempted to board his train, only to find himself rudely directed to the “Jim Crow car.”

Looking at himself in train’s bathroom mirror, the white man discovers he has become black, an “even hue of black.”

“‘I know what’s happened,’ are the next words of the man,” Welles reports. “It’s very simple —They woke up the wrong man!”

The police officer who tore away Isaac Woodard’s sight with a billy club, continues Welles, has not been named. “For just now, let’s call the policeman Officer X. He might be listening to this — I hope so. Officer X, I’m talking to you… They woke up the wrong man!”

Welles’ voice expands, ignites. It wrings color from the eardrums:

“That somebody else, that man sleeping there, is you — the you that God brought into the world all innocent of hate, a paid-up member of the brotherhood of man. Yes, believe or not, that’s you, Officer X, still asleep. That you could have been anything — it could have gone to the White House when it grew up, it could have gone to heaven when it died. But they woke up the wrong man!”

There is no justice possible in this case, Welles says. Even if Officer X is tried and jailed, as he should be, Woodard’s mutilation will remain. Still, the broadcaster continues, he is interested in the policeman’s fate:

“Your welfare is a measure of the welfare of my country. I cannot call it your country. How long will you get on in these United States? Which of the states will still consent to get along with you? Where stands the sun of common fellowship? When will it rise over your dark country? When will it be noon in Georgia?”

October 2nd, that year. Officer X is named and indicted in South Carolina, following a national outrage propelled, in large part, by Orson Welles’ blistering commentary. The culprit, as it turns out, is the local Chief of Police, Linwood Shull.

November 5th, 1946. After half an hour’s deliberation, Shull is cleared of all charges by a white jury.

***

On a movie screen, ten years can pass in a moment. A boy becomes a man in the flicker of a cut. A man dies, grows old, is young again — all in seventy minutes. Welles mastered the technique, in Kane.

It is September, 1992. Isaac Woodard is dying a Bronx Veteran’s Hospital.

It is May 19th, 1942. Jacaré is drowning in the waters off of Rio, while Welles watches through a camera lens.

It is August 1940, and Kane is underway. Welles is imagining Jesus Christ in American drag. Miracles from the desert, Parables from the breadlines. Death and resurrection in overalls.

It is 1997, a few days after Christmas, and Officer X is dead, aged ninety-five.

It is 2014. The money-changers are in charge. Carnival is a word for a tent show. We cannot rest, even on our holidays. Funny hats are serious business. Christ on film is a matter for people like Mark Burnett, the producer of Survivor.

The public failed Orson Welles. He failed them right back.

***

By the end of the 1940s, Orson Welles’ career in America was all but exhausted. He spent the rest of his life primarily in Europe, where his works for stage, screen, and radio remained inconsistent, only occasionally materializing in finished form. What he managed to produce was a catalogue of despair, horror, crime and paranoia: stories of bad people in dark places, their pains reflected and multiplied by a reality where truth seems constantly withheld.

There are hints, just beneath the surface, of a direct, credulous Christianity in all this. A conviction that, at some level, all men are endowed with a dignity that transcends the messy particulars of their time and place. He imagined Christ in Texas — but it was never filmed. He saw, in the fishers of Brazil, some flash of deep eternity — but it was never edited together.

The fate of a twentieth century artist. He wanted Jesus Christ, but he gave us Harry Lime.

In The Third Man, at the foot of the Ferris wheel, Welles turns to his co-star and smiles roguishly. “Don’t be so gloomy,” he says. “After all, it’s not that awful.”

“Remember what the fellow said — In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.”

He’s supposed to have come up with that bit on his own.

***

Special thanks for this column are due the staff of the Lily Library at Indiana University, where Welles’ correspondence from the early 1940s is capably archived. A heavy debt is also owed to Simon Callow, the author of The Road to Xanadu and Hello Americans, the first two volumes of a proposed biographical trilogy on the subject of Welles. A third volume is expected next year.

