The Unreasonable

The heart moves like a winged bird- white fluff that dances on the water of the lake.  A smooth wind takes it, transforming it into the magic of light and moistened clouds ready to spurt their seed. 
There is a man in the clouds, tall and dark and outlined in the golden rays of the sun nearing dusk. A bright burst moves across the sky, fervent in its need to explode outward.
End and beginning are the same. It goes without thought, without any implied intent. It is movement without rationality. Words without meaning. 
Their beauty is easy to read, the light easy to spot and wish upon, but there is no reason. No man in the clouds that makes the stars twinkle. 
The sand is a bad place for a head- take it out and behold the blackness of space, the limitless that cannot be understood. 
It is not for you to comprehend, it may not be for you to know. 
Shopping carts and diapers, packed stadiums of hungry onlookers, waiting for a preacher to deliver the message of god.  We are a pack of wolves and the body wants the taste of flesh. 
Each prayer is an invitation to death, open the book and begin to sing. 
What is it that you desire? Maybe the clouds will give it to you, maybe the idol of stone will speak, maybe the invisible which cannot be proven by any measure will dance. 
Is the stain on the tortilla enough?  The bush that burns?  The fluttering heart that can only be described as a whisper? 
Sit in the temples, rise and fall at the command of the man dressed in white. Do it because you are told, do it for the children.  Do it because everyone else does. 
They will mark your house with stones, the windows will be broken, the lawn dug for your grave.  There is no choice here, not in this country of laws, not in these places of worship. 
Thought is for the heathens, questions are for the devil. 
There is only one path and it has already been decided- not by you, but the people before you.  The way is cleared, swept by slaves and those already condemned to death, they wait in cages until the flames rise with the call of the chosen. 
Your dress will be torn when we arrive, your lips will be chapped, you will be thirsty, prepare for the voyage and bring the book.

Him And Dogs Like Him

Supreme transit, it’s the nearly invisible vehicle in which opposing thoughts share the same metal lines, they move on a whim, crisscrossing the country, converging in neural networks with hyperbolic speed. In white and black robes, with little red books tinged with gold leafing and yard sticks that poke out from their underwear, they move through time, piggy-backing on waves of political enthusiasm and newly-sprung militia groups.

It was happening now. He could smell it in the air. They whispered ‘constitution’ under their breath, the letters reeking of coffee as they spat out the word with religious zeal. They coughed up those letters, spilling the 2nd as if it was word inherited directly from an ancient bearded god.
Francisco was covered in the pulsing blue light of the nightly news, he watched every station, clicking through them in random order until he fell asleep just after10. As he fell into dreams that bulged in their shape and color, he wondered why those men in the news always waved the 2nd Amendment around like a flag.
What about him?
He saw those same people aiming, shooting, trying to take down his children’s right to citizenship, his grandmother’s right to drive to the mercado. They pulled the trigger, firing at sympathetic senators and congressmen, the black suits had jumped ship, leaving him and his family in the sun.

They all sweated, not just from the heat that had bleached even the heartiest saguaro cactus, but fear also dripped down their cheeks, glistening beads of worry dropped off their cracked chin.
Another gun went off, clack! in the night.
Everyone here owned a gun, all the white men that lived in the low foothills and the ranchers that wore red white and blue flag shirts. Yesterday he found his own American flag vandalized, the one that sat beside his Mexican flag.
No they didn’t sit, they waved in the breeze that seemed to come from the lowlands of hell. Pure heat to dry the beads of fear dripping down grandmother’s chin.
The dog lay on the ceramic tiles of the kitchen all day long, living in blissful agony, giving no thoughts to rights and amendments and the news stations. A dog was a dog was a dog. Mexican, American, Indian, dogs responded no matter what color skin delivered a bowl of water and a soft caress.
A dog was a dog was a dog. That’s how they thought of him, his family, the people with skin that looked like his.
A dog was a dog. Those men in their white shirts with guns at their waist, they thought all the browns were the same – Mexicans- a word that described fear instead of a country. A word that was just as ugly as the coffee-scented breath of its speaker.
No, they had come from farms in the valleys, from cities with museums and towns without plumbing, from mountains that touched snow and from the crashing Atlantic ocean. From the central umbilical cord of two continents and the southern hemisphere, from the highlands and the valleys and the places in between where women wore embroidered blouses and woolen skirts and carried babies and chickens alike. They were not the same, but they were linked by one essential quality in the eyes of those men with guns.

