Job

I had an electric guitar come to my house yesterday and beat me up because I skipped to another track before it was through playing. “I’m doing this for your own good,” it said. “What do you mean?” I pleaded as blood filled the spaces between my teeth. “I am the Transcendent; I am the All in All; and you, you, are but a worm made of mud, and you need me.” When it finally turned to go, I begged it to stay. “I love you,” I said; “I’ll write bad checks for you,” I said; “I’ll rob banks for you; I’ll sauté my eyeballs in vomit and feed them to cockroaches for you. Just please, please don’t go; I’m begging you.” I can still hear its laughter as it walked away, the door left open so bottle-flies could eat my blood. 

Nothing fills me like an electric guitar, but sometimes I listen to Ebb Tide (an easy listening piece from 1953). I have nine versions of Ebb Tide, and not one contains an electric guitar, but I think they’re all about a man’s love for the electric guitar, although Peggy looks sad and shakes her head when I say this. 

I’m told that people who are dying sometimes develop a fondness for harp music and Gregorian Chants. I hope I never come to that. I hope I go out listening to an electric guitar—either that or Ebb Tide.

I emailed the draft of what you just read to one of my loyal and loving readers for his/her (how can one ever really know another person’s gender?) opinion. He/she responded: “I knew you were one fucked excuse for a boil on the righteous Job’s hairy asshole, but you have truly exceeded yourself with this crap.”

I wrote back: “If that’s your attitude, I’m glad I didn’t send you the part where it gets worse. As for the above, it’s metaphor, dude—or dudette. This is what those old-timey Middle Eastern guys would have written had they listened to Led Zeppelin while doing drugs instead of sitting in a sweltering tent in the desert listening to donkey farts and smelling sheep shit while green flies buzzed around their heads.

XXX

The words of Job sound as ancient as they are, even by Biblical standards. They are also highly visual and constitute one of my earliest memories. Indeed, Job haunted me for years because nowhere in the Bible is the lack of a moral distinction between God and Satan more evident. Yet, I also love the book because of how hard its ancient author worked to make sense out of injustice. The fact that he failed hardly matters against the fact that he did his pathetically bad best.

The book opens (I write from memory, so a few insignificant details might be wrong) with God and Satan hanging out, and God trying to lord it over Satan by saying, “Have you considered my servant, Job, how good he is, how there are none like him in the whole earth?” God smirks as he says this because he knows very well that the existence of a man who does no evil would keep Satan up at night. As God knew would happen (he knows everything, after all), Satan tries to appear nonchalant by only vaguely acknowledging that he has even heard of Job. The two fall into a silent reverie as they sit sipping their beers, and then Satan says, “Say, Jehovah, how about you letting me have a little fun with your friend…Job, was it? I’ll bet you a fish dinner that he’ll curse you to your face when I’m done with him.” Satan isn’t so confident as he appears, but he hates God’s guts, so he’s not about to show insecurity.

“You’re on,” God says. “Do anything else you please, but don’t kill him.” About then the bartender announces that it’s closing time, so God and Satan go their separate ways; God to heaven for a good night’s sleep, and Satan to hell to convene a night-long council of demons to come up with a plan for making Job so outrageously and unjustly miserable that he will curse god.

A day or two later, Job can be found covered head to toe with boils and sitting naked in a large pile of sheep shit. His wealth is gone, his servants massacred, and his family killed by high winds, except for his wife whom Satan thoughtfully spared. Three friends drop by. They spend days sitting in shocked silence before first the one and then the others launch into torturously long and tedious speeches that set Job’s teeth on edge because his “friends” (who stupidly assume that God is just and loving) are intent on blaming his problems on him, and he knows he’s innocent. Then, his wife shows up and glares at his friends (who she never liked anyway but especially not now that she can’t afford shampoo to wash the Middle Eastern stink from her hair). She too knows that Job is innocent, but she’s so thoroughly disenchanted with the way the patriarchy has screwed-up her life ever since she was a child, that she hates anything with balls, so she says to Job, “That’s some god you’ve got there, hubby-dearest. If he had done to me what he’s done to you, I would curse him and die, and I think that’s what you should do. Please allow me to demonstrate,” and so she does, at least the cursing part. She then leaves, God knows to where since she’s up in years, has no family or Obama-care, and is completely destitute. 

Job and his friends are stunned by what she said, so while Job sits lancing boils with shit-encrusted fingernails, his friends wonder if they’ve been there long enough that it wouldn’t be a fox paw (French hadn’t been invented yet) if they left. Right about then, Job launches into his own little speech that concludes with him saying that he’s going to love and serve God no matter what, because if God treats him this bad when God likes him, he sure doesn’t want to piss God off.

Just as he says this, the tent flap opens and, lo and behold, the Almighty is standing there silhouetted by the blinding light of the noonday sun. He isn’t a happy camper, so he goes on a tirade about how ancient, and smart, and powerful he is; how no one can hold a candle to him in any way whatsoever; and how no one should ever question anything he does. After he rants on for awhile like a love-gone-bad, he rewards Job for his unreciprocated love by giving him perfect health, a bigger and more desirable family, and bigger and more desirable herds. As for Job’s first wife, she eventually dies of dehydration in the desert and is condemned to hell for doubting God’s goodness.