The calendar says this is the holiday season. I suspect, however, that nobody reading this feels quite like celebrating. Although the brief account contained above elides their participation, the NAACP was instrumental is publicizing Isaac Woodard’s case and agitating both the state of South Carolina and the federal government on his behalf. Their legal defense fund is in constant need of donations.

In his “Wrong Man” commentary, Welles makes the essential point that no crime can be truly corrected. Criminals may be jailed, or hurt, but there is no turning back time — and no true reversal of injustice. The closest we can come, he says, is by attempting to smother each brutality in the annals of our nation with an equal or greater degree of gentleness, enacted through whatever meager instruments fall within our personal command. In other words, much older: “where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

Which is as good a sentiment to take into the new year as any.

A final thanks are due to my editor at The Revealer, Kali Handelman, who has tolerated much on my behalf over the last twelve months, and done so gracefully.

***

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Orson Welles’ The Life of Christ appeared first on The Revealer.

Dark Dungeons

kh1242 — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 18:25:16 +0000

By Don Jolly

I can’t do anything on time these days. I get ghosts in November.

My Brooklyn street is lined with bare branches. Rent’s past due but nobody cares. I’ve seen my landlord twice — both times at a distance.

It’s getting cold at night. The corners are clearing. During the day, when there’s no sun, the stoops stand empty. No talk, no cars. Just the long streets whispering, near silence. Wind and trash and bicycles.

I sit in a bare spot on the hardwood floor, leaning against the wall. The place is trashed.

Jack’s here.

“What are you working on?” he asks, shuffling through the papers on my desk.

“The column,” I explain. “You’ll like it — it’s about Dungeons & Dragons again.” We played together.

“Really?” he asks. A purple-covered pamphlet among the notes and clippings catches his eye: A Christian Response to Dungeons & Dragons: The Catechism of the New Age, says the cover. Beneath the title, a snarling dragon reaches for unsuspecting kids. Jack picks it up, smiles incredulously, and then begins to read aloud. “It’s Christmas morning,” he says.

“Brimming with excitement Junior opens his first gift, a Basic Dungeons and Dragons set. Inside he finds a rule book, some graph paper and an odd set of dice. No game board. No little ‘men’ to move around. He checks the wrapping paper for missing pieces, then begins to open the other packages, hoping to find ‘the rest’ of his game.”

Jack turns to me, excited. “Is this real?” he asks.

“Good question,” I say. The way his eyebrow sags into its socket disgusts me. I wince, and try to stop myself from wincing. Don’t they sell patches where he’s from?

Jack returns to the pamphlet.

“But, Junior has all he needs to play Dungeons & Dragons,” he reads. “The game, you see, doesn’t take place on a board. Instead you play in your head. In D&D, the basic rule is, ‘Use your imagination. Stretch it to the limit.’ Game boards and little men can be so confusing.”

He laughs. “Who wrote that?”

“A couple of Presbyterian ministers,” I answer. “Peter Leithart and George Grant. They’re pretty active writers. Have been since the eighties. Leithart has done some commentaries — Kings and Samuel, I think. Grant does rightwing political stuff, mostly. Lot of attacks on Planned Parenthood. In 1992 he wrote a whole book about Ross Perot.”

Jack is still thumbing through A Christian Response. “Really?”

“Yeah.” I brace my hands in the air, outlining an invisible marquee. “Perot: The Populist Appeal of Strongman Politics,” I say, with grandeur.

“Great title.”

“It is.”

“So why’d they write about D&D?”

“Well, A Christian Response was released in 1987. Throughout the eighties there was a lot of concern about D&D in the media. Evangelical media especially. You remember how it was, back when —”

Jack interrupts, grinning. “When I was alive?”

“When we were kids,” I correct.

He laughs. “Whatever.”

James Dallas Egbert III

“These days, D&D gets treated like any other nerdy hobby,” I say. “But in the eighties and nineties, it had a patina of troubled youth. Isolation and suicide, they said. All because of James Dallas Egbert the Third.”

“Who was that?” Jack scoffs. “Sounds made-up.”

