Trinity

Woke up this morning thinking about this. Maybe it was the sound of church bells—working their subliminal magic—or the fact that I was visited by a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses yesterday.

Who knows?

I know I wasn’t thinking of the Cajun aromatic mixture of onion, green pepper, and celery—even though I do feel a certain reverence for that mirepoix. Nor was I thinking about a spot in the New Mexico desert where the sand was fused into radioactive glass, back in the fifties. No, a more fundamental mystery had me twisting the bedsheets in existential angst.

The Trinity. The Holy Trinity. The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost.

I have a vague, but functional, idea of the first two—but am confused by the third. Back when I was a child, I spent a lot (too much) time in church. And Sunday School (which was cruel, having to go to school when it wasn’t even a school day). The sermons… and lessons… and readings… and hymns all celebrated the first two. They spelled out, in often gruesome detail, what one of them did, and what was done to the other.

I can’t recall a single instance when anyone told me who—or what—The Holy Ghost was. Or what its function was. I suppose it was all part of the mystery of the thing.

I mean, really, our culture is full of ghosts. They serve all sorts of purposes. The ghost of Hamlet’s father provokes an entire series of tragic events, while Topper’s deceased drinking buddies only provoke laughter. Casper, the friendly ghost, was—apparently—created to keep children from being terrified by ghosts (which is odd since ghosts don’t exist, and children only fear them because adults told them about such non-existent entities). Ebeneezer Scrooge’s ghosts rekindle the Christmas spirit in the old miser.

“Spirit.” Another word for “ghost.” And just as vague. We say someone “has spirit,” and even imagine that we know what we’re talking about. Do we? It’s just some unquantifiable essence that infuses a person with genial—or courageous—energy.

Which is weird, because another kind of spirit is completely quantifiable; we measure it as ABV (alcohol by volume), or “proof.” Which is also weird, because we’re supposed to accept belief in The Holy Spirit on faith—that is, without recourse to any sort of proof.

Obviously, I’ve spent too much time thinking about stuff that isn’t real. The study of religion (at least my version) might be the very definition of mental masturbation. It has, however, given rise to other kinds of spectres. Stories. More specifically, ghost stories. I’ve written a few of them—despite not believing in any sort of spirits (other than those measured in proof). The interview with a ghost, below, appeared in Tabula Rasa, Baby: (Not Written in Stone).

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Darkness, Darkness

With much trepidation—both about my immediate well-being, and because of the nature of my destination—I climbed over the gunwale. The boat was old—very old—its grayed wood spalling-off with disturbing frequency. A decrepit sail, shredded by ancient gales, hung like Spanish moss from a warped and creaking spar. It was only an omen, not a real concern. The damage to the sail was irrelevant and wasn’t going to get worse.

The stagnant air had no more breath than a corpse.

I hoped to get a first glimpse of our destination, if only the dark gloom of the place would permit it. Leaning as far over the rotting bow as I dared, I could just make out the surface of water that looked like molasses. It was so heavy and black that our craft barely made a bow wave. The boatman strained at a long single oar from the stern, pushing us across the viscous liquid. It made no sound, no splash at all.

As I couldn’t see him, only the rasp of his breathing proved that I was not adrift—alone—in the darkness.

With neither sun, moon, or stars above us, I had no way of knowing how much time passed as we made our way across the motionless water. Was it hours, or even days, before a faint glimmer appeared on what I supposed was the horizon? There was no sound of surf, not even the gentle lapping of waves upon the shore—but, when we drew closer, I heard the crunch of boots upon the shingle.

Then I saw the man.

He was stocky, past middle age, with a grizzled—but neatly-trimmed—beard. He carried a double-barreled shotgun and stopped every few paces to look up through the darkness. I called out to him, and he turned to look at us with some surprise.

I called out to him, “What are you guarding?”

Hearing no response, I assured him, “We mean no harm.”

“Guarding? Is that your idea of a joke? There is nothing here that anyone wants.”

“Then why the gun?”

“I come here, every day, to hunt ducks.”

“No luck, today?”

“No luck any day. I have yet to see a single duck.”

“And yet, you keep trying?”

“It’s what I do when I can’t go to the bullfights.”

“There are bullfights here?”

“No. Nada. Nothing. Nunca.”

I stepped ashore. The mention of bullfights made me want to look closer at the man.

It was!

