March 14, 2004
Dave,
Thanks for getting back to me so… rapidly. I must admit I really wasn’t expecting a response, especially considering how many of your readers you were probably having to explain yourself to again (and again and again.) If you don’t mind me saying so, you do sound like you are awfully worn out. "And now I’m going to spend the rest of my life talking about it [Cerebus]" almost sounds like you mean it in exclusion to doing anything else. I’m sure you’ll find some other project to poke into the public at large soon enough and no doubt piss off enough people that you’ll be wishing that Cerebus was all you had to talk about.
I understand what you are saying about gratitude. It is a difficult thing to sincerely maintain, and I say this as someone who tries to maintain it myself. I know you give a lot of money to charity (and I have nothing but respect for your doing that,) but I have found that actually doing charity work to be an excellent means of maintaining my gratitude. Like most things we are encouraged to do by God, there are enormous benefits to it, and if you haven’t tried it, I cannot recommend it enough. Since you aren’t chained to the drawing board anymore (or for now, anyway) maybe you might find the time for it.
Flannery O’Connor
While I have had, like I said, a while to consider this question relative to Miss O’Connor, I had not considered it concerning her before your letter (nor really thought much about her, period, in the interim.) I was glad to be able to revisit her on the other side of that question because it certainly deepened my appreciation for what she did. Unfortunately— looking at what I wrote to you earlier— I was coming to that realization while I was writing you and (ho ho ho) just left you right out of the conversation, didn’t I? Sorry about that.
God did this to Flannery O’Connor. She also brought it upon herself, simultaneously. There are so many actors upon our lives, from God to nature (sometimes lupus is just lupus, after all) to ourselves, that discerning just what— exactly— is the principal (though I would say God is always the principal) is like predicting the weather. There are too many variables to determine what predicates any action accurately. The best indicator in a matter like this is not so much our actions (which are, ultimately, the end result of a process) but our intention, because that is as well indicative of where the path that we find ourselves following lies. We rarely do anything contrary to those intentions. You set off writing Cerebus to find the Truth; that in itself says a great deal about not only where you ended up but also who you were when you started. It is the thread of your life. Regardless of what one does, refusing God or following Him, the thread remains the same. Everything that we do is measured against it In Flannery O’Connor’s life, one can see her already sharpening her knives long before she even knows what to do with them. The question is: just how serious was she? How far would she go to know? In her case, very very deep indeed. She did not just accept her lupus— her grotesquery so that she might understand it— but she accepted God, so that she might know Him as well. If she had simply accepted her lupus, she probably wouldn’t have looked greatly different from most of the artistes on Oprah "sharing" their "wisdom" on these matters so they might empower the flock.
It is probably no small thing to notice how much the sin of Pride figures in her work. Virtually all of her stories revolve around this sin, and it is a charge that she levels against herself ("Good Country People,") but there seems to be little evidence of it in any of her letters before or after she became sick. This charge seems to proceed more from a lack of understanding the gravity of just what it was she was bringing upon herself, the sin of Presumption more than Pride, though they are tied very closely together; a rather wry judgment she made upon herself after the fact. It is clear that she brought something much deeper than simply lupus upon herself. At some point in time, she was confronted by God— whether it was a matter of her calling Him out or not (in her Pride?), we simply do not know, but He certainly did answer her prayers. One can see this manifest change in her after this event. She came up on the singularity of Him: I Am.
When we are faced with I Am, the Absolute, there are a lot of ways that we can respond. "Curse God and die" is certainly one. One can also freak out and become a religious nut. Most of those responses are, if one looks at them closely, acts of removal, even if it is a polite removal; a bow in His presence is as well an averting of the eyes. I would venture that this act of removal is not only because of the sheer alienness of the manifested God but also because we sense just what it is that He wants from us, which is everything. I think that we can, certainly, get by with less— God seems to be rather understanding about just how steep that request is— but it still is what He wants. By means of her prayers about her condition, Flannery had found herself before the manifested God, a God who was not interested in her lupus, a God that wanted everything. But she did not remove herself, she did not turn away. She gave herself to Him, agápē. She bent to the yoke.
