The Reader Travels

After reading A Hunger Artist, it was interesting to find out that Franz Kafka had died of starvation, a complication from the tuberculosis that tore up his throat from so much coughing that he could hardly eat.

OK, so I realize this is an odd topic for Easter Sunday, but I imagine that Jesus died of something close to starvation, hanging up there on the cross, dehydrating and withering in the sun, bleeding slowly with nothing to nourish him but his conversations with God.

When I started writing, I had no intention of comparing Franz Kafka with Jesus, but there it is. I could delete my words, take them all back, but what the heck. They were both Jewish. They both suffered. They were both misunderstood.

But it’s not about the starvation or the death today. It’s about the celebration of life and immortality. And what better way to celebrate life than with chocolate bunnies? Let’s eat.

So God gave Adam and Eve all this great food to eat, but the very idea that there was a tree whose fruit was off limits made them want that fruit all the more.  I don’t really understand the psychology of it, but there’s a real thrill in doing things considered taboo. I just don’t like the notion that pleasure must be accompanied by punishment.

But then, that’s my fear as I look forward to Tuesday when I’ll let myself eat citrus fruit again. I’ve eaten so well over the last two weeks — leg of lamb, Alaskan salmon, Cornish game hen, apples, bananas, cherries, grapes, avocadoes. But even so, everywhere I look, I think, “Nope, can’t eat that either.” When I do eat it, what if my food punishes me, stops up my nose, attacks my stomach?

It’s no fun to be an ascetic.

Catholics embrace the story of the wedding at Cana so they can enjoy their liquor and still be like Jesus. Weddings and other earthly celebrations are given the blessing of God because Jesus performed his first public miracle turning water into wine. 

Of course, some Protestants might argue that they were simply using the wine to sterilize the water since they didn’t have the benefit of Louis Pasteur’s wisdom back in those days, and if they drank plain old water, they might get sick. So, yeah,  this was a great miracle indeed.

Personally, I believe in moderation versus austerity or debauchery, but I think it was totally cool of Jesus to keep the party going like that, whatever your interpretation. Life simply wouldn’t be the same without celebration, good food, good drink, good friends.

So in this time of year where the harvest and winter celebrations abound, may your glass be ever full.

My preferred translation of Bethlehem is “House of Meat,” and it reminds me that the little manger where Jesus was born was there to house livestock who would one day become supper for the town’s residents. So really, the tiny Messiah came to this world in a little meat room in the big house of meat.

I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. So, in honor of this new discovery, I think I will buy everyone sausages for Christmas.

I will repeat myself. I am not, nor will I ever be, a Bible scholar. But I do know a few things. The Bible is filled with gruesome and violent tales, there are lots of rules and prophecies, and there’s a whole lot of eating going on.

Since I was raised Catholic, we were not encouraged to actually read The Bible and spout out chapters and verses. I remember getting little red copies of the New Testament in grade school, but I was never able to get past the “begats.” In my freshman year of college, I took a humanities class where we studied a few books of The Bible and discussed them as literature. I managed to read all of Genesis and get the gist of Exodus, so after college, I thought I might pick up where I left off with Leviticus.

This was the book that kick-started the idea of moralizing about food within the whole judeo-christian-islamic belief complex. There’s all this stuff about what to eat and what not to eat in Leviticus and later in Deuteronomy. I especially like the rules about not eating the meat of a baby goat that’s cooked in its mother’s milk. So you have to realize that people must have been doing a whole lot of that if they had to make a rule against it, right?

Sure, there are some good common sense reasons not to eat vultures and pigs, who will eat just about anything. Best to stick to the chickens and the “cud-chewers,” who can keep us closer to the top of the food chain. Oh, and vegetables, of course.

It reminds me once again of the ancient Mexican tribes who shared their peyote trips on down the line. Of course, in this situation, only the priests were able to remain “clean.” At least with the early people of God, they shared their superiority with each other and only dumped the unclean food on foreigners and outsiders.

I know this may sound irreverent, but for my nephew’s First Communion, I gave him a little speech about the awesomeness of ritual cannibalism. We talked about the Karankawa tribes of Gulf Coast Texas who would eat the flesh of their fallen enemies to gain their power. The very idea of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus to gain his strength, love and forgiveness is pretty powerful stuff. You have to admit.

But it’s become such an oft-repeated ritual that the power is lost on most Christians. Although my nephew was a little older for his First Communion, most Catholics indoctrinate their kids into the ritual at around seven years old. By the time they’re old enough to think about how cool it really is, the repetition has numbed them to it.

