Morality vs Legality

President Obama believes that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (EIT) are immoral, and that they are and have been illegal. Thus, in his view, someone within the previous administration is criminally liable. Morality and legality are distinct issues, which the president’s current approach doesn’t adequately separate. In particular, morality has the quality of the ideal, while legality has that of the practical. Morality is absolute, while legality is the result of the compromises of differing opinions which our founding fathers knew occur among men of good conscience.

Evidently by coincidence, President Obama and former Vice President Cheney recently gave back-to-back speeches on the subject of EIT’s. Cheney argued that the CIA was authorized to use these methods to gather information in a timely manner when a particular prisoner likely had information that, if extracted, could be used to prevent harm to American citizens. He argued further that Obama would set a dangerous precedent by criminalizing practices authorized by a previous administration.

Cheney’s last point is strong. Assuming that Obama is a man of unquestionable moral fiber, this is the exception among politicians. After all, the democratic necessity of willingness to compromise one’s position is at best amoral. But there is an accelerating trend among politicians to exploit law as a political weapon – if it’s doubtful whether one can defeat an opponent’s platform, then impeach the man himself. However sincere his motives, for the president to himself aggressively pursue such matters is to invite purges based on partisan politics into our future. The separation of powers was made integral to our constitution to avoid just this sort of thing.

Whether or not the prior use of EIT’s was marginally legal, because Obama believes they should not have been, his focus should be to work as hard as his conviction is strong to change the law.

The question he faces is “Who’s law – U.S. or international?” International law is a matter of treaty, mostly among Western governments, but the United States Congress has not ratified these treaties. The arguments against doing so are that our own judicial system is competent to investigate and try cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that it would violate our constitution to allow a foreign party to conduct police activities on American soil, even if the agency is an international group with whom we’ve established treaties. Ireland faced a similar problem, and amended their constitution in order to participate in the international court at The Hague.

At present we do not submit to international law. We assert ourselves as a nation governed by law, but only by our own law. Right is what we say it is. But this is simply asserting that we are powerful enough to defy any challenge to our behavior – and we are the most powerful nation in history. Power, however, is a practical matter, while morality is ideal – what’s right is right absolutely, even for those who are completely unable to defend themselves.

And right is not one thing within our borders and another beyond our shores. Not moral right, but because of our position this is the case with legal right. The CIA expresses an intuition of the questionability of certain methods by naming them ‘enhanced techniques,’ combining the positive-sounding word ‘enhanced’ with the sophisticated word, ‘techniques’ (the implication that a science is used depersonalizes the practice.) These same EIT’s are what other nations call torture – and if we agreed with that label we’d almost certainly also agree that EIT’s are immoral.

But the CIA is concerned with expediency, and it’s hardly controversial that this agency has no concept of morality. The CIA is a police agency. Police bureaus operate on the basis of power, and this power is normally restrained by competing local, state, and federal agencies. That’s why at the federal level we have separate agencies such the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, The Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs and Immigration, and even the Secret Service (with their responsibility to the Treasury Dept) when their investigations surely overlap and could all be combined more efficiently within the FBI. The CIA is unique in that it operates beyond our borders and so is profoundly less subject to such restraint. The agency is subject to United States and not international law, yet its sphere of activity is outside the U.S. and not among the citizens on whose behalf it acts.

As an aside, this points to the danger of having a unified Department of Homeland Security. Police authorities must be indulged a certain level of secrecy in order to conduct investigations. This privilege can be abused, but it is also a restraint when one agency has authority to investigate another. Giving a single agency authority over all others certainly has the advantage of sharing information about enemies of our country, but it also carries the inherent danger of centralizing police authority. Repeating, police activity is implicitly power oriented – expediency is their nature, not morality. And the more urban experience an officer has, the more character it requires to avoid regarding all citizens as suspects, more to be defended against than defended.

The previous administration proclaimed 9/11 as an act of war, and as a practical matter civil liberties are compromised in times of war – civil liberties within our own nation as well as in our actions abroad. But terrorist groups are an unusual enemy in that they do not represent a country but rather an ideology. Because of this, it was recognized at the outset that this ‘war’ would last decades. Decades – time enough for an entire generation to grow to adulthood in the atmosphere of compromised liberties, and acceptance of the wartime expediency of a Department of Homeland Security, whose umbrella includes even FEMA (thus, by association, civilian FEMA agents acquire more police authority.)

The previous administration did also acknowledge that the citizens of a free nation are more at risk than those of a totalitarian regime. If recognizing that EIT’s are immoral, the price of making their use illegal is to leave us more at risk. We must face the question of whether security is worth compromising our values. And our liberties.

Cheney contends that the ends justify the means – that’s implicit in his argument that the use of EIT’s did provide information that prevented planned attacks, and that there was no further loss of life within the United States. He cites the climate which existed after 9/11 as part of his justification. The question, however, is not whether EIT’s were effective, but whether they were legal and moral. His first argument asserts that they were right because they worked, and his second is the far more dangerous position that fear and outrage justifies extreme behavior.

Despite their declaration that 9/11 was an act of war, the previous administration classified captured terrorists as ‘enemy combatants,’ as though this label distinguished them from persons entitled to the protections afforded prisoners of war. Thus, EIT’s were legal. The label seems reasonable, since the prisoners were acting on political rather than criminal motives, but were agents of an ideology and not a country – thus, not exactly criminal or soldier. By the same reasoning, water-boarding could have been used in interrogating Terry Nichols to identify and track down Timothy McVeigh, as theirs was surely an act of political terrorism. And eager investigators may have used the same methods on Richard Jewell when he was the primary suspect in the Olympic Park bombing actually perpetrated by Eric Rudolph.

Unless domestic terrorism is not an act of war if conducted by American citizens. No doubt many individuals extend the belief that America should not be subject to international law to the position that our citizens have moral primacy over all others. Or that we are justified in using EIT’s with those who have used the same or worse methods on our soldiers and citizens. While it would be hoped that none of our political representatives make the same sort of claim publicly, there’s an uneasy sense that the previous administration incorporated such attitudes in their policies.

Significantly different world-views exist between the traditionally Christian West, the largely Moslem Mideast, and Asia, and include different measures of the worth of an individual versus social or national interests.  While most people sense  intuitively that moral right is absolute, in practice we differ on what these absolutes are – even when we interpret the teachings of the founders of our various religions. No one is justified in claiming his concept of moral right is supreme. But we can agree to minimum standards of what is unacceptable behavior in any circumstance in war (war crimes) and within nations (crimes against humanity.) This is the reason for international treaty – not to declare what is moral, but to establish what is legal.

Our present position leaves us with no moral authority, especially if we distinguish domestic from international terrorists – we are asserting that American citizens are of greater moral worth than everyone else. And there is no international law if it does not exist within the borders of the leader of the free world. Even should it happen that our own parallels international law in every way, we have no right to appear at any international court except perhaps as a defendant. Our presence at the Nuremberg trials is exposed to the argument – which some Nazi’s voiced – that our judgements were not justice, but only the revenge of the victors.

