Before I took my first parish, far from my home in the North Carolina hills, I attended seminary. Of course since I’m in a confessional of sorts, administering my own last rites, it seems only fitting to relay the joke we all shared by referring to the facility and the education’s collective effect on our souls as not a seminary, but a cemetery.
Cemeteries are amazing places and paradoxically heap great beauty above decay, not too unlike the cosmos itself whose giant dying stars collide, explode, and birth new places in the deepest, most inaccessible erogenous zones of Mother Nature. We had an old one there, a real cemetery that is, that was something of tourist attraction because of the sculptures that had been created by a famous Italian artist whose name I now forget. Although never quite reaching the fame of the Stagileno in Genoa where great thinkers such as Mark Twain and Friedrich Nietzsche would sometimes frequent to contemplate life’s deeper questions, the views none the less did my soul well. I found that I spent many afternoons there among the granite gods gathering what goodly messages could be found and recording them for dryer souls who would grade my performance and measure my fitness for the ministry. In such a righteous gloss, my professors could only weigh the inscriptions I inked for them above the deeper truths which sunk into the bosom of the soil, nearer still to the now decrepit bones of finer men whose human lubricant keeps the shaft and crank of Nature’s engine secretly turning.
So inviting was this particular seminary (I meant cemetery) that the locals would often come to walk their pets exuberantly along the dry, decorated chests of those who had passed. I remember some of their faces even after twenty years, the pensive looks beneath the relaxing strolls and the oblivious frolicking of the canines and even recall the occasional cocked leg of mutts showering down what they had used up atop thirsty graveside pollen. And so too did my cemetery essay papers frolic and raise a leg above the deeper truths for which so many of my teachers were unprepared.
One such particularly offensive paper lends itself neatly to this blood and soil confession and took the murder of one brother by another to a series of logical questions and abundantly graceful answers. When Cain slew his brother, he received of all things a mark of protection from the Divine, a mark that the lowly and innocent Abel would have found quite useful just moments earlier. I was not pointing this odd little fact out to be cute or make them gasp; instead I was as I had often done then, lamenting my squashed kitten among the carved stone faces in the seminary. Most everyone will at some point storm angrily into God’s presence with raised fists and burning questions, but as the good teacher said, only the “pure in heart” ever really see Him. The rest are simply shadow boxers.
My education was in great need of entombment and I found no deeper ditches in which to throw my wasted nobility than those ruts carved out by fermentation. Alcohol was once the heavenly project of enlightened monks and for good reason. I’ve always said there are two reasons a man drinks too much – the first reason is that he doesn’t know God at all; while the second reason is that he knows God too well.
We had a watering hole we liked to frequent back then. It sat across from a dog food factory that filled the air with a thick rank of slaughter and ground feed each night, although admittedly it would be hard to notice upon exiting the place. Inebriation’s greatest gift is a dulling of the senses. My personal poison was the “Boiler Maker,” a shot of thick bourbon dropped in fresh beer that fizzled and foamed through each gulp, popping like seltzer, but as numbing as any dental cream. Every time I would drop in the shot of liquor and watch the effect, I thought about the Big Bang and how the universe was probably quite similar in both its appearance and paralyzing effect on consciousness.
We would talk, my fellow wanderers and I, about a great many things and I must confess I seldom grew tired of their company. One particular evening Joe, my friend across the hall, asked the most penetrating question about narcolepsy and while totally unrelated to the confession at hand, I could not help but grow weary thinking through its complexity. “If narcolepsy is a real disease, then couldn’t anything be?” he asked. Although I’m certain he never knew it (because I am certain I have always kept my best thoughts to myself), the question affected me deeply, and as with all the deeper questions of my life, I was left with either folding his inquiry neatly between the legs of our barmaid who’d taken a particular affinity for me in those days, or fetching my father’s old flathead gravel shovel and scraping up the mess of the question off the road so that I might see the stain of it and draw clear conclusions.
Joe probably never thought anything more about it, but I would spend the remainder of my days in the seminary pondering the statistics of classification and the way in which the ruler we take to the pavement’s slop of fur often determines what exactly gets measured. In the case of narcolepsy it would seem one is measuring for fatigue and overall daytime sleepiness, genetic markers could be found and an overall “predisposition” for this thing uncovered while the whole world pours another unmeasured cup of hot coffee upon the sticky flypaper of being. And if this is true (and I think maybe it is so) then we could for any other reason chose to take another stick to prod the whole damn cosmic soup and thereby classify in any direction, be it breath or gasp. And it occurred to me then that this procedure is one we’ve followed for generations and in essence carved out our own beautiful statues of meaning that we heap atop the old boxes of bones. These statues sprout angelic wings while boxes of bone see without ever opening their long missing eyes.
And so, while in the cemetery, I sat and pondered with myself, thinking indeed it might be best to see without eyes, to get beneath the circus of wreaths and granite and flowers, and deeper still below the thin roots of trees to reach the pulsating womb of darkness and decomposition – to force her out and eat her placenta if necessary.
Now when I mention moving down into rhythm of death and becoming a box of old bones, I didn’t mean this literally, at least not then. As a corpse I would have been of little use to these matters besides serving up a fresh meal to our very large and transcendent ecosystem. I mean this figuratively of course, and perhaps (dare I confess it here?) spiritually. I would descend into the box of a great silence as if to escape the way in which my world was crafted. To get to this place would perhaps even require the risk of damnation, unless of course such a grand disorder was indeed determined by the strangest of narcoleptic men who came before me with their own dark rulers until everything I thought I knew about God was in fact summed up in that dark red stain on the pavement that I recall so often: a stain created not by some mindless driver en route to his destination, but instead by the tire treads of ancient prophets who wrote their fearful destinies into my own blood.
Over time, even my cemetery (I meant seminary) friends began to view me with pity and yet never a single one of them offered me a shot of epinephrine. The smoke of my education would fade and I would breathe again, even go on to serve as the youngest board member for the institution. But at this time of my life, there were no nurses, no intellectual midwives.
Today, I would only rarely lean back against the window sill and count my cows before returning to bed in a deep and altogether constructed sleep, where I sputter and cough beneath the cancer of knowing too many things. I would resist the temptation to turn all my cemetery stones to bread and contemplate whether I too had been marked for protection, given my cocked and often irreligious legs.
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