The Ghost of Odysseus Arrives in Rivendell

So. Begin when all the rest had left behind them headlong death in battle or at sea…

Yah, yah. Okay. We are going to be gentle with the grandiosity, yes? Because it is at once fragile and formidable. Go carefully. It’s okay. Every man in his own mind gets to play Odysseus, no? 

But at the moment, last night and this morning, I seem to be completely unstrung. A guitar turned into a not very useful percussion instrument: all you can do is thump on it. It’s a sound, I guess. But it’s not what guitars are meant for.

Now. A day is too precious a thing to throw away. Take council: take council, my Lord.

All right then. I call the Sun who walks all day through Heaven.

---

Sun: I am here, in plain fact. You do have to call me, though. I can’t come on my own. To call me a god is a bit of an extravagance. Divine, perhaps. Immortal, possibly. But the distance between me and the Yahweh who created the heavens and the earth is much much farther than the distance between you and me, between any of you and me. So you have to call me, not because I have some weird celestial fetish, of “wanting to be asked,” but just because I can’t come, I can’t even be, without a call. Enough. Tell me what is worrying you. Anyone?

Ghost: what if it all comes apart next week? What if sex is the thing that unravels everything? It has been before.

Sun: it has always been the most undigested thing, maybe. Despite, or because of our focus on it. It’s hard to look directly at it and see it clearly. But come. What could unravel?

Ghost: Freud hovers here: the fear I guess partly at least is that all our motives are really disguised versions of wanting soft-focus Cindy from the March 1971 Oui Magazine, and we don’t want anything else, and everything – God, beauty, justice – is just crap I fiddle with because I can’t have Cindy.

Lieutenant: Cindy who crouched by the stream and smiled at us, as if she saw us, as if she knew us, and all would be well.

Captain: somewhere there was, or there would come to be, a country where we were at home and all the seventeen year old girls were mature adults who loved us.

Rat: and would trace divine characters on our flesh with slender fingers.

Ghost: I mean, yes, it resonates all the way forward with Tolkien’s Galadriel. The roots of this are deeper than any of ours. 

Captain: But MY job was going to be to make the divine earthly and the earthly divine, right? I was going to make it all happen.

Lieutenant: Except that we were a pudgy, easily confused eleven year old boy, yes. I guess thirteen by the time we were gazing at Cindy, and mistaking some photographer’s vision for a vision of reality. So we stepped sideways into fantasy, when we could. 

Sun: which was the right thing to do, at the time, and not to be scoffed at. Losing everything we wanted and aspired to would have been much much worse. It was a way of preserving things that were threatened by the reality of Springfield, and bullies, and people who weren’t interested in anything difficult to understand. We do still live on the outskirts of a brutal and uncomprehending people. We still rely daily on certain deceptions and elisions. Dear friends we are still spies, in important senses, and always will be. It’s not that we’ve arrived in paradise and can lay our burdens down. I’m sorry: I wish it were: but we are still in the thick of it.

Rat: But we need not any longer pretend to anyone near and dear that the case is any different than that. And the poor Captain here need not complete the repair of the world within ten business days. We have our eighteen years (if we have them) and I at least want us to get along and help each other.

Ghost: is what we have enough?

Sun: to make us live forever in the golden sunlight of the new Atlantis? No. We will die, we are dying now, and we will vanish entirely, But we have answers to all that. And right now I think we are more distracted, and confused, than we are confronting mortality. We are absorbing a lot of Martha’s anxiety, for one thing. Another instance of second-hand smoke. We don’t need to be worried about this trip, either for her or for us. 

Ghost: Well you know, what it is, is grief: grief at all the waste of days, all the hiding and sneaking, all the time spent under the domination of Ahriman. Grief and anger. It’s nobody’s fault, really, but such a life of loss! So much skulking. And we are still skulking, and we’re tired of it, and we’re afraid that at the very worst moment we’ll suddenly break everything for no reason and every reason. Because…. It shouldn’t have been this way. It shouldn’t be this way. 

Sun: yes. I can’t fix this, you know. I can’t make the world other than it is. 

Ghost: [grins] No. No, and we’re like those disappointed Christians who are so angry at God for not existing. 

Sun: But what we can do… is not blame each other for the way of the world, not expect each other either to make it right or to make us fit comfortably in it. The problem is not that we are in rebellion against the world. The problem indeed is that we are not resolute and cohesive enough in our rebellion, Not committed enough to it. We hide for good reasons. The hostility of the world is not a figment our our imagination, which will vanish when achieve an adult vision. We need to pull together and really be on our own side, wholeheartedly, though. And we can do that. And we can both do that and grieve, and honor the struggle, and have compassion for the times we have been defeated and caved in and let ourselves down and let others down. We can do both those things. In fact, we have to do both those things, they are actually the same thing. 