The declaration that we are a nation of laws, and that our courts are just and competent will be seen as self-righteousness by others. Any nation can make the same claim – not only vast and ancient China, but also those rogue nations which recent presidents have referred to as the ‘axis of evil.’ These nations – and the terrorist groups with political agendas – who know they lack the military capability of resisting us can also use Cheney’s argument that fear of a dangerous enemy justifies extreme behavior.

Iran can, for example, accuse American citizens within its borders of spying, arrest them, and submit them to the same techniques we use – or any other interrogation method they choose. And claim the same justifications as does Cheney – that these prisoners pose a great danger to the way of life of Iranian citizens, and that EIT’s are the most expedient way to prevent further harm to its people by the United States.

We cannot impose any international standard of behavior which we do not submit to ourselves and claim right. We can claim the power to do so, but not the right.  If the legality of EIT’s is based on morality, then the law has to be international. Thus, Obama and former presidents are correct in wanting to be signatory to an international court. But Cheney is right in protesting against a sitting president wanting to criminalize the former administration.

Legend of Tallulah Gorge

Dusk was building his house in what seemed a fair land, full of promise both for planting and for hunting in their seasons, when a rumbling beneath his feet set his knees to tremble and caused him to sit lest he fall headlong to the ground.

Before him the earth opened; the bedrock split, and opened into a great granite-walled gorge. The depth thereof dizzied him, and though Dusk pushed legs madly against the void, the yawning chasm drew him toward the precipice, as if the Earth Mother herself drew him in with her breath.

A river carved out the bottom of the gorge with high falls and narrow rapids. Many names could be given it: Alleyah, which announces a ‘guide of others,’ Galilahi, which is the word for ‘attractive’ to one people, or its like, Galilah, which to another nation means ‘God shall redeem.’ But its true name is Tallulah, which dissolves all in its meaning, ‘running water.’

Tallulah River has always been, though before it had run deep underground. And its currents have always swirled around the legs of maidens busy at their bath, their toes grasping granite pebbles in its bed.

There among them was Dawn. And as soon as Dusk saw her all her companions faded into the shadows, lingering only as the song of water splashing against stone and rising in a mist of chatter and laughter. The aroma of Dawn caught Dusk as a scent he had been born remembering; it entered his nostrils as a freshness, a perennial newness which intoxicated him before ever he tasted her lips.

All which Dusk had built, all which he had planned now seemed as naught – mere distractions which had occupied him until this moment of beholding her. He did not know her name, but if compelled he might have falteringly spoken the epithet, Hope.

And hope she flashed when she cast her eyes up, piercing questions into the heavens. Her glances had not yet discovered Dusk atop the granite cliff. After each blink Dawn quickly lowered her face to her bathing, demurely avoiding again voicing her prayer that this be the day she’d always felt approaching.

He no longer resisted the precipice, and slid, falling, floating over the edge. Dawn turned her face to the sky again, and beheld Dusk as a cloud settling into the gorge. But rather than blocking the sun which she had so recently discovered, it set a glow in her face, a blush in skin which before had been hidden from warmth, and pale. Indeed, the sun drew a silver edge to the cloud, presenting a shape for Dusk to Dawn.

Dawn crawled upon a stone to see what this cloud might be. Though the sun seemed so tiny and far away, it had already warmed her bed; its light burst into colors sparkling in the mist, and seemed to be not behind but within the cloud, and swelled as it descended to her.

Dusk touched her, gently at first, and as his cloud settled upon her and his mass grew the moisture alternately warmed and opened her skin, and cooled and quickened her. In pulses Dusk pressed her deep into the boulder, then raised her up within the walls. Dawn floated, she was crushed, and the waves were within her as well as without. He sustained his rhythm and she withdrew into the swirling rapids within her, and he changed his rhythm and she opened her eyes to Dusk as a living presence come, having chosen her, and frightening - no,  thrilling her.

In this way Dusk lifted her ever higher. And as he did, the sparkling granite walls opened around them as a night sky bristling with stars. There is only this short hour in which Dusk and Dawn come together; they are unlike and do not know the same world, for Dusk has walked the surface of our Earth Mother, and Dawn is a seed newly emerging from her womb. Yet there is this moment every morning and every evening when they are one and the same.

Every day our wives go about their tasks in the village, and our husbands leave for field and forest, but, like Dawn and Dusk, we begin and end each day with a kiss. Thus do our families and our village grow and prosper.

The Howling

In the early morning of 6/13/08, my movie was interrupted with the unavoidable commercials. Not for beer, or cars – though it sounds like a joke told by a fifteen-year-old, my tv was offering ‘his & hers’ dildos, and personal finger massagers for women (no possibility of misunderstanding their intended use when the manufacturer is Trojan.) Competing companies offered their pills for erectile dysfunction, and another offered its capsule to enlarge the male organ. All this in one block of commercials, and the same group was repeated every ten minutes. This wasn’t the Comedy Channel (Commode TV), or Spike, where one should expect potty humor – this was AMC (American Movie Classics.)

Echoing my email inbox, my tv is very concerned about my privates. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend must be complaining – she’s probably an ex precisely because she’s so verbose about whether she’s being properly gruntled.

Appropriately, the movie being shown was The Howling, in which people who’ve been infected by werewolves become man-eating beasts themselves. In the end, even the dainty blonde anchor-woman succumbed, turning into a pretty little monster while being broadcast on live tv.

Can this be stopped? Not easily. My governor has written that the feds have complete control over the airways, and local standards are irrelevant. My congressmen have also responded, implying that they have no power over the FCC. One wonders if they will realize their potency when they discover a Trojan massager hidden in their daughter’s music box. And of course AMC is a cable/satellite channel, not broadcast over public airways, and so it’s implicit that the viewer is requesting what he gets. But suppose Charlie Wilson wasn’t a womanizer – instead of finding secret means to fight communism, might he have discovered a way to clean-up our media? Or is the FCC a front for Las Vegas mafia?

Yes, it was after-hours. But who if not teens will be the majority audience at 2 AM on a June night? It doesn’t make any difference to them whether it’s broadcast or satellite – appearance on tv gives an aura of legitimacy, normalcy to the products being pushed and the lifestyle they imply. And the advertisers are experts obligated to persuade a mainstream audience. Son, don’t let the commercials misguide you; the advertisers aren’t playing pocket-pool with you to help you with the girls – they are reaching for your wallet, and any girl you get with their pills, lotions, and appliances has an emptiness that no amount of Extenze can fill.

I would defend an adult’s right to purchase and use these products. I support the right for people to operate strip clubs, and even think it misguided that prostitution is illegal. These things are corrupt, but it’s not appropriate for one fellow to legislate another’s morality. Legalize, just don’t legitimize them, and regulate them with zoning laws. Can we not have zoning laws for tv, such that not only programming, but also advertisement is restricted to the audience with a taste for the vulgar?

