CHAPTER 38
Like salt spilling rapidly...crashing, like the shatter and splattering of the dropped baby bottle at 2 a.m...fragged!...like the pop of the flashbulb...Wow!...like the coldness between loveless lovers: cannibalistic…so did the Sixties end. Somewhere in the midriff of the Seventies—at its navel?—when “The War” ended...Nam not Nagasaki. After bodies falling from soul and psyche: personal and public: Kings and Kennedys and Kongs and Krists and Krishnas…Nixon gone—what else to say? “Nixon has left the building!”
It’s over.
Now, “Doctor Frakes,” “Professor Frank”—almost famous, wittily penning popular tomes on cultural history...an infamous article in Harpers on “America: Eating Our Own Children?”—innovative, clever, insightful, yet still searching: irreverent, blasphemous, sacrilegous.
Ken and Tui kept growing...as Family Unit they all moved forward, grew—but there was a yet unsatisfied hunger.
“What do you know about the Mormons?”
Dalores didn’t pause while setting the table, shouted, “Not much.”
Red Fox had remained. So had Lonny and Janet. More than friends, each had a favorite room in the house...they left some stuff there—stayed whenever they wanted. Their presence was always welcomed—“Mostly” both Frank and Dalores would have admitted, for there were days and nights, at times weeks, when they wished that they were just four...just nuclear.
“I’m Mormon,” Red Fox said.
“Really?” Frank
“Yeah. We’re the Lost Tribe. Don’t know that, do you?”
Frank saw her walking towards him on the beach...“Sorta. Maybe. Tell me.”
It was like reading his own notes from his senior seminar on “Re-imagining a Mythos.” Red Fox kept dropping images and words, phrases, theological tidbits which Frank nibbled some, others gulped down—at times holding between his fingers amazed at the concoction, at others, just full hand-grabs stuffed into his face.
“Native Americans are the Lost Tribe of Israel. There’s a whole unknown history, sorta invisible, I guess, of these Nephi and others called Lamanites. When I was young, I didn’t pay much attention, but since I left—see, you can’t really leave, kinda weird, but in my mind I’ve left.”
“Apostate. You’re an apostate.” His comment meant little.
“So you want to know, right? The problem’s it’s all patriarchal. I mean with a vengeance. Women are really dolls. Kinda good if you like being cared for, if you like being brainless. Lots of attention. See, they want lots of kids.”
There was a structure to it—a History of Religion course template to lay across it...goes like this—Upstate New York, vast, seething turmoil, Civil War, immigrants, living on the frontier, mingling of sects, a great need to melt down to the basics...a flush of the Holy Spirit—“The Holy Spirit is always convenient—reformers and rebels like to use Him.” It’s called “The Burned-over District,” and Joseph Smith comes up with a fabulous story about angels and heavenly bodies and golden plates in some kind of Egyptian dialect and him being less bright than the average guy—“Or is that revisionism?”—of humble birth, being Called out of his Ordinariness to be Special, to be Chosen—“Here we go, again!”—and has these visions and visitations...the story is Biblical...completes but is distinct from the Jewish, yet he keeps all the Christian stuff—“That anti-Semitic rant?!”—and there’s just a bunch of guys, white males: blacks being sucked into the era’s theology of Ham—stained, can’t be Mormons.
“They get you married forever. Eternal Marriage,” keying and locking-up: Me and Yellowjack, “But really these guys are hot. Real dicks. Sex pistols!…Holy dicks. They want to fuck you cosmically. Forever! Make babies with them for other planets.”
“You’re a god?”
“Yep.”
“God the Father has a body?”
“Sure thing.”
“We’re like God the Father…going out to other planets and being gods like him?”
“Ya got it!”
Frank frames it: “Blavatsky came then. The archaeological revival of everything Egyptian in Europe. All the back then novel and spine-tingling tomb robberies. Spectacular!” Jotting down notes for an essay: “Cultural transference. Inversion. Absolute novelty. Old wine into new wineskins. Foreskin. Chuckle. Chuckle. Drawing out the question: Where is the goddess?”
Red Fox: “That’s why you can’t just brush it off. Don’t do that. I’d lose my respect for you if you did.”
Turns to the others: “Do you all know this?”
Nods. Frank checks them off: “Like a Greek chorus”—what are they waiting to say?
Lonny: “There was—is still—a Mother of God tradition. Here’s the issue. Eternal Marriage bases itself on the fact that Eve was created from Adam and was “bone of his bone” etcetera before The Fall.”
Light bulbs pop and burst. “So, no Original Sin!” He hears himself as if he were answering himself!
“That’s what I always liked. Women are good. Not all that Protestant Puritan horseshit.”
“Catholics have it too,” Janet inserts.
“They all do.” Anger. Pain. Tortured cry.
“The Shakers, I think it was them, maybe the Quakers, too? Frank?”
“Don’t quibble.”
“Certainly not Mary.” No one laughs. Harsh silence.
“Whoa, okay,” Red Fox, “that’s the kicker. You get Old Testament, New Testament, Another Testament as they call it, all Yahweh and Jesus and now Moroni...but in the sum you still get kicked in the ass: ole anal fuck! “Bend over and smile!” But now it’s for the blasted forever!…Sucks. Really sucks.”
“But it is a revelation—all myths are.” A bit too academic: Frank. A bit too “kid in the candy store” excited: uncritical. A male rush?
“We’ve been working with that,” a tone revealing that only he has not been here before.
Janet: “When with The Corn we lived out all these Mormons had to give. We entered the Latter Days, so to speak. Frank, it’s your stuff on the Shade Mother, America, the West, the whole Biblical mess as the Mother who eats her children…that’s the linchpin for where we have to go. Go beyond all these myths—create a new one.”
I hear you.
Said simply. In a house in Minneapolis. In a state named Minnesota. In a country called United. In a world just recently discovered as Spaceship Earth. And as said, so it was spoken by all of them together—spoken through their fuller being, their robust presence each to the other in the openness which the house was, is.
The house decrees and ordains, “Come!”
PART 4: D