I was talking with the shade of Ernest Hemingway! Stunned, I blurted out, “But what are you doing here? You died, decades ago, in Idaho… .” Realizing that I might have been insensitive by reminding him of what—I suspected—must have been an uncomfortable memory, I stopped in mid-sentence.

“Where else would I go? None of us, here, are welcome in Heaven or Hell.” He stopped and looked out over the water. “Maybe Hell,” he thought for a moment, “hell—maybe that’s where we are!”

“We? Am I dead?” It was a possibility I had not, heretofore, considered.

“Nah. Can’t see through you.” For the first time, I noticed that there was a hazy translucency about him that I hadn’t noticed in the dim light. “We don’t get turistas here.”

I wondered, for a second, exactly which turista he’d intended. It could have been a simple answer, or a snide comment—since the word refers to both “tourist,” or the “diarrhea that tourists suffer.”

I emerged from my speculations when he picked-up where he’d left off, “Dante, of course. And Odysseus. And Aeneus. But all that was a helluva’ long time ago.”

“Then, who is ‘we’—and where, exactly, is ‘here’?”

“‘Here’ is nowhere land. An unplace for we who undid ourselves. In the other world.”

“Does everyone who commits suicide wind up here?”

“Hardly. Not those who kill themselves out of sense of honor. Like Japanese seppuku. They go straight on up to Heaven. Catholics still believe that suicide is a sin. They drop straight into Hell. Some suicide bombers, do their damnedest to create Hell on Earth. They don’t come here. They’re spirited off to an Islamic Heaven filled with virgins. What, in god’s name, makes useless virgins deserve a place in heaven?”

It was plain—given his low opinion of virgins—that the last part of his question occupied entirely too much of his thinking. Changing the subject, I asked what else he did here, when he wasn’t not-duck hunting. “Do you ever get to not-fish?”

“Fish? Why would I do that? Would I really want to go mano a mano with anything from that murk?”

“What about the rest of the time—do you still write?”

“No one writes here. What would be the point?”

“There are other writers here? Do you see them, chat, commiserate, compare notes?”

“Lots of writers. Think what the writing life was like, up there. Pitiful pay, long lonely hours, and the choice between crippling fame or complete non-recognition. Why aren’t there more writers here? The place should be over-run with long-suffering bastards who offed themselves.”

“Do you see many of them? If you do, do you speak to each other? I’ve heard that—in the other world—writers tend to have love/hate relations with other writers. Is that the same down here?”

“Not as much as before. There’s no reason to be jealous of writers who make more money. Down here, neither money nor fame will get you laid. No point in fighting over crap like that.”

“So… which writers do you see here?”

“A lot of women. Poets especially. I don’t think it pays, in the long run, to be too sensitive…” he tapered off, no doubt expecting me to make a comment about his sensitive side. I suspected that he was bracing himself to deny that he even had a sensitive side. I side-stepped that particular conversation by asking who he’d seen recently. “Ever run into Sylvia Plath?”

“Sometimes. Mostly she spends her time with Bourdain. When she’s not complaining about her bastard-of-a-husband, she wallows in endless reminiscences of meals she ate when she was alive.”

“I’m guessing she doesn’t talk much about baking.”

“You think we obsess about our last minutes on Earth? Nah. Mostly, we regret things we should have done. At least I do. Sylvia and Tony mostly miss going out to eat. I don’t get the attraction, myself. Other than when I was starving in Paris, food never meant a helluva’ lot to me.”

I wondered, aloud, if suicides were drawn to others who had chosen the same method to kill themselves. He answered, “I don’t hang out with other guys who shot themselves, if that’s what you want to know.”

“You mean like Brautigan?” I asked?

“What an asshole. That hippie-dipshit had the nerve to write Trout Fishing in America. It was no more about trout fishing than ‘Big Two-hearted River’ was. But at least I know something about catching trout.”

“Believe me,” I said, “I never imagined that you two would have much to say to each other. Any others that might have discussed their methods?”

“Will Cuppy and Arthur Koestler both took sleeping pills. Not at the same time, ‘though Koestler and his wife did take them together.”

“Koestler was very sick, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. Parkinson’s and leukemia.”

“But not Cuppy?”

“No. Cuppy had been a hermit. Until he had to abandon his shack when the place was turned into Jones Beach State Park. He got an apartment in Manhattan, but couldn’t afford the rent. None of his friends believed him, so he killed himself. When they cleaned out all of his shit, they found thousands of note cards filled with odd facts he’d collected. An editor compiled the cards into The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. The book became a best-seller. Too late for Cuppy.”