One shouldn’t expect a channel offering ‘classic American movies’ to actually be a sex shop. But these commercials are pervasive. Not even the news channels will let twenty minutes go by without pushing a male potency pill. We have a choice whether to watch or not, but the choice is not whether to block a particular channel, but rather whether to watch tv at all. When AMC as a window into traditional Americana shows a couple in bed beckoning with their dildos, it’s only frustrating that the nude scenes are edited out of the movie.

Howling # 2 – a related subject

Drug companies are not our friends. They are large businesses obligated to make money for their share holders. They are not immoral, but they are driven by the profit motive, and profit is an amoral drive. It is to their advantage to promote products which treat disease, not those that cure; they advertise products which a person must take for the rest of their lives.

We have conflicting beliefs: everyone is entitled to the best possible medical care, and medical care is free enterprise. The drug companies exploit this, as they are obligated to their shareholders to do. The result is a mix of socialist and capitalist medicine – the pharmaceuticals offer their products for the greatest profit they can, and their price is obscured by government subsidy and insurance. There’s no outcry because the consumer is at best marginally aware of the full price he’s paying in taxes and insurance premiums. This is capitalist because the manufacturers set their prices as they think the market will tolerate and have patent protections, and it is socialist because we are all paying indirectly for each others’ medicines. Do you not groan on April 15 when a commercial begins, “Attention Medicare Beneficiaries”?

The drug companies try to convince us that they are our friends with the frequent promotions for their Partnership For Prescription Assistance. If that big orange bus actually exists, what real purpose might it serve outside of natural disasters? It isn’t rolling into rural America as the ally of the working man – this is pure propaganda designed to maintain the status quo of social capitalism. There’s a red star somewhere on that bus. And we are paying for its diesel fuel.

Why do drug companies advertise prescription medicine on tv if not to encourage us to put mass pressure on our doctors to give us access to their pills? “Doctor may I have some please?”

The cumulative effect of constant bombardment with drug advertisement is itself harmful to us, in more ways that I will mention. We are subject to the continuous message that the first solution to all life’s problems is a pill. Can’t sleep, can’t really awaken, memory problems, your food gives you heartburn, too little or low-quality sex – all these things can be corrected by a pill, so if life is painful or just boring it’s a small step to recreational drugs for perking things up. CNN, Fox – you’ve become drug-peddlers. Or does meteorology school actually teach forecasters to prepare the allergy reports brought to us by Allerest & Benadryl?

And of course there’s the raging competition between three or four pills for erectile dysfunction on every channel every hour of the day. Millions of men take them? Ask my doctor if I’m healthy enough for sexual activity? If I’m asking permission from my doctor, then I’m clearly not the cock of the block. I don’t know how much tax money has funded studies of how often men think about women during the day, but now my tv wants me to ponder my own genitals every ten minutes that I watch. Maybe the Immodium ads aren’t so bad.

Dear tv, it’s simple; if a product is something that can’t be discussed in the workplace without a supervisor being in jeopardy of harassment charges, then its advertisement should be blocked by the V-chip. Dear AMC – can you pretend to any sophistication in your programming when it’s only filler between sex-shop ads? Do you really want it to be mainstream for men to be womanizers and women to be voracious tramps.

So many pretty blond anchor-women. But I doubt that any of you watch your own programming because the proliferation of captions, tickers, and promos on the screen obscures your videos of airplanes coming in for belly-landings to just the tree-line on the horizon. Smoke is exciting, but one does wonder what is burning. Never were so many in such dire need of a silver bullet.

Words and Music

After retiring from a long career as a paramedic, I lived in the old German city of Nürnberg. Most of the town was destroyed in a fire storm during World War II, and when Nürnberg was subsequently rebuilt, Katharinenkirche was maintained as a burnt-out shell. Rather than a neglected war memorial, however, the townspeople still to this day use this Church of St. Catherine as an open-air theater for concerts of all musical genres.

The walls of Katherinenkirche still stand, though bare. When fire burnt away its roof and hollowed it out, the church’s sanctity was released to the heavens. Its remaining skeleton evokes a memory from the opposite end of my career, an hour in which, as part of my training to become a paramedic, I was called to witness the autopsy of a woman in her late twenties. Although she’d died of a cancerous liver, her body showed no external signs; her face was lovely and her figure the ideal of a woman. I think of her now as Catherine, in recognizing her likeness to the ruins of the medieval church.

St. Catherine of Alexandria, ‘the pure one,’ is the patron saint of scholars, philosophers, and apologists. St. Catherine was a beautiful, privileged and well-educated woman who tried to convince the Roman Emperor Maxentius to end persecution of Christians. Maxentius called pagan philosophers to debate her, but she converted them all. For that, and surely also because she refused the emperor’s seduction, she was martyred.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Catherine was a devout intellect who “declared to her parents that she would only enter into marriage with someone who surpassed her in reputation, wealth, beauty and wisdom.. Her intercession was implored by theologians, apologists, pulpit orators, and philosophers. Before studying, writing, or preaching, they besought her to illumine their minds, guide their pens, and impart eloquence to their words.”

Part of her legend (not embraced by the church) is that, upon her own conversion, Catherine was transported to heaven in a vision and betrothed to Christ by the Virgin Mary. This story comes from a time in which people believed that the body is a burden to the soul, and that truly holy people rejected all worldly things, and especially fleshly love.

Within the medieval walls of Katharinenkirche, where there are no windows to the world but the roof is open to the sky, one can imagine St. Catherine’s male counterpart as Sir Galahad, the purest knight of the Table Round, who pursued the Holy Grail in preference to everything earthly. The day after Sir Galahad was made to accept a kingship, Joseph of Aramathie appeared to him and offered him to drink from the holy cup. When he did, Sir Galahad ascended into Heaven in the company of angels, freed forever from his mortal burden.

Only the shell of Katharinenkirche still remains. And of the woman I know as Catherine, I have only the memory of her autopsy. I felt it a blasphemy to dissect her in the cold basement of the hospital, and yet this was an academic necessity in my acquiring the knowledge with which I could bring healing to my community.

St. Catherine and Sir Galahad left their mortal burdens as virgins; I can’t know whether my Catherine did, but I remember her as a promise unfulfilled. How dearly I would like to have known her as she went about her apartment singing love songs, or joining in with folk tunes on the radio while driving about our city. But the love she might have inspired in me was multiplied in every patient I touched throughout a long career, through the knowledge she imparted to me.

St. Catherine converted the pagan philosophers, not by refusing their arguments, but by engaging with them. She revealed something beyond the laws of logic, of nature, and of moral living – the love of a personal God. Remembering the concerts I heard in Katharinenkirche, it’s fitting that the shell of her church still reverberates with music even when the words of gospel are no longer preached therein; I’m reminded of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who’s study of mathematics was preliminary to and fulfilled in the Music of the Spheres.

