The Sweet White Fire of Love beyond Name

The following is an excerpt from my memoir “The Stooge.” The scene opens in a motel room. My male self George, his friend Cedar and seven born-again street kids are in Eugene, Oregon, on a road trip, checking in on a teenage married couple that had fled the Land, a Christian camp where the kids live. This experience initiated me into spiritual life.

With his contempt for Christians stoked, George retired to the rear bedroom. There were shouts and thumps sounding through the greyish-blue wall from the unit next door. George got out the Alan Watts book he was reading, Man, Woman and Nature, and skimmed a paragraph several times without taking any of it in, so he put the book aside and got between the chilly sheets. Thirty minutes later he got up to brush his teeth at the sink, between the bedroom and TV room. There, under the fluorescent light Jared asked him, “Do you follow the Lord?”

George hated that question. “There’s no way I can answer that,” he replied.

“The Lord loves you,” Jared blissfully assured him.

George shuffled back to bed and got between the cold sheets feeling brain-dead. In a few minutes, Cedar came in and sat down on the bed beside him. George was always glad to see him and wanted to vent about the kids. He was feeling savage with hatred about the things they had done. He described the boys’ misbehavior with food at lunch and their attempt to convert the waitress. Cedar agreed that they had been out of line. Then, George accused the kids of acting as if they belonged to a Jesus club. “They’re just kids,” Cedar admonished with a frown.

He may have agreed with George, but it didn’t matter because, in Cedar’s estimation, the kids were doing their best. Their backgrounds of drug abuse, domestic violence and Satanism didn’t allow for better. Anyway, George was acting juvenile himself, maligning the kids because he needed acknowledgement. Surrounded by them, George felt disposable. Having any sense of a separate existence was impossible amidst their misguided calling. Though George loathed them, he did his best to oblige them.

George looked to Christ as a symbol of the transcendent because he needed to transcend as profoundly as Christ had. George depended on Cedar’s accompaniment in this since he appreciated George spiritually more than anyone. George regarded Cedar as a guide. Outside of dreams, Cedar was the only thing keeping George going. George had to accept Cedar’s world so that Cedar would not dispossess him. The tension between Cedar’s world and George’s was becoming lethal.

George had wanted to inform Cedar of the boys’ objectification of the Spring Break bimbo, but he let it go since he didn’t want to anger Cedar further. Anyway, Cedar had a story for him:

Friends of the husband’s were having a cocaine party in the adjoining unit, which explained the thumping through the wall George heard. His wife knew about the party and stopped by the room. While the kids and George had been watching TV, the couple was having a row, beating each other in the motel parking lot. Cops were called. Cedar intermediated, dispatching the law without anyone going to jail. Then, he took the couple for a walk to talk things out.