Ghost: …. Actually the same thing. I’ve traveled a long way to come and hear that.

Sun: A very long way. This has not been easy, and it’s not going to be easy. But take your seat with us, here. We need you.

A Compost Prayer

The knotted candyflower and the bleeding hearts
were supposed to like the shade: perversely
they are flourishing now in the bright sun
around the trunk of the cut down maple;
a surging lace skirt for the dragon lilies.
Nothing is as it was supposed to be, this year.
The lilies lift their horns, and their throats
are thick with flies. Here is the garden
where all our sins are remembered, where
all the embers are numbered, where the fires
join hands and sing across the Gorge: a canticle
for rain forests that were never meant to burn.
Well. Lift the black target of the compost bin,
upend the glass pan. Down falls the onion skin,
the flakes of garlic paper,
the potato that rotted on the shelf.
Down roll peels of bananas and oranges
from Costa Rica; the bamboo sleeves of
coffee grounds from the Eje Cafetero:
nymph, in thy orisons be all my words forgot.

Officers and Crew: Top Down and Bottom Up

Captain: And you could draw the analogy – I’m not saying you should, mind you, just that you could – that that’s what consciousness is, and that’s the role of human beings in a sentient universe: that our work is precisely figuring out what the work is. All very meta and suited to the 21st Century. But we actually are situated, not just under a cesspool with the ceiling cracking, but in a good place for seeing some things that other people in other times have been less able to see. Why be self-conscious at all? Because you need to other yourself, to be able to step outside yourself and look back, in order to attain some kinds of understanding. 

Lieutenant: though to complete it you have to step BACK again. Otherwise you get stuck in Descartes’ nightmare world of automata, and are susceptible to believing nonsense, like that the world is a simulation. Yeah. But we’re getting way way off the track here, Captain. I don’t think we want to lose the thread we followed last time. And you (of all people!) are the only one who has offered actual substantial answers. I’ll add one of my own: there’s poetry. Hell, we could start a poetry podcast. Amaze our friends.

Captain: And what Vlad said the other day is a key part. We need to deliberately, consistently plunge into beauty, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes a day. 

Lieutenant: In fact there’s two ways to go at this, and maybe we should do both at once. One is top down: to figure out the project in conceptual terms. The other is from the bottom up: we have some strong intuitions of what the component habits and activities are going to be. One of them is going to be that regular immersion in beauty. We don’t have to know what the project is before we start forming the habits. Not completely, anyway. By the way, where is the Sun?

Rat: where he often is when you need him most. Nowhere to be seen.

Kid: [unintelligible]

Rat: Well, what do you know. You got something to say, Kid?

Kid: No, not really, I mean – I don’t know. Sorry. I don’t really belong here.

Rat: [softly] Yeah you do, Kid. Hang out with us. You don’t have to say anything: you don’t have to make sense. We got all the top brass for that. They make sense all day long, the poor chumps. 

A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness

Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
     A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There!"

Sun: So here’s one question. When we look for a home, or for a way to build an altar: are we looking for something that can actually be found, or built, in the workaday world? Or are we making a basic category mistake? Maybe home is elsewhere. I mean, that’s basically the answer that Christianity and Islam and many sorts of Buddhism give: you don’t feel at home because home is not available in this world. Home is somewhere else: this is the land of sin, where nobody is at home. So that’s an answer that a lot of very smart people have taken seriously. We have resisted that answer strenuously all our lives: not because we have a great refutation of it, but just because we don’t want it to be true. Or, rather, because we are afraid that “our reward is neither here nor there”: maybe there’s no home at all, and the search is a fool’s errand. If that were true, where would it leave us?

Rat: Scrabbling in the garbage, I guess.

Sun: Yes, and this is our perpetual alternation. It seems like a dead end, or at least a profitless cycle. What we what is to move, somehow, out of the plane of this discussion. We’re stuck in two dimensions and we need to move in a third one if we want to do anything but go back and forth.

Lt: Is there a third dimension?