The medieval mind understood Pythagoras’s musica universalis (music of the heavenly bodies) as one of three branches of their concept of musica; the other two are musica humana (music of the human body) and musica instrumentalis (music of instruments and voices.) Hindus (who were aware of Pythagoras) expressed this theme as Shabd (the Word made flesh) – a near identity with divine meaning and sound, tones which can be heard with ‘the inner ear.’ The idea is that of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Indulge me an exert from my novella, The Beautiful Fountain:

“The universe was approaching clarity – expanding with Aristotle’s vocabulary and contracting with Plato’s nameless Beauty. But, though these two sages were restored by the Orient, Pythagoras was returned in tatters. The monks were extracting the Music of the Spheres and discarding the harmony. Their thesis was a dictionary – a circular argument, words sustained only by each other, and without a theme.”

A friend – my fellow blogger, Moriah Joy – danced around these ideas in speculating what heaven might be like, especially in her intuition that Heaven has much to do with the intellect, as she remembered God’s charges to Adam before the Fall. In the first creation story, God gave man rulership of all the fish, the birds, and the beasts of the earth, and in the second, more detailed creation story God paraded all these creatures before Adam to see what he would name them.

Naming the things of the earth is beginning to take rulership of them. Naming things is forming concepts of them, but rulership is more – it becomes co-creative by organizing them intellectually in a specific way. As there is more than one language, there is more than one way to understand the world. And, for that matter, each speaker within even a common language will have a unique understanding of his own tongue, formed of both natural and accidental associations of terms within his dictionary. The history and legends of St. Catherine are in the public encyclopedia, while Nürnberg’s Katharinenkirche, the autopsy, Sir Galahad, and my association with Pythagorus’s music are additional elements in my personal lexicon of Catherine.

Having names for things gives one the focus, the power to master them intellectually, with something comparable to using variable names in algebraic equations or logical expressions. The word, “dog,” for example, is an abstraction for rather a wide variety of beasts – knowing the features common to dogs gives one knowledge of how to interact with all, but the generic word obscures the unique characteristics of each. We achieve a certain clarity in the use of language, a recognition of the structure of our world, but we want always to remember that our dictionary is an approximation, a thesis comprised partly of what is given to us and partly an extension of our own minds.

But the structure is a skeleton – it lacks something which gives it life. What I wanted during Catherine’s autopsy was her life restored. Her body had fallen out of harmony, and life had left it. It’s necessary to exploit language, to say that what was missing in her flesh was her music, because there is no really suitable English word – and if one were invented it would soon be martyred by academics, if the emperors of the flesh didn’t first turn it to their use.

In communion service we eat bread and drink wine; bread is a universal symbol for knowledge, but, again, there is no satisfying word for what the wine represents. One thinks first of “life,” but this doesn’t capture the immediacy, the human passion that is wanting in the intuition. For this we want music. The bread is broken – separated into parts – and then the wine follows; the words are written, then revealed in music.”Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music” ( Edward Abbey.) Though the words are written first, the music is the alpha and the omega; if one changes the music it expresses a different passion – it’s a different song – but if the words are changed it’s only another stanza.

Much of Richard Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” was set within the city’s Katharinenkirche (before it was burned.) Wagner’s opera is the tale of a naturally gifted musician who struggles against the rigid rules of the music guilds, so that, by winning a competition, he would win the hand of the woman he loves. But the musician, Walther, has a competitor named Beckmesser. Walther has composed a song for the event, and the local master, Hans Sachs, arranges that Beckmesser obtain a copy and believe it to be Sachs’ work. But Sachs anticipates correctly that Beckmesser will utterly fail to understand the spirit of the song, and when Walther follows and sings it in a way to reveal its inner beauty, Walther wins the prize and thus also his paramour.

The words were the same, but where Beckmesser was a master of the craft, Walther bested him by expressing the passion within the words. As one who understood the rules, Beckmesser was an academic, an intellectual musician, while Walther was a poet in love.

Within the text of Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory often mentioned that he was translating the history from the French, but when he spoke of the Holy Grail he almost always retained the French word, Sangreal. Consciously or not, Mallory was communicating the meanings both of san greal (cup of Christ) and also sang real (royal blood.) Sangreal incorporates a mix of ideas (which our unconscious mind tends to do); depending upon the legend, it may be a platter, or the cup which Christ used in the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Aremathie later used to catch Christ’s blood in the tomb. Sangreal captures the sense of the full dinnerware of communion – most importantly, the vessel containing the wine, but also to a lessor extent the tray containing the bread.

When the Sangreal appears, it is carried by a maiden, and in some stories that maiden is thought to be Mary, mother of Jesus. But one may also recall the revived story that Mary Magdalene carried the daughter of Jesus; what is downplayed in The Da Vinci Code is that the legends assert not only Christ’s bloodline through French aristocracy but also through them to Scottish nobles, and so to Uthur Pendragon (King Arthur’s father.) Literalists would not be happy with this connection to the legendary King Arthur. But the power of myth is not in its historical accuracy, rather, in the spiritual intuition that is honed through the retelling from generation to generation, including ours.

The myth expresses the heart’s yearning for the divine feminine (”God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” – Genesis 1:27.) Too often, and especially in Arthurian times, the church becomes a political power in the world. What is done in public is masculine – it is the outer world, law, authority. But if the church is the bride of Christ, what it does is private, and intimately personal. The quest for the grail is our unconscious yearning for a personal union with God, unmediated by any clergy. It is our feminine instinct to find and submit to God, to take him into ourselves, to fill our senses with the Spirit as wine heats our blood, to make of our own hearts the cup of Christ.

St. Catherine was prepared for this with a good education and a fine intellect. But, like Pythagoras’s study of mathematics opening him to the music of the spheres, this was only preparatory to betrothal to Christ, to Sir Galahad drinking the wine. This is a metaphor for the union of the masculine and the feminine. We can fill our senses anonymously with the lights dimmed and our eyes closed, but taking the bread before drinking the wine symbolizes our learning the law and then discovering the love; it’s coming to know our partner so that we can kiss with our eyes open and looking into those of our beloved, learning the words before our hearts burst into song.

The Arthurian legends have it that on many occasions the Sangreal was present but could not be seen; nonetheless its presence healed both physical wounds and injuries to the soul (it cured Sir Lancelot of a two-year madness.) Many Arthurian tales depict a lady healing a knight of wounds or poisoning, and nurturing him back to health. The maiden bearing the Sangreal is the ultimate fulfillment of this feminine virtue.

God prepared Adam for rulership of the earth by awakening language within him. After the Fall, Adam was separated from God, and had to learn both natural and God’s laws to survive. Through Adam, mankind becomes masculine, but through Christ the feminine is restored.

Wagner’s Beckmesser is like Maxentius’s pagan philosophers – intellectuals, masters of both natural science and moral law. In communion, we partake not only of the body (the bread, the truth) but also the blood (the wine, the passion) in expressing our union with Christ. Walther is like St. Catherine, having not only an intellectual understanding of God, but also that inarticulable something of a heart in love.