“That sucks.”

“No shit. Cuppy and Koestler would never have anything to say to each other. Even if—or maybe because—Koestler wrote the entry on humor for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

“You know what E.B White said about humor? ‘Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.’ Can you think of any others that might talked about their methodology?”

“I’ll bet White communed with Twain’s ghost.” He returned to my last question, “From college days on, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath had been friends. And competitors. Both tried to commit suicide several times, with sleeping pills, with no luck. When Sexton finally succeeded, with help from a car’s exhaust pipe, it pissed Plath off. She complained that Sexton had stolen her suicide. A gas oven would have to do for her.”

He looked up to say, “But no, I have never seen them together here.”

“Any others come to mind?’

 “Jerzy Kosinski put a plastic bag over his head. Carolyn Heilbrun did the same. You’ve seen her mysteries, written as Amanda Cross? Don’t think they’ve even met down here. They had very different reasons for wanting out. He had plenty of health problems to escape. His last written words were: ‘I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it eternity.’”

“Heilbrun was in fine health. She chose suicide to take final control over her life. She had always complained—and still complains—that she had been deprived of control by the male-dominated society. Her idea of looking-at-the-bright-side was writing, ‘Each day, one can say to oneself; I can always die; do I chose death or life? I daily choose life the more earnestly because it is a choice.’ Her suicide note, it pleases me to say, used fewer words than Kosinsky’s: ‘The journey is over. Love to all.’ You know Heilbrun was a Virginia Woolfe scholar?”

I asked him if he’d ever seen Woolfe here.

“I have run into her, but not very often. She doesn’t come down to the shore very often. Mostly she stays in her room. They both thought having ‘a room of their own’ was essential for women writers. Heilbrun had several of them up there. I did see Woolfe, one time when I was out looking for ducks. She kept away from the water’s edge, trudging along, parallel to it. Every once in a while, she took a stone from her pocket and dropped it on the shingle.”

“I get it. Unpleasant memories. What about other drowners—do they avoid the water too?”

“There aren’t that many of them. Hart Crane chucked himself into the Gulf of Mexico. He never comes near the shore here. Maybe it’s the sight of so much dark water. Maybe he just avoids he-man types like me. You know, just before he leapt off the stern of the S.S. Orizaba, the faggot came on to one of the sailors on the ship. The offended sailor rightly beat the stuffing out of him. Real men would rather die than admit to having a poetic nature. A feminine side. Oh wait…” He tilted his head, drawing his hoary eyebrows together. “…you’re thinking that that was my choice, aren’t you?”

Tactfully changing the subject, I hypothesized, “There is something poetic about dying in water, isn’t there? The ultimate plunge into amniotic metaphor, a coda that functions as the period at the end of a literary life sentence, a final variation upon ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ If only the drowned Shelley could have had the epitaph Keats chose for himself!”

“You might be trying too hard, son.”

After some reflection—during which he seemed to enjoy watching my awkward moment fester—Hemingway continued. “You might have something after all. John Berryman—another damned poet, by the way—also tried to drown himself. He jumped from a bridge, up in Minnesota. He missed the Mississippi River by several yards. Crashed into a rock-hard frozen bank.”

“That had to hurt. Metaphorically, and otherwise… perhaps even alliteratively.”

“What are you—a goddamned English professor? You do know that I’m dead, right? There’s no prize for impressing me. But, yeah, Berryman never comes down to the shore, either. Probably embarrassed to show the face he splattered all over the riverbank.”

Still shuddering at the mental image, I was startled by a bony finger touching my shoulder. Turning around, I watched the boatman shuffle back to prepare his craft for our return trip.

It’s hard to recall what I had expected to find here. But it was obvious that there would be no intimate tête-à-tête with any of my other literary idols. Hemingway was to be my only Tiresias.

A splinter pierced my palm as I climbed back over the gunwale. For a second, I saw Hemingway cast a longing gaze at the drop of blood oozing from my hand, before forcing himself to look away. Turning his eyes upward—no doubt in search of the ducks of yesteryear—he offered some last-minute advice. “I don’t know what it’s like at your university, son, but don’t get worked-up with worrying about tenure. Just keep reminding yourself that it’s not ‘publish or perish.’ It’s ‘publish and perish.’ There’s no future in writing. At least, not the kind the living imagine, over on the far side of Styx.”

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