Kings and Rubber Cigars

Today is the epiphany, or the theophany if you're Coptic, which always seemed a better name for me since the point is that the day represents the revealing of the theos, or Godness of Jesus, roughly "God Appears" in English. (apologies to those whose greek is far better than mine.)

In most traditions, it celebrates the day the Magi followed the star of Bethlehem to pay their respects to the baby Jesus. "Magi" is a Persian word usually associated with Zoroastrianism, meaning "priest" or "philosopher," but often translated to "wise men" or "king" in English.

The Magi are only mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew. It doesn't mention their names, their countries, or even how many there were. There being three of them, their three different nationalities and their three names are all part of supernumerary and not canon Christian traditions.

Much of the traditions we associate with the Magi come, not from the Gospel, but from the Old Testament, particularly from Isaiah predicting the coming of the Messiah. They bring gifts to the newborn "king of the Jews," or "the true king of the Jews," or "Messiah." Their presence and their naming the baby "King of the Jews" is what first reveals Jesus as the Messiah, and so that's why we celebrate it. It also predicts the next step in the Jesus story, where the acting King of the Jews, Herod the Great, seeks to destroy the baby before it can take his throne, forcing the holy family to escape to Egypt, much like Joseph did.

In English tradition, Ephiphany is associated with wassailing, or the visiting of orchards to procure their cider, which should have a reasonably strong alcoholic content by this time of the year, so it's a good day to get smashed and sing. In the American tradition, you're also supposed to have your Christmas decorations down by today, so you can start putting up your Valentine's day decorations.

We three kings of Orient are

Trying to smoke this rubber cigar

it was loaded and exploded

spreading us ever so far

How to Paint: Lesson One

If I'm gonna do this painting thing, then I'm gonna do it for mastery, not to pass the time because I got nothing better to do.  That sounds like a bold statement for somebody who quit doing it for almost thirty years and was only moderately talented to begin with.  All that's true, but I'm just that kind of an asshole.

I have weird ideas about art.  They're similar to my weird ideas about religion.  Both involve chasing something you can't ever touch and most never catch even a glimpse of.  Beauty is a fundamental force of the universe, both creating and destroying; it is a principal motivator in whatever game God plays.  It's a principal element in what drives him to create, essentially us, as well as everything else, but then also to destroy the same so that its fleeting temporal nature magnifies the intensity of its value.  That its overwhelming power can exist only in the liquid nature of time encourages us to persevere, even though we are meek and puny in the face of beauty.    

Because art and beauty have no structure or definition, I figure if I go about it also without structure and definition, then I'll just get lost and confused and probably drink myself to death like Hemmingway.  Just kidding about that, although losing his path really is how Papa died.  Watercolor is a new medium for me.  That's good, though.  That means I can't use shit I learned when I was sixteen as a crutch.  I have to learn all new disciplines, all new methods, and perspectives.  Since I'm moving into the second half of a centenarian life, I have to be mindful of constantly learning new things to keep my mind exercised to prevent its decline.  I've seen what happens when it declines, and I don't want that.  Since music, dance, and science seem out of the question, art must be the way to go.  I'm not spending the rest of my life learning new words for scrabble.

All of that unnecessary verbiage aside, here's the plan:  five new watercolor paintings a week.  They may be exercises, or they may be an attempt at finished pieces, but there must be five of them, at least nine by twelve inches in size.  Because all my research so far says that drawing is a key element of watercolor, then I'll need to do at least five drawings a week, separate from the painting, although they can be used to prepare myself for a painting.  Draw it once as a drawing, draw it again as the underpinning of a painting, like so.  That's a total of ten hours a week working on this project.  That's nothing.  I used to spend twenty-five hours a week sitting on my ass at scrooges.  This is a lot more productive and a lot less likely to lead me into chatting up a woman who might ruin my life.  The food won't be as good, though, and sometimes I really miss whiskey and tobacco.  There may be weeks when I do ten paintings, but there have to be at least five.  It's too easy to "think about" painting without actually doing it.  I did that for longer than some of you have been alive.  

None of this is to say I will be any good.  None of my efforts to paint or write or draw or sculpt or act is to "be good" or seek approval; it's about whatever that's inside me needs coming out, and it won't leave me alone unless I let it.  There were times in my life when I would do these things and not tell anyone, not my wife, not my mother, not my father; it's not about that.  What's different now is that I've found that it's actually kind of nice if I share what I'm doing.  Sharing is good like Mrs. Nelson said.  Naps are good too, but I've napped too long.  It's time for work.