On the opposite side of Nürnberg’s central river from Katharinenkirche stands a world-class music school, where students who are naturally gifted must go through the academics, the autopsies of music before they can become masters of their craft. In like manner, our intellectual grasp of God’s order in this world is a step in preparing us for our place in the divine symphony, our part in the Music of the Spheres. Bread and wine – words and music. Heaven is not plucking a harp somewhere in the clouds, following notes on sheet music, but rather the co-creative expression of our own hearts in love. In this way we are keepers of the garden. This garden.

Perhaps we shouldn’t bemoan the Fall overmuch. Now we are in the academy, mastering language, mastering our world, but seeking the music – the passion, intent, the meaning. The autopsy is a necessary step in learning what the music is about. And in recalling that Walther’s paramour was named Eva, I am reminded that Adam’s wife was not named until they were expelled from the garden. Neither did I have a name for my Catherine until the close of my career. By study, by intellect, we come to more clearly see whom we love. Beauty is, after all, an intellectual perception. Love is our heart’s response to it.

Dreams of Candles & Kittens

The image of your candle flame is burned into my mind. I still see it flickering on your forehead like a third eye looking back at me. Even behind closed lids I see it, feel your gaze.

I should get up soon, go to the sewing kit and stitch my costume for the day. The basket lies open near the bed – some dusty spools are mine, but many more are yours. The ghost of the flame still lingers, fitting the shape of a needle’s eye. I stare through it, knowing it to be a portal through which time will resume as soon as a thread is chosen and is passed through. Just a moment for my pulse to slow to the rhythm of your breath, those deliberate waves that draw me deeper into the blankets.

Cruel, cold floor – the slightest touch of my foot against it would connect me with this house, the entire estate, and some role it demands I play. A map of our villa is in a drawer somewhere in the room – a tailor’s pattern, a blueprint, an unfinished dream. I recall sketching lines on the parchment, but now it seems much of the handwriting is yours. You’ve made everything new, novel, perennially under construction. And yet under the blankets, where you turn to nuzzle your back into me, all seems timeless and familiar. On paper, in sunlight, every line was straight and square, correct. Too correct. Now, under moonlit shadows, the geometry is organic, conforming to each of your curves.

My thoughts have disturbed a ball of yarn in the basket. It tumbles out, and the kitten gives chase. I don’t recall your having a cat, but there she is, the mighty hunter toying with her prey. Her forehead is branded with the candle flame in my mind, like an Egyptian hieroglyph of the All-Seeing Eye. The kitty is even more Eastern than that – Siamese, I should think, judging from the turquoise and emerald of her eyes, matching the satins and sequins that wrap my love.

The fuzzy ball escapes through the balcony door. The cat pursues, after glancing back to confirm my attention hasn’t drifted. But I’m not anxious to fling open the blankets and release nocturnal warmth. I can follow her, anyway, in the theater of my mind.

Pussy is in my studio, where I spent so many years sculpting my hopes of you, my fingers penetrating deep in moist clay, my nostrils filled with the scent of earth. My hands delighted in anticipating your shape. Busts fill the shelves, statues line the walls – the stove eyes still glow atop the oven where I baked my models. Every one came short of you, though, draining of life as it dried. It must be the eyes. I sculpted a hollow in each to catch a shadow – it works, but only if I stand a little distance away. What’s that about cakes – why can’t I hold my love and look at her, too? My ceramic faces look through me to you, and crack, disenchanted now with their artist.

Feline fur whispers through the door. She’s become larger, a lynx. Though she doesn’t turn to demand I follow, it’s no accident that her tail is flipped so high. She’s in the gardens. The estate is studded with them – the baroque, the labyrinth, the orchard – and I’ve strolled through every one, though they seem to shift about and are impossible to embroider on my map. The bouncing ball has disappeared, lost. Or has it multiplied, become the fruit dangling in the branches like your delicious ideas? The lynx poses beneath the trees, waiting for me to choose one and give it a toss. The puzzle is to pick which citrus is yours and which mine, but I know the trick, and sniff for that with the sweetest, juiciest breath.

I’ve won the game but disturbed birds roosting in the trees where the fruit had been – they flutter out in a blaze of Amazon colors, the lynx watching with more than interest. I could swear she said, “Aye, sir, I’ll try you in the labyrinth next,” and she pulls my arm round her shoulder to carry me there.

The flickering wings settle as torches to light lush halls of tall hedges that are decidedly yours. A flame meets my eye wherever I turn, and lures my hand irresistibly to pierce inside. Its soul feels as wet on my skin as it does warm.

The lynx prowls on, but I stop before each corridor to listen. The wind rustles twigs into the clacking of a million little spider legs knitting their webs, and if the way is blocked somewhere around a bend the breeze is trapped, and resonates with whistles and hums of things you shouldn’t have to tell me, that I should just know. I’ve learned to avoid such paths, and choose instead the quiet ways, those you’ve forgotten were open or don’t know so well, even if all these halls are yours. The passages house thieving bunnies which take caution against the lynx, and sometimes darker, grumbling shadows and stains. Well, a few little beasties haunt my own caverns, too, and it’s best not to pester such creatures, to trust another day’s sunlight to burn them away.

So I escape your labyrinth, though leaving groomed green paths for dark jungle seems more going deeper than emerging. The torches spark and disperse as prisms woven into a veil of mist, shimmering in vines that smell of my angel’s hair. Having grown to respect my triumphs in her tests, the cat has matured more potent, a jungle feline, though before I can tell what kind she disappears with two graceful bounds into the bush, a fading shadow daring me to find her. I do still sense her behind the chaos of birdcalls, screaming insects, and alien cries that fill the forest; she’s there as surely as the sun is somewhere beyond the fog.

I choose the one constant – the song of a river threading through mangrove roots. Its chorus gradually increases to a crescendo at the base of a waterfall. A thousand eyes push me up its channeling rocks, the cascade washing my back so clear that my heart is revealed, throbbing like a red sun. Easily I claw to the summit – our balcony overlooking the rainforest – and notice your kitten-paw slippers beside the bed. Somewhere under the mound of blankets is the spring, the source of all that moisture.

The sewing kit still lies open. I squint through the needle’s eye, deciding which uniform, what version of me best says to you, “It is I.” But animal magic begins to reveal the moon whole under the shadow of its crescent, and my lids open full. I find your eye peeking over the pillow, flickering the scantily coded message, “Need you get dressed just yet? The candle is still lit.”

Lost Dove

A dove should be nesting at this late hour, but there she is, flitting about as if crazed by the full moon. Like a moth drawn to a candle, she tries to reach the silvery orb, only to drop exhausted from the sky – the reflection is farther away than it appears. Again and again she falls from light into shadow, till I see her no more.

I’ve lifted my own dove in this very same glow, produced by blue gels over stage lights, when dancing a pas de deux with Lacy, my ballerina of many seasons. But that was in the past – I’m on duty now, in the back parking lot of a church in urban Atlanta.

