OPEN LETTER TO A FUNDAMENTALIST PREACHER LONG DEAD

salvador dali

Through the late 1940s and the 1950s we were told to be very afraid of nuclear war. The Bomb is gonna getcha. You can't hide from the Bomb. First, it was the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, then the Neutron bomb. I heard an old woman preacher rant about Neutron bombs in the early 1980s, "It'll burn their eyes right outta their sockets." After praising the bomb for its ability not to destroy property. This was the only time I met her. I sure as hell would never have gone to her church. What she told me was that she likes things and dislikes people; that is, the people not dropping dollars in her collection plate. I'd been invited by someone I knew to a "Bible study," one Wednesday evening. This was my early years in the mountains, curious about all aspects of the culture. My mailman of that time was there. He talked about the apocalypse, the rapture and the terrible sufferings at hand for nonbelievers with such zeal for their torment, my respect for him took a downward turn. This was the church mindset I grew up in that set me in motion running for my life away from that mind. It confused me as a kid noticing the church mind was full of derision for the people around them who were not members of the church, a church with attendance seldom more than a dozen, one of them a kid who was present by duress only. I don't know what it was about me that saw the preacher was spreading hate in the name of Jesus, God and the Bible. The contempt toward nonbelievers, the "unsaved," did not mix with my reading of the Bible that said, "God is love." Like Jesus said to his close ones, It's easy for you to love one another. Try loving your neighbor, the people around you, the nonmembers, the people of the world you live in. That's where my fundamentalist upbringing jumped the track. I didn't know of anybody in the church that even liked anybody else in the church. 

salvador dali

I couldn't love indiscriminately, nor could I love the people in the church. I'd been taught about fear and punishment as our relationship with God the judge. I heard about communists that don't believe in God, how they're damned for hell, eternal suffering---they'll get theirs for not being born capitalist Americans. I wanted to talk to the preacher about these issues, but learned early he had no answers. The time the kid brought up the strait and narrow reference in the Bible, noting it is spelled strait, not straight. Same difference. I thought: What? Not according to the dictionary, but the preacher knows better than the dictionary. He knows the Bible. I recall the day at a short-lived bookstore in Sparta an old long-faced preacher stood in the open doorway looking at me. I saw a game about to start and said, "Come on in." He said, "You gonna let me in?" I said, "Sure, it's open to the public." He stepped across the threshold like he was entering the devil's lair and said, "You know, there's only one book." I thought: Oh shit, here we go, and said, "I understand that. But there are a few others." I knew the preacher and he knew me. I was not going to back down from him. I knew him to be a long-faced Bible-thumper with the hawkish eye that kept track of everybody's sins but his own. He was introducing a sermon he had in mind for me: There's only one Book. I wasn't going there and didn't give a shit if I pissed him off. I liberated myself from that mind about three decades before, wasn't going back. And I was not allowing him to control me with his poorly reasoned pontifications. His state of mind was responsible for the worst years of my life. I was not going to humor him. He knew I'd recently left a church and I knew he had heard the gossip around the departure, none of which had to do with what was behind it. He didn't stay long. I have a hard time with a preacher's arrogance; hard time in that I don't honor his role in the masculine hierarchy. I cede nothing of myself to his control. They don't like it. And I say, Good: keeps them away. 

salvador dali

It was bewildering to the kid to be in school learning about the world I lived in, on the one hand, and on the other, church with emphasis on after I'm dead, hell if God won't have me, heaven if I'm lucky. Of course, the preacher is not going to hell for making the people twofold more children for hell than he, himself, but the kid was one heartbeat from hell for thinking about sex. My doctor who diagnosed a heart issue, said in his straightforward minimalism with language, "You're gonna die." I didn't know what to say. I could only think, Duh, and assessed it too disrespectful to say out loud in a place where you say urine instead of piss. I sat thinking, I grew up a fundamentalist, that I will die is one thing I know probably better than anything else. And? By this time in the life, a long time after turning away from church/religion, power of the few over the many, I've found by experience God is love, not a tightrope to walk with hell fire waiting below. I've found what I call raw God, the core, love. The years of religion telling me people of other religions were worshiping the devil, and Satan is everywhere, Halloween forever, took fifteen years of unwinding the burdens of a belief system that kept me in despair. In school, I recall learning the word despair, identifying with it so deeply I got it without having to memorize it. Once I caught on that God is love and love only, it took quite awhile to shed the turtle shell of defense grown from experiences with conditional love as coercion or agenda down through the early years of this lifetime. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Up yours, too, preacher. If God wants me to live my life according to your approval, I don't want anything to do with God. If you want to engage in a constant war with Satan, go for it. I approve. Do what you gotta do. Leave me out of it.  

