GOD, INTERRUPTED, OR INGESTED

“The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion's chemical surrogates-alcohol and "goof pills" in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America.” 

--Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954, p. 20 

When John Lennon sings, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” I think he refers to the pain of duality and the constant sense of being a particulate separate “self” in a world of other particulate “selves.” Alan Watts called this feeling of identity as a sense of entrapment in a “skin-encapsulated ego.” My whole life has been a series of attempted ego-prison breaks and a quest for permanent reunion with the indivisible consciousness known as “God,” or, more accurately, “god-head.” I know it is a reality because I experienced being in God’s head on LSD. And my sense of the world on psychotropics matched the natural state of being Sufis and Zen Masters describe when they sing and sermonize about “ultimate reality.” 

A Frank O’Hara fragment comes to mind in which he describes a state in which “there was very little difference / in what was good / and what would happen.” Now that’s a pause in the pandemonium that truly refreshes.

I have long believed in “better living through chemistry.” Like one of the many wounded in a senseless war, I am rescued by a medic(ine), then taken by helicopter and dusted off somewhere between the heavens and a safe landing back on earth. “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?” Yes, when your own body is the fountain of that blood. “Hey, Jesus, you paid for lunch. This feast’s on me.”

THE GREAT DIVIDE: POETRY VS. PROSE

I remember one snowy night in Pittsburgh, late January 1966, on acid and the world being divided into a sparse poetry of necessary things and a pent-up prose of unnecessary ones. We asked the circumambient (meta)physical world for some objective correlatives. Suddenly we heard the chinka-chinka of tire chains on the street outside. “What’s he doing driving around on a night like this?” I asked. “He thinks he will die if he doesn’t get laid,” my tripmate answered. “Doesn’t he know that even the whore houses must close this holy night?” We both agreed that attending to any daily, obsessive need constituted prose on a night when the world was supposed to be dedicated solely to poetry. 

“But what is poetry?” I asked. 

The clanging bell of a trolley car took me and my tripmate to a window to see it glide through the street-light lit tundra of Forbes Avenue with no occupants but the driver. “Anybody who boards this trolley tonight will have the uncommon and divine duty of saving the world,” I proclaimed with an indoor certainty born of and borne by his witnessing. We both looked outdoors and vowed to write poems as urgent and solitary as any rider called to board a trolley in a snowstorm. The world seemed to be waiting and willing to read the poetry of actions, deeds or words that would be asked of him on this squall-stricken, blizzard-blanketed night. 

That night 53 years ago remains vivid, begging for sustainability I have yet to find. 

I refuse to forget that night or give up hope of its permanent recurrence. Like Wordsworth, I live in a remembrance that will not renew its origins or release me from the exile of nostalgia for them. 

That night 53 years ago remains vivid, begging for sustainability I have yet to find. 

I refuse to forget that night or give up hope of its permanent recurrence. Like Wordsworth, I live in a remembrance that will not renew its origins or release me from the exile of nostalgia.

THINKING OF POET JACK GILBERT

I was thinking of poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) the other day, and his death, aged 87, from Alzheimer's: a curse for a writer as gifted as he was. My friend and fellow poet Daniel Abdul Hayy Moore, who died swiftly of second-bout cancer in April 2016, told me that the disease left him a "complete scarecrow"—hounded, haunted by a total lack of memory and absence of any knowledge. It reminded me of the Alzheimer's that devoured a photographer friend. His wife told me, "He used to watch TV. Now he just stares at it,"

Jack won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1962 and the next year was asked to read at the University of Pittsburgh, an event he enjoyed because Pittsburgh was his hometown. A small group of the university's young poets, including me, spent an evening with him. During a night of conversation, he temporarily detoured discussion to admit that he was worried because he had received a big advance for a novel he found himself unable to write. He plied us for remedies, but we had none. I think he even asked us to help him twist some plots. But again we couldn’t be of help. We resumed talking about poetry.

That memory of his writer's block returns every time I think of his death from the worst block--if not blankness--imaginable. Indeed, I wrote a memorial poem to him over the past few days, "Next To Never," and tried to fit him into a composite sketch of all the people I have known to suffer from this existential holocaust of memory. I'm affixing it after I print out the kind of Pittsburgh poem that a man destined for such dreadful permanent amnesia might write.

I remember Jack as a very direct, laconic, almost self-effacing man who seemed happier to talk about the poets for whom we shared mutual admiration than himself. Like Creeley, he told us there was nothing more to say about his poems than what they said. It was as if he was trying to tell us: Once a poem is written, the reader knows as much about it--or is entitled to--as the writer.