Sun: Of course there is. Where else could WE live? Where would I come from? If there’s no home, we all become totally inexplicable and unintelligible. And, like the Zen people say, it’s not elsewhere: it’s right here. But

Captain: But but but – yeah. That’s fine for a framework, but it doesn’t answer Rat’s question. What IS our business? It’s a fair question, and we have not begun to answer it. Is it writing poetry? Is it building model airplanes? Is it learning to carve walking sticks with elaborately worked knobs? Is it designing the history game to end all history games? Is it REALLY learning Spanish (French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew)? Is it discovering (making, unearthing, disclosing, refurbishing) the one true church?

Rat: And this is where someone pipes up and says it doesn’t matter so long as we pick something. The existentialist move. And I would say, if it doesn’t matter then none of this matters. The center doesn’t hold, and the whole thing collapses. It does matter. And if, as the Sun says, there IS this third dimension, then there actually IS an answer.

Lieutenant … and our business is in fact to figure out what it is: and – until we have figured it out we actually have no other business that matters. We have our work cut out for us. Our work is figuring out what our work is. NOT what we would like to do. What we MUST do because it’s the right thing to do. I mean, I don’t see any other way to read our predicament.

Council

Sun: Righto. Let’s have a council then, and hear everyone. Lieutenant, you want to bring something up.

Lieutenant: I guess we have all had some education, and maybe we need to see it differently. But let me just say it as I would have said it a couple months ago: we’re wasting time. These hours of sitting in our chair shifting restlessly from a book that doesn’t really engage us to videos that do or don’t, and then landing in those accursed shorts, or reels, that always decline into vengeance fantasies and low-grade titillation… in the old days I would have put it like that: we’re wasting time: we need to pull up our socks and get to business. Any business, anything we could be proud of or at least not ashamed of.

Captain: Yes, that’s how I would have put it. And tried to impose a checklist of duties on everyone. But maybe we have a better way now? Would the Sun speak to us?

Sun: the shame suggests that someone is not being heard. If we’re in conflict, then there must be another party to it. If lieutenant and captain both want this thing, but it’s not happening, then someone is not on board with it. I would like that person to feel welcome here and to know they will be heard. We are not here to punish or thwart them. We are here to learn from them.

Rat: Well, all right, I’m here then.

Sun: Welcome! You need stay only as long as you like, and you may hide when you need to, and slip away without pursuit at any time. We would hear you, not chase you or catch you.

Rat: First of all. Look. You don’t have anything you really want to do. What’s this “business” we’re going to get down to? What good is it going to do anyone? I mean, sure, I scrabble around finding garbage, and it’s all a bit grubby and all, but at least I have velleities to follow. Do you guys even have that? I mean the Captain wants to establish a new church and be the wonder of the world and everyone will be drunk on his gorgeous presence, ecstasy all round, but in the meanwhile… how about a fashion video where a blouse might fall open? That’s basically how it works, right? And the algorithms know it. We’re all being jerked around by them. One for me, one for the Captain, one for me, one for the Captain. Something titillating, something edifying, ad infinitum.

Lieutenant (heavy sigh): Yeah, the church thing. The church thing again. I don’t know, dude, where are we with that?

Captain: I don’t know. I know I’m holding this tiny flame, and that I feel desperately protective of it, and I don’t want it to go out. And that’s really ALL I know. That’s why I’ve been so scarce lately. I’m not up to founding the church that will save the world. I’m not up to founding anything at all. But I’m holding this flame and I have to protect it from the wind. And the wind of the world is howling, friends. It’s blowing hard out there.

Rat: The question might be: what is that flame? Can it really be nourished? Can it really go out? Is it something other than the Sun who has called us here?

Sun: Oh, it’s something other, all right.

Rat: Well, that’s something, anyway.

Death and Decay: I’m just marking time. But remember: your capacities are dwindling, all the time. The time is not far off when you won’t be able to undertake new business. There’s that Rubicon, you know. Like when Dad realized that he no longer had the will and the concentration even to think out his deliberate death. One of the questions here is: have we actually already crossed that? Would we know if we had?

Rat: Or, is there any reason why we should? Does it make any difference?

Sun: I don’t think it makes the kind of difference you all are thinking of, no.

Lieutenant: So you, Captain, are afraid that the candle will go out.

Captain: Yes.