Lessons of the Cross

 

Despite what the Beatles tell you, the amount of love you give does not equal the amount of love you take. In many lives, the amount of love you put into the world greatly out measures the amount of love the world returns to you by the final act. They know this, but they move forward despite it, because they know a secret.

You must go, fearless, into the abyss of this inequity because if you do not, there is no life at all. Most of the people who know this terrible secret never mention it. They serve, they love, they suffer, they die, and they do it for you. That is the lesson of the Christ.

I'm not Jesus. I cannot promise you love and life and redemption eternal because, unlike Jesus, I have not seen it. For all I know, it could be a myth created to make us feel better.

What I do know is this: if you falter, if you fail, if you do not make your proper contribution to this cycle of declivity and suffering, then those who come after you will have even less love, less opportunity, less hope, than you had. Only through your sacrifice is their redemption possible. That is the lesson of the cross. Turn away if you must, but the price of your absence will be paid not by you but by those who come after.

Journeys of Faith

The Christian apologists I depend on the most are Spong and Lewis (C.S., not T.W., although T.W. is way up there). There are oceans between their perspectives, but I believe Christology is that deep and varied if you give it a chance.

The question every Christian must answer is "do you believe?" and I never know how to answer that. I do not have child-like faith, but I didn't have it as a child, either. I was, and am, a very nervous and frightened child. That makes it very difficult to have a complete and blinding faith in anything or anyone.

There was a time when I chose to disavow all childhood instruction and memes and tribal fielty with regards to Christianity and start over, to rebuild my faith on my own terms as an adult. Begining from a position of no belief, I rebuilt the foundations of my faith, brick by brick to discover what I really felt and what I could really present as my own life.

In my journey to rebuild my faith, I included two atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins. I didn't think I could make an honest conclusion without considering all sides of the issue, and for people without faith, these two are among the best. 

Dawkins' ideas about memes actually provided me the building blocks of my new faith. Combining Dawkin's theories about memes with Jung's theories about archetypes allowed me to hypothesize that maybe this is the language by which the divine communicates with us, and that's why these memes and archetypes repeat themselves in nearly every culture. It's a way to deliver these gigantic ideas to us in smaller, digestible pieces.

Faith is a journey, not a destination, and it's a journey we make every moment of our entire lives; even if we tell ourselves our minds and our hearts are settled on the subject, they never really are. Lewis is somebody you might think had a settled and firm faith, but if you read A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, Joy, you'll see that even Lewis had an evolving and changing faith and faced days when the well seemed dry and unrecoverable.

I start essays like this thinking by the end, I'll come up with some sort of constructed and complete point, but on this particular subject, I never do. Maybe there is no focused point in faith. Maybe there's not meant to be. Maybe we're not able to complete this mind journey while we're alive. Maybe that was the point all along.  

Tellers of Stories

Besides girls with brown eyes and good coffee, there's not much in the world I love as much as a good story, especially if it's a story about Mississippi.   My life has been blessed in so many ways.  That I've been surrounded by so many, more than excellent, raconteurs means more to me than I can say.  

Telling stories runs in my family.  Besides basic communication and fellowship, telling stories is the foundation of good writing.  Both my nephews are excellent writers.  I knew Jack was and suspected Campbell might be.  I read over some of Campbell's master's thesis on Christmas, and he's a fantastic writer.  I haven't read anything Collins wrote yet.  She's pretty young but the quickest of the three and fierce like a lion, so I don't see how she could be anything but an excellent writer.  Their mom tells great stories.  She favors our mom, who could hold her own among all the men around her who thought they knew better.  

Of all the boys my baby sister brought home, she married the one that told the best stories.  I don't know if that was part of her criteria, but it was a big part of mine.  There was this one fella called the Prince of Darkness, who apparently could sneak across enemy lines with nothing but a pen knife and take out a platoon, but he couldn't tell a story worth a damn.  He couldn't tell stories, but there are some pretty good stories about him, though.  Ask me about the alligators or the fight at CS's sometimes.  

I don't know if it was his intention, but Jay collected a remarkable group of storytellers around him through the years, which surprised the hell out of me, seeing as two-thirds of them are Phi Delta Thetas.  Bowman's really good, but the king will always be Hank Aiken.  I think the key is that they're all very active readers, and for whatever else is going on up there, Oxford has an excellent culture for reading and writing.  Square Books is a big part of that; the bar at City Grocery has a reputation for wetting some excellent writers, most notably Larry Brown.  I wasn't there, but the people who know tell me that Barry Hannah is probably the most responsible for the literary culture at Ole Miss.  It's not so much that he was an amazing writer himself, which he was, but that he promoted and mentored and made welcome so many other writers, creating a seed and a tree that still bears fruit up in Oxford town.