As an afterthought, Cedar mentioned that one of the kids had told him demons from the cocaine party next door were taunting her. They were saying, “You invited us. You invited us.”
~~~
With Cedar sleeping beside him, George awakened in the middle of the night with his heart racing. His muscles were cramping and twitching. His loathing for the kids had morphed into a generalized, all-consuming hatred. In his sleep, Cedar opened his eyes, took hold of George’s arm, shook his finger at him and said, “No no no no no. No no no no no.” The reproach enabled George to step outside his mind and see himself. He sensed an island of feeling around the heart. It was the only place he was not seething with rage.

Focusing on the heart, George recognized it as a door. He turned away from everything but the door and called through it to “love beyond name.” The door blasted open and love annihilated the hatred with a sweetness that burned through George like white fire, leaving him as defenseless as he was when he was born. It was like being tenderly microwaved.

It was painful to have the flesh so open so suddenly. It was most painful at the stomach, where George still felt a sickness. George was afraid to completely let go of sickness because he couldn’t tell the difference between sickness and himself. Releasing sickness would have been like releasing his identity, which was synonymous with death. Love beyond name told George, “I am the beginning & the end.”

George was too enrapt to think and after a minute he dozed off. He then woke again, once more embroiled in wrath and rage. In his sleep, Cedar laid his body across George. Stomachs touching, they formed a cross. George called once more through the door of the heart and love beyond name came again, but with less intensity. It gave him a vision to use for protection. The vision called itself “the Eternal Monologue.” In the vision George was a stone in a field on the third day of Creation. Animals had not yet evolved. There was a cloudbank that extended from the ground to the sky. The Eternal Monologue was safe from the portals that channelled hatred into George’s internal monologue.

George spent the last stretch of the night, into the early morning, holding onto the sanctuary of the Eternal Monologue, trying to rest as a stone in the primeval field. Sometimes his mind drifted off and fogged over with wrath and rage. Then Cedar, still sleeping, rocked and cooed from the unconscious part of his being, keeping George tethered to his balance.

George got up an hour after the first sign of light, stepped over the bodies covering the floor in the TV room and left the motel. The air outside was harsh with misty, frigid drizzle. Sweeping bursts of wind concentrated the drizzle into liquid needles that smarted on the skin. George was aching with cold, without his woollen jacket. He was blowing snot every few paces, searching vigilantly for coffee.

Finding a coffee shop, he stepped inside the warmth, sogged napkins with snot, tossed them out, got in line, got his coffee in a large to-go cup, left a tip and kept going, striding steadily away from the motel, warming his hands, mouth, organs and mind with the steaming brew of wakefulness, focused on a hill in the distance at the edge of town.

The path up the hill was littered with muddy junk-food wrappers and beer cans. On top there was a saturated meadow encircled by trees. George cried bitterly there. He was ready and willing to give his life to Christ, but he still had to reconcile what he believed was right with mind-boggling Christian attitudes, particularly with the precept that what was right for George was intrinsically not right for Christ. If what was right for Christ was the culture of the Land, George had to find a way to fit in.

Because of his dreams, Siddhartha, and his Alan Watts book, George’s mind was engaged with eastern perspectives that were undeniably beautiful and relevant: he was thinking, “Is it Christian to forsake such beauty and relevance? If it is, I can’t see any reason for it other than the most juvenile spite. How can being Buddhist contradict also being Christian? It can if Jesus is some kind of supernatural fascist. Maybe he is. Is Buddha damned because he wasn’t saved? That would be wrong! Maybe it’s supposed to be wrong. Don’t ask so many questions. God works in mysterious ways. What’s the [expletive] point?!”

With his internal monologue tormenting him, George trod back down the hill, occasionally moaning and bursting into tears, scribbling questions and answers onto a moist, folded piece of paper torn from a notebook. By the time he reached the motel, the sun was out and it was muggy.

Back in the Saturn, on the road, George told Cedar, Bongo and Geronimo about the previous night. Cedar had no memory of doing anything but sleeping.

Bongo added, “Yeah, before we went to sleep Jared cranked the radiator up to ten and then I, like, woke up in the middle of the night and it was so hot, dude. I said, ‘I’m burning in hell!’”

They stopped off at a hot spring. For keeping things dry at the spring, there was a partial roof on two beams, like a bus stop. It had hooks for hanging things, and places to sit. All the bathers were nude. Misty rain tingled on George’s body as he chose his way from the shelter to the water across stepping stones. The water flowed through five pools down the forested hillside. The four had a pool to themselves. Bongo said, “Man, God is good.”

Some Japanese tourists got into the top pool. They were wearing bathing suits they had on under their clothes.

A strapping, goateed man and his tender, buxom girlfriend were getting into the pool with Cedar, George and the boys. When George glimpsed her as she settled in, she seemed quite apprehensive to be exposing her awesome beauty to four naked, male strangers. George did not look her way again and immersed himself, letting the water from the pool above pour over his head so that he could not see or hear and he let himself go to the warm blackness of the whale. [fin]

The final image about the whale is a reference to a dream from earlier in the text which George had at the outset of his spiritual odyssey:

I'm on an island where me and a man try to kill each other for a long time until we realize we have to join forces to fight a big black whale that wants to kill both of us. We make a bomb and blow up the whale, but the whale becomes the ocean. Bigger and bigger waves of it sweep over the island until me and the man let it take us and we are held in its warm, black, all-compassing mass.