Rat: I just want to say that sometimes, when we bust all the bounds and just gobble stuff down, sometimes we seem closer to being able to hold some business. Like we read with that passion, while we’re eating the ice cream. Like the eternal fussing at each other gets drowned out, for a little. For a little. The Captain, he’s afraid the flame will go out, and I get that. But you know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid of this continual fucking whispering fight will go on forever and ever and ever, without anyone ever knowing what the hell it’s about. It makes me want to just break stuff, to just call a fucking halt, any way I can. I mean, alcohol simulated that so well, that’s why it was so seductive, it said, oh, here’s a way to make the whispering stop. Here’s the way to actually want something wholeheartedly. Of course, what we wanted was for a dancer to fuck with us and to have a really good hamburger and fries: but at least we wanted something. Aren’t we at the same place, dealing with the same thing, for the same reasons, now? We want to want something wholeheartedly, and we just don’t. Or we don’t dare to.

Captain: Well, yes, we’d look ridiculous. We want some twenty-year-old girl to want to fuck us? Of course everyone would laugh at us. They should laugh at us. That’s a stupid thing for an old man to want. It shows that you don’t know what the hell you are.

Lieutenant: Freud would say I guess that that’s what we really want, but… there we are with real again. Christ, this thing goes round and round, doesn’t it?

Captain: I mean, you can see why he would say that. Because after circling the drain for a couple hours, there you are with the vengeance fantasies and the soft core porn. If it all tends to that, then maybe that’s what’s real? That’s how Dr Freud would read it. But if that were the case, why would any of us be here? That doesn’t really make any sense, without having scooted out somehow to the view from nowhere. Who’s doing this watching?

Lieutenant: and when we’ve experimented with just taking ownership and going into the bedroom and closing the door and jerking off, without apology – it doesn’t actually take us anywhere. It doesn’t feel like liberation, it feels like more of the same.

Captain: maybe the problem is that we’ve maneuvered ourselves into a life with almost no obligations, but it’s precisely the life with no obligations that has no meaning. When the Lt came up with his demands and we actually started thinking of answering them we backed off pretty damn quick. OH hell, we thought. THAT would land us in OBLIGATIONS. Horrors!

Rat: yeah, we could go back and look at that conversation. But remember just because you close the door, doesn't mean you've left enemy territory. And obligation is enemy territory too: they love obligation. 

Lieutenant: Yeah. The World would be perfectly happy to waste all of our time and give us nothing, nothing of value, in return. It’s eager to do that.

Captain: Heh. we really are “a spy in the land of the living,” then. It’s not a far-fetched conceit. It’s our situation. We’ve made a little island of relative safety but… we’re in the land of the enemy. We’re not home.

Rat & Lt: No. No, you’re damn right. We’re not home.

Sun: We’re homesick, that’s what we are. And no wonder.

Death and Decay: You can figure me as home, but I don’t think that’s quite right, either.

Sun: No, Close, but no cigar.

Lieutenant: So what do we have? It’s home. It’s like being drunk, but it’s not being drunk. We’re afraid, rightly afraid, of incurring the obligations but never getting the rewards. We’re being targeted by the enemy, every day in every way. We’re not here just because of our weak morals and our declining capacities: we’re here because it’s right where the enemy wants us to be.

Rat: Yes. And there’s a certain amount of energy to be derived just from resisting the enemy, but not enough. There’s has to be a real home that we’re trying to find, or build. That’s what would orient us. That’s what would give us a business that we would want to get down to.

Captain: A real home. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? And in that home there would be an altar, and I could light the candle there with this little flame, and its space would be so protected that I would never have to worry again about it ever going out. We would go out instead: and it would go on.

Lieutenant / Union Boss

[ I asked the persona variously known as the First Lieutenant and the Union Boss -- First Lieutenant, because he thinks of himself as the person who actually makes the daily running of the ship possible, and Union Boss, because he's happy to be known as the persona who leads the eating binges, which he refers to as "strikes" -- to tell his story ]

As far back as I can? Well you know, the food was the first thing. Food was a big fucking deal. It was the difference between Dad’s approval and his disapproval: was I a strong-minded rational man or a weak-minded irrational sheep? To my mom it was whether I was fated for a life of misery and failure – fat like her – or a life of happiness and success. And to me – you know, this is my origin story – to me it was just fucking food. Leave me alone to eat my fucking food. Just leave me the fuck alone.

And by God I was going to eat ALL of it. Every bit. I’d eat as long as it tasted good. Who cares if it’s supposedly too much? Orangutans find a tree of ripe durian and eat themselves silly, gorge till they fall asleep under the tree, still chewing. Why not? Mom and Dad could have all the stories about it they wanted to: I was just going to eat.

I don’t know when the Kid showed up. [ The Kid is the public persona who originally called himself the Captain: the Lieutenant always calls him the Kid ]. I don’t remember us really being at loggerheads early on. He had his domain and I had mine. He ran the show in public, among adults, around my parents. I ran the show in private.