I never knew my great-grandfather.  He seemed to have been excellent with his hands, having built a schoolhouse and a store and used his ox team to plow most of the roads up in Atalla County in that time.   "Good with his hands" is an accurate way to describe my Great-grand, who everyone called Cap, but an interesting choice of words, seeing as, of hands, he had only one, losing the other in an accident as a young man.  Whatever else Cap did in life, he must have been an excellent storyteller because his children were and their children were.

One of the great pleasures of my young life was shadowing my father when he was with his cousins and friends, so much so that I learned to carry things and mix drinks and light cigarettes in hopes that I'd be useful enough that they'd tolerate my presence.  It's not that they were captains of industry, marshals of law, or bulwarks of Mississippi politics; (although they were); they fascinated me because of the stories they told, mostly about each other, but also about the life and conditions and events and passions that make up Mississippi.

Dad had a cousin on his mom's side, Ben McCarty, and a cousin on his dad's side, Robert Wingate, who both told excellent stories, some of the best.  There was a fraternity of men around my dad who all looked into their glass and swirled the ice as they told stories like it was a scrying glass that showed them the past.  Dad did it too.  Smoking and drinking, especially to excess, was part of the culture of men in their generation.  It probably contributed to why there are so few of them left, but it made them all excellent at gesturing while they talked, and they talked a lot.  

Daddy idolized his older cousin Robert Wingate, and I did too.  Robert was the keep of the family legends for many years.  Besides Wingate, Dad's best friend was Rowan Taylor.   Rowan had an excellent mind, one of the best I've known.  He was an avid reader and often found ways to introduce himself to and associate himself with the many excellent writers in Mississippi.  I'm sure he knew her before, but through his beloved Suzanna Marrs, he was able to befriend Eudora Welty in the last years of her life.  Miss Eudora was selective about her companions.  That she allowed him was something of an honor.  In conversation and as a storyteller, Rowan practiced a very precise sort of conservation of words that made him seem stoic to some but, to me, made him seem more interesting than the others.  I always found his choice and economy of words as interesting as whatever story he told.  Like Miss Eudora, Rowan was a life trustee of Millsaps, which benefited us in many ways.  

For several reasons, reading and writing were difficult for me, but befriending and knowing and loving these amazing people made a shy boy like me, whose eyes didn't work properly, want to read and want to write and want to tell stories.  It's the wanting to that makes us all capable of doing the worthwhile things in life, no matter how difficult they are for us.  Some of them are lost to us now, but their voices, their ideas, and their stories are, and will always be, a part of me.

My Old School

The party tonight energized me, so sleep may not come. My muse can be a very inconsiderate person. There are nine of them, I tend to split my time between Calliope, Clio, Thalia, Melpomene, and Polyhymnia, so they keep me busy. 

The last time I attended a function at the lower school gym, I spent two days working up the courage to ask someone for a dance, who ended up not even going to the party. She didn't show up last night, either. Pretty inconsiderate, if you ask me. She got married about thirty-five years ago so that ship might have sailed.

Although there weren't many people from my class at the party, several of them had children who did. I hadn't seen some of them since I was a student at St. Andrews myself, so seeing the ghost of their reflection in the faces of their twenty-five-year-old child was haunting and melancholy but deeply touching. Soon, their faces will be reflected in the faces of grandchildren at our old school.

St. Andrews features heavily in my vision and hopes for Jackson and Mississippi. Their concepts and philosophy on education align closely with my own. I hope to become as useful to them as they are to me in time. 

They say your old school looks smaller when you return. St. Andrews looked considerably larger to me, probably because it actually is physically larger. I enjoyed making out features of my old school inside the physical plant that sits on Old Canton Road now, almost like counting the rings of a tree. Doors and windows and ramps and halls I passed a thousand times now share space with younger, fresher cousins. I'm actually quite impressed with how later architects made their projects fit in with the earlier structures. It looks like a cohesive whole, even though it was assembled in several pushes through the years. 

They also say you can't go home again. I don't think that's true. I felt almost hauntingly home again. 

I was drawn almost immediately to the spot where Timmy Allen used to sit during P.E. Timmy suffered pretty bad juvenile arthritis and often had to sit out some of the more physical stuff we did because his body hurt. He was my friend, and because my body had begun to become stronger and larger than my classmates, I imagined myself as his protector and phalanx. I found the spot where I used to sit and keep statistics of the girl's basketball team when I was their erstwhile manager. If a place can become a part of you, that place certainly is. I'm glad I went, both last night and when I was a child.