Trying To Have Something Left Over by Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

NEXT TO NEVER
For poet Jack Gilbert who died of Alzheimer’s

1
I remember
Enough about Time
To watch the sun rise and set
And wait
During interminable
Sleepless nights
For it to rise again.
I also know
I won’t keep such watch
Much longer.
There is an approaching point
Of no return
To any purpose
For waiting.
Then all life will be clutched
In one fell swoop
Of anonymity.


2
Imagine gazing
Driven by a reason.
Imagine a steady stare
At snowy peaks
That remind of
“Friends living and dead.”
Imagine tracking
Long distances
Where birds seem to dis-
Appear
But never cease
To be
Near.
Imagine gratitude for
Thoughts of people
You still know by name.
Imagine the habitual comfort
Of being someone to talk to.
Call me Jack
And I’ll call you Dave.
Oh! this ecstasy
Of exchange.


3
Sometimes America still stands for red wheelbarrows
And drinks at the Pink Parrot.
Then I can afford to squander
My remaining inheritance
On the shrinking multitude of things
I remember
Loving
With an intimate intensity
That re-
Minds of love.


4
No man should ever face
The false Nothingness
That stems
From incapacity
To know or acknowledge
People, places and things by name.
To know names
By recurrence and heart
Is to find Heaven on earth.
‘Hell' is to lose the stamina
For premeditated perceptions.
You feel damned to a nostalgia
For the time
When you could take things for granted.
Now you face a blankness so pervasive
That even sordid thoughts
Of broken commandments
Would be welcome
To restore you to a life
That is distinctly your own
And worth living.


5
The memory of Time
Begins to weaken
In a vagueness
That no longer divulges
Significant differences between
Day and Night.
Gradually, I will be left
No choice
But to dwell in Limbo
Like prolonged solitary confinement.
No pardon or parole
When days no longer count
Nor can be
Counted.


6
By the time
All names are gone
Mine will be among the missing, too.
I wonder if I will recall them
In my dreams
Which come from a deeper
Still un-
Stricken
Place.


7
Two names are still vouchsafed
At all times:
Mom and Dad.
Not their real names, of course,
But the dearest names
For the twins
Of lifelong deepest need
For respites from howling doubt
About a life of meaning


8
I fear having to relinquish
Any hope of feeling
At home
With this person
Staring back from the mirror.
Although the two of us look alike

All we have

In common

Is a stare

Of helplessness.

9
What is this drift
Of moments all about
Beyond a seethe of silence?
It sounds like surf.
A surf
That seems the surface
Of things?


10
Things go bump
In the light as well as night
Trying to jar
A sense of themselves
From growing more faint and foreign.
I want to weep
Each time I fail
To attract words for things
That summon attention.
It is then that seen and seer
Are both nameless
Objects.


11
I hear the word “shortage” from the radio
While out for a drive by the ocean.
I see a motel sign
That reads “Vacancy.”
I can’t help but wonder if the words
Have double meaning
Related to the life
I know more and more of
Yet less and less
About.


12
I am a superhero
Of tenuousness.
My sworn enemy
Is forsworn
To make me become invisible--
But only to myself.
To everyone else
I am a laughing stock
Of incompetent visibility.


13
I am identity-impaired.
Soon there will be
No ‘Me’
To love or hate.
I live with a trapped bumblebee’s
Fury to escape enclosure
For which there is
No escape.


14
Count as blessing each thing
With which you remain
On familiar terms—
Even if it turns
Hot stove and burns you
Back to remembrance.
Just to curse it by name
Seems a miracle cure
For erasure.


15
In recent antiquity
Things mattered
Beyond the moment
At hand.
Now forget-
Fullness
Seems out of hand.
When did so much
Slip beyond
Grasp?
When did things cease
To matter
And succumb
To ceaseless
Intangibility?


16
"And what do you want
From Santa Claus little boy?"
I prepare a list:
1) An impingement
Greater than pangs
Of fear or hunger.
2) A weighty worry
About politics or war.
3) An intricate memory
That holds a key to understanding
A life larger than the one I am living.
Santa shrugs, hands me back to my mother.
"For those you must sit
On the lap of God, son.
Only he is equipped
To feed such hungers."


17
Are you now 
Or have you ever been
A practicing poet?
Yes I tell the communion.
Are you ready to name names
Of fellow poets 
From your days as such?
Creeley, Spicer, Welch
Are last and lasting names
My heart strings
Together with what mind
I have left.
Then I add,
Olson, Whalen, O'Hara
to stretch this rare moment's
Clemency
Of coherence.

