Dead Sea Capers (cont'd)

Dead Sea Capers (cont'd)

These--the scrolls, that is--were to be kept out of reach of all scholars and also out of the public eye. Nothing was to escape the vigilance of the repressors of information.  No communication of any sort was to be allowed about them. No publications in journals. No newspaper accounts of how Malek the Shepherd found them when he threw a stone into a cave and heard pots breaking. Imagine! Two thousand years after they had been put there they had not been discovered! Nor robbed! Nor any piracy whatsoever done to them! Astonishing! Why astonishing? Because the Bedouins, who share that particular desert around Kumran where the Essenes made their last stand against the Romans in 70 AD on the top of not Mount Oreb but that fascinating mesa that the Middle East has come to call Masada, have for centuries done a flourishing trade in and made a passible living from the sale of codices such as the Dead Sea scrolls. The only difference is that they get big dollars for these texts and I mean big dollars! So, guess what. They break--yes! Can you believe it! Literally break, and it breaks my heart to even say it, I cannot bear to--these old, old scrolls into fragments that they sell to buyers with the promise of providing more of the same if the buyers come up with another half million denarii. God! God in Heaven! How can such a travesty be let to exist? No appeals to the divine. It will help you nothing, let me tell you.

       Back to the story. Now, having found these scrolls, this shepherd, not learned in the nasty art of scroll profiteering, actually went to a local scholar, not a man of any renown, but still someone who understood the seriousness of the find and himself longed not for money but for the joy of historical fulfillments of various sorts. This reminds me of The Pardoner's Tale. The maligned Pardoner, the hero of that tale, decides to confide in his fellow travellers--these men and women are on a pilgrimage to Canterbury in spring time and each agree to tell a story or two--confide to them that he is a cheat and a liar. Now, imagine that! A seller of relics and religious artifacts no more holy than the baubles the Germans sell in their Haupmarts to "seely" tourists in May and June, say around the Porte Negra, he agrees to come clean. Why? Why, really? Ask yourselves. He has nothing to gain from doing so. Oh, scholars have argued that he does it to pinch and piss off the other less pecuniary companions, but I have another theory, one imminently and eminently more intelligent than anything I have read in Modern Languages Quarterly. or the Journal of British Literature. He does it to illustrate the fallenness of all people. No one can hide behind his goodness, no one can pretend by being shy or quiet or nice or gentle to a goodness that saves him (or her, in the case of the Wife of Bath). No, we all are saved only by grace. by Grace! Think of it. Not a one of us will ever make it to any happy eternity one wit sooner by giving money to the poor. No, we will not. Anyway, what I began to say was that Chaucer understood as few have done that few earn the right to respect. The Pardoner was one. This scholar Sharbek was another. He still lives in the same village and has been essentially forgotten. Of course. Who reveres human goodness? The scrolls made their way quickly, and this time in their entirety, to some government office where they were kept for a few days until archivists familiar with the preservation of valuable codices arrived and in a rude fashion for the time being caused them to be protected against the elements.

       Soon they were housed more permanently. When word leaked out that Gnostic texts of biblical significance and old as Christ had been discovered, scholars around the world wished to see and study them. Guess what? No one--not a soul, including myself--has been let to see a word of these documents. Not the Nag Hamadi library, at least. Oh, one or two fragments were photographed and given out as a sort of plastic prize to appease who I don't know. But all the hundreds, nay, thousands of important fragments, words that might change how we receive the gospels and the message of salvation and even the historical figure of Jesus himself, all this has been repressed and scrupulously kept from the eyes of the general scholar. Why? I think it is to keep the news from leaking out that Jesus was a Sadduccee. He was one of those fighters who carried a long dagger under his cloak. Did you know that, you who paid twenty dollars to come hear me speak on these matters, that he was a militant? Yes, he carried a dagger and likely killed for the Essene cause. He may, too, have died on Masada. Way up there from where you can see Golgotha on a clear day. One of the suicides.   