What We Are Not

In educational terms, I'm what's sometimes called a triple threat.  I have three significant learning disabilities.   Born into a generation where educators and doctors first began to treat these conditions, although they'd known about them for many years before, I was diagnosed with: Dyslexia, all four types, and its lesser-known cousin, dyscalculia, which is the same thing but for math, Developmental Stuttering, and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.  Three severe threats to any form of education.

For men of my generation (most were, and still are, men), we were often considered uneducable and incorrigible.  Many of us never completed our education.  I never actually graduated from High School.  I took two courses at the Education Center and a test and went to college a year sooner than my classmates.  Having been held back in the second grade, I ended up going to college right on time by skipping my senior year in high school.  I received one degree in college and lack just a few semester hours for three more.   My Grade Point Average was far below stellar, but I crossed the finish line and completed all the work, just not always on time.

My dyslexia and dyscalculia were treated at home by my mother.  Already having an education degree from Belhaven, she taught herself Montisory Methods, so I might have a chance.  Among other things, she cut letters and numbers out of sandpaper so that I could feel them with my fingers in hopes it might sink in that way.  With these and many other means, I did eventually learn to read and write, things I cannot imagine life without.

The Stuttering was treated at St. Andrews by a woman who came twice a week to work privately with a few other students and me.  They call it developmental stuttering because it can't be traced to any brain damage, deformation, or emotional trauma.  In other words, they don't know what causes it.  After third grade, they treated my stuttering by enrolling me in every form of public speaking or acting class they could find, with hopes that it would give me more confidence and become less shy.  This is the same sort of treatment the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie prescribes for himself, so maybe it was common in the fifties and sixties.  I can't say that it made me more confident, and I'm as shy now as I was at six, but it did give me a life-long appreciation and love for acting, so there's that.

When I was in school, the treatment for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder was sports, sports, and more sports and lots and lots of punishment.  The operative theory being that we needed a way to burn off that extra energy and learn some discipline, goddamnit!   

Unlike the previous two, I can't say this worked very well.  Modern methods are much more effective.   Everything ended up feeling like punishment, which made sports that were supposed to be fun sometimes a miserable experience for me.  While many of my coaches are men I still love dearly, many others became the bane of my existence because I associated them with punishment, and to be honest, some of them did too.  

Even today, scientists disagree about the causes of these conditions, and educators disagree on the best method to cope with these conditions, so I can't really tell you what people like me are, but I can tell you what we are not with a high degree of certainty.

We are not stupid.

I can understand any subject or concept you can.  I can read any book or poem you can.  It may take me more time, but I'll get there, and I almost always do.  I've met very few people who said they had dyslexia, who I couldn't describe as above average in intelligence.  Whatever happens in our brains to cause this condition doesn't impair our ability to think.

We don't lack discipline or motivation.

Living with my father, discipline was never an option.  It was a survival tool.  Motivation, I brought myself.  I can and do sometimes want to accomplish things with a burning desire that I rarely discuss with anyone because I'm worried they'll think I've gone mad.  What breaks discipline, motivation, and determination in people like me is not a lack of character, but depression, which becomes our life-long companion.  We know we don't fit in.  We know it from diapers to death.  That fact can sometimes break even the strongest desire or most constant discipline.  

We're not bad kids.

We can be, and often are, deeply moralistic people.    No amount of punishment will resolve our issues.  This one might be the most important.  I've spent my life trying to understand the intricacies of right and wrong.  Morality is not something you ever really figure out.  That man's reach should exceed his grasp; else, what's a heaven for?  Because we are different, we often see things differently and make different decisions from other people.  That might make us seem bad in the eyes of a society that places a high value on conformity.  I would conform if I could.  So would most people like me.  It's not an option, though.  

If you're considering becoming a parent, or a grandparent, or an educator, you will encounter people like me.  We work differently and think differently, which sometimes will be very frustrating and annoying for you.   Sometimes you'll wonder if the extra effort we require is worth it.  We're not enemies, though.  I can tell you this:  we struggle to understand you as much as you struggle to understand us, but if you make the effort, so shall we.  If you make the effort, we will love and remember you our life long.  There are many, some who may even read this, who made the effort for me, and I will remember that until my eyes shut for the final time.   

The Shofar

 I had lunch today with two men.  They're older than me, and I've been aware of them and their family my whole life.  Listening to their perspective on events of the past was fascinating.  One of the things we talked about was how difficult it is to get people to stay in Mississippi once they become motivated and educated.  