—David Federman, Ardmore, PA, June 11-14, 2019

DONALD TRUMP REFUSED ACCOMMODATIONS IN BOTH HEAVEN AND HELL

• Apparently, according to New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz, Jesus Christ refused a Facebook friend-request from Donald Trump during the 2016 primary season. More recent rumor has it that the real estate developer has asked evangelical superstars and close friends, Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, to intercede on his behalf to have his tweets to the Savior unblocked. However, in an explanatory press release from his latest chief booking agent, Pope Francis, the Savior is quoted as saying, “'I saved the president from stoning so many times and forgave him for cheating of so many sorts that I have run out of cheeks to turn. And I have it on good authority that he is as unwanted Down Below as Up Above. Lucifer, the Damnation-counterpart of Salvation, told me on his hot line he turned down Mr. Trump's application for a beach-front golf course by the Lake of Fire in his infamous equatorial hot spot. In fact, the Infernal One begged me to save him from having to personally refuse The Donald’s next request for retirement and residency at his permanent resort because the applicant has no soul to give as the required down payment and entrance fee',” adding, "And now Beelzebub is receiving pestering emails from Graham and Robertson complaining their dear friend is in grave danger of finding no place to stay once he departs this earth. 'Can't you find one more cheek to turn?' Satan tweeted early this morning.'"

  Trump’s Bid to Become Born-Again Fails as Jesus Turns Down Friend Request

  By Andy Borowitz
  June 27, 2016
  NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The billionaire Donald J. Trump’s bid to become a born-again Christian failed over the weekend after Jesus Christ turned down his friend request, campaign officials have acknowledged.
  
  
  Jesus, who has not generally been active on Facebook, made a rare appearance on the social network on Monday to announce His decision to ignore the presumptive Republican nominee’s request for a personal relationship with Him.
  
  
  In a brief post, Jesus offered the following explanation: “Just everything.”
  
  
  The turndown from Jesus Christ, the inspiration behind one of the world’s most prominent religions, caps what has been a tough month for the Trump campaign.
  
  
  Privately, campaign staffers fretted that the candidate would pen a disparaging tweet about Jesus, which might alienate evangelical voters in key battleground states.
  
  
  But, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump made no reference to Jesus, and instead touted endorsements he had received from Gary Busey, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher.
  • Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The 

DAVE READS THE SUNDAY MORNING MOEBUS STRIPS

1
From here
You can get to eternity
But only if you stay
Here
Within
Hearing distance
Of the moment’s
Voice


2
Every
Where
You go
Is a kind of
Afterlife
For the latest life
You have outlived
And shed
Like a skin


3
Wisdom is knowing
When it’s time
To leave
Well enough
Alone


4
You weigh practically
Nothing on the moon
Which is the weight loss
Space can bring
To outer life
But somehow
That paunch
Remains
A reminder of
An inner life
That is still
far from weightless


5
Try true life on earth
Where
Weight loss
Can be
A permanent
Gain


6
When clouds cover the glaring moon
They derail trains of thought
That were probably headed for
Auschwitz.
When clouds cover the sun
They bring a darkness
Where no one can find you
But yourself.


7
The dew-drenched grass
Gives new grounds
For Being.


8
His father
Was a communist
Who named names
Then changed his own
As a form of
Witness protection


9
To cite scripture
To mock or disprove
The evidence
Of your own senses
Is a form of
Witness tampering.


10
On your best days
You feel like
You will live forever
In splendor
And on your worst days
You feel like
You will live forever
In shame



11
Stop thinking about God
As something
That can be proven
True or false
Rather than proof of a
Persistent need
For more than
What is already there
And always within
Reach


12
The world
Is what God sees
With practiced steady gaze
No different from
Yours or mine
Once we learn
To look
With our own eyes


13
No need
For a second opinion
As long as first things
Keep coming first
To give
A fresh start


14
Bird songs
Are music lessons
Passed from
Parent to child
Until the young learn
To sing
On their own


--David Federman, Ardmore, PA, June 2, 2019

MISSOURI ON MY MIND

Missouri = Misery.

Have we come to the point where there will have to be "underground railroads" from Missouri and other states with draconian anti-abortion laws to states where abortion is still legal? A psychiatrist friend of ours says there will soon be drugs readily available through the Internet to women for safe stay-at-home abortions? His implication: no laws will be able to stop abortion; so stop worrying. "Excuse me, folks, but Amazon delivered my miscarriage kit and I'm getting up early tomorrow to induce one." 

The widespread availability of safe abortion-inducing drugs is no consolation because it allows doctors to skirt the legal, moral and social issues connected with abortion. If 1,000 prosecutors could send a letter to the Attorney General saying Donald Trump is guilty of impeachable crimes, certainly as many doctors can send a letter to the AG says abortion is a basic right. My doctor friend is, as far as I am concerned, defending illicit means to achieve what should be permissible ends. Drugs allow doctors to avert, rather than face and solve, a millennial predicament. 

