In Alexie Sherman's "This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix,Arizona", Russell Banks' "Sarah Cole:A Type of Love Story" and Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales From The Mekong Delta" we see the contemporary absence of God or the spiritual realm in modern life. We are turning to new gods such as consumerism, narcissism and drugs.
The course of the 20th century in the United States has moved away from the mainstream spirtual traditions that guided the country at its origins. In the 1880's Nietzche declared that "God is dead." He was not simply referring to the God of Christianity that had been in decline for at least 100 years. He meant the outlook and focus of intellectual thought had lost its center, its logos, its guiding word and spirit. The outlook had crashed to earth, into the jumble and chaos of the world of things and away from the Platonic and Kantian spiritual realm. In order to fill the spirtual realm, new "gods", perhaps even a new religion, would have to be created. The new religion was supplied by the State in the form of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia. By the middle of the 20th century these had been discredited, the one by fire-bombing and Auschwitz and the other by Stalin and the terror of famines and gulags.
After this we might have expected a return, especially in the US to a more traditional God. To some extent we saw this in the perversion of the religious Right, however, for the most part we have seen an increasing escape into personal "gods" be they consumer goods, self-love or drugs.
This worship of "brave new gods" is understandable in the context of the bankruptcy of statism and the seeming confirmation of God's non-existence in the smoldering radioactive rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the simmering flesh-filled ovens of Auschwitz. If Man can do THIS to Man without God's intercession, then there must be NO God. As Voltaire's Candide eventually learned, we must simply tend our own garden in the end.
Man's greatest discovery, the splitting of the atom, spelled his spiritual descent into post-modern angst and chaos. The intellect in its timeless tumult with the soul stood gawking and dumbstruck at the soulless inferno it had wrought and looked forward in horror to the soulless being who would inhabit the dead and earthly realm, untethered from its spiritual sustenance, like the Blue Devil frozen in the depths of Dante's Hell.
Sherman, Banks, and Braverman, in their excellent stories, examine this new world and the new gods that we have created to fill the spiritual void.
"This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona" is Sherman's tale of Victor's loss of his father and his journey to recover the body accompanied by Thomas. They are American Indians living on a reservation. Thomas is a spiritual man who tries to teach his people through the use of stories. Nobody wants to listen to him. When they are seven, Thomas tells Victor that he senses his father is sick.
When he was a boy Thomas believed that he could fly and he jumped off a roof to prove it. He actually flew a bit. However, the world caught him and he fell to the ground and broke his arm. The spiritual had defied the concrete and secular for a few moments. But the concrete firmly and harshly reasserted its dominance. The other boys watch could simply taunt Thomas about the broken arm.
As they are driving back to Washington through a dead Nevada landscape devoid of all spirit, Thomas and Victor hit a Jack-Rabbit, the only living thing they have seen. Ironically it is the spiritual Thomas who is the driver after Victor had driven all day.
As they arrive back at the Reservation the two men see the rising on a new day. The people are arising and praying to the secular gods of work, breakfast, and the paper, "just like everybody else does."
Thomas professes his philosophy of "take care of each other" and "nothing stops." These profoundly spirited statements express the Amerindian spirit of the circular pattern to life where actions and reactions rebound together in a perpetual path of Being. In response to this Victor reflects that the most he shares with his friends is a beer bottle. In the end Victor and Thomas cannot remain friends. After one brief acquaintance the earth and spirit must separate again.
In "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story", we see the narcissistic love of self replace spiritual love and existence. Ron is the self-described handsome man who becomes the lover of an extremely fat and ugly woman, Sarah Cole. Sarah is in love with Ron's physical appearance and approaches him in a bar. Ron objectifies Sarah not in the usual sense of wanting to possess beauty, but in the warped sense of wanting to possess the ugliest person he had ever seen.
At one point Sarah asks if Ron wants to make love to her. Of course he does. "What could be be simpler", he thinks. Here the self-loving and loathing aspiritual attitude of Ron is at its most obvious. He equates sex to a simple mechanical process in which it is obvious he and she both want it. Ron seems to see it as similar to munching a bag of chips. It is the ultimate victory of the long sexual revolution of the 20th century that has culminated in a world where sex is relatively easy to find, without consequences if we are careful, and more an act of soulless self-love than love. This triumph in some ways has been a godsend, as we can quench our loneliness in the soft and moist body of another. In the short-run much pleasure has been gained from this. In the long-run many lives are broken and ruined by the suppression of the soul that results. It becomes impossible to love.
By the end Ron experiences this inability to love Sarah. "Go on and leave you ugly bitch", Ron says to her during an argument. He describes Sarah as wrapped in a golden light. He is left alone with his beautiful hands in his beautiful face, spiritually dead.
Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales From The Mekong Delta" is the story of a woman's (let's call her Kate) descent back into the morass of drug addiction. Her gods are cocaine, cigarettes and booze. Lenny, a drug-dealer and cocaine addict, becomes Kate's anti-Moses, leading her back into the bitter land of the slavery of drug addiction. Lenny is shorth, fat and rude. Kate surrenders to the only temptation Lenny can offer: the forbidden fruit of this exciting, fast, soul-killing and ultimately suicidal world.
Lenny has money and he reminds Kate of her love of material things. "Want a rolex?" Lenny asks. This gets Kate's attention.
Like the color of Dante's Devil, blue is the prevailing color in the air. China Blue is the drug Lenny sells. "The air was a pale blue, bleeding into the horizon taking the sky." The oxygen is being sucked out of Kate and blue death is being injected into her. For Kate it feels good and comforting. It is a structured environment, as Lenny says. Never mind that the structure is rotten and infected where mental anguish and pain is not confronted but smothered by chemical concoctions that kill the pain but dull the mind. No matter, a mind is superfluous in modern Los Angeles where pleasure and ease are what is desired. The drugs deliver this comfortably and painlessly for Kate.
Eventually Kate gives Lenny the sex that he craves. She opens her lips and legs to him as the Santa Ana winds howl. She is left wedded to her god of drugs, addicted again and floating in a blue haze, dead spiritually and perhaps soon dead physically.
In Sherman, Banks, and Braverman we see the world of soulless creatures that we have become. Sherman shows the secular embraced at the expense of the spirit. Banks shows how narcissism can twist love inward rendering it unable to reach out for another. Braverman demonstrates the dominating aspects of drug abuse demanding the submission of the soul in obeisance to a mind dulled to a flame flickering out.
Commonality, narcissism, and drugs are just three of the many post-modern gods that we have embraced in the Nietzchean world of "God's Death" and the atom bomb. It seems that there are as many gods as persons and they have become death, the demons within us squeezing the life from souls screaming in agony, ultimately to be our destroyers. Living Being cannot long inhabit a dead world. Either we regain our souls from the depths into which we have buried them or we ourselves, humankind, will descend into the recesses and catacombs from which nothing emerges save the darkness of lost souls.
Have a good Sunday...wherever you might be, John.
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