Dear diary,
I am writing to you in the aftermath of yesterday’s wedding. Nothing tragic happened, beyond the fact that I had to leave my writer’s desk, which is always dreadful. (I mean the leaving is dreadful; the desk itself is just sad.) No writer who wants to remain at her desk should ever be compelled to leave it. Especially for a wedding.
I told you in my last entry about how I’d never been to a Catholic church, so I was curious how the place would look and how the service would go. I’ve seen such things depicted in movies, so I knew it wouldn’t be an all-out surprise; but to experience an event in real life is always different, at least in some small way, from its fictional equivalents. I mean, we’ve all seen a million murders on TV, thus we assume we’re desensitized to the point of immunity, but once we encounter bloody violence in real life, it’s wholly terrifying. That’s what this wedding was like for me – not terrifying but euphoric:
I was instantly struck with the beauty of the church building: the inside was filled with light, and the pipes of the organ magnificently commandeered the entire wall; and even the crucifix, which I normally consider a vulgar and grotesque reminder of the ugly vindictiveness of humankind, was as awesome as such a sight can be: they had suspended the thing over the pulpit, so that it looked like it was floating in midair. It reminded me of the Corpus Hypercubus of Salvador Dalí.
When the service started, the forms of worship entered straight into my heart, it was all done in a language familiar to me, like a direct-blood infusion: the language of poetry. Music needs no translation: it was that direct. The proceedings, which to regular churchgoers are, I assume, so familiar as to have grown ignorable, were FRESH to me, like a play that has been in rehearsal for centuries and now is finally reaching its intended audience: GOD. And god approves. (I really liked the priest’s singsong delivery.)
So my soul filled with love and I watched the whole proceedings with tears brimming my eyes—literally: I had continually to dab my face with a kerchief, everything was so touching. I’m told that it’s customary for male earthlings to loathe wedding ceremonies, and to attend them only impatiently, all the time yearning to return home and watch The TV Football. If that’s true, then perhaps I am not a male earthling; for I loved this wedding: I cried more than the bride: no joke: I even kept track of this; she caught my attention when I noted that she was the only one who seemed to be perceiving the event fully; everyone else in attendance was only half-watching, like when you’re ironing clothes and a talk show is on: you only half-listen.
I appreciated the way that the immediate family members walked down the aisle for all to see, slowly, measuredly, and then the bridesmaids and groomsmen promenaded toward the altar and would gently bow and take their places at either side. And the bridesmaids were attired gorgeously in lime-green and light-orange, and the fabric was translucent, so that it tastefully displayed their nude bodies beneath. And the bride was truly beaming, the way you’d expect a bride to beam. White dress, flowing train and gauze ribbons like sunrays.
And even the scriptures that they chose to read were excellent. Normally the scripture reading is where a church service loses me: for, in the protestant sermons that I have endured in the past, the pastor has harped on the same few tired passages, usually from the prosaic New Testament, and it’s hard to forgive such negligence – or rather malice than negligence: for I know the scriptures well enough to understand that one must toil to unearth an lackluster passage: the Bible is a treasure trove of some of the best poetry ever composed, and yet, from this lavish compendium, protestant pastors manage to pluck the rare dull nuggets.
But yesterday’s ceremony proved a happy exception. I don’t want to assume that ALL Catholic scripture readings are so good, and I don’t want to put all the blame on my familiar protestant church pastors for lousy text choices… Come to think of it, it was the betrothed couple themselves who chose the passages, so maybe this is simply another verification of my idea that everything should be made more democratic: the people themselves know best. Down with authority.
Anyway, the passage was from “The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.” I didn’t get a program, so I have to identify the verses from memory after only hearing them read aloud, but I’m sure it was from the end of the second chapter (verse 8 forward):
The voice of my beloved!
behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains,
skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart:
behold, he standeth behind our wall,
he looketh forth at the windows,
shewing himself through the lattice.My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock,
in the secret places of the stairs,
let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice;
for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines:
for our vines have tender grapes.My beloved is mine, and I am his:
he feedeth among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away,
turn, my beloved,
and be thou like a roe or a young hart
upon the mountains of Bether.