“No! He was real. A bright kid who played D&D in the seventies. In 1979, he was sixteen years old and already a sophomore at Michigan State University, taking courses in computer science There’s a picture of him in that pile, there,” I indicate some papers on my desk.

Jack shuffles through them, finding the photograph. “Good looking kid,” he shrugs.

“Nobody liked him, apparently. He was younger than his classmates — socially awkward. Gay. His best friend at school was a girl from the dorms named Karen Coleman. Dallas nicknamed her ‘Mother.’”

Jack shakes his head. “Yikes.”

“No, no… I mean, yeah, it’s embarrassing, but we have to own that kind of thing, right? I grew up playing D&D, and you played with me, at least a few times... I’ve been doing it for twenty years, now. And I’ve played with more guys like James Dallas Egbert the Third than I care to admit in mixed company.”

“Newsflash,” Jack says. “Nerds play D&D.”

“But being a nerd in 2014 is very different than being a nerd in 1994,” I say. “The Avengers made more than a billion dollars at the box office two years ago. Everybody’s on the Internet, now. Nerd culture is just culture. The old stigmas are being dismantled by apologetic writing. You’ve probably seen some of it. Headlines like ‘Videogames Make You Smarter and Healthier,’ or pieces like that one about writers playing D&D that ran in the New York Times this summer. Ethan Gilsdorf wrote that one. It’s pretty good, actually. In it, he lists off all these creative, successful people who played D&D when they were growing up. Fantasy writers like China Miéville and Cory Doctorow. Stephen Colbert, the T.V. comedian. Even Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic. They all used to play. The message of the piece is that the kind of imagination involved in D&D helped these people strengthen their creative muscles. It’s not just a game for losers, Gilsdorf implies. Winners play it, too.”

Jack shrugs. “You disagree?”

I think for a second. “I disagree with the terms of the conversation.” A breeze whips at my windows, clattering the naked trees. “In this particular place and time, I’d rather lose than win..”

Jack grows serious. “So, obliquely, I’m a loser?” The skin arches above his missing eye.

I can speak my mind to people in his situation. “Yeah,” I nod. ”You’re a loser, I’m a loser — who cares?”

Outside, a garbage truck rattles down the block, big and hollow. “The reactionary literature about D&D in the 1980s, misguided as it was, still had a certain empathy to it,” I continue. “In 1991, a minor Christian television personality named Joan Hake Robie wrote her own entry in the genre, a seventy-six-page booklet called The Truth About Dungeons & Dragons. She dedicated it to ‘all the gifted young men and women’ who play D&D. ‘May your eyes be opened to the truth,’ she wrote.’ I think that’s kind of sweet. At least she cared enough to write.”

Jack shakes his head, disagreeing. “That’s not empathy,” he says. “That’s a pitch.”

I shrug. “Take what you can get,” I say.

“Whatever.” Jack’s eyes return to the photograph. “So what happened to him, exactly?”

William Dear

“Oh, right. James Dallas Egbert disappeared on August 15th, 1979. He got stoned, had lunch with ‘Mother,’ and then just vanished. He was missing for almost a month, and the press had a field day. A young genius missing, maybe dead. The Egbert family hired a private investigator named William Dear to help find him.”

“This guy?” Jack asks, holding up a photo from my mess of notes. “The dude with the tommy gun?”

“That’s him.”

Jack shakes his head, still looking at the picture. “This all seems fake.”

“Oh, it’s real. Or real as anything in print. Dear was flamboyant. In the introduction to his book The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert the III, which came out in 1984, he bragged about some of his exploits being turned into episodes of Simon & Simon and Matt Houston.”

“Never seen ‘em,” Jack says.

“Detective shows,” I explain. “Dear started interviewing the kids who knew Dallas at Michigan State. He found out that the kid was playing a strange new game called Dungeons & Dragons. He also found out that Michigan State, like a lot of colleges, had a network of steam tunnels running under the campus. Sometimes, Dear learned, Dallas and his D&D friends would play the game in those tunnels. The detective thought maybe Dallas had gone down there by himself one day and gotten lost. The press ate it up. They thought D&D was to blame.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jack says. “That’s like blaming chess or something. Dungeons & Dragons is a game, you play it around a table and roll dice.”

