Tee day reading prep

Dear diary,

My take on the Thanksgiving holiday is this. I will never understand it. Whatever I say about it will always be waived off and dismissed as “just my own opinion, which is all mixed up”. So if that’s the case, and I’m predestined to be seen as uniquely wrong, then let me at least play this game with a smile, rather than pouting. I’ll state my mixed up opinion, which nobody shares, and at least I will have been true to my own heart.

When a child, the holiday seemed to be about a bird. The family gathers to honor God’s holy creation: the turkey. I even broke the commandment prohibiting making “any likeness of any thing that is on earth” (Exodus 20:4) and drew a picture of a turkey, by tracing my hand: the shape of the fingers served as its tail feathers, and the thumb was Arturo’s head. I named my turkey Arturo, after the Sicilian artist Arturo Di Modica, who was my hero in youth because he followed the tradition of Moses’ brother Aaron from the Bible, by breaking the same commandment that I mentioned above when he crafted a golden calf and named it Charging Bull. It is the idol known commonly as the Wall Street Bull.

And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.
   And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.
   And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. (Exodus 32:2-4)

As I said, Arturo Di Modica (after whom I named my childhood turkey picture) followed in the footsteps of his forerunner Aaron; and, fittingly, his story is told in Our New World’s Bible, Wikipedia:

On December 14, 1989 Di Modica arrived on Wall Street with his statue of Charging Bull on the back of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the New York Stock Exchange. The artwork was conceived in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. Charging Bull was intended to inspire each person who came into contact with it to carry on fighting through the hard times after the market crash for a brighter future. Di Modica later recounted to art critic Anthony Haden Guest “My point was to show people that if you want to do something in a moment things are very bad, you can do it. You can do it by yourself. My point was that you must be strong”.

So this grand tradition of breaking commandments, ignoring rules, and acting illegally, which Aaron, Arturo & I uphold, eventually was taken up by the prophet Jesus. His story is told in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the work of another outlaw, William Blake:

Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud. and the Devil utterd these words:

The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius. and loving the greatest men best, those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.

The Angel hearing this became almost blue but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling, and then replied,

Thou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten commandments and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings?

The Devil answer’d; bray a fool in a morter with wheat. yet shall his folly not be beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake the dust off their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

Now the thing about Thanksgiving is that the holiday keeps changing as you age. I already explained that when one is young, the day is just an excuse to draw pictures and eat a big meal. But then when you enter your second childhood, you realize that the holiday is an attempt at commemorating an act of cruelty. It turns out that you yourself, Bryan Ray, before you were a turkey artist, actually sailed the seven seas in a sieve, and stopped at America, and assumed it was India, and slew the entire population of inhabitants. Actually, not exactly the whole population: you left a remnant of a couple of the groups who were living there — but the important thing is that you tried. Inspired by the Charging Bull of Di Modica, you carried on fighting to possess the future, after your cruise: you proved that if you want to do something very bad, you can do it. You can do it by yourself. You were strong, and strength matters, cuz might makes right. And you memorialized your personal victory by inventing the concept of Thanksgiving: a day set aside to praise the Creator of the Universe for consenting to endow you with so many firearms.

But even when you read the Hebrew Bible and you watch Israel go from being slaves in Egypt to wandering in the wilderness, and then after Moses keels over they try to inhabit the Promised Land — even this halfway happy ending leaves me uncomfortable. For I don’t understand why, when a land is already inhabited, and some aliens come along and need a place to stay for awhile, why the aliens must always slaughter all the natives? The true gift of humankind is not material but mental — you’ve heard that phrase “mind over matter”: that’s what I’m talking about. Instead of just confiscating everything by force, I wish we’d try, at least once, to see if we can use our brains to find out a way that all the groups can coexist. It seems impossible: there’s not enough resources — yes, but haven’t we proved, time and again, that impossibility is like a savory scent that always leads to a banquet for humankind? Every time we assume that something’s impossible, it turns out that we were wrong and that, as God himself admitted, there’s nothing imaginable that can be restrained from us:

And the LORD said, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” (Genesis 11:6)

Note, however, the catch: we people must be ONE. We can’t look at our world, this globe in space, as a place to be divided up and possessed privately; instead, like turkey-tracing children, we must learn how to share.

OK but we can’t share the wealth; that’s impossible, considering the law — we must bow to precedent until our own upcoming aliens demonstrate for us, in turn, the other half of the maxim “He who lives by the sword...” So, instead, let us celebrate this Day of Bounty, and eat and drink our troubles away.