Don't get me wrong. Drugs are an answer, but only after abortion is not only decriminalized--but de-stigmatized. Fetal heart beats, stowaway souls at conception--all of this is junk science; natal creationism, if you will. I've been studying scripture, trying to find where God, through one of his many messengers, forbade abortion--and I'm coming up as empty-handed as scripture-combers are empty-headed. 

I'm writing because I fear the steady, nearly unstoppable march of religious fascism. The Evangelicals don't just march to deafening drum beats; they march to imaginary heartbeats. Clarence Thomas even frames abortion as part of a monstrous eugenics crusade to kill undesirables like, you guessed it, black people in the embryo-stage. Crazy science borrowed from the heyday of genocidal eugenics back in the 1930s. 

ARE ABORTION BANS A FORM OF EMINENT DOMAIN? As it see them, anti-abortion laws are an attempt to claim eminent domain over women's wombs. States can forbid a woman from ownership of her uterus once it is "occupied" with an embryo--even if its presence is involuntary or unwanted. Note that recent laws forbid abortion even in cases of rape or incest. How ironic that a rapist can ben sent to jail but his victim is sentenced to an even worse punishment: full-term pregnancy. Indeed, a Michigan rapist was recently granted joint custody of his child. If pregnancy is a circumstance for there are no exceptions to permit abortion, this makes pregnancy a form of servitude. It is as unjust as any other form of enslavement. 

Okay, maybe I'm a libertine or a hedonist. But I think choice is a sacred right--at least, within a certain period of time when a woman can know and act on her own informed behalf and non-coerced will about her condition. That means at least a trimester--and, if left up to me, a helluva lot more time. Moreover, I think an abortion should be as easily chosen and scheduled as a colonoscopy. 

PREGNANCY AS PUNISHMENT FOR PLEASURE. Now you might argue that pregnancy is often an outcome of careless activity. Hence, there must be responsibility for this reckless behavior. The consequence of this activity--no matter if non-consensual or accidental--must be made inescapable. I would think any sane person would disagree with--indeed, repudiate--this punitive moralism. Sex is very often unplanned--a kind of spontaneous combustion of two libidos. Should a woman have to pay for an outcome of pregnancy? Absolutely not, in my opinion. Just as we have cooling-off, and change-of-mind, laws for major purchases, women should have laws that give there the right to second--and often first (when unexpected)--thoughts about pregnancy. It's that simple--and practical.

Perhaps, if we had better sex education and easier, affordable access to contraception, this whole issue would be moot. But behind the growing anti-abortion crusade is a looming crusade against contraception. What or who is to stop pro-life fanatics from introducing laws to ban contraception and criminalize vasectomies? Already health plans offered by companies whose owners are "religious" can deny employees contraception coverage with their health plans based on "belief." "My religion says all life is sacred and, therefore, you can't terminate a pregnancy." 

But, wait, things are getting worse as the pro-lifers arm themselves with a new specious legalism. Recently, a majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that religious pharmacists or religion-owned pharmacy chains have a First Amendment right of "religious free speech" (an oxymoron if ever there was one) to deny customer requests for contraceptives. As bad, businesses and corporations are allowed to offer health care that restricts distribution of contraceptions. It is amazing how the Extreme Right has turned the First Amendment inside out and upside down. Just remember this: the fetal remains portion of an Indiana law was upheld by a 7-2 SCOTUS majority. Liberals joined conservatives to vote for this requirement to give full burial rights to fetuses. The same number upheld the right of "religious" people to deny their services to gays and others who practice prohibited acts and live ungodly life styles. "If I knew you were coming, I still wouldn't have baked you a cake."

BACK TO BASICS. As I see it, abortion should be a routine medical procedure, like an appendectomy, and, as such, be performed as widely and safely as any other medical procedure--and not just in isolated clinics but hospitals: public and private. For me, the whole debate over abortion has forgotten or ignored that sex is as much, if not more, for recreation than reproduction. Just ask any sex doll or porn-atronic Internet partner. Pregnancy is often an unplanned consequence of a vital, necessary and, at its best, profound pleasure. And it strikes me as an undue burden on any woman to force her to see pregnancy as a great moral dilemma. 

I could go on, but I wonder what you think. This is an issue worth discussing among ourselves. The hour is late. Sales of erectile dysfunction meds are at stake. 

The real heart of the matter isn't the faint heart-beat of the unborn but the ever-more-faint heart-beat of Disestablishmentarianism--the crucial separation of church and state and freedom FROM religion. The battle over abortion rights is just one in an ongoing war against the First Amendment. Fundamentalist religion is destroying America! 