The police are tidying up their report just a few blocks away. Next of kin known, but disinterested – the little crack-whore is destined for the paupers’ cemetery which runs downhill from the prison, just above the landfill. Her drama will soon be covered over by the light of the moon. I think of it as a hunters’ moon – I avoid claiming that it actually contributes to lunacy with the pragmatic observation that the bad guys can simply see their targets better. It’s just risen above a branch of that oak against the fence, as if the tree were raising a lantern to reveal the world for which I am responsible.

I seek to recover strength behind Israel Baptist Church, sitting in the cruiser assigned to me as EMS lieutenant for the southern half of the county. The child around the corner is dead, beyond recovery. As I approached, the cop had lifted pencil from clipboard just enough to indicate the door to a toolshed – a sure sign that his most pressing concern was to avoid contaminating a crime scene. The moonlight that could penetrate the one greasy window took a moment before revealing a little black girl collapsed over her knees like a Muslim at prayer, her forehead to the concrete. I had no real hope that the dark pool running from beneath her to the floor drain might be oil. Her skin was the temperature of the night, and my fingers discovered only the wound in her neck – the heartbeat had gone out with her blood, it had been a while since her last sigh.

I wanted to do more for her – at least give her the dignity of pulling her pants up from around her knees. But once death is confirmed it is indeed a crime scene. The medical emergency is over – just cancel the ambulance and fire crews who are en route, and disturb nothing for fear of cheating CSI technicians of their booty. I’ve no more duty to her – only to the file cabinet, providing a medical report to supplement the police documentation. The cop knew her name, having picked her up a few times as a child out too late and loitering at the wrong corner.

The church parking lot is empty, save for me. A few hours earlier it had been filled. They call it choir practice, but at an urban gospel church on a Saturday night surely throats were filled with the same passion and joy as will be shared with the congregation in the morning. Worship that waxes and wanes as does the moon – their song will rise again with the sun. It’s a hot night, but the cool blue of the moonlight makes everything in this world gleam as if from a light within, a landscape under a summer snow.

The peace belies the neighborhood. Somewhere in the shadows nearby is the monster who thought her life worth less than the coins she’d asked for her service. I don’t know that devil, though it’s easy to recognize others – I can diagnose a patient’s drug of choice by the personality of the demon who’s taken him over. There’s a corner suckling at liquor, a whole block loiters with marijuana and hashish, but the nearest intersection is the haunt of crack cocaine, her pushers and her whores.

The girl was fourteen. Her skin had become ashen upon releasing her dove, no moisture left in her body to give it a sheen. Her voice is silenced forever, her dove flung into darkness, with only my prayers to lift her to the light. Maybe that’s why I think of Lacy – she was about this age when I first danced with her.

My virginal Lacy – she danced the Snow Pas de Deux clad all in white and glowing in the stage lights. I appeared in white, too, when I danced with her, my partnering an act of worship of Beauty become corporeal. During this dance our legs grew cold from the dry ice machine rolling a heavy fog over the stage – I can imagine how that felt to the snowflake dancers when they finally found order, forming two columns and bowing deep into the mist. Approaching the final crescendo, I carried Lacy overhead in promenade between them, and paused at center stage. I could feel her leg stretch just a bit higher above me in arabesque, even feel her wrists pulse the last waves of music before the curtain. Nothing so lovely could be real, but there she was, living, perched on my hand as if I’d plucked her from the heavens to present her almost within reach of the first row. As the music receded I could hear the audience draw in the vision with their breath.

Movement in the shadows under the tree catches my eye, but it’s only a breeze stirring dead leaves. Where in the debris has that dove fallen? I would brush away the ashes of the world into which this little spirit was born and, like that oak lifting the moon above the shadows, present her to the heavens, asking God to receive back this child. I can’t save them all – I know that. The choir must rest its voice in the stillness before sunrise, but I search for the prayer that could find the lost dove. No words come – what rises from my heart is a vision of Lacy circling cautiously till she takes my hand, and trusts me to lift her into the lights. I have touched Beauty. I am ready for the next call.

Flaming Ice

The cartwright’s wife had no wood left for the fireplace before which her guest could warm his limbs as her dinner had warmed his stomach. Her visitor, a hermit who had settled just beyond the city walls to bring the message of Christ to Nuremberg’s poor, told her to fetch icicles outside from the eaves and cast them into the fire. Obedient to the missionary hermit, she was soon astonished to see her icicles blaze as if oaken tinder.

The hermit, Sebald, who was later recognized as the patron saint of Nuremberg, visited this same family on another occasion, and expressed a taste for fish. Unfortunately, the lord of the city had just passed an edict that no one would be allowed this dish until the castle was first provided. When it was discovered that the cartwright was in violation for the sake of his guest, the lord had his eyes put out. This ruler should perhaps have considered that the breach was for the sake of Sebald – all the town knew of a man who had once heckled the hermit while he preached, knew that Sebald had called the ground to open and swallow him whole. But no such punishment came to the lord, as it was not the gospel in Sebald’s mouth to which he objected, but only the fish in his belly – the hermit simply restored the cartwright’s vision.

                                                     *    *    *                                          

I learned this lore of St. Sebald while living in Nuremberg, where a gothic cathedral fixes him in the city’s memory. His body rests in a silver casket within an iron shrine built by Peter Vischer, east of the altar. Like all such churches in Europe, the exterior of Sebaldskirche (the church of St. Sebald) is darkened by the modern city air. Stone saints imbedded in its walls cast stern eyes on the world’s corruption, and demons trained as gargoyles hold others of their kind at bay. The cathedral doesn’t seem meant to bring a presence into this world, but rather to carve out a protected space inside. Its inner skin does show some stain – the graffiti of privileged families hawking their names, resembling the faded tatoos of once nubile women whose concepts of beauty have been profaned by the world. However, in from the walls, the holiness of the place is palpable.

I felt instinctively that Sebaldskirche is the spiritual heart of the city, even before learning of the patron saint. I was thus excited to notice a placard one day which announced an Angels’ Choir Concert to be held in the early evening. I’d absorbed much of the instrumental music that flows continuously throughout this city, but very little choral work.

And sundown is the perfect time to be in the sanctuary. There are two rows of pink sandstone columns which branch at the top, creating quite the sense of a woodland clearing with its canopy of tree limbs. The sandstone is quarried from Nuremberg’s own bedrock, and catches the sunset from the west window perfectly. With the rosy glow augmented by flickering candlelight, one feels himself to be at a timeless forest campfire – as all these stone cathedrals are cool like the earth beneath the frost line, it’s a welcome, warming impression.

I learned at least one architectural term that evening – it seems that an Angels’ Choir is not a collection of heavenly voices, but rather the balcony high up in the west between the two towers. The music was actually a string quartet, the performers positioned against the railing. The audience, too, was required to ascend the spiraling staircase and take seat in the balcony, which was much deeper than would be imagined.