He saw the advertisements every night. He saw the guns in their holsters, the posters that could intimidate even the most hardened politician.
The men with the guns knew where to aim. The targets were set, they took down what every man in a suit wants most, pointed the barrel right at the pounding heart of power and squinted an eye. They aimed at those politicians sitting pretty on those shiny leather office chairs on perfectly clean plush carpet. They aimed, and- clack!
There were not enough shelters to hide the tears. The rivers flowed from Fernando, out past concrete dividers. When the insults came, causing the floods to mount, he lost it all, all the salt and all the water. It flowed from him a storm that dried on bleached sand, drying instantly in the land without rain.

He saw their guns, felt them pointed at him, at his family, at people with his same skin. Though nothing had really changed, he had become the villain. The constitution to which they always pointed, that 2nd point that they waved higher than flags, that constitution didn’t apply to him, not to him and the dogs like him.
Their policy was to shoot first. The targets were set, not one, or two, but the millions like him. How they loved their bullets, how they hated his music and food, the smell of his clean clothes, his daughter in pretty pink dresses, his tacos and beans, his lawnmower and round sweet wife, his son in school, his language and the rolling r’s of his tongue. How they hated him and his dogs, him and his enthusiastic use of English and the small home he painted every five years.

Them and those guns, them and the rights that they asserted. Them and those rights that they would deny him, the ones they would deny his children if they could. That Second Amendment they held tight to their heart, those words that they would spit forth, smelling like coffee and disfigured prostitutes, they shaped the world as they would like to imagine it, saw their chosen right as immovable while others were flawed. If his rights were not written in stone, then why did they scream for their guns?

Why did the men of highest power remain so quiet? Gently stroking their hands, rubbing their toes together, waiting to see what the tide of people would endorse before they walked to the microphone and made a statement.
They were always so scared to have an opinion. Only the men with those guns were solid in their statements, they were the ones that never changed, maybe they were getting harder, turning to stone, they were certainly never afraid to scream, their guns talked for them, clack!
Hitting his neighbor in the chest, taking away the breath of that young girl on the border, taking her father too. Their guns talked and not only did they have the right to have them, they thought they had the right to use them, declaring people like him the enemy. Turning his mother, that thick tree that bore a dozen lives, turning her into a villain, into a criminal deserving of a bullet. His children, turning them into aliens with only one signature.

He looked around with tear-stained eyes, unsure when it would stop, maybe now that the devil had sprouted naked from the ground. He wondered if it was ever gone, or had that dusting of sulfur merely hidden in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to come out the red door and find them.

He was now a criminal and the ones with the guns were free. The ones that murdered walked around and waved their striped flags and they would rest on the constitution like it was made for them alone, forgetting, perhaps never knowing, that this actually used to be his land, his and the dogs like him.
They didn’t knock on the door, they came in the night, that huge group with their guns and disease, their sickness that would spread, killing their enemy with only a coffee-scented breath discharged in their direction.

The movie had not changed, not a bit of dialogue had been altered. The policy, the billboards, the country and its actors. They smiled on those shiny posters, looking out at them, at that dried land and the browns and whites that dotted the landscape, those with power and bullets, those that lived like dogs under the sun, crying salty tears that ran down grandmother’s face, tasting not of salt, but of pepper.