It is also probably no coincidence that the acts of people who felt like they had to play out scenes from the Bible to understand them would so obsess her. These acts seemed to come from almost inarticulate compulsions towards gnosis, doomed because of a lack of understanding what it was they were engaging in. It seems— to me, anyway— that this is highly unlikely a preoccupation for someone who has not, themselves, done something similar, who has come out of this fire transformed by not only the knowledge of the act itself but by God Himself. In giving herself to Him, she came to understand Him.
The best evidence of this is in just how far her understanding of what she was working on deepened as well— well past the point where most of her readers could grasp what she was talking about. The misinterpretations of her work (to this day) appear almost as if she had performed one of the greatest magic acts in literary history. There is nothing occult in the process— she was being as literal as one can be— and yet what she was saying still remains seemingly invisible to those who read her work and some of them her biggest fans. But she was doing God’s work—or, more accurately, allowing God to work through her, to inform her work—and the Word is there in the very foundation of it. It is only the inability (or perhaps one might say the unworthiness) of her modern audience to see it. Like I said, God does get the Word out still, doesn’t He? Even when it is hidden in broad daylight.
Stepping back to your statement that "all manner of suffering is possible and our job is just to bear up under it," I think I would say that is up to us to find what is beyond it. To simply bear our suffering is not much different than being an animal. To find what lies beyond that suffering (and "All life is suffering") is to find what makes it bearable to begin with, what makes it purposeful— otherwise life is just a long walk from one end of the abattoir to the other. Or, more accurately, to recognize that the value of our suffering is miniscule relative to the infinitely greater value of the Divine and to adjust ourselves accordingly. As, when we do recognize the value of Divine, we should step towards Him, instead of what most people do, which is to turn away, to cower into our suffering flesh, to "curse God and die." How much better we embrace Him.
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re completely free.
—Jelaluddin Rumi
Mary
I figured that was what you were referring to and from where. In Matthew and Mark both, "a woman" does anoint Jesus with spikenard, breaking a box over him (an "alabaster" one in Mark, as if this detail was important.) In John, it is Mary who does it, anointing his feet. In both cases it is immediately before he goes to Jerusalem to die, and in both cases it happens in Bethany (in Matthew and Mark, at Simon the Leper’s house; in John, at Lazarus’.) While I hardly expect the Gospels to agree on anything other than, apparently, that Jesus died on a cross, I’m afraid I’m going to have to side with John (like always) simply because in the Synoptic Gospels it says: "She will be remembered always" and then doesn’t even name her, as opposed to John where that phrase is not repeated, about her being remembered, and yet it does tell who she was, which is the only way she can be "remembered always." I think Mary and "the woman" are the one and the same and she had kept the spikenard for the day of his burial, otherwise what he says about the poor makes no sense coming from Jesus.
I realize that this is— to say the least— a minor point, especially when you consider the fact that I think that you used the anecdote correctly in the context you made it in, but I guess I’ve got enough of the Scots in me myself to just let it go at that. I’m sure you understand. And stay away from my Guinness mugs, you bastard.
Jesus
And last but not least, I got a good book a while back—Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis—which is a collection of writings from traditional Sufi and Muslim sources on Jesus and when I ran across this I immediately thought of you— though why it has taken me a year or so now to send it, I don’t know. I also don’t know how old this story is. I mean, this particular version is from the Middle Ages, but a lot of the stuff in there is originally from much older and, in a lot of cases, oral sources previous to these collected sources that exist. I bring this up only because it reminds me of a scene in King Jesus, Robert Graves’ book, where Jesus confronts Graves’ charming (yes, that would be sarcasm) "White Goddess" and, while he does not list the sources he used in the book, I am quite sure he researched the hell out of it (simply because he says himself in the introduction that the sheer volume of sources made listing them an enormous task, almost another book in itself.) I just wonder if he came across another, older version of this same story that he used as the basis of that confrontation. As if that has anything to do with the story at hand:
Though the level of Jesus, The Purified One, transcended paradise, still he desired to behold the world.