It was well worth the climb. Before I had only known Sebaldskirche from a perspective on its stone floor. The columns, statuary, alcoves – all enhance the sense of forest clutter, in which the space marked as one’s campsite fades indefinitely into the woods with the bonfire light. But from the balcony high above one sees the perfect order of the architect’s vision of sanctuary. I had not imagined this space held so much light.

I had already realized that it was time for me to move away from this medieval city when I saw another placard at Sebaldskirche. Something about a meditation – the sign’s language was too complex for my skill – but again I anticipated music of a very gentle sort. After all, Pachelbel himself had once been organist in this very church. But I’d forgotten how literal the Germans are – this was indeed to simply be meditation. A score or so drifted into the sanctuary alone or in pairs. The host acknowledged each arrival by striking his hand-held chime, its voice a crisp, wintery tone inviting each to take a seat for silent prayer.

The feeling of Nuremberg leaving my heart became increasingly like a placenta pulling itself away from the womb, cramping in my gut so hard that I moved from my pew to sit on the stone floor, my back against one of the columns. No sunset light, and what candles there were barely lit the space in which I sat, above and around me only darkness.

But the host insisted I move my limbs – we were to take our meditation to different stations throughout the church. Like a stray dog, I followed the line of native citizens up the spiral of the south tower, endlessly, so high that many were winded. The weight of my own legs increased with every step as if affixed to a cable, hauling more and more flagstones up from the floor below. We finally halted on a tower platform, and with the thinness of the air everyone easily recovered the meditative state. All but me, my feet still objecting to stepping away from the town I’d come to know in these past years, to walk into an unknown future.

We were ushered through a door onto a narrow rim around the outside of the tower, high above the old city. Familiar streets, the river, restaurants where I’d met friends so often – I had drifted above them, separated, it seemed, forever, as if I were already in the airliner that would be taking me away. Again we paused to meditate. No words were ever spoken – our guide used his chime to announce the beginning and end of our movements. Nonetheless I felt I had only a migrant’s understanding of the language used in this place.

Evidently our pilgrimage was timed to bring us here on the hour, for the bell in the opposite tower began to dong. So massive a sound, the north tower found a harmonic with which to sway, and in a moment the ledge which suspended our legs so high above the cobblestones began also to weave. It was here I realized that my grief was visible to others in the group, that they were allowing me distance for the wind to clear it away. A human touch might have drained my heart straightaway, but this was not forthcoming.

Not until the tones rippled away were we allowed to leave the ledge and partially descend the tower. I’d left much behind, was lighter because empty. Our host showed the entrance to an attic – I hadn’t known that this space existed between the roof and the sanctuary ceiling, but it was quite large. We found our places along wooden walks for this station. The ceiling below appeared as rows of cement dunes – odd that from heaven’s perspective the holy sanctuary looked to be under primitive burial mounds.

A pilgrimage always ends where it began, the place changed not in what is there but in who we have become. And so we returned to the sanctuary to embed the experience in our souls. My heart felt blank, but light enough to smile with the hope that what I’d given to the air outside the tower hadn’t added to the pollution darkening the walls of Sebaldskirche.

How like a church is the human psyche, separated from heaven and buried in the earth below. And yet within the walls there is a sacred space full of light, the seed of Deity. Little deaths and big, yet always I emerge, empty but restored, ready to go through those doors out into the next world. The meditation was at end, and I grew restless. The past life finally surrendered to winter, its icicles in my heart have flickered into flames – the hermit’s gift warming me in remembering Nuremberg.

The Voyeurs

The two aged scientists were alone in the observatory. It was quite late, although the hour was irrelevant when using the uplink to a telescope suspended in Earth orbit. Perhaps they were too old to change their ways.

“Let’s see – 11:15 PM. What would that be in sidereal time?” Steve asked.

“17.32156 hours, today.” Joyce checked the orientation of the telescope, clicked a bit on her computer, and called out the rotation figures.

Steve fetched champagne glasses from a drawer while they waited for the telescope to execute the command. They turned their attention to the monitor. The planet was so far away that it took almost twenty years for the light reflected from it to reach the lens and be transmitted back to Earth. But their equipment snapped pictures so quickly that they were effectively watching live video of the planet’s past.

“Focus in at that lake in the northeast quadrant,” Joyce instructed. “There…”

Joyce and Steve could see what was obviously a group of living humanoids enjoying what appeared in every respect to be an old fashioned Sunday afternoon picnic.

“Here we are,” said Steve, and popped the cork. “We’ll make history on this day.”

“Teens at a lake shore,” Joyce observed. “Yes, I can hear the news vans filling the parking lot now, come to beg for our footage.”

“What a handsome boy standing there underneath the tree, proving our theory. You bet. MTV will probably pirate this video and make a rock icon of him.”

“They will want to wash him up a bit first. What – is that chocolate smeared all over his face?”

“Give the kid a break, Joyce. He’s wiping it off.”

“Oh, and his species has discovered napkins, too. I had feared for his sleeve.”

“When he’s fixed his eyes on that pixie over by the table? Oh, she is a little darling, isn’t she? Were you ever that skinny?”

Joyce pushed at his chair with her foot, but only caused her own chair to roll away. Steve cautioned her, “Careful, dear – I don’t know how well our insurance covers hip replacement.”

Joyce returned to the monitor. “She is cute. I don’t know, though – is he studying her, or the food set out behind her? Look how he’s wolfing down that cake – I don’t know how he can even taste it for worrying about what’s still on the table.”

“He looks like a clever young man – he may be trying to decide if she knows how to bake.”

Joyce said, “I don’t think she made the cake. Aren’t those crumbs of chocolate on her plate, too? Look – there’s still a slice left on the table. Is that devil’s food?”

“Devil’s food? The girl or the cake?” Steve asked. “Oh, it does look good. If that frosting were any thicker it would just slide down onto the platter. Uh oh – look, he’s turning to her. I think he’s making his move.”

“My turn to ask,” said Joyce, “His move on the girl or on the cake? Look how he’s stepping between her and the platter.”

“He wouldn’t bother to wipe his mouth if he were after more cake.”

“He is talking to her. But I don’t know,” she said. “A smooth operator like him would know that a girl could never take a second slice with someone watching her.”

Steve said, “Oh, but there’s always someone watching.” The two astrophysicists exchanged knowing smiles. “Look – what’s he saying to her?”

“Like I can hear from halfway across the universe. Well, I’ll try to read his lips. Hmm… something… look at him motion to the sky with his arm – do you think he knows he’s being watched?”

“He’s telling her that their love is written in the stars,” Steve said.

“Every boy tells every girl that,” said Joyce. “Look, she’s dropping her chin to hide a grin. She’s not buying it.”

“You’re interpreting the data too quickly. Would disbelief make her pink-up like that? Such a pretty face. But a girl who wears white to a picnic – does she look like a young rocket scientist to you? Look, look – he’s reaching for it.”