The Cord

The typewriter clicked under his quick-moving fingers. Chik-chik-chik…the pace hardly ever stopped. Light would be streaming in from the window and typed pages would form a stack next to the typewriter. He would lose the sun and then be accompanied by a few of the strongest stars, and the manuscript grew taller and taller. He was unaffected by the hours of man, by the hands of the clock or the tilt of the earth. The sounds of the neighborhood did not disturb him, nor the snoring of his neighbor, Levi, that he could hear through the wall.
He would only break the rhythm of the writing when his body required tending, or when Mrs. Johnson from upstairs would come over to prepare him some lunch. She told him she could not stand to know a man was not eating and wasting away, so she made it her business to prepare him simple meals three times a day. Besides those necessary interruptions and an occasional walk to the living room window, his place was at the desk, before the typewriter and the clean white pages that he would fill with other worlds.
He preferred living in those other places, the realities he created. They were so much more interesting than the city that was just outside his 16th floor window. In his mind, there were no rules, no conventions, no limits as to what could happen. It was total freedom, and he dove into it everyday, as if finally, he was home.
The typewriter clicked.
“…Cintra held onto the helm. She could see the star system fast approaching. It was a cluster of white lights that sparkled brighter than anything she had ever seen. Moving in and out of the clusters were other space craft, smaller than the one she now maneuvered, smaller and more round, like shooting spheres that had the light-willed movement of bubbles. She was not quite sure which direction to turn. Would the smaller ship carrying her crew and supplies follow her into the cluster of light? Perhaps she should circumvent the stars and arc over them…She heard the phone next to her ring. She picked up the receiver, pulling the cord as far as it would go so she could walk towards the wide glass that was the front windshield of the spacecraft. Before waiting for a voice, she said, ‘Let’s go for it Kurt. Let’s see what lives out here.’ ‘OK Captain.’ She walked towards her seat and hung up the phone, resting it gently in its plastic cradle. She got into the chair and gripped the steering device.”
He pushed hard on the key for “period.” He did it more sharply, more exaggerated than the rest of the paragraph. This was getting good. He nodded to himself, enjoying where the story was taking him. He nodded softly, over and over, a small trance coming over him.
It was how he rested. Images of space craft took the place of words. He saw the dark sky of space, imagined what it would be like to approach a thick cluster of stars that seemed to vibrate a thousand times greater than the most populated city. He let himself feel the tension of the space travelers, the anticipation, the curiosity building as they quickly approached the lights.
His body jerked slightly as he heard the rattle of a key in the door. Without even looking up, he could see the round shape of Mrs. Johnson emerging through the doorway, her thick arm pulling the key from the metal hole. Her pudgy pink hand closed the door, locking the deadbolt, she took just a few steps to the small kitchen left of the door, then reached for the apron she left on a single metal hook. He could hear her humming.
He pulled the paper out of the typewriter, tugging gently on it from both corners so as not to bend it. He re-read the paragraph and found it pleasing, though he thought there would be more details he could add later. He liked the world. He read it again, still missing the one thing that would act like a siren to a reader far in the future.
The cord, the phone. In a world of easy space travel, he had inserted an object bound by the world around him. An object he knew, a thing he recognized. His publisher would glaze over it too, both unable to recognize an object from his unconscious daily assumptions.
He walked over to the window, looking out at the constant traffic of a New York street, where cars remained long and bound by the laws of physics. Technology moved so fast, soon engineers would realize that small, round, bubble cars made more sense. He heard the telephone ring and walked to the small wooden end table. He picked up the receiver, trying to untangle the gray cord as he brought the plastic piece to his ear.

Brian David Mitchell

In this realm of the human. In this society we understand filled with cars, TV, politicians, ads, churches, movies, restaurants, laws…in this realm, in this American culture, there are shared symbols. Each single person will look at the same advertisement (or a thousand other things) in a different way based on their own upbringing, knowledge, memories, etc., but there is a basic shared language that exists between the bulk of the population. The shared collective symbols of right and wrong and beauty and ugly and funny and colors and laws is what allows millions of people to interact with each other through language and action. We can look around and see people behaving in generally the same way as we do, this we consider “sane.” Millions of people in America share the same “symbolic order.” The symbolic order are the words we use to explain our human experience. Words to describe our emotions, to describe our experience, words to describe our actions and understanding of events. Because of a general consensus that there is a God in the sky that created life on earth, because a majority of people share this “symbolic order,” (they use words like god, heaven, hell, creation, bible, etc) they all consider themselves normal and sane.

When there is a disconnect, when a minority of people (or perhaps one person) has a symbolic order (a collection of words used to explain their experience, etc) that does not fit within the larger symbolic order, there is conflict. These people are considered “insane.” They understand and explain the world with different words.

Brian David Mitchell believes he is a man of god. He was a street preacher in Utah in early 2000. Many people would have regarded him as a semi-delusional zealot who believes he can hear God. Many people pray to god. They talk to him, some think they hear answers, all of this is considered sane by the majority of the American public. But when a man does nothing but stand on the street and preach and shout and lecture to the passers-by about the word of God and Jesus, the majority, even the church going people, think that the mind has slipped.

Brian David Mitchell had constructed a world around himself, as we all do, to explain his existence. In his world, God speaks to him, God commands him. In his world, his symbolic system, men may have more than one wife. Men may do what they want with their women as long as they are married. Within his symbolic order, he believed that people must be humbled. They must experience the low-human state so they can one day experience a higher one.