One of them had just this experience.  After leaving Millsaps, Mississippi just wasn't big enough for him, so he moved on, but then, news came that a friend had his house bombed in Jackson.  "I figured I'd better get back to Mississippi," he said.  

In 1967, I was watching a lot of Captain Kangaroo while my mother was trying to figure out why I could say my alphabet but not write it or recognize the letters on flash cards.  My struggles with dyslexia were pretty insignificant compared to what else was going on in Mississippi.  Our own people were turning into monsters to prevent Mississippi from evolving.  In 1967, men in Mississippi, motivated by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of a political campaign, made bombs to destroy a synagog and a home, hoping to intimidate Jackson Jews into staying out of our cultural struggles and moving away if they could.

"I figured I'd better get back to Mississippi,"  my friend said.  He heard the alarm, and he answered it. His homeland needed him.

Without other means of distance communication, ancient Jews developed a musical instrument whose sound could be heard over long distances.  They made it from a ram's horn and called it a Shofar.  Although mostly ceremonial now, the original purpose of the Shofar was to communicate alarm and call for help.  "Wolves are attacking my sheep!  Alarm!  Alarm!"  "The city is under attack, Alarm!  Blow the Shofar!" Help would come because men afield recognized the call.

A bombing, a murder, a flood, economic distress, broken water systems, these things are all alarms.  "Help us!  The community is in great peril!  Alarm!"  We don't use the Shofar anymore, but the intent is the same if the alarm comes over the news or the internet or however you hear it.  The Shofar is a call to your countrymen, "Come now!  We need you!"

It would be so easy for me to stay in Madison once I'm well again and shop and eat and do all sorts of innocent, unchallenging white people things until I die, except that I'd never have any peace because all I can hear is the Shofar calling from my home.  "We need you!  Come now!  Come NOW!"

I am not yet well, and I'll never be as strong as I once was in some ways, but I'm strong in other ways, and I know what I must do.

The Manger

A manger is a table where we lay out food for our animals.

An altar is a table where we lay out food for our god.

If you're a Christian, an altar is where God lays out food for you.

Because we package Christmas for children, we can easily miss some of the more challenging but essential aspects of the Nativity story.  It begins with the Roman oppression of the world by taxation.   In later chapters, Roman taxes and tax collectors would become integral to the Jesus story.  Seventy years after the birth of Christ, Rome burned the temple in Jerusalem and the rest of the city to the ground and dispersed the children of Abraham throughout the world.  The story begins with oppression and ends with the holy family hiding in Egypt to escape the mass infanticide ordered by Harrod the Great in his attempt to destroy the Christ.  That's a lot of negative feelings for a child, so we tend to omit those ideas from the Christmas story.  

I start the Christmas story not with the birth of Jesus but with the birth of Isaac many years before.  To prove his devotion to God, Abraham moves to sacrifice his own son and builds an altar to offer Isaac to the Godhead.  God stops the hand of Abraham and provides him with a perfect ram for sacrifice, setting a new standard between the people and God.  

Today, we think Abraham's actions were horrific, but human sacrifice was common among ancient peoples.  All over the world, there are stories of royal and tribal people offering a non-heir child as a human sacrifice.  Agamemnon provides the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis so that the she will provide him fair winds on the way to Troy.  By stopping Abraham, God began a new paradigm among his people, who no longer were expected to make a human sacrifice to please their god.   

An altar is a table where people lay out food for their god to eat.  Agamemnon lays out a table where he offers his daughter's blood to the Goddess Artemis to drink.  In return, she forgave Agamemnon and allowed him fair winds.  In Abraham's case, he built a table, an altar, for the lord where the food was to be the meat of his son Isaac, but it ended up being the meat of a ram.

In French, the word "manger" means to eat.  A manger is an archaic term for a table laid out with food for animals to eat.  It is a humble altar dressed so that we sacrifice food for our humble servants: the beasts of the field.  

There is very little in the Bible that isn't a symbol for something else.   In time, we learn that God flips the dynamic between himself and his people, and instead of our offering sacrifices to him, he sacrifices his own son to us.  Laying the newborn Christ child in a manger doesn't just mean that he was born of humble surroundings; it means that God puts his own son on the humblest of all altars and offers him as sacrificial food for us. 

Later, in the Jesus story, Jesus says, "Hoc est corpus meum pro vobis; hoc facite in meam--Take, eat; this is My body."  God reverses the story of Abraham.  We no longer offer our children as food for gods; God offers his child as food for us.  

A manger might begin as the humblest of all altars, fit only for beasts, but the nature of God's offering on it elevates the manger to the greatest of all altars.  On a manger, God offers food for all humanity.