salvador dali

It was several years after seeing by experience God is love that my heart was able to open. Like a flower, it needed it's time to develop toward opening. The first key I got was that love and understanding are the same. I'd held love as a lofty word and couldn't find my own connection to something so "pure." Upon seeing understanding is love, I thought: I can do that. I started paying attention to understanding others more consciously. I feel like understanding led to, or unveiled, empathy. I have come to a place in the life where I have empathic feelings with everyone I know and everyone I meet. I've come to receive people I am present with aware that this is a soul who passes through many lifetimes, like I am, and this is what they're doing this time around. It does not mean I'm full of charming sweetness. There are some people I really don't like to be around for reasons I don't pet rattlesnakes. Still, they have my empathy. They are souls making it awfully hard on themselves, over and over, never seeming to get it, heads full of blaming others, self-unaware and self-centered. I'm understanding as I'm able and feel empathy for their psychological twist, I have my own, but I get too close, they piss me off, so I stay away. Only one time that I know of have I forgiven somebody. I just dismissed the problem. It went away. The one I held bitter contempt for became in that moment one of my better friends. I'm not saying I'm somebody special because I forgave somebody. We all have our own such experiences. This was mine that taught me how enlightening forgiveness is. I'm not a model of forgiveness. I still carry some bitter resentments difficult to let go of, so I don't worry over them. It's ego. They'll fade into indifference. This new kind of seeing self in relation to others, continual awareness of loving neighbor as self, looking to the good for those around me, has grown out of interpreting God as love. The old one, God as fear, made me want to rebel. God as love is convincing to me by way of experience. By now, my heart is so healed I can cry with donkeys. 

  

salvador dali himself

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END OF THE WORLD AGAIN



mark tobey, fire dancers, 1957

 

Tonight is the Eve of the End of the World. 2012. 2000. 1984. This end of the world has nothing whatever to do with Mayan anything, although it is the parallel Dec 31 of a calendar of 5,000+ years, and next day is Jan 1 of the new 5,000+ year calendar. It is not called a year, though it does have a name of its own that I don't remember. The need for Apocalypse in Christendom evidently has its beginnings in the Revelation of John the Revelator. Yes, it's the end of the world as we know it. Every day is the end of the world as we know it. You-can't-stand-in-the-same-river-twice. In the time of Y2K the zeal for apocalypse in Christendom was silly, yet at the same time made me wonder where this mania for destruction of everything came from. It's evidently as American as it is Christian. People I've known who have been zealots for apocalypse, the destruction of everybody but themselves, tend to be absolutists, wingnuts, people who think of everybody else as in their way.

Then we have the pop culture fear products from Hollywood of computer enhanced destruction of cities by tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, explosions galore, buses flying through the air, end over end, cars tumbling over each other, people screaming, pavement cracking, skyscrapers falling, the metaphorical end of the world. A woman I never suspected would be concerned about the end of the world on the 21st told me a couple days ago about her fear of what will happen. I had to double-take, but she meant it. I attempted a brief explanation that this movie 2012 is computerized fiction, a fear-based product, a marketing device. And if you want to believe something is going to happen, it's not going to be anything like in that movie, not in any way at all. I did my best to explain that it's the same as going from Dec 31 to Jan 1. Just a turn of a calendar page. The Mayan wheel is not a prophecy. It is a calendar. A calendar is not a prophecy. It is not woo-woo. It's an invention of the human mind to have a collectively agreed upon accounting of days, such that everyplace in the world calls Dec 21 this year Friday. Whatever cultures might call it something else are not in touch with our civilization yet. Maybe people on a small island of the SE Asian archipelago no white man has set foot on, people that shoot arrows at single-engine planes.

I'd like to be able to just think of it as a kind of New Year's Eve, the Eve of a much bigger cycle the annual cycle is inside with all the other cycles, from all the way around the zodiac in one year of months, each month with four phases of the moon, cycles of weeks, the weeks seven cycles of the earth's rotation, hours, seconds, nanoseconds. It can go in the other direction, macro, as infinitely as it can go micro. We're used to cycles. It's no big deal. It might be worth pouring a drink over. A sweet justification to have a taste of some fine liquor. I talked myself into it. Them that refuse it are few. I'll hush up my mug if you'll fill up my jug with that good old mountain dew. That's a good one to hear Grandpa Jones pick and sing. The song Little Maggie comes to mind; when Tommy Jarrell sings it, Maggie is sitting on the beach pickin a banjo with liquor bottles all around her. What a great scene, a hillbilly girl drunk at Myrtle Beach, off to herself sitting in the sand pickin a banjo, drinking her troubles away, liquor bottles all around her. Except today she'd be arrested. For certain when they found her .44.

