Frank blizzards and wild-cast bibliophiles
share a cabin built one-storied in the western gaze
where we sit monocled, in pretentious silence
watching The Gospel according the St Matthew
on mute with english subtitles. The italian home
theatre’s baritone has sliced our ears and we,
having grasped the real gist of Jesus and protest
opera seek enough quiet the speaker’s leftover
to glug maniacally on cold bordeax and discuss
monotheism: things like whether Bowie’s inessential
Pilot role served Scorsese and otherwise make clinks
to the certain exit strategy of the palpatine pope’s insipid
resignation. Kari’s the optimistic catholic, who feels that
democratic principles require the next pope to be of black
or latin ancestry. Or female for that matter. Her favorite was
Pope Calixtus, who she calls Obamian, for negotiating power
among holy catholics and the roman wealth mongrels in Salerno
which became this conversation hideout for fascists
in the 30s. Pasolini who directed this Italian black and white
on Jesus was a bisexual atheist who was killed by
bashers. I’d rather see an atheist depiction of Mark myself,
which is more literary. Jesus the fig tree killer. Jesus the
irregular stranger, decked in dark, who upon death blasted
the sky and scared some roman horses. Kari says Matthew
and Luke’s virtually identical testimony on the savior’s pretty
shiny in contrast, more Aslan than Camus. Pasolini’s Jesus
speaks for the filmmaker, grilling the roman capital for mistreatment
of its metropolis’ intense poverty. Kari told me that she only believes
in transubstantiation because, as a jesuit volunteer in st vincent
retreats among pro-life role-play and segregated trust exercises,
she was enlisted by Father Rodney to buy wine from Giant Eagle.
The banquet hall’s went missing from its catecomb-ian holder in the
mission basement a few days early because she drank it. She got
the cheap box of Zinfandel and, because it was the blood of christ,
none of the secretly alcoholic brothers at St Benedictines even noticed.
We only got paid with symbolism she says, but she was seriously
trembling before confession. I figure nothing’s happening
that’s worth more than opium to people.
Maybe the pope noticed the glaciers and wanted to spend his
days enveloped in the gown of a distant non-vatican church.
Away from cameras and the newly molested, who by the thousands
crowd the ancient gates whose unarmed costumed guards
stand around with faces blank like old maps. The pope is shaped
like a cartoon villain. Like he’s never cried, says Kari. To me,
he has a sort of mayonnaise androgyny. If Papal infallibility is real
and God is real, then it’s god himself quitting, like the old wallmart guy
too blind to find a cart, stenciling his two weeks on the snowflake office
calendar. In Job’s story, Job rattles his atheist friends who lecture about
the costs of believing in any kinds of Almighty-ness. Let be be the finale.
The whole book is an unanswered affliction where Job asks
God why and gets an echo. He starts squeaking in his non-godish
ittiness and aims his revulsion in this inward circle like a
Chernobyl implosion. Does the bible ever flatly say
that god is all-powerful? If so, I feel, he’d make an immortal
unambiguous pope. Weisel would not have had to interpret
the shared faces of Holocaust’s lost to see the thread of mercy
in the mirror. It’s like how Jesus spoke in parables. My mom’s like
“God’s mysterious,” yet her sermons are short and make sense.
Picture the heavens yelling at Jesus: go to bed. But Yeshua was
the living representation of God, at least according to Kari’s brother
who is an autistic genius. Did God feed himself to the sentries and
watch himself sleep on the rusty ex, God shouting to
himself eli eli lama sabaktoni, which Ginsberg compared to a
saxophone. Christianity is thus, of all religions, at least momentarily
atheist: God paying himself with himself to save the sins of every
doomed earthling. An emotional notion? Maybe all-powerful as
an adjective is too rash. Perhaps a thing desirous of anything
has, at best, one weakness, although antiquated, unspecific
and muted through politics. Due time, which Kari is too post-modern
to resist, inside which Ratzinger jingles his decorated bells, and
appreciates his imperfect egoism, his frantically probative immortality.