“Yeah,” I acknowledge. “But it’s an imagination game. It’s not confined to a board, and each session links up with each other session. D&D games can go on for months — years. You know how hard it is to explain that to anyone who hasn’t played.”

“Not really,” Jack says. “I never explained it anybody.”

“I don’t know if I have either, really. I’ve tried.”

“Yeah, I read your column every month.”

“Really?” I say, not believing him.

“Oh sure,” Jack answers. “I keep up with the internet like crazy. They’ve got a fiber-optic line in Hell.”

He laughs uproariously. I don’t.

“ Seriously,” he says. “Nobody reads your column.”

“The point I was trying to make last month is that D&D is a game so large, and so complicated that it has more in common with a model of reality than Checkers or Risk… It’s a space where modern people play at things that their real lives make difficult or impossible.”

“Like believing in God,” Jack says.

“Or talking to ghosts,” I answer.

“Whatever.”

“Now, imagine you’re a writer for the New York Times, or the Dayton Journal Herald, in 1979. How do you explain something like D&D in a paragraph? The game was less than a decade old, at that point. The people who played it were part of a tiny subculture of hobby gamers. Information on the topic wasn’t exactly easy to get. As a result, most of the stories about Egbert focused on the superficial, talking about how D&D contained hideous monsters and magic spells. People thought it was witchcraft.”

“I remember that,” Jack says. “What was that old comic? Dark Dungeons? The one where the girl starts playing D&D, and gets sucked into a witches’ coven or something?”

“I’ll get there,” I say. “Dark Dungeons comes later. The immediate aftermath of the James Dallas Egbert disappearance is stuff like that Rona Jaffe novel from 1981, Mazes and Monsters. They made it into a T.V. movie the next year, starring Tom Hanks as a college student who gets caught up in a game like D&D and then goes insane. He ends up trying to jump off the World Trade Center, thinking he can fly.” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfxXug5ZMdk]

Jack giggles. “I have spells!” he quotes, pathetically. “That movie’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, it’s funny,” I say. “But people were scared. In 1983, a woman named Patricia A. Pulling started an anti-D&D advocacy group — Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or B.A.D.D.. Her son played the game at a school club, and when he killed himself in 1982, she blamed it and sued its publisher. “60 Minutes” did a whole segment with her and one of the game’s creators, Gary Gygax, in 1985. A real he-said-she-said thing.”

Jack shakes his head, disbelieving. “This whole thing is so strange,” he says. A pause. “Did Egbert commit suicide?”

“Eventually.”

Jack sucks air behind his back teeth. “Tcch!”

“Dear, the detective, tracked him to an oil town called Morgan City, in Louisiana,” I explain. “This was mid-September, 1979. Dallas had been working on a derrick. By September 13th, he was back with his family. Dear and the Egberts never really cleared up where the kid had been, or why he’d left in the first place. The D&D theory was all anyone had. About a year later, on August 11th, 1980, Dallas put a pistol to his right temple and fired. He never regained consciousness. Died five days later.”

“Poor guy,” Jack says.

“Poor guy,” I agree. “Now, look back at A Christian Response to Dungeons & Dragons. The first line of the first chapter.”

Jack finds the little booklet, retrieving it from a confusion of scraps. “Parents are concerned,” he reads, aloud. “And well they should be. Our children are growing up in a very hazardous world. Not only are they forced to pick their way through a complex maze of conflicting values at school, in the neighborhood, and out in the marketplace, but they are even being assaulted in the ‘safety’ of their own homes.”

He chuckles. “By Dungeons & Dragons?” he asks.

“By Dungeons & Dragons,” I affirm.

Jack puts the book back, smiling. “So, these Christian authors didn’t really understand it, right? The game?”