GARCIA LORCA'S CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

Granada in 1936 was as dangerous as Gangland Chicago a decade earlier. So divided was the city by the Spanish civil war, it hadn't had a mayor in months. Bravely, Manuel Fernandez-Montesinos, the brother-in-law of renowned poet Federico Garcia Lorca, volunteered for the job. A week later, on August 18th, he was assassinated and Lorca was arrested the same day by Franco's goons, along with three other men, all of whom were killed by a firing squad within 24 hours. Although Lorca had Loyalist sympathies and was a known socialist, Franco had him executed for the capital crime (to fervent Catholics like the Generalissimo, that is) of "bestiality," meaning his homosexuality. The martyrdom still haunts Spain and every place where poetry is honored. (By the way, his grave has never been found.)

Recently, I have begun what I call "The Lorca Project," whose purpose is to find all music written as a memorial for the poet after his death. So far, I have found only a three-movement chamber-orchestra homage by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and a violin-and-piano sonata by French composer Frances Poulenc. I'm sure there is more. Desperately sure, I admit, because I cannot imagine a world bereft of numerous outcries over Lorca's murder. Some day soon, I hope to share my findings with you.

Meanwhile, with summer nearly upon us, and seashore vacations in the cards for those of us with credit cards, I give you a poem written while Lorca was in New York City, studying at Columbia University, in 1929-30. If you think Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a summit of surrealist protest poetry, Lorca's "Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude" is a base camp for this peak. Certainly, it will prep you for future climbs with its hallucinatory anger. Sometimes, I think surrealism this savage is as much shelter as catharsis. As Robert Creeley memorably wrote, "To look at it is more than it was." Surrealism was a way of both bearing and baring witness in a reckless throes of molten free association and the ecstatic custody of wild imagery. Lorca was there when the bottom fell out of American life, and New York City (in his case, Spanish Harlem) was one of the most bottomless pits of the time. As you read this, see if you don't hear adumbrations of Kenneth Patchen in the 1940s and the Bob Dylan of the mid-1960s when he was rock and roll's Lorca.

My own Coney Island memory: My dad used to dock his small, beloved Chris Craft (I think that was the brand) at Coney Island and I'd accompany him on fishing trips. I still remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper" with him on a portable radio in the summer of 1967 while the boat was at anchor and we were eating lunch. "What do you hear in this music that makes you love it so much?" he asked in slightly testy bewilderment. I was at a complete loss for words. I thought the Beatles would be something we could have in common. After all, Aaron Copland had proclaimed admiration for it. So had Leonard Bernstein. But he refused to share their enthusiasm. For the good of all concerned, we changed stations. By then, there was as much to divide as unite us. But those dwindling points of agreement are another story. I still remember both of us awed by the sight of Coney Island's Wonder Wheel (built around 1920)--both off shore and on land. It was like a monument to merriment and summer--despite already having read and loved Lorca's "Poet in New York". Returning to the poem after 50 years or so, the opening line made me laugh. I remembered the cliche, "It ain't over until the Fat Lady sings." In this case, it must be modified to: "It ain't begun until the Fat Lady is sung about." Lorca, I plan to spend a lot of this travel-less summer with you. You set the itinerary. You'll be a great sherpa for any trips to the heights (or depths). You know these terrains so well.

Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude (from "Poet in New York")

(Dusk at Coney Island)

The fat lady came first,

tearing out roots and moistening drumsticks.

The fat lady

who turns dying octopuses inside out.

The fat lady, the moon's antagonist

was running through the streets and deserted buildings

and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners

and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts

and summoning the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills

and filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.

The graveyards, yes, the graveyards

and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,

the dead, pheasants and apples of another era,

pushing into our throat.

There were murmurings from the jungle of vomit

with the empty women, with hot wax children,

with fermented trees and tireless waiters

who serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.

There's no other way, my son, vomit! There's no other way.

It's not the vomit of hussars on the breasts of their whores,

nor the vomit of a cat choking down a frog,

but the dead who scratch with clay hands

on flint gates where clouds and deserts decay.

The fat lady came first

with the crowds from the ships, taverns and parks.

Vomit was delicately shaking its drums

among a few little girls of blood

who were begging the moon for protection.

Who could imagine my sadness?

The look on my face was mine, but now isn't me.

The naked look on my face, trembling in alcohol

and launching incredible ships

through the anemones of the piers.

I protect myself with this look

that flows from the waves where no dawn would go,

I, poet without arms, lost

in the vomiting multitude,

with no effusive horse to shear

the thick moss from my temples.

But the fat lady went first

and the crowds kept looking for the pharmacies

where the bitter tropics could be found.

Only when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived

did the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.