      

Dead Sea Capers

Dead Sea Capers

       Sightless Douglas the Weightlifter

              I never did like floats. Other kids would

                        favor them but I always got a cone.

I swim but I don't float. Even in the Dead Sea I sink. My partner floats so very well that her toes and nipples stay out of the water. When we visited the Dead Sea last summer I think hardly an inch of her buttocks sank out of sight. She dislikes the culture of intellectual debate and so spent most of her time tanning and swimming. The food at the banquet hardly lived up to expectations. Too salty, everything. And the lectures wearisome as well.

       One sold the other studied. That's the way of the world, agreed? Read Homer, for instance. Or better yet, Horace. And after Horace read Ovid. When you tire of the classics, turn for a few well-spent evenings to Beowulf and Gawain. End with Chaucer. Here we have the greatest purveyor of, or better yet, the most intense dealer in, the contradictions between the meditant and the merchant.

       Who am I? My name is Meckling. I teach philosophy of religion at a small college in Trier, the oldest city in the country. That is neither here nor there, though. In my spare time I read--increasingly, to my curiosity; why anyone else's? nobody cares, and for good reason--accounts of the intrigue around the granting of Dead Sea scroll privileges. These codices are all housed in the Kumran Building in Hafiz. Access to the library of fragments is strictly controlled by particular members of the Department of Antiquities, at the university of Hafiz. That is, ostensibly. Actually the credit for the restrictions goes to the Israeli government.

       What is this to you? Nothing, really. This is a question for the trained thinker, not for you. Not for commoners dabbling in ideas as if they were indifferently stirring their pudding after a satisfying meal of roast beef and succulent pig. I eat no pig. My name should tell you that. Mine is one of the few sects, in fact, let me qualify to you, which still observes ritual holidays and fervently follows traditional rules. I am a believer, that is. That is neither here nor there, though. You, unfamiliar with either Jewish ritual or German intellectual rigor, will about now be throwing this book aside for some less patently partisan and more piquantly sexual reading.  But bear with me. This is the end of my digression into exposition of this sort. Let me now tell you a little about the intrigue here. Adventure, see? Now you are all ears, for the moment! So let me begin.

       First, however, I wish to ask you if the name Eisemann means anything to you? No? Never mind. I will introduce you to him. Eisemann toppled the Israeli government single-handed over this business.

(To be continued)  

Einstein

Einstein

       by Dougie the Derelict

As you will recall, when Einstein was a little boy he went caving and came, in a deep and forbidding cavern, upon a bad Indian man named Indian Joe who had found a treasure and kept it hidden there. But Einstein and his band of cutthroat pirates, using their wits and high talents for arithmetic, located the cave, entered it, found the box of gold and brought it to another secret spot where Indian Joe would not be able to get it again. When Indian Joe captured them and forced them to show him where the treasure was, it had already been surreptitiously re-hidden by Einstein's reclusive and fellow adventurer, Ben Gunn. The gang was as surprised to find the treasure gone as was old Indian Joe himself. And this is where we return to our story.

       These two, Ben and Einstein, were true companions. Their friendship came as no surprise to those who knew them, and it comes as no surprise to me. I have a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy and am currently the owner of Dougie's Designs, a tatoo parlor on the east side of Missberg, Mississippi, a city of maybe 400,000 souls. They were not blood brothers though they were born of the same mother as twins. Ben came out first and Einstein followed holding onto Ben's heel as if to say that he had not the strength to exit unless Ben gave him a hand. Einstein had a strange, x-shaped birthmark on his groin and Ben had one that resembled a mermaid bent around his anus. Neither of them ever showed these marks to anyone. They did not even know of each other's marks, so fastidious they were about keeping these oddities unseen. When they went swimming they wore trunks, even when it was just boys at the local swimming hole and all the rest swam naked. I think it was this common use of trunks when all others were naked that bound these two together at an early age, though one would have to research the Einstein past more fully to say this with any certainty. Ben has no past. No records exist for and of his passage through time. Hearsay alone (and, of course, my experience of him) accounts for all that I record here.

