A less hostile recurrence

The only reason that I added the words "HUGE DRESS SALE!" in my own handwriting (tho in upper-case letters, using a blue felt-tip marker) is that I actually saw a sign in my neighborhood that said this. I saw the sign on Tuesday, when I was bicycling to the park. I wish I had taken a photograph, so that I could add the actual image to the rest of these sayings, but such is life.

The reason that I love the phrase "HUGE DRESS SALE!" is very simple: I'm a sucker for those types of statements that could signify any one of many meanings & yet you (the reader) 'll never know exactly what was intended. In the present case, this exclamation could imply either "DRESSES OF VARYING SIZES ARE BEING SOLD AT AN YUGE EVENT!" or "ENORMOUS DRESSES ARE FOR SALE AT AN EVENT OF UNDISCLOSED SIZE!" — it might even be attempting to say "MY NAME IS BRYAN AND I AM SELLING ONE PLANET-SIZED DRESS; PLEASE BUY IT, O JUPITER, AND COVER YOUR SPOT!"

But the rest of the words in the pic are just truths clipped from ads.

Dear diary,

We visited my bio-mom yesterday, my sweetheart and I. I use that term bio-mom, which means biological mother, to distinguish her from my true mother, which is to say my spiritual mother, Ophelia. For I am the successor of she who drowned in virginity and the dead son of Shakespeare. I recall Harold Bloom teaching that no modern intellectual can avoid becoming Hamlet (who was named after Hamnet Shakespeare, the poet’s bio-son, who died for our sins at the age 11, no one knows why, and was later resurrected as his play’s hero-villain).

When I parse between the biological and the spiritual, I’m referring to a teaching of Jesus that is recounted in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, Mark’s (3:31-35), Matthew’s (12:46-50), & Luke’s (8:19-21), wherein Jesus enters a house, which becomes crowded when his droves of followers join him inside; then Jesus’ bio-fam approaches the house, and they ask to see Jesus, yet Jesus, instead of saying

“Oh, sure, make way for my biological family; they are important to me because I am a modern Christian and a Fiscal Conservative who understands the importance of familial bonds, especially in light of the U.S. legal structure (I’m thinking about inheritance, and nepotism in general),”

I repeat, instead of saying all THAT, Monsieur Jesus says THIS:

“I define the terms ‘parent’ and ‘siblings’ as anyone who shares my artistic temperament, NOT whoever shares my flesh and blood — the latter is mere coincidence and slavery-to-nature; the former is Wisdom.”

But here I’ll copy Saint Luke’s actual account, since it’s the shortest and sweetest — only three verses long (8:19-21)...

Then came to him his mother and his brethren, and could not come at him for the press.

And it was told him by certain which said, “Thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to see thee.”

And he answered and said unto them, “My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do it.”

Keep in mind that “God” simply means “the Poetic Genius”. So, even if you’re an atheist like I am, you can still be the true sibling of Jesus — in fact, I think it’s even easier for us atheists to join this family, since we don’t have to unload all the doctrinal baggage that the priests pile on their adherents.

Anyway, all the above is just a necessary tangent; but I wanna get back to speaking about my chat with bio-mom. So, after not having seen or talked to her for weeks (no reason for the silence: no feud or anything; we’re just not a close herd) we stopped by the house of my bio-mom Tuesday (the same day that I spotted the sign for the HUGE DRESS SALE!) and had a really friendly talk. It’s not always like that — oftentimes we end up tensely arguing. Religion and politics are the great dividers, which have effectively divided us for years. But this was an honest and interesting conversation:

I told my mom how ashamed I am for having recently spent hours at a party discussing Christianity with her own longtime friend (for my bio-mom and this partygoer with whom I had intellectually sparred were comrades from wayback) — incidentally I attempted to recount this consultation in my Bloomsday entry titled “Failing to recount my thots about the shindig”. That particular talk wasn’t an all-out argument, it wasn’t heated or hateful; but the reason for my shame is that I wish I would have swayed our exchange toward the realm of brainstorm and away from nitpicking: I wish it had been more constructive and harmonious, with ideas building upon each other and opening up new avenues of imagination, rather than a session of hairsplitting over historical factoids. Not to mention the old literal-versus-figurative tug-o-war, regarding biblical analysis. (It’s always the propriety of interpretation that matters to these priest followers and church adherents, never possibility.)

So maybe my mentioning of this foible caused us (bio-mom and me) subconsciously to resolve upon avoiding the same pitfalls, because the conversation that ensued was abnormally sublimated. I hope this becomes our future habit.