Federico Garcia Lorca, 1930

-Translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White

Some Thoughts on Leonard Cohen's "You Want It Darker"
Somehow Leonard Cohen made peace with the Kali Yuga before his death on November 7, 2016. He did so by facing God in his/her/its third Hindu manifestation (many-fastness), as Kali--in Kali's time. You have probably seen Kali in her modern-day breakfast-of-champions representations as a sort of super-woman, a sometimes-black and sometimes dark-blue-bodied goddess who wears a lei made of skulls (Kali-flowers?), disco-dancing to welcome the dead (mostly heroes) she escorts to the afterlife. When she is not acting as escort to the newly, usually bravely dead, she keeps Shiva, supreme Hindu masculine god known as the Destroyer, tied to her apron strings (Shiva apparently has apocalyptic-magnitude anger-management problems). It is no coincidence (to me, at least) that Jews also call their period of mourning, Shiva, and play Kali to the Shiva in them by sitting for seven days until grief is tolerable. In Hindu mythology, Kali is pictured, or depicted, as keeping her foot on Shiva's chest to render him latent. "Be a dear, Shivvy, and fetch some more canadel."

The point I am making is this. If there is to be belief in God in this century when genocide is the leading international pastime, that God would have to be Kali-&-Shiva-like and, as Leonard Cohen says, wants things "darker."  Are you ready for that? Cohen was, or tried to be. I am not.

You Want It Darker
Leonard Cohen
If you are the dealer, 
I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, 
it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory 
then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning 
for the help that never came
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord

There's a lover in the story
But the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission 
to murder and to maim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Ah! Such a post-Auschwitz song, one fitting to serve as the opening theme for Netflix's new miniseries, "Black Earth Rising," a searing drama about the Chinese box of interlocking evils known as Rwanda--a country synonymous with genocide. Note that Cohen feels asked to be a "willing executioner." In each verse of the song, he refuses. But finally he bows (like a Buddhist?) to pressure and repeats Abraham's surrender to Yahweh. Of course, God browbeats him into submission before he utters the word he uttered when he agreed to kill his son, Isaac: "Hineni.” In my street-wise translation from the Hebrew this means, "Whatever you say, Lord." Traditionalists translate the word as, "I'm ready." Ugh! For what? A day or night or lost weekend of slaughter? Just how far are you willing to go to prove your faith in the father (mothers rarely ask for things so drastic as killing).

And here is where and why the story of Abraham and Isaac is so befuddling and beguiling. God, in his profoundly petulant bi-polarity, shames the prophet for even considering sacrificing his son. "What are you doing?" he screams. "Your bidding," Abraham stammers. "My bidding!" God thunders. "What kind of God do you think I am?" Indeed!
Maybe Yahweh is Zen's First Patriarch. Maybe there is no right answer. Stop at the first beckoning to kill. 

Maybe the son-sacrifice story is a koan which Abraham is prevented from answering wrong. We used to try to console ourselves about Abraham's aborted infanticide by rationalizing that it was a story about breaking all blood-ties in pursuit of the True Father. If so, the story is a kind of a low-lumens beacon for faith that is rewarded with last minute intervention. Not surprisingly, that intervention is rare. How rare? As Cohen sings, “A million candles burning / for the help that never came.” Yes, this God wants things "darker." But do his children? Do I or you need to pray away our atheism or homosexuality?

Pre- and PostLapsarian Life
According to Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition, we are postlapsarian beings. "Lapse" refers to the Primal Big Thud, or Fall. Through faith, we try to gain prelapsarian equanimity. That ain't easy at 77. So what's a poor old boy to do? Surely not to play in a rock and roll band. So what then?

So glad 'you' asked.

Cherry-pick the traditions; find the ones-in-a-million that got away and learn their escape tactics and exit strategies.  
As you know, I'm not on the best of terms with my natal religion: Judaism. In my obstinate opinion, it has been corrupted and corroded beyond recognition by the same nationalism that almost destroyed the Jewish people between 1941 and 1945. Now, like the sons of alcoholic fathers, Jews have become the fathers they should denounce and quarantine. But like those abusive fathers, they have learned to demonize entire populations and dehumanize them to the extent where (in Israel's case) slow-drip extermination is possible, even preferable to the imaginary annihilation they fear. 
“Tradition!” the "Fiddler on the Roof" song mockingly proclaims. No wonder. Ezra Pond defined tradition as "the inherited imbecilities of the past."
Yet I want to make peace with Judaism and see this as an increasing possibility, even a plausibility. How? In my case, it has meant coming to terns with this religion as a Reader's Digest condensation of Hinduism. As in Hinduism, the Jewish God is a compound deity, composed (for personification purposes) of multiple personalities--all of them able to manifest with impunity. Seen in this light, the Christ story is about a largely unsuccessful attempt (Jewish in origin; possibly early Freudian) to curb, if not cure, what we now call "dissociative identity disorder," to place him and us under some benevolent Prospero apotheosis of character. Ariel and Caliban living in one dominion (psyche). 