*

My brother & his wife & their child, my nephew Frank Booth Ray, can’t make it tonight, so we’ll do our alternate family get-together on Saturday. But my mom and sister still wanted to have a little party on the official day; so they asked if my sweetheart and I would like to join them for a meal. We said yes: we never turn down a chance at a family argument. Then my mom said:

“Your sister Susan would like to make a special meal, and her only request is that you, Bryan, choose a text to read that is proper for the occasion; after all, you are the inventor of this holiday, therefore you should know better than anyone what all the hype is about.”

I was happy to be asked this; but now I’m trying to figure out what to read. As I type this entry, I still have no idea what to choose. I sorta hoped that by just rambling here, pouring out my thots and brainstorming around, I might stumble upon a couple of decent ideas; but so far nothing seems to have stuck. Perhaps I need to focus harder:

What seems to be the main difference between the life that I brought to this land versus the life that was thriving here before my alien invasion slaughtered everybody? See: here’s the problem: when you genocide and destroy and annihilate and wipe out and erase whole nations of peoples, it becomes hard to know what those obliterated peoples believed, and how they lived and what was their philosophy — cuz you forgot to record an audiovisual interview with them to edit into your documentary before you liquidated them.

NOTE TO SELF: Next time, remember to perform inquiries prior to decimating. You have heard it said of old “Shoot first and ask questions later”; but I say unto thee: Thou shalt henceforth postpone pillaging until at least a fair amount of documentary footage has been filmed. And this is not one of those rules that’s cool to break, like the law against drawing barnyard animals.

But, being that no one can gainsay my guesswork, since I destroyed all the evidence, I’ll venture to speculate that the main difference between my own forces and the populations that they made extinct was this: We aliens believed in PERSONAL PRIVATE PROPERTY, in owning land and nabbing anything we could get our mitts on (that is, anything not welded to a corporate structure), whereas those who can’t speak for themselves believed in living harmoniously, sharing all resources, etc.

So that’s point one: ownership versus freely sharing. And point two is the religion of Christianity. It does seem to me that the religion that I Bryan singlehandedly brought to this continent played (and continues to play) a big role in something.

Therefore, in choosing which texts to read at the family jamboree, I will center upon the first god that Christianity slew: the literary character Jesus. And then I will look for interpretations that center upon the philosophy of this Jesus, as it relates to the Thanksgiving notion of private property and land possession. (For land leads to food, and food is what we’re told to be thankful for. Do not be thankful for imagination, for humankind’s uniquely poetic ability to use MINDPOWER to make the impossible possible, and to bring about world peace, NO: be thankful for material items, roast flesh and whatnot. For man lives by bread alone.)

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother’.” The man answered Jesus, “Teacher, I have kept all these commandments since my youth.” Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” But when the man heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
     Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter heaven.” (Mark 10:17-25)

I like this passage because it is very clear. And I’m not sure if anyone other than myself would consider it pro-U.S.-Thanksgiving-Day or anti-U.S.-Thanksgiving-Day. Who knows: perhaps everyone in the world will agree with me that it’s a good tale to read at this time of year. Then after the gospel account, if my mom and sister will allow me to continue, I will read another scripture, this second choice will be from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, which interprets the above excerpt explicitly:

It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.

In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one.

“Know Thyself” was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, “Be Thyself” shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply “Be Thyself.” That is the secret of Christ.

When Jesus talks about the poor He simply means personalities, just as when He talks about the rich He simply means people who have not developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as our does, and the gospel that He preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northwards the material necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any society of the antique world. What Jesus meant was this. He said to man, “You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.” It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily bad. That would not have been true. Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved. There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus says to him, “You should give up private property. It hinders you from realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.” To His own friends He says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But this is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.

It feels too arbitrary to stop quoting Wilde at this point; I want to continue, because his essay goes on delivering brilliant highlights of Jesus’ teachings, but since I don’t want to overstay my welcome as a textual curator, and I have one last quote still to share, I’ll end with this next passage — it’s the famous part about Jesus from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address. (Not till now did I associate Jesus so heavily with Turkey Day — I guess my daemon is attempting to alter and amend the emphasis.) I’ve quoted this before, but it’s worth sharing again and again; it gets better with every fresh reading:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man; One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the man is diviner. But the very word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
     He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus was he a true man.

That’s sounds good to me. Those last three passages, from Mark, Wilde, and Emerson, will be my choice of what to read for T-Day 2019. That way we can focus on being thankful for intellectual genius as opposed to mere THINGS.

However, I do like things. I like them even more than the mind. So you’re right: I should compose an entry in praise of things sometime soon. Maybe create another new holiday.