The numbness might also have something to do with the fact that Jesus doesn’t taste like anything at all. I remember as a kid when my young cousin, who had never been to the Catholic church, visited us one summer. We took her to church with us and sat in our usual spot in the front row. The rest of us went up to stand in line, and my mother made sure she stayed back in her pew.

When she saw us go up and take the wafer , she protested quite loudly, “Is that a potato chip? I want a potato chip!” I assured her when I returned to her side, scrunching up my nose, “You don’t really want that. It doesn’t taste anything like a potato chip.”

What if the second coming was a Martian who liked free sex and free meat? Personally, I might become a believer.

In Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised on Mars, who has been taught it’s the worst kind of sacrilege not to eat the flesh of your fallen friends. It’s truly a sin to “waste food.”

In a later work, Heinlein would goof on himself about Stranger, pondering what some writers would do “for money.” But I actually think it’s quite a poignant novel that helped me to see my religious upbringing in a different light. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Stranger is my Bible, but I will say it was more fun to read, more sex, less violence, and it had Martians.

Even though all of Heinlein’s women were hot nurses, hot secretaries or hot strippers, he was quite the forward thinker. And he turned the words, “eat me,” into the greatest of compliments.

Can you grok?

I sometimes think much of the morality we have manufactured over the centuries comes from humans attempting to deny that they are also animals. After all, the “original sin” is sex, something that we must do to procreate, as animals. So then the next thing to moralize about is what we eat, which again, we must do to survive.

Some groups moralize about eating cows, others about horses, dogs and cats, others about eating pigs, lobsters and cheeseburgers. Others moralize about eating any kind of meat, denying once again our animal nature as omnivores.

Should we judge the lion for being a carnivore when he was designed that way? We accept the lion the way he is, but then we can choose not to eat meat because it’s “wrong” to eat meat, and then we can feel all superior over lions.

Stephen Jay Gould has a very popular essay called “Nonmoral Nature,” available in the collection Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, where he talks about this parasitic wasp that would seem cruel by some human standards. So here’s how it works. The mother selects a big juicy insect and injects it with a paralyzing poison. Then she injects her egg into its belly so it can live in the warm body and eat its way out until it’s big enough to survive on its own. The host dies a slow death, and the baby wasp emerges, cracking through the carapace like it’s busting through the shell of an egg.

We can’t call it immoral. It’s just nature. You have to admit, it’s kinda cool too.

In honor of Mother’s Day, I’d like to talk a little about guilt. Since my mother instilled in us what she called “a healthy sense of guilt,” I became a minor hedonist to balance things out a bit. So I love sex and I love food, and I feel no guilt about eating eggs from caged chickens or slices from a baby cow raised in a dark box or salmon raised on a farm or meat of any kind.

But there are a lot of people who consider these things amoral, some opting never to eat any dead animals, others even opting not to eat anything that came out of an animal, no eggs, no cheese, no milk, no butter. Some even go so far as to say that eating these things brings negative energy into your body, causing you stress and strife and peacelessness.

Some eastern religions claim that garlic and onions are bad for the soul, and to lead a happy life one must strike them from their diets. I recognize that there is a great amount of peace in people who choose this lifestyle. But I refuse to feel guilt over garlic, this most wondrous creation of the gods.

I went looking, but I couldn’t find the paper I wrote in college called, “Migrant Farm Workers and Wandering Jews,” comparing the lives represented in Tomas Rivera’s The Searchers with the Jewish people scattered across the globe. Like the dispersed Jews, the migrant farm workers share a faith and a history, a mindset that connects them beyond the miles.

I found a nice succinct definition of the collective unconscious on answers.com.

“In Jungian psychology, a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality.”

Kurt Vonnegut also had a bit to say about collective mindsets and both the reality and the illusion of being connected. In Cat’s Cradle, he first introduces the “granfalloon” to his readers, this illusion that just because we have this one thing in common, doesn’t mean I should like you – “My God, are you a Hoosier?… I’m a Hoosier, too.” But in Breakfast of Champions, he pays a little more honor to things that connect people on a deeper level. (I’m not sure how well Bruce Willis captured it, so read the book if you haven’t already, but not before Cat’s Cradle because that would just be the wrong order.)

Having been raised Catholic, I noticed at some point in my life that being a Catholic is a bit of a granfalloon, especially if you’re on the fence about the whole thing. Earlier in life, when I would run across other Catholics, they’d act like we were a little more deeply connected than I would have liked. “Oh, you’re a Catholic? Come sit next to me.” (It’s even worse when someone thinks that just because we’re both white, we should be buds.)

Then again, when I meet other former Catholics, I do feel an instant connection. Go figure.