One day, while out walking, imbued with a divine radiance, Jesus perceived an old woman off in the distance. Hoary-haired and hunchbacked, she stood, her mouth drooped open in a toothless gaping stare. Her gloomy, sunken visage was pierced with eyes a livid blue, and a noxious odor emanated from her every pore. A motley frock she wore, but her heart was full of rancor and her head, of hostile spite. One hand was dyed a host of hues, the other drenched in blood. From every lock a buzzard’s beak hung down, forming a frightful mask.
"Who are you?" Jesus called out, on catching sight of her, "so cunning and so vile?"
"I am the realization of that desire you late conceived," the crone replied, "granted for your righteousness."
"Ah! So you are the squalid world!" he exclaimed.
"And that I am," she affirmed, "And how are you?"
"Why do you wear this veil?" he asked. "Why this parti-colored dress?"
"The veil is to keep my face from being seen, for if its hideousness were in view, who could stand to stay by me even for a moment? And this motley costume is to bedazzle men and lead them astray, for all who gaze on it are bewitched and enamored."
"You pit of disgrace," cried Jesus, "what means that blood-stained hand of yours?"
"Ah, prince of men," she said, "that comes from all the husbands I have slain."
"Now then, you drunken hag," said Jesus, "for what have you stained the other hand?"
"I use this dazzling allure," she said, "to seduce men into marrying me."
"Have you no mercy," queried Christ, "in murdering all these men?"
"What does mercy mean to me?" she countered. "All I know is shedding blood and seeing it flow."
"But you must have some semblance of tenderness," he insisted, "to encourage these victims with all your enticements."
"I have heard the name of ‘mercy’," she replied, "but I have never applied it myself towards anyone. I stalk the ages and lure all I can into my trap. I turn all I catch into my disciples."
Jesus, amazed, gasped, "I’m appalled by such a mate! How can there be such deluded fools to chase after such a wanton strumpet? Will they never learn from this accursed creature? Can they never turn away and surrender to God? Oh, bemoan the folk who have missed the meaning and forsaken their faith, blind to the reality of the world."
Elsewhere, another author recounts a considerably shorter version of basically the same story, but I think it begs inclusion here too.
Jesus said: "The world was revealed to me as an old hag, bedecked with jewelry. I asked her how many husbands she had had and she replied she could not count them all. I asked her whether they had died or she had divorced them. Her answer was, ‘I murdered them, every one.”
"‘Alas,’ I cried, ‘so much the worse for the ones who remain. How is it that, in knowing about what has happened to their predecessors, who were slain each in his turn, they are not afraid?"
And finally, I must admit I was pleasantly surprised at your offer to "catch me up" on the remaining issues of Cerebus, but I guess I am also enough of a guy not to take you up on it, though I certainly appreciate the offer, to say the least. By way of compromise, though, I’ll tell you what: why don’t you send me a postcard or something when the trade paperback of Latter Days comes out (surely it can’t be that far off) and I’ll pay you for it. My financial predicament, like most things, is hardly going to last forever.
Anyway, sorry this ended up being so long a letter but I do hope it managed to clarify things somewhat. Do take care of yourself.
God bless,
D.B. Little
P.S. I just read the "Saturday Night" article. Christ, I didn’t realize just what a creepy bastard you are. I can’t believe I am wasting my time writing to you.
What the fuck kind of article is that? I’ve never seen such a bunch of left-handed compliments in my life. "..you’re one of the top creators working today." You are also Satan. Satan, I tell you…. And they wonder why you don’t have a lot of contact with anyone anymore. Go figure.