       Before they could talk these two dined together against their mother's wishes. She worked, oh curses on such mothers, have had them sup at separate tables, and though for a time she got her way, Einstein calculated that if he whined and screamed each time she made motion to part them she would eventually give in to his needs (he referred to them then, and later, too, as his needs, not his demands) and let the two be friends. Needless to say, Einstein's prediction came true, and his mother eventually let the two of them be. They took their meals together from then on and not one meal but one or two did they ever spend apart from that victorious day onward (except for a period of three years, of which more later). In sum, they were inseparable.

       They ate prodigiously, though politely, consuming when young, at the ages of two or three, whole fowl at one sitting, washed down by two liters of milk each and a glass of white wine. Red wine did not sit well with Ben whose constitution was somewhat consumptive. They were late weaners and their mother dreaded each occasion at her breasts since these, once upon a time erect and lovely, became dugs, flat and so empty of substance as to make it difficult to find a brassiere to fit. 

     By the time the boys were five, a fat porker would disappear down their gullets at a sitting during which time, while masticating and gulleting both hard liquors and wine, they would play games of counting and arithmetic. They knew their times and tables by heart long before they spent their first days formally at school. At the age of ten, they would call for another ox and a hogshead of wine brought to table as a sur sur la fete if they felt that the three bullocks and the herd of chickens turned on spit and roasted to perfection constituted too meager a repast at the main course. When they went outside to relieve themselves after such dining, streams that country folk would see suddenly flowing past their huts would be regiven names, and with such naming the two made the country new and got it remapped simply through their endless hugeormous gustifariousnesses.

       I, myself, have seen them gorge in this manner but I have other matters with which to acquaint you. When Einstein was twelve years old Ben disappeared and he had no knowledge of Ben's whereabouts, which troubled him not the least, knowing as he did that Ben would make trouble enough without him. Also, when Einstein was twelve—his mother tiring of his consumption of her vitals and drink at the Benbow where she kept tavern—he hired on to a ship bound for the south seas to trade British goods for those of hotter climes. He sailed as a common cabin boy, first checking to make sure that the captain was a God fearing and abstemious man. He was not, but Einstein knew this not until much later, the third day of their voyage, when he was required to bring a special bottle to the captain and asked, upon his entry into the cabin, to come in and lock the door after him.

       Einstein learned much on this his first voyage, not the least of which was the fact that instead of being a trading venture this journey of the Smallwood, a little but sturdy and trustworthy ship of French design, was after treasure. Yes, treasure! The treasure of a nefarious pirate commonly named Blackbeard. When they finally arrived at the small coral island to which the treasure map directed them, they found it deserted with not a soul there. But the trouble lay in their own midst. Unbeknownst to them, the sailors that the captain had hired to take the ship south were pirates themselves, also in search of Blackbeard's hidden hoard. These cutthroats remained quiet and good enough until they reached their destination because they had no map of their own telling them wither to sail or where to dig. Once anchored in the island's harbor (and a quaint little harbor it was, all surrounded by a white sandy beach and tall endless successions of coconut trees waving their emerald branches in the warm breezes) these criminals showed their true colors. They shouted a sudden command that rest of the conspiring sailors obeyed, and these manhandled Doctor Smallet, and a certain Squire Tremblay who had with grand generosity funded the journey, as well as young Einstein. Their leader, one Randex by name, a peg-legged man who had had his left leg bitten off at the knee by a great grey shark, clapped the good men in the hold in irons, starved them till they produced the treasure map, and departed for the island to dig it up.

       Now, the skeleton crew of pirates left aboard to guard the prisoners and the vessel were soon roaring drunk and the good Doctor, Squire Tremblay, and young Einstein quickly made an escape. Before long the situation had reversed itself. The good now controlled the ship and the bad lay moaning in irons. O blessed tidings!