Old age is giving me the gift of pluralism. So let us look at God's worst-hair days through a bifocal lens. In monotheism, Noah's ark is lifeboat for a few sanctified (sanctimonious) survivors. Evangelicals, you might say. In polytheism, however, it is Noh play for a rescue ship sent to tundra lands to feed caribou-loving arctic natives their favorite foods during the hardest winter of all time. In the polytheistic telling, Noah is bringing humanitarian aid--on the terms of the people who need it. He doesn't dictate those terms. Very Hindu. Very U.N. And maybe, after all is said and done, very Jewish.

Faith as a Flagellate's Black Hair-shirt or a Monk's Saffron Robe
Throughout his later life of melded Zen and Judaism, Leonard Cohen was intent on keeping faith intact. I admit it is a hard faith to keep--harder than the hardest Siberian permafrost. My faith is one suited to times of global warming where faltering on the gleaming ice is the straightest gait I can manage. But I deeply admire Cohen for his endeavor. It is, for me, the most courageous public spiritual quest of this century.

In my own attempt to meld Zen and Judaism, I have demoted the Fall of Man to a Pratfall, and wondered if it was God or a Goliath god-man (mentioned in Genesis) who placed the banana peel or roller skate on which Adam slipped. It's pretty shabby, but 'pun' takes the pain out of 'punishment'. Or does it? Leonard doesn't find it funny, just grim and ironic.

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission 
to murder and to maim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

This is where I draw the line: that genocide happens with "permission." Sorry, folks, but there is no way this could ever make sense or be excused. That's believing in a '”false god." Your God’s arm is that of a one-hand-clapping one, not made for boxing with his short-handed subjects.

Look, folks, maybe atheism is God's greatest parting gift to mankind--part of a metaphysical immune system. It’s message might be a simple, “Don’t look back.” The present, unflinchingly perceived, will tell you what to do next. Imagine one of Job's comforters who is also a standup comedian, telling the greatest Victim of all time, "What? You refuse to stop believing in a schmuck who floods the world because he's pissed at the tribe or rapes 16-year-old teenagers just because he has a sudden whim for fatherhood. Fool! Curse God and see what happens." If you've ever read "The Blue Cliff Record," you would know this is how equally endowed Zen masters regularly talk to each other. Otherwise, or should I say, other-than-wise, I would continue to practice conversion therapy to hold on to an ex-mavhina god despite my intrinsic, fully justified skepticism. Like any other cult member, Atheism was as much anathema as homosexuality to the elders. I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting who I am, or asking anyone I love to fight who they are.

Fight the natural urge to give God the middle finger, I was warned for decades. On the other hand, my father taught me that that was the highest and best use of the middle finger. But I was at war with my Communist-turned-Zionist father. So I stubbornly maintained belief that every lapse in faith, every invitation to disbelief, was an arcane test ordained by God. I was to fail each test and keep faith. In what? In faith itself. Koan = Cohen. 

My spiritual life was, shall I say, masochistic, although it was rewarded with insights that I still apply to daily life. 
God knows, I always tried to keep the latest faith I studied. I was, to recapitulate a cartoon I saw recently, at the uppermost bow-tip of the sinking Titanic, believing I was closer to heaven than the sea. Today seeing any sketch of the last moments of the Titanic, the ship's almost-vertical profile obscenely reminds me of men bowing in prayer in a mosque. Ass-up to God, I think, and shudder, still sometimes asking the ghost-limb God for forgiveness at such a grotesque association between prostrate men and sinking ships. Once back on their feet, many of those "submitted" (i.e., devout) would feel duty-bound to kill their own brothers and sisters for bringing the disgrace of unwed pregnancy or homosexuality on their families. I watched as the mosque I once attended forbid professed gays and lesbians from attending prayers. I watched as friends who hated this violation of human rights continued to attend prayers and to make excuses for the community they had become. What was I doing in a mosque in First Amendment America?
If this is the price I must pay to keep faith, fuck faith. Or fuck faith with a denominational name.

Where Do I Go from Nowhere?
My spirituality is, I realize now, forever traumatized. So was Cohen's. To believe in God means to believe in ultimate, explicable 'containment' of all that exists or has ever happened. As spiritual aid, we call that sphere of containment "Le Mystery." Of course, we expect that mystery to be solvable--if not by us, by a few avatars; if not in or by Life than by Death. Every time I hear a man of the cloth swear that God has a presently unknown (or unknowable) reason for evil, I sicken. Everytime I hear the mother or father of a victim of a Gaza shooting say “All praise is to God,” I want to explode. Clinging isn't faith. Evolution needs rotten apples for ripe ones. But I don't need to live in a Manichean world for that to happen. I need a more collaborative kind of duality--one in which humans recognize and prevent the damage they do to one another. You can't do that in a segregated universe.