Mom simply told me about an event that she recently attended, and then she spoke about some of the meetings that she’s had with a fellow Christian. She (mom) participates in biblical studies (not of the Bible itself but of books about the Bible) with an acquaintance who for years had fallen away from the church but now has come back into the fold. Mom admitted that these meetings distress her, on account of the views in the material of the book that they’ve been studying (my own hunch is that the type of book that helps a lapsed believer regain belief may not appeal identically to one who never dared commit the sin of freethinking): it’s a book that tends toward a more liberal view of the Bible and its stories.

This was interesting to me, because I’m the opposite: the more imaginative one’s beliefs can be, the better; that’s what I say. And yet, maybe someday I’ll convert to a more rigid stance, due to my own failing health coupled with the cultural triumph of racism and misogyny. Tho I hope those days never come, I’ll die thru them then just as I die thru these now.

And mom also spoke about a couple of her other friends who also study books with her (it’s all about bolstering your faith, I gather); but I’m running out of time this morning, so I’ll skip these items of gossip and jump-cut to Hecuba. As it is written:

Films, whether tragic or comic, always climaxed in chase scenes. The best screenwriters would pad their scripts with ornate dialogue, which prolonged the time before the exciting chase scene. Cut to the chase was a phrase used by studio executives and financiers to mean that the mob will be bored by too much wisdom, and that the movie should, without delay, advance to the scene where the protagonist chases the antagonist into the bedroom. This idiom, having entered common usage, now means simply “get to the point.” An earlier version of the phrase was Cut to Hecuba, which refers to the habit of shortening matinée performances of Hamlet by skipping all the fine speeches before the reference to Hecuba in Act II, Scene ii.

So the big event that my mom most recently attended was this sermon that was delivered by some scientist who was previously an atheist but later converted to Christianity. My mom was really taken with this guy. She bought his book, and she spoke highly of the guy’s wife, who had accompanied the guy on his speaking tour, and to whom the guy dedicated his book, because she (this new wife) pulled him out of the doldrums after God slew his first true love.

The fact that this guy was a scientist really impressed my mom: she couldn’t get over the amount of scientific knowledge that this guy possessed. My mom then successfully recounted the content of the speech that this guy delivered at the church event. She said:

“He told us how he had always doubted Christianity, and when his first true love expired he was devastated and didn’t think that he could continue living; but then he met this second wife, Camilla, who was cute and young and fun; but she was a Christian, so everywhere they went together, this scientist and his new girlfriend, she (the girlfriend) would always tarnish every occasion by wedging into it awkward praise for the Christian God; like, for instance, if the two of them were to visit Niagara Falls on a romantic date, he (the scientist) might say something reasonable like ‘I acknowledge that yon cascade possesses oxygen and hydrogen’; however, then Camilla would pipe up and attribute every last atom to Jesus: ‘All this is the handiwork of our Creator!’, and she would tear off the proper scientific label of this matter and seductively re-label it as ‘Christ’s blessing’, thus sacralizing its water·droplet·hood. — So this angered the scientist, and he began to read the Bible. But his attitude, at first, while reading, was one of criticism: and he was negatively critical. His motive for skimming thru its text initially was to find fault with the scriptures. HOWEVER what he discovered instead was that the Bible contains all scientific truths, and it is accurate in every way from the day of its creation. Amazingly, this Scientist of Scientists, upon reading the Bible, could not find one single scientific flaw. And the strange thing is that this scientist who is now a Christian Believer (yes, he’s STILL a scientist, because, as he assures us, science and religion are not at odds) began studying the Holy Scriptures with the attitude of ‘I shall debunk this misleading book’: in fact, his whole M.O. (Method of Operation) was to scan the text carefully for signs of scientific error; and yet he found nothing! — on the contrary: the text persuaded him to become a true churchgoer.”

That’s what my mom said. So I told her that we should try to get together more often because I love talking about this kind of stuff.

Then my mom added as a point of great importance that the speaker above (the scientist who converted to traditional Christianity) was significantly aged — decades older than her (my mom), even: “so it’s not like he’s doing this for the money, or to gain fame or whatever.”

In conclusion, my mom declared that the testimony of this Man of Science who became a Man of God gave her far more repose than her recent book-discussions with fellow Christians, because she just doesn’t understand that newfangled way of interpreting the scriptures, where they say that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you rather than elsewhere in the physical afterlife, and that our Savior resurrected before he died rather than posthumously. “For if their weird way of philosophizing is correct,” saith my mother, “then I’ve wasted my entire life slaving under Capitalism when I shoulda participated in a debt strike and overthrown the system.”