Works ✏️ Alberta

The King’s Horses

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

I’m not sure if the Demon Priests have a secret society with a long history on Earth. I wouldn’t doubt it. They certainly have fellow-travellers.

The fellow-travellers probably started out in Sumer and Akkad, giving Sargon advice on how to subjugate the peoples around him. They probably also enjoyed going up in French and American planes, pressing the buttons and looking down to see the sampans split in two and sink slowly into the rice paddies of Vietnam.

For centuries these fellow-travellers worked for the Catholic Church, making ridiculous rules and getting altar boys to twirl the tassels on their skirts. Only recently has there been much of a Spotlight on the sliding curtain of those sacerdotal robes.

Now many work as Russians, especially in the Kremlin. They spend their time stealing Ukrainian children, and bombing one children’s hospital after the next.

In more humble assignments, they work in Sunday schools or summer camps, teaching boys to sing “Kumbaya.” They get the boys to sing this song around the campfire, before shepherding them up the forest path to their cabin in the woods. In the afternoons they hum the tune inside the cabin, “Someone’s crying lord, Kumbaya,” as the little boys take off their underwear so that they can check their bodies for ticks. And in the late afternoon they sing the song out loud, swimming naked in the lake.

When I was 11 years old I watched on the shoreline as the small ripples washed over my feet, eating away at the sands of belief.

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In his short story “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne imagines how centuries ago in New England they tempted Puritans into the forest. They seduced the good young men with the lure of good intentions. They told them stories about walking on water, the magic of love, and a life of eternal happiness. They told them stories about holy grails and about finding themselves lost in the middle of their lives’ path. Dante’s selva oscura nel mezzo del cammin. But this wasn’t just poetic talk; they also took them there, past the last street in the village, over the bridge, and off the path into the dense wood. Nazguls flew over head, sounding the way. Crocodiles watched from the swamps. The raven cawed.

Entering a large clearing, they heard the throats of strange birds announcing the midnight mass. The Head Goat tipped his horn, and his eyes glowed red in the dark. The Demon Priests proceeded to chop the spirits into kindling, and send the crackling flames into the night sky.

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Each of has our traumas, moments when we fall from the sky, like Satan, Icarus, or Phaeton. Yet in the grand scheme (or schemelessness) of things, the infinite night sky grinds all our days to dusk, and all our dust to smithereens. What was once so important — that thing the Priest did to me, that thing I said to her, the way she looked at me — will one day be lost, buried with our atoms in the ground. And even if we recorded it all somehow, it will still be lost, at least to anyone who has the faintest clue who we are. Or, if the human species doesn’t make it, it might be found at the end of a voltage meter held by an alien whose name we can’t pronounce.

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Together, on vacation, at camp, in love, all disperse in time into memory, that imperfect storage container of the self. This earlier self once laughed like the fire roared at some absurd thing my dad said around the campfire, next to the pop-up camper, in a summer of forest trails, creamsicles at dusk, and endless goodnights.

My parents slept on one side of the camper and the four of us on the other. I always needed to take a pee about twenty minutes after the last goodnight was said (we were like a rolling Greek chorus, cheek to cheek). Because I slept at the far end, I climbed over everyone in the dark.

Meanwhile, the memory of laughing around a campfire and stumbling out into the dark finds itself next to the memory of a different campfire, around which counsellors are telling little boys about ghosts, walking on water, and burning bushes. The campfire is next to a path leading into a dark forest full of cabins.

Dante was 33 when he found himself in a dark forest, in una selva oscura. I was 11. Dante’s journey was epic and imaginary, and full of powerful Italian phrases: ma per trattar del ben che v’i vi trovai / dirò de l’altre cose ch’i v’ho scorte (but to tell of the good I found there / I’ll also tell of the other things I saw there). My journey, on the other hand, was ordinary and real. I didn’t meet a man who walked on water or a goat with glowing red eyes, and I didn’t get any insight into the world beyond.

Instead of inspiring me to sing “Kumbaya,” my experience at this camp made me want to listen to Uriah Heep and Black Sabbath, Queen and Led Zeppelin. Any band that promised to turn the sanctimonious world on its head. Let me explain.

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Here I am, at “The Camp in the Dark Woods” with my Little League baseball cap on my head. Our team was called “the Royals,” as in Kansas City. I was always ready for anything…

But I wasn’t ready for what camp counsellors might do to young boys. I’m not sure where the paths of these counsellors will take them in the end, but I do know that they took us with them just as we were starting out on our own paths. I suspect that deceit played a large part. Or perhaps they were just waiting patiently in the swamp. It’s hard to say. I’m inclined to think the worst of them.

First, the water drips from the cabin ceiling onto your sleeping bag and mattress. Slowly, you’re getting drenched. You complain that you’re getting soaked. The counsellor counsels you to come into his bed, which is conveniently dry. What he does there takes you decades to figure out. Suffice it to say that being fondled by another male doesn’t do any good to an eleven-year-old boy growing up in Alberta.

Second, on a rainy day two or three counsellors line us up in the cabin and tell us to take off our clothes. All our clothes. They tell us that we may have ticks. They search everywhere, especially those tricky areas at the back of the legs. They pretend to help us.

Third, they take us skinny-dipping in the lake, which is right next to “The Camp in the Dark Woods.” They float in the water with their genitals on display. They talk about the naturalness of it all, encouraging us to let ourselves go. Despite being a competitive swimmer, I refuse to go into the water. I stand on the shoreline, disgusted by their display. Fuming.

Every night they preach around the campfire about Jesus and the many forms of love. “Higher forms of love” that society doesn’t understand. Then they get us to sing “Kumbaya.”

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I could barely touch another male for years. By the time I got to high school, the last thing on earth I wanted to do was join the wrestling club. I’d still rather not hug anyone, especially males.

You suspect that looking into neuroscience will help you get over this sort of thing. Some might even argue that memories are just traces of actions that no longer matter. Or perhaps a father’s love and a counsellor’s abuse will cancel each other out. Perhaps your experiences are superseded by higher forms of love and forgiveness. Perhaps one day you’ll travel beyond joy and anger. Perhaps all dualities will dissolve into the fog-banks of the Infinite. Love in, love out. Ashes to ashes.

But what if you want to keep one memory (of your father), and dispense with the other (of the counsellor)?

The brain isn’t a computer, with specific files you can erase, or specific circuits you can scrub. God knows I tried. At 13, I started binge drinking. At 14 I started in on drugs. Here, for instance, I’m impersonating a sailor, guzzling a beer in the woods near the Dijon Grand Prix:

And here I am several months later in a photo booth in Paris, lips compressed, about to explode — while my sister, by comparison, looks calmly into the eye of the camera:

I drank, smoked pot, dropped various chemicals, and started Transcendental Meditation, which my mother hoped would calm me down and stop me from being an out-of-control maniac. But if I was looking for a white blotter blank slate or an absolutional samadhi beyond all the things that don’t matter, I never found it. How can you remain yourself and then say that your upbringing and your experiences don’t matter? The Absolute is a wonderful thing, but everything else is relative.

As with so much else in life, to cherish one thing you have to tolerate another. As much as we’d like a perfect place to live, there are always neighbours. Perhaps that’s why we believe in Heaven: to keep the riff-raff out. Perhaps it’s also why I like writing science-fiction: to give the Demon Priests a taste of their own medicine.

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Next: 🎲 Hunger & Lust

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