Nevertheless, I have come to hate religion. But so many people I know find it the best source of identity. No religion per se, but membership in a religion and, if needs be, obligatory attendance at high holiday services. You know, just in case. Jack Spicer wrote, "If you don't believe in God, don't quote him." But the non-believers quote words attributed to God or his messengers. Personally, I don't think God is needed to make Christ's injunction to turn the other cheek as many times as there are beads on your rosary or abacus any wiser. When Christ says, "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," I realize that exhortation is the best antidote to evil ever prescribed. Just count to one and stop there. My guru taught me that most (not all) evil is projection of what we fear and hate in ourselves onto others. He knew the meaning of "plucking out one's own eye." But he also knew there were creatures beyond redemption and that they roamed this earth--to be avoided not rehabilitated. Creatures like our current president.

Look, I'm a Jew for Jesus, but Jesus as a reformer of Judaism the way Buddha was a reformer of Hinduism. I don't need Christ to be lynched or tried and convicted for the sin of proclaiming the only God is within as pre-existent Good. I like the idea that messiahood is only a satori flash away, attainable by any and everyone. Like Jesus, I'll talk to Gentile or Jew, man or woman, with equal amity. And I hope Jesus has a girlfriend who, if, as despicable rumor has it, is a whore, is like the 'escort' Julia Roberts played in "Pretty Girl." Richard Gere is a Buddhist and this movie makes perfect sense for him.

Polymorphs and Poor-In-Spirit Unite!
If you must find a religion, find one conducive to the hardcore, often grisly complexities of life. In hindsight, I think my guru was more of a Hindu than a Muslim. So I advocate a compromise religion based on polytheism (not just Indian but Greco-Roman). I lived in a Hindu ashram where God could be worshipped in the aspect of your guru's choosing. (Guruji always knew best, right?) My first live-in guru chose Hanuman, monkey-god who was a celestial Congressional Medal of Honor holder. Every morning I asked Monkey-Man for the strength, bravery and fortitude he symbolized. We bathed him every morning; offered him fresh fruit (no, not bananas)--but hoped that day he would be spared the need for heroism. I have muddled my deities. It might have been Ganesha, elephant-God of wise choices and good luck. All I remember for sure is that we bathed some animal deity.

Then, after that guru was exposed as a predator, I switched to the ultimate conversion therapy: Islam. I tried to be a mono morph and deny my polymorphous perverse nature. Freud was right about the reality of human beings and human nature. Some say he was a secular chassid. Could be. Certainly, my guru was a Zen-like mischief-maker. He deplored religion every day, then, in 1983, built a mosque where he naively hoped out loud and in print bar mitzvahs could be performed. I realize now he wanted his mosque to be more like a Hindu or Buddhist temple. I think he knew his chances of those hopes being realized were nil because after he inaugurated his mosque in May 1983, he never attended it again (he died in early December 1986). Indeed, he left his students free to choose to spend nightly prayer time with him or in the mosque. He personally told me to come and act out (silently, of course) my inner craziness in his presence and under his protection, which meant sitting quietly with him (usually in his bedroom). But I tried to be a Muslim, learning just enough surahs (chapters of the Quran) to satisfy ritual requirements. Four, to be exact. In Arabic. No one dared to recite them in English.

I haven't been back to my guru's ashram in several years. I get the shakes when I go. Honestly, I do. I sweat.  Besides, my mosque is homophobic. I would be betraying too many friends and principles to return. But even if I could, I don't think I would do so.

No, I'm trying to live a life on what both my guru and Walt Whitman called "the open road." It isn't easy these days. Lots of storm-wind branches and other forms of debris litter it or long stretches of it spend weeks in submersion. The bars where I could take refuge are all showing sporting events or superhero movies. So I take refuge in my home, practicing a meager half hour of Zikr nightly, and trying to manage late-life penury.

Leonard Cohen has been very helpful in conducting this stay-at-home, shut-in life. It is he who helped me realize what Christ meant when he said “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.” He is talking about the spiritually battered like Cohen who continue to “serve” against all reason. “You want it darker,” he sings, Hineni, hineni / I'm ready, my lord.” 

Service for me is to fight for reason and against religion to preserve a collective, expansive consciousness in which all are welcome (except the predators). I don’t need a one-size-fits-all spirituality. I realize I am “poor in spirit” and try to make do with my fevered thoughts. Reason is a seasoned bitch. Thank God! Occasionally, I peek in on my inner Isaac, who has forgiven me my wayward moment on the mountain and even tells my friends that the man with the dagger in the air pictured in my Yearbook doesn’t look a bit like me. “Don’t go so easy,” I always tell him later. “You were just following orders,” he answers, “like every other father I know.”