It is 12 o'clock, straight up, at this moment. Happy new whatever-it's-called. I'll have a sip to that. If the world ended, it hasn't got here yet. Or it means something else. Or it's nonsense played out. Like Y2K. Bogus nonsense. Playing fear. I'd like for it not to be overcast, raining and cold wind so I could see the planet alignment in the sky. The Peggy Lee song comes to mind, If That's All There Is, we'll keep on dancing. I wonder if these fears of collective apocalypse, the harvest, amount to a longing to not have to go to work tomorrow, not have to pay any more bills, no more nagging wives, no more bullying husbands, no more impossible parents, school's out forever. I've an idea it has something to do with fear of living more than fear of dying. Dying is ok if everybody dies at the same time. It's individual dying, then, that's scary. Anyway, apocalypse is not a fix-it device. Apocalypse in the Revelation has, as my old preacher friend Millard Pruitt said, "a spiritual meaning." If the people anxious about the end of the world in one big explosion would study the spiritual meaning, they might learn something. But learning is out of the picture. Not an option. Another apocalypse dream that went poof.

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BLACKS AND WHITES UNLIMITED

and the blacks unlimited



Another day that went by too fast. For some odd reason I sat for 2.5 hours and watched 2012, "the best disaster movie ever," watched it despite recognizing at the beginning I'd seen it. Started watching it being lazy, then continued watching because it was constantly compelling, kept interest rolling. It's not like I'd give it more than 3 stars on the netflix scale of 5. It must have cost a fortune to produce. Special effects. For my taste special effects equals special ed. They're always artificial looking, like ocean waves crashing over the Himalayas: give me a break. Big tsunamis drenched all the earth and the water level presumably rose a very great deal and Africa raised something like a thousand feet, floating like an innertube on the risen water. Whatever. Of course, the kid in it was named Noah. At the start was the notice that it was rated R "for intense disaster sequences." It's a children's movie. Then they rate it so kids can't see it in a theater. Kids can only see it at home after the thrill of the new is gone. I don't try to understand much anymore. Too much is incomprehensible.



From there I painted a bit, then came to the computer and found a Thomas Mapfumo video performing his song Moyo Wango. He's from Zimbabwe. Back when Rhodesia had white rule Mapfumo was a rebel singer, sang about putting out the white government and taking it over by blacks. His band is the Blacks Unlimited. Kinda racist, but he's African, exempt from American middle class morality. Unfortunately when the revolution occurred and the white landowners and government people were killed or run back to Europe, the new government by blacks was headed by a dictator, worse, inept, took everything for himself, dropped the entire country into the worst kind of poverty and unrealistic inflation. Mapfumo as an entertainer survived everything he stood for before it all fell down around him.



What do you do when you struggle for what you believe to be the good of your country and your people, and then it's worse than even possible for it to be? I hope our Supreme Court experienced at least a little remorse for giving the 2000 election to the loser after seeing the mayhem the Bush-Cheney-Rummy triumvirate unleashed on the American people and our democracy, if they care, which I see no evidence of. We're the thick-fingered masses that didn't go to Yale or Harvard. Resistance to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is lethal. Mapfumo's music continues to be good music. Real music. Flowing music. It's music that sets the body in motion, head nodding to the rhythm, feet tapping, a kind of swimming in the flow of the smooth rhythm. Mapfumo uses a thumb piano (mbira) in his band. It's a hand-held device played by the thumb, an instrument particular to traditional Zimbabwean music. Electric guitars, drums, horns and dancing girls on stage compose the Blacks Unlimited.



At amazon where I borrowed the above picture I found they had sources for out of print copies of Skeeter & the Skidmarks album, Hubbin It. They also had from Alternate Roots, Tales of Love and Sorrow, Branching Out and Another Dirt Road (expensive prices on this one). Next week Skeeter & the Skidmarks are playing at the Front Porch Gallery. I'll tell some people who go there who have been asking about finding some Skeeter or Alternate Roots cds. Both bands were Willard and Scott's bands. Willard and Scott have been a musical team for a long time, at least 20 years. They make music with as smooth a rhythmic flow as Mapfumo's Blacks Unlimited, just more in a Whites Unlimited sort of way. As poverty tends to bring the music out in people, I wonder about the music in small Zimbabwean towns when they're writhing in the agonies of poverty. The music must be something extraordinary.