       Peg-Leg did not find the treasure and came forward begging to be let back aboard (his real purpose despite his remonstrance being to manhandle the good ones again and to force them through whatever means necessary to account for where the treasure was really buried). The fact was that on this very island Ben Gunn had been marooned by a black-hearted captain some three years past, and he had found the treasure by accident and re hidden it in a small seaside cave. The upshot of the events here was that Ben freed the good, helped confound and finally capture the bad, and showed them all the location of the gold that he made them promise he would receive a quarter share in while Dr. Smallet, SquireTremblay and young Einstein received each a quarter share as well for their parts in the adventures of Treasure Island.

       I have since changed my ways. Converted now to good living and temperance, I regret only that my one good leg has recently shown signs of infection, possibly the result of a recent tattoo,. It may well have to be amputated, Dr. Smallet has informed me, if I am to live much past my fiftieth year. My grandson, Dougie of Dougie's Designs, has formed quite a strong relationship with the good men of the ship. Now and then he is asked by prison officials to provide his services to this or that incarcerated pirate who wishes for one of his creations. Adornment is of such importance to us all, I might safely postulate.

No Political Campaigning (cont'd)

No Political Campaigning (cont'd)

"I heard from Abe that you'd been to his house campaigning!" He looked at her as if this fact alone should be enough to knock some sense into her head. She smiled at him and carried out another of her decisions from that morning. She carried on as if he had not said a word and as if she had not heard one either. Her dress flipped as she walked away and down another front lawn sidewalk. When she was done that door he caught up with her again, driving along beside her in his pick-up.

       "Get in the truck!" he hissed. She ignored him and disappeared along another person's sidewalk.       

       "Honey, what's wrong?" he intoned when she finally left that place, one that had shown much interest and signed a name at the end.

       "Oh, all right," she said when he asked more kindly this time. "Take me to the car on fourteenth."  He did that.

       In the next days she covered the entire town even though she was not an official candidate. That fall her name was on no ballot but by the following year she had been approached by the incumbent and gone to work for him in his office. By the next election four years later she herself Liberal party's representative of the district around Mather, MB and sat in the legislature. 

No Political Campaigning

No Political Campaigning

       by Douglas R. Trudeau

give a man a hundred pence

give a man a dollar

give a man a cockatil

and watch him loose his coler

In the small town where I was born and lived until I decided to leave at the age of forty-six politics was all  importent. It concerned everyone and it consumed everyone. People sat in coffee shops in winter when nothing on the farm required their presence and there they spoke of the virtues of this or that candidate for the fall election. Jokes made the rounds, serious tones of voice suddenly overcame some, expenditures were discussed vehemently in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars, and local issues such as the state of roads, the problem with regulated agricultural industries, and the division of church and state led to heated debates. This was a time for care and, above all, a time for mental exertion by thousands of farmers, by thousands of those who made their livings laboring in the soil, by all those men and women on whose backs rested the well-being of the entire Canadian nation.

       One farmer's wife, Mrs. Amanda Caliphmann, was sick and tired of sitting at home waiting for her husband to return from his two hour coffee breaks at Renfrew's Café in Mather, Manitoba. One morning she decided no longer to chafe Ralphman nor to speak to him nicely about being home more nor to in any way make his life easy. She made up her mind in the morning having woken with the thought in her head again for the third day running.

       She drove her car into town and went to the municipality office where she wrote her name on the ballot for the Liberal party. She paid the two hundred dollars down, which Percy Groominger accepted with a smile and then absently put into his jacket pocket. She started on Sixteenth Street knocking on doors.

       "Hello!" she said, smiling, aware that she looked quite neat and delicious in a fresh dress, green shoes and red lipstick, and with a bit of rouge on her cheeks. "My name is Amanda and I am the Liberal candidate in town. Would you consider voting for me in the election in October?" The parties addressed usually smiled in return since rural neighborliness demanded the drama of mutuality and kindness, and then said that they would think about it. She worked her way down the rest of Sixteenth, and then Fifteenth, Fourteenth, and partway along Thirteenth by the time her husband caught up with her.

       "What the hell are you doing?" he whispered, smiling, since people would be watching.

(to be continued)