“Some of them tried to,” I said. “Leithart and Grant actually do a pretty good job. Better than Rona Jaffe, anyway. Their problem with D&D, as they put it in A Christian Response, isn’t really that the game contains magic or monsters. They were more concerned by the imagination involved. Here, give me the book.”

Jack hands it over. I flip to page five, and read from section titled “The Moral Dilemma.”

“Of course, not everyone who plays the game becomes suicidal or homicidal,” I read. “One of the chief defenses of [D&D] is that [it stimulates] the imagination. This is undeniably true. The question is whether we want our imagination (or that of our children) to be stimulated in this particular way.”

“Jesus,” Jack says.

“Exactly. D&D allows players to imagine a miniature world, where God is just part of a game system, a piece of the whole, like a rook on chessboard. For Leithart and Grant, that goes too far. It’s blasphemy.” I thumb to the book’s conclusion. “Scripture encourages leisure, play and even role-playing, though always within the limits of moral Law,” I read aloud. “In the context of these standards […] our imaginations find true freedom. Like the sheep to which the Scripture so often compares us, our freest play is within the fold. Outside, there is only the bondage of fear that allows for no real leisure.”

“It’s about control,” Jack says.

“It is,” I agree. “But, on this point at least, Leithart and Grant aren’t too far from the position taken by Rona Jaffe, or any other ‘secular’ person caught up in the D&D panic of the eighties. The premise of the whole fiasco was that the imagination is a dangerous place. James Egbert got lost there. He never came back. There were a whole slew of secular and religious books saying roughly the same thing, all the way into the early nineties.”

“So, what about Dark Dungeons? That was a Christian thing, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, sure,” I say, getting up from my seat to browse through a shoebox of old papers. Dark Dungeons is a tiny, illustrated pamphlet, something like a flip-book. Its author, Jack T. Chick, is a reclusive evangelical cartoonist who’s been screaming from the margins of American religious life since the early sixties. His “Chick Tracts,” including Dark Dungeons, tell simple, frightening stories in pictures, with the ultimate objective of bringing lost souls to Christ. Chick’s Christian readers distribute his tracts far and wide, on missionary crusades and in any public space that accepts free literature. Their method is to win souls through horror — to literally scare the hell out of people.”

“Dark Dungeons was released in 1984,” I say, retrieving my copy from the scraps. I pass it to Jack. He scoffs.

“I remember this,” he says. “This girl, Debbie, starts playing D&D with a creepy looking woman named Ms. Frost. Eventually she joins some kind of cult, where she learns to ‘really cast spells.’”

“And her friend Marcie gets so wrapped up in the game that she kills herself,” I add. “Just like Egbert.”

Jack pauses. “Here’s what I never understood,” he says. “This idea that the magic and stuff in D&D is real, that it’s all some kind of training to join a Satanic order or something.”

“Chick was always into conspiracies,” I explain. “He really believes that his tract making has made him the target of Satan’s agents on Earth. Chick thinks they’re everywhere, hiding in plain sight, operating through an endlessly complex series of clandestine organizations. In the end, it all goes back to the Vatican.”

“The Vatican?” Jack asks.

“Well, Chick isn’t a formal member of any Christian organization, but he’s definitely protestant. His view of the Catholic Church would fit into a Thomas Pynchon novel. Or Robert Anton Wilson.”

“So D&D is a Catholic conspiracy.”

“Yeah, roughly. Or part of one. Debbie, the main character of Dark Dungeons, gets saved at the end of the tract by a lecturer who encourages her to burn her game manuals and rock and roll records in a bonfire, right? That lecturer was based on somebody Chick knew — an anti-occult crusader named John Wayne Todd. Todd used to travel around speaking at churches about ‘the occult‘ in the late seventies and early eighties. He organized bonfires like that. For him, the almost all of ‘secular‘ pop culture was a satanic power play.”

Jack points to a page in the booklet — a picture of the curly-haired man putting his hand on Debbie’s shoulder, saying “In the name of Jesus, I order you spirits of the occult to leave Debbie.” Sure enough, the girl’s body is being vacated by disconsolate ghosts. “Lord Jesus, I repent,” she says.