And the other passages that they read were from Matthew’s gospel; also the famous “Love” chapter (13) from St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. I don’t care how common or cliché that latter choice is to read at a wedding: I embrace it fully when I hear it: I love it, and I think it’s a good idea: it works perfectly and never wears out for me. That’s the defining trait of the finest art: it cannot grow old but is always alive to the mind. A schoolmate of mine once claimed that she disliked Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” because it’s “played out.” I feel sorry for anyone who thinks this – for me, it’s always effective: I remain under the spell of all powerful art. The famous tales from the second and third chapters of Genesis, dealing with the so-called fall of Adam, only get fresher and newer with every re-reading; as does all great poetry. With familiarity, Shakespeare paradoxically acquires new strangenesses. Like a weird snowball amassing weird new snow.
What I’m trying to say is that I LOVE the “Love” chapter of 1st Corinthians. So much so that I do not believe St. Paul wrote it.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not LOVE, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not LOVE, I am nothing...
So I was a weepy damsel from the point when the service started, all the way till they began the eucharist (communion, or the bread and wine, or whatever you call it)—then the tears stopped, and I sobered up: for some reason, this stuff left me cold. The elevating of the bread, the chilling chimes that someone sounded from side-stage, and then the raising of the cup, and the creepy chimes again. It felt like, after enjoying an evening of friendly conversation with a new acquaintance, suddenly the stranger’s face grows blank and... bad things happen. And this bread-and-wine bit took forever. And all the non-infidels had to kneel down for the duration of the priest-show, so the little kids in the pew behind me kept jabbing their elbows into my back, and their dad repeatedly whispered at them in a scolding tone: “I see what you’re doing! I see what you’re doing!”
I tried not to have a bad attitude; I tried to accept this eucharist business the same way that I held my heart open for the marriage pageant. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t help thinking also of how, if memory serves, my hero Ralph Waldo Emerson left his position in the church over this issue of communion: it was a while ago that I read his words about it, but I recall him outlining how it was never supposed to be a ritual as it is today. There are many things that one could say about it, and I don’t care if something was intended by anyone to be a thing or not – all that matters to me is if it WORKS as a ritual; and the eucharist does not work. At least not for me. What I’d like better is if the congregation would always (that is to say, thrice daily or more) partake of genuine feasts together, and openly invite the entire outside world to join them, so that it’d be impossible for anyone to starve on the streets, since all are welcome to the Lord’s table; and not just former soldiers of war, for one meal, on a single holiday, but rather all people, all day, every day. That’s what I’m going to implement in MY church: WE feed the veterans AND their victims; and we aim to stop all war, for peace on earth. (See my previous entry for more details about how my church will take over the world.)
Hmm, what am I missing? (I’m writing this from memory, and I feel like I might be forgetting juicy details.) I didn’t take a quill pen and notepad with me into the church, like a journalist might, because I hate journalism. It’s too much like accounting. Fuck facts; I prefer to let events marinate in my imagination: there they get filtered, like water through rocky strata; this way, impurities are removed while soul-sustaining nutrients get admixed. Like Fred Madison says to the detectives in Lost Highway (1997): I like to remember things my own way.
Gol darnit, back about two sentences ago, when I was struggling to devise a water-filtration theme for my mental procedures, I copied a sentence from the encyclopedia and forgot to incorporate it; so allow me to leave it here, half-explicably:
What ends up emerging as deep groundwater may have fallen as rain many thousands of years ago.
At one point in the service, the priest gave a command, which apparently meant something specific to the regulars in the audience, because everyone began turning to their neighbors and shaking hands and proclaiming greetings. This took me by surprise, and then the woman in front of me turned and faced ME with her hand extended, and it was with unconcealed embarrassment that I fumblingly transferred the kerchief, which I’d been using to dab mine eyes, from one hand to the other.
Why shake hands in church, tho? I thought the purpose of a handshake was to prove that you aren’t holding a gun. Are we truly worried that we all came to church armed for battle? And this point, so late in the service, is the best time to figure out who’s to be trusted?