I will now return to Led Zeppelin, whose song at the top of the page (along with marijuana) inspired this post.

People abandon you

They move, they die, they get mad, changing allegiances take them from you. Worst of all, they break off their friendship without a word because something horrible is happening in your life, and this tells them that it’s time to clue you in on the fact that they were just there for the good times, and you were a sap for thinking they loved you. You probably were too because you probably ignored repeated warning signs.

People who form shallow friendships with a lot of people don’t seem to suffer much when friends go away, but people who invest themselves in only a few other people can suffer a lot. I’m in the latter group, and it has taught me to never assume that any given person will be in my life tomorrow.

When I felt that I had a lot to lose—as with someone I especially wanted to stay friends with—I was burdened by the desire to protect myself by pleasing them. I have, over the years, grown to expect much less from people, and this has made me increasingly content when I get much less and increasingly unwilling to bend myself into a pretzel for what I do get. Living this way makes it easier for me to: know what my feelings are; to be open about them to the extent that is prudent; to let other people’s feelings be what they are; and to be open to hearing whatever anyone chooses to tell me. I’ve learned that not only can I not control other people, it makes life harder for everyone when I try. Besides, I’m too old to lose my dignity to bullshit. I sometimes hear that life is a game, but I don’t see it that way because when something is all you’ve got, it’s not to be trifled with. In regard to wisdom: 

“Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” -from II Corinthians 6:2

Truly, none of us have a long future in which to get our lives in order.

“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.” -Thoreau

If you’re playing dice, and you throw seven 7s in a row, you might consider it remarkable, although the likelihood of throwing a 10, 2, 3, 6, 12, 4, and 9, is the same as that of throwing seven 7s. Why is it then that we remember the one and forget the other? It is because our survival as a species depends upon our ability to recognize patterns, the result being that we take advantage of some patterns (such as the seasonal changes that indicate the best time to plant); avoid other patterns (such as the increased risk of being hit by falling rocks during ice melt in high mountains); and imagine still others (as in the case of throwing seven 7s).

I felt frightened when I learned how prevalent randomness is because I took it to mean that I had less control over my destiny than I imagined. I later concluded that, whereas a realistic recognition of what is and isn’t a pattern might not make me feel as safe, it gives me more actual control. Take the case of a ballplayer who pitches a no-hitter while wearing red underwear, and concludes that his future success is more dependent upon red underwear than regular practice. Or consider those who are so enslaved by OCD that they wash their hands a certain number of times at certain intervals, weigh their food to achieve a multiple of that same number, and so on. Belief in an untruth takes energy from productive thoughts and activities and puts it into thoughts and activities that are a waste of time if not destructive.

Another error we humans often make in interpreting reality is that we limit our judgment of what causes an event to that which we either most want to be the cause or most fear to be the cause. For example, a person who is deathly afraid of cancer might interpret every ache and pain as advanced cancer, whereas another person—one who once had cancer—might believe that remission was brought about by chanting the Hare Krishna mantra 1,065 times a day.

Sad to say, a wrong conclusion that is irrationally drawn is less susceptible to being overturned than a wrong conclusion that is rationally drawn. The reason for this is that if you draw a wrong conclusion through rationality, you’re more likely to be open to changing your conclusion through rationality because it is with rationality that your allegiance lies; whereas if you draw a wrong conclusion through an allegiance to that which lacks a rational foundation, how are you to be reached?

"Jizo is a bodhisattva...

...a divine being of infinite grace and compassion who forestalls his own buddhahood in order to help sentient beings to enlightenment. Since the 10th century, he has been portrayed as a young, itinerant monk who carries a pilgrim's staff and a wish-granting jewel. He is popularly believed to assist those condemned to the torments of hell, and the wayward souls of deceased children. This statue shows Jizo descending from the heavens, as suggested by the cloud that supports his lotus pedestal. The exquisite workmanship and extreme elegance of the figure, particularly the serene beauty of the face, are elements associated with the Kei school of sculptors active during the Kamakura period (1185-1336).” –the Minneapolis Institute of Art

As you might recall, my two years in a group marriage in Minneapolis were so hard that I can think of little good to say about them—the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the First Unitarian Society, the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory, and a few friends with whom I’ve lost contact, were about it. This 13^th century wood and lacquer statue is but 26” tall, and I all but ran to it the first time I saw it. Those two years marked the only time in my life that I lived near preternaturally beautiful art from every age and every part of the world, and my only regret is that I wasn’t able to take better advantage of it.

After I put this post online just now, I sat looking at the statue and wondering if anyone would understand how beautiful it is. You might respond that beauty is subjective, and I would agree inasmuch as our species is concerned, but, as I see it, that's the problem. How can any species that considers the concept of beauty to be less than absolute (more real than real) be a terribly worthwhile species. When beauty screams at us so loudly, how can we not hear it?