RUDIMENTS, pt. 61
Making Cars
When I first started slinking around, as
a tender lad of maybe 12, checking into
how others thought and what philosophies
and points of view there were, everything
seemed exotic, and the weirder or more
bizarre the person was who I was reading,
the better the stuff seemed to fit - Sartre
and those ridiculous glasses of his; James
Joyce, and his strange eyesight too. The
vague elan and stuffy Missouri stiffness
of T. S. Eliot who, for all the rest of the
world, was just another English guy but
wasn't. There were a million surprises,
and a new premise at every turn. It ran
the entire gamut, and one of the burdens
of being twelve years old is that everything
is fresh and has to be processed. Those 3
war novel trilogy books, by Sartre, for
instance, I forced myself through and did
'enjoy' if that's the word (it's not); but they
certainly didn't turn out important, and
they've probably only been so read, in
that manner, maybe 12 other times in the
whole history of the world. Do you want
to know what kept me along with him?
Pride. Because he turned down the Nobel
Prize for Literature, and essentially told
the academy to shove it, I was proud, of
him, for him, and for my silly self too.
Now, isn't that kind of weird. Victor
Hugo and Charles Dickens, two very
different writer-types, but each of them
played a role as well.
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There were things I couldn't shake, and
they kept rattling me. My two-pronged
strategy, for instance, of being in, of going
to, the seminary, that ended up as a mix-up
that I just had to deal with, which is how
I bring myself now to the main central
conflict of my early life, and the premise
of this chapter, and my illusionary impetus
to be at seminary school, and harbor if
even the slightest idea of being a priest.
It quickly became apparent to me that
the church is, at essence, anti-human.
Because of that I soon realized I'd want
nothing to do with it. It groomed rules
and regulations, and its stepsons were
eunuch-sized boy-men who been
propagandized into believing a whole
line of crud. Plain and simple and there
were no other ways around that.
Liberalizing an extreme changes
nothing. Turning altars around,
changing the gobbledy-gook into the
local language instead of ancient
church-Latin, and putting a few guitars
in place to sing with and break communal
bread among 'friends' with, didn't cut it.
Like putting a nice party dress on an
old, jagged whore. Underneath it
all, you've still got what you got. You
can't just go 'worker-priest' cool and
think you've done it. The problem
of 'Doctrine' is still there.
-
The most major crossing ground I
ever came to, during those years and
after too, was 'Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man,' by James Joyce. As
good as it was so too was as detestable
as it was. It held out the sickening
aspects of the Catholic Church - Irish
and Pope versions - for all to see. How
anyone could slog through that and not
get the tumult of an interdiction by the
wee-Devil himself was beyond me. I
knew every word of that book by the
time I was done, probably my tenth read
time. It was like a stage play to me and
I loved watching my own in-head version
of it being acted out in my mind as I read.
The religion presented in that book
revealed the paucity of any form of
what it reflected, a sad, sorry, sick, ship
of state. Stephen Daedalus, I walked as.
I wanted to be an artist. I dropped the
closure and the afforded, supposed,
certainty of that church junk right off
the bat. If you begin at page 124, and
read into that episode of the Sermon,
starting with the Emma section on 124,
it will take you on the whirlwind that
broke the Pope's back - pure and
random foolishness.
-
The Sermon Episode is rank perverse,
downright pathetic. My own little reader's
notes, scribbled in, as a kid-reader, are funny
now: "Sermon of Hell, different fires junk, bad
mis-shapen company forever, never-ending
flames, can't move, and can't burn, company
of the damned (itself), bizarre formulation..."
In one paperback version I have, a previous
college student, a female, has cluttered the
margins with her own notes, throughout.
At the Sermon episode, Eve as the eternal
fatal temptress, she has scrawled: "I sense a
negative anima projection coming (on the
priest's part, not Joyce's)." And the Confession
pages, and the episode of the priest and the
vocation, and all that, until finally Stephen's
decided upon NO! Art wins the scuffle.
-
No matter how I tried to wriggle out of it.
the rest of that book kept me straight and
working. Two small segments in particular,
capturing for me the fine and worldy cap of
love and desire, outdid the rest of that malarkey
previous to it. The first, pg. 185 (he is walking
a rivulet along the strand): "A girl stood before
him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out
to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had
changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful
seabird. Her long, slender, bare legs were delicate
as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail
of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the
flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory,
were bared almost to the hips where the white
fringes of her drawers were like featherings of
soft white down. Her slate blue skirts were kilted
boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind
her...touched with the wonder of mortal beauty,
her face. She was alone and still, gazing out
to sea..." And the second, the friend, Davin,
relates his tale of wonder to Stephen. Page 196:
Without a ride from the match, he had to walk:
"Well, I started to walk and and I went and it was
coming on night when I got into the Ballyhoura
Hills, that's better than ten miles from Kilmallock,
and there's a long, lonely road after that. You
wouldn't see a Christian house along the road or
hear a sound....at last I spied a little cottage with
a light in the window. I went up and knocked;
a voice asked who was there...and I answered
I'd be thankful for a glass of water. After a while
a young woman opened the door and brought
me out a big mug of milk. She was half undressed
as if she was going to bed when I knocked and
she had her hair hanging; and I thought by her
figure and by something in the look of her eyes
that she must be carrying a child. She kept me
in talk a long while at the door and I thought
it strange because her breast and her shoulders
were bare. She asked me if I were tired and
would I like to stop the night there. She said
that she was all alone in the house and that
her husband had gone that morning to
Queenstown with his sister to see her off.
And all the time she was talking, Stevie,
she had her eyes fixed on my face and stood
so close to me I could hear her breathing.
When I handed her back the mug at last
she took my hand to draw me in over the
threshold and said 'Come and stay the night
here. You've no call to be frightened. There's
no one in it but ourselves.' I didn't go in, Stevie.
I thanked her and went on my way again, all
in a fever. At the first bend in the road I looked
back and she was standing at the door."
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