“That was a real guy?” Jack asks.

“Well,” I shrug. “John Wayne Todd is a little slippery. He claimed to have been raised in a coven, and maintained that his family was highly placed in the secret, Satanic cult that ran the world. He called it the Illuminati, of course. Todd was saved, he said, in San Antonio, Texas, back in 1972. Apparently he had just seen The Cross and the Switchblade, an evangelical movie starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada. On the way out of his screening, someone handed him a Chick Tract.”

“Crazy,” Jack says.

“Maybe,” I acknowledge. “Or made up. Todd and Chick worked together for a decade, and cartoonist put out a lot of comics and pamphlets based on Todd’s stories of the witch-cult. Dark Dungeons was part of that.”

“You can tell they sure never played the game,” he says, closing the tract. “Just the way people in this thing talk about it… ‘I’m fighting the Zombie. Tell her I’ll see her tonight,’ or ‘Debbie, your cleric has been raised to the 8th level.’ It’s all just — wrong.”

“‘I used the mind bondage spell on my father,’” I say, quoting from Dark Dungeons. “He was trying to stop me from playing D&D.”

Jack giggles, crinkling his wound. “Right,” he says. “There’s no divide between the game and the real world in here. And all Todd’s conspiracies are true.”

“He ran with some serious people, apparently,” I say. “In interviews Todd claimed to have seen George McGovern kill a girl during a ritual sacrifice. Todd was the ‘occult advisor‘ to the Kennedy’s, too, of course. All before he got saved.”

Outside, the wind picks up. The sun is almost set. “Does this thing go all the way to the J.F.K. assassination?” asks Jack. “I mean, of course it does.”

“Well,” I say. “J.F.K. wasn’t really assassinated. Todd says that was all a sham. He used to hang out on Jack Kennedy’s yacht in the seventies.”

Jack rolls his eyes. “Of course.”

We sit, reading separately. It gets dark.

“What are we going to do with all this?” Jack asks.

I pause. “Well, as I see it, this is all about secrets and games. Stories and imagination. Systems, ‘real’ or not, that have places set for humanity, and politics, and God. We think there’s a division between fantasy and reality, but there isn’t. It’s all a big mess.”

I look around, at my apartment, which I haven’t cleaned since I got my Master’s Degree, at the end of the summer. Papers everywhere. Paper and trash. “This is the world we live in,” I say. Jack looks out the window. It starts to rain.

“You know what really happened to James Dallas Egbert?” I ask.

Jack’s expression doesn’t change.

“He was young. He felt pressured. His mother, his real mother, had driven him to enter college early, and she wasn’t satisfied with anything but perfect grades. Dallas felt trapped, like he was in a game whose next twenty moves had been worked out ahead of time. So he left. He went into the steam tunnels, first, but not to play. He went to be alone.”

“How do you know all this?”

“The detective, William Dear, put it in his book. The Dungeon Master.”

Jack nods. “Sure.”

“Dallas tried to commit suicide in the tunnels,” I explain. “It didn’t work, so he crawled to a friend’s house. From there, he got pawned off on friends and friends of friends, until he ended up in Louisiana.”

The rain gets harder.

“But before that, when he was alone, Dallas felt, for a minute, like he’d gotten away. ‘I sat down against the wall, so I could lean against it,’ he told Dear. ‘It was chilly and I was wrapped in my blanket. I had food within reaching distance. It was heaven.’”

We sit for a while. The shadows lengthen.

Finally, Jack faces me. I stare. “What do you think really happened?” he asks. “To me, I mean.”

“Well,” I say. “I think you were bright kid, but a little weird. We met in the fifth grade, but we weren’t really friends. You played the game with me.”

“Sure,” he shrugged. “Right so far.”

“I think you started shooting up in high school. And then you dropped out. We saw each other a few times after that. Someone cut your face in that flophouse on the East side. That’s how you lost the eye. Eventually you just — got away. The cops found you in that drainage ditch.”

“Eh, pretty close.”

***