I already knew that there was no way I was going to fit in the world. The food was just one thing. I wasn’t like other kids. I knew precisely where the Marshall Islands were, but I couldn’t learn to tie my shoes. I could solve quadratic equations in my head, but I never did grasp the rules of baseball. I spooked my peers and annoyed them. (I was an insufferable know-it-all, as I realize now, among other socially unpleasant things: totally self-absorbed and arrogant. That probably had more to do with my unpopularity than my intelligence.) But anyway, I struck the other kids as weird, and I took it on as my identity. “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it”: that sort of thing.

Halfway through the year, in third grade, I got called out of class and into the counselor’s office. I wasn’t in trouble, as it turned out. He wanted me to take some tests. He took out some blocks. “Oh, the Stanford-Binet! I like this one,” I said. My mom’s friends were all grad students in psychology, and they had always needed kids to practice on: giving kids intelligence tests was all the rage, in those days. He pulled out another, looking for one that I didn’t already know, but I knew all of them. Eventually he found one unfamiliar to me, that was basically just a vocabulary test. Well, that could only go one way. I read all the time: I was already in the process of reading everything on the science fiction shelves at the public library. I knew all the words, up through the college levels. So he told me I was going to get moved up to the fourth grade.

I have a hard time, now, believing this is what actually happened – weren’t there consultations with my parents? Didn’t anyone talk to me first, consult me about my preferences? All I remember is sliding back into my seat and whispering the news to my friend, who looked wise and said, “I thought that might be it.” And the next day I was a fourth-grader.

Weirder than ever, less physically competent that ever, but by God I was smart. Smart and weird. Look out for me: I’m little and wimpy, but I’ve got a wicked gift for inventing nasty nicknames that will stick. Leave me the fuck alone.

Well: and then, a couple years later, puberty hit. I was eleven years old, I had no chance of being seen as a viable boyfriend by anyone in the world (my then known world, at any rate) and I adored girls intensely. I had always adored girls: but this overbalanced me completely. I was kind of a wreck. I spied shamelessly, desperately, hoping for a glimpse up a skirt or down a blouse. My autism had already supplied me with the identity of “a spy in the land of the living”: now it was intensified. Fashion magazines and Sears catalogs with lingerie sections got my absorbed, painstaking attention. The years from eleven to fifteen were disastrously formative. Nothing but eros, in intense, absolutely unreachable images, really absorbed my attention. Now, at the age of 68, I still drop easily into that state: I can find myself watching fashion videos on YouTube, rapt, on the off chance of a momentary slip of a half-buttoned blouse. An hour later I’ll come to my senses and ask myself, “what on earth are you doing?” Embarrassed, chagrined; but it still is a wrench to tear myself away.

(A spy in the land of the living. The line is Edna St Vincent Millay’s, from a poem spoken by a conscientious objector to WW I: “Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to death?” Not a bad poem. A little too easy and pat, maybe, like a lot of her stuff, but she’s as underrated these days as she was overrated in her glory days.)

Anyway, the point is that bifurcation into two personas, one who was public and behaved acceptably, (especially under the eyes of scholastic authority, who actually might lavish praise upon me), and one who was utterly unacceptable and who was devoted to unscrupulously serving his appetites, was reinforced: to reappear and reverberate the rest of my life.

History is Real: our Past is Real

So. I guess I would say that where Abrahamic religion strikes me as uniquely valuable

Is that it conceives of the person and the religious polity as in time in a different way, an open-ended way.

The end-state of a person is NOT ACTUALLY KNOWN, nor knowable

Covenants of communities are broken and repaired

(I am speaking of course of Abrahamic religion as it can be, not as it usually is)

I broke with Buddhism for two reasons: one, that it took the end-state for known and static. It will be like a moment of illumination and plenitude, except for ever and ever, it will be an ecstatic death. And two, that a person’s quiddity was simply a mask and an illusion. Those were my two reasons. Neither of those two things can be quite right. We labor in ignorance. We are seeds of something we can’t understand, but are reaching toward. We will arrive in places whose existence we could not have guessed. But we will arrive as selves which also we could not have guessed, but which are threaded on an unbreakable thread to who we are right now, individual and indelible. Change is real. History is real. Our past is real.

Are we immortal? I don’t know. In some sense, maybe. But just as certainly, we have to really die. Those three days, Good Friday to Easter, are not optional, not notional. The resurrection wasn’t theater. Jesus was stone dead.