So this ceremony occurred at two in the afternoon, and the reception was scheduled for five; we therefore had an hour in-between to go home and regroup. (Little kids were playing outside of my window while I was trying to meditate; they were teasing a dog by mimicking its howl, which caused the dog to howl even more despairingly.) And the reception was to take place in a hotel on the other side of town; they were to serve a meal (we ex’d the “pasta” option on our RSVP card, for it was either that or “chicken” or “beef”; and we don’t like the way that animals are tortured in the slaughterhouses when being prepared for the dinner table, and if you choose a meatless dish at a wedding reception, the animal that would’ve otherwise been slain for your consumption gets to come back to life and enjoy more time inside its prison camp, until the next customer orders it), and there was to be dancing afterwards.
By the way, in the Baptist church that I used to attend, dancing was forbidden. In my greenhorn days there, I asked the reason for this: coincidentally the occasion for my question was my sister-in-law’s own wedding reception – I asked her parents, “Why do you never dance?” and her father said: “Well you know what dancing leads to.” That’s the journalistic truth.
So we headed out to the reception, and we got there at five on the dot. All the tables were circular, and every single one of them was filled. I mean, there were a couple vacant chairs here or there, which my sweetheart and I could have occupied after asking the parties who were already seated if they mind; but this event was for my sweetheart’s flugelhorn student, as opposed to a friend or relative of either of us; therefore, neither of us knew a soul among all the attendees, beyond the groom himself. My point is that we were the oddballs. So we stood for a while in the entryway, contemplating our next move, until I grew too self-conscious and said, “Let’s get out of the spotlight until we can figure out where we’re going to sit.” So we went back out to the hallway. And there we saw a long table with a registration book, like a scrap book with pictures of the affianced couple having fun, and there were spaces where guests could write a short note and sign their name; so I wrote: “Get well soon! Love, Bryan Ray (MCB).” Because MCB stands for emcee Bryan, my rap name. Then a passerby appeared and my sweetheart asked her where we should leave our gift (we bought them an eggbeater); and the woman pointed to a place in the corner of the dining room; so we had to cross diagonally through the mass of tables to get to the place where the gifts were piled. Then we shuffled all the way back and stood near the emergency exit door, my sweetheart and I, where we remained for a few minutes bickering about the seating dilemma. I was uncomfortable with the fact that, no matter where we would choose to sit, we’d be interrupting a family or friends with our presence: for we’re unknown strangers to them all – I felt like a lowdown party-crasher – for, I repeat, we knew NOBODY. But then the most brilliant idea stuck me:
“Look,” I said to my sweetheart, “let’s consider the details of our situation. We already greeted the bride and groom at the church, thus leaving them with a memory of our having attended their ceremony; moreover, we signed their guest book, so there’s hard proof that we attended this dinner reception—not to mention that everyone here has seen us cross and re-cross the room in order to offer our gift unto Moloch—so we have eyewitnesses galore to back up the claim that we were present; yet, since we haven’t committed to sitting at a table, and not a soul here knows who we are (except the groom, who’s preoccupied to say the least), nobody is expecting us to return; therefore, if we simply leave now, nobody will miss us!”
Then I leaned against the emergency exit, and we slipped out. (Never in my life have I feared so intensely the possibility of an alarm sounding from the opening of an emergency door. But it didn’t; thank Athena.) We then walked at a casual pace to our motor-coach, and no one suspected us of escaping from such a dangerous festival; for I was wearing a suit, and my sweetheart was dolled to the nines: the elite are above reproach. So that’s how we managed to reclaim from the social world five hours of evening-time.
P.S.
Here’s another track from my mock-gangster demo tape that I made about a decade ago. Each of the album’s songs ends with a guitar performance by my biological brother Paul, hence the album’s title “Slow Raps with Guitar Solos?”—tho I never allowed poor Paul to rehearse or do more than one take, ever: I just forced him to play cold during his first time hearing each beat. More info here.
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