There was one family that did not believe he was completely insane. The Smart family of Utah hired him to help repair their roof. He worked at their house for five hours one day. One night, he cut a hole in their screen, broke into their home and kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, the 14 year old from her bed in the middle of the night. He took her to the woods. His wife gave Elizabeth a robe and told her change to change into it. A small ceremony was performed and Brian David Mitchell proclaimed Elizabeth as his wife, he raped her afterwards, as he would many times afterwards. When his first wife complained that he was having sex with Elizabeth too often, he began to rotate between them. Elizabeth was found nearly a year later. "Anything I showed resistance or hesitation to, he would turn to me and say, 'The Lord has commanded you to do this. You have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest.”

Brian David Mitchell and his first wife are in police custody. They are both declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It is Mitchell’s explanation that the court sees as unstable. Although many people in this country pray, when God is used as a reason to commit a crime (actions the collective accepts as “wrong”) the general consensus of the explanation is “insanity.” This explanation is not shared in the symbolic order of the larger society.

The writer of a particular article about the Elizabeth Smart case used words like “horrific and sick” to describe Brian David Mitchell. This is the conflict. One man believes he is doing what God wants him to do. He is humbling a young woman so that one day she can reach a higher state. This is what he actually believes. This is how he actually understands the world. The police, the criminal justice system, her parents, neighbors, journalists, the Americana public see this act as the raping of a young girl by a crazy zealot. One deed is thought of as righteous, the same deed is seen by others as evil. Both are words used to describe an action.

Even in custody and in court, Brian David Mitchell continuously sang hymns to himself until he was removed from the courtroom. Perhaps the world around him seemed crazy, full of evil men who had no contact with god. Perhaps he sang to remind himself that he was the one with the truth. He was the one with God on his side. He had to sing to protect his world. He sang to protect his symbolic order, the world he had built for himself, the only world that still had a place for him.

The Book

I sat back on the bed, reclining more fully into the arm that held me up. It was late morning and the light filtering in through the blinds of the small rectangular window was soft with the promise of a sun filled day. I had just realized something very large and a sense of awe had come over me akin to looking up at the star filled night sky and sensing the enormity of it all and my very small place within it. My words were stolen with the impact of the realization.
"Everything we know about Jesus comes from the book. There are no other sources that verify his existence."
I saw the bloody bodies on the path made by the crusaders. I saw the witches burning and the missionaries in the tropics. I saw the abortion clinics in flames and men strapping bombs to their chests. All of this, and so much more…all starting with a book. The written words of scribes cast two thousand years ago.
The planet we live on, amongst countless stars and endless phenomena, is the source of many questions. Why does the moon cover the sun in a total eclipse? Why does the earth sometimes shake and why did my sister die under piles of broken bricks and mortar? Why does the sun come back every morning?
Humans need a reason for the mystery, an explanation for the unseen. The answer most often given is God…God’s will that decided it, God’s will that made it happen. God is the answer to the unknowable. The answer to the questions that burn and consume. Without an answer, the enormity of the Universe is lonesome.
The mechanical impulses of birth, copulation and death are too gray and stark. Humans need a reason. A reason to be good, a reason to be clean, a reason to exist; otherwise, what is the point of the suffering? The supposed word of God has been used as a foundation for all endeavors.
Circumcise your males…because God wills it. Bury your dead in three days, because God wills it. Abandon your olive groves and pyramids… because the real God wills it. Vote for this man… because God wills it. And always, it is the masses following the words of the few.
The ancient rabbis were considered to be the most educated among all the people, and perhaps they were. They used the idea of God, the threat of God’s wrath, to control large masses of illiterate peasants. Judaism has over 400 rules of hygiene and all of it is directly practiced and enforced under the permanent threat of the fearsome wrath of God.
In the United States, there is a huge political force of Christian fundamentalists who do as they’re told. They follow the word of their preachers who are supposed to be in direct contact with God. They follow an ancient book written for a distant time and a different people.
The believers follow the interpretations of rabbis and priests, but it is still a book. Is there direct experience with something like God? Is there real evidence in their lives of the promises that the Bible prescribes? Religion is a set of dead answers to living questions. They provide the comfort we seek, the final death to our sense of yearning and the hope of a clear explanation to all the mysteries of the Universe. The word is considered absolute, the modern interpretation easily molded to fit into specific current ideology.
We do not ask for faith. We ask for an open heart to experience the Absolute without interpretation or ancient dogma. We do not want to believe. We do not want to have dead answers, we want to drink deeply of the living questions.