“For the cake, I hope, and not her,” said Joyce. “He’s going to leave chocolate fingerprints on anything he touches. Oh, look in the eyes of that hungry beast – he’s frightening.”

“Come here, let me put my arms around you. I won’t let that monster get you.”

“Wait,” she said, “No time for kissing. What’s he doing? See – he’s picked up the cake knife.”

“What do you think, Joyce? Are her charms so wanting that he’s taking the last piece for himself, or will the young gentleman serve it to her?

Suddenly the voice of the observatory director broke in from behind them. “Are my two senior scientists making history again.” Studying their monitor, he said, “Hmph. Billions of dollars of equipment – so powerful that it can look back almost to the beginning of time, back to the Big Bang itself – and you two use it to watch your own courtship reflected on the lakes of Vulcan.” But, seeing that there were only two glasses for toasting their success, he turned for the door.

Joyce whispered to Steve, “Oh, if we’re going to watch the Big Bang, we’ll need to recalibrate, and switch to infra-red.”

He replied, “Our theory is proven – every stolen kiss is recorded in the heavens.” As the director pulled the door to, Steve slid the drawer open again and pulled out a box of cherry cordials, adding, “Every secret chocolate, too.”

Robert C Flanders

all rights reserved

Dragons & Virgins

Dragons and virgins belong together in the Western mind. The images as we have them developed together through the Dark Ages. Dragons are quite solitary creatures, usually referred to as ‘she,’ and they have an appetite for virgins.

It’s different in the East. Asian dragons are rather high up in the hierarchy of nature spirits, rather like embodiments of the Greek’s primitive elements of fire, water, earth, and wind. Should nature get out of balance, Asian dragons make catastrophic adjustments to restore harmony, but they are normally more benign than in the West, and serve a natural purpose. The ideas of balance and harmony is captured in the traditional Buddhist symbol – an abstract rendering of two dragons circling each other facing outward, each holding the other’s tale in it’s mouth. The image encapsulates Taoist philosophy of the interplay of Yin and Yang.

Post Roman Europe went quite the opposite way, however. Rather than seeking balance, we incorporated polar extremes in our world view. Dragons and virgins are among these.

When Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, there were about four fundamentally different interpretations of the faith. The religion and its moral code finally became standardized through the ministry and writings of St. Augustine. He had immersed himself in various understandings of Christianity before finally fixing himself on the idea that we humans are utterly corrupt and unworthy of redemption, and totally dependent on the mercy of God, who inexplicably loves us. In particular, Augustine condemned our desire nature as emblematic of our original sin, defying God’s will. And so he preached the ascetic life.

Northern Europeans had dragon myths from pagan times. As these people became Christian, dragons absorbed the quality of being among the last fading remnants of the previous age of earth, a time of magical creatures and sorcerers. Once Europe was Christian, however, the dragon became increasingly reptilian, connected at least unconsciously with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In association with the serpent, the dragon became the subconscious archetype for Eve’s desire nature. The dragon handed down to us is the female libido.

Not all early interpretations of Christianity recognized Jesus as divinity, as One of the Three Persons of God. Augustinian Christianity did, and so Jesus could be perfect, even though men are fundamentally corrupt, because He was God made flesh. That gives support for the hope that at least men are potentially redeemable, but women are different enough that they need a model for holiness, too. Meeting this, Christianity found increasing importance in the virgin birth of Jesus, admitting that in Mary’s likeness a woman could be pure enough that God as the incorporeal Holy Spirit (not the personified Father) would come to her.

Many ancient religions included tales of immaculate conception, varying from visitations by the One (as in Buddha’s conception) to impregnation by any of a family of gods. Alexander the Great is said to have been conceived by a god coming to his mother; being half mortal, half god handily accounted for Alexander’s incredible military and cultural accomplishments, though the legend may have also been a political device to remove the implication of patricide in any complicity he may have had in the assassination of his mother’s husband, the king.

However, the virginity of Mary took on great significance to the Christian world. No element of sex or desire was involved in Jesus’s conception. Had lust played any part, that stain would have been passed on to Jesus in the same way that original sin is passed on to us, and as perfect man, Jesus could not be stained. In this context, one might cast a Freudian eye on what Augustine writes about his mother, and his subsequent adult relationships with women, then consider how the original sin of disobedience to God became fixed to Adam, while at least subconsciously (where it actually has more power) Eve’s sinfulness became identified with her desire nature. Surely the first shame – recognizing that they were naked – became dominantly linked to Eve in Augustine’s thought as he struggled with asceticism.

In the Dark Ages, only first-born sons of the nobility inherited the titles and estates of their fathers. The church hierarchy became the place for other, disenfranchised sons to find a place with many of the trappings of aristocracy. The church became a worldly institution, and reflected a male-dominated feudal culture. The political and social repression of women was extended into religious doctrine, too. The stain of our desire nature was even blacker in the hearts of the lesser humans, women, and could only be redeemable within the bonds of marriage. The ideal for a woman is to be like the Virgin Mary, her passion only for God, and by remaining innocent to be desirable to God.

Feminine passion can be restrained, but not destroyed. Our unconscious sense of it is contained in the dragon. Fittingly, our dragon rests in solitude underground, and can only be approached through a narrow cave opening. Heros can’t resist approaching her, however, because she guards a treasure. That treasure is sometimes said to be precious jewels of the earth, sometimes her own eggs. Our dragon is scaled because of her association with the serpent. We can’t admit she is warm-blooded, and so we recognize her fire as coming from a furnace where a heart should be, and the flames released under pressure as a weapon, rather than any civil use of fire. Yet her fiery breath is not the greatest challenge to the hero-thief; never mind any aversion we may have to reptiles, he finds her hypnotically beautiful, her voice intoxicating.

The virgin and dragon are polar opposites of the mortal aspect of women. The virgin is seen as holy because she hasn’t had worldly experience. That, however, is only Augustinian interpretation of the virgin birth. The simpler is that immaculate conception is evidence that something comes into this world through a woman that is not of this world, but rather of Deity. According to His purposes for us, God sends the heavenly, the divine in the person of a man who walks among us, whether we understand this to be His Son, Jesus, or as in another culture the warrior Alexander. Virgin birth speaks to the heavenly origin of the child thus conceived, not to whether Deity condemns the desires we mortals have for each other.

It’s revealing that the first great dragon story of the Dark Ages, St. George and the Dragon, is almost concurrent with Augustine’s ministry. As Augustine’s preaching of ascetic living spread, a dragon crawled from a well, quite close to Augustine’s homeland in North Africa. The local king tried to placate the beast with livestock, but eventually found himself having to offer his own daughter in sacrifice to save his kingdom. Giving his virgin daughter to the beast would be her death. This image expresses the paternal, Augustinian concept that freeing a woman’s libido leads to her damnation. And the image draws from a father’s emotion that the idealized romance with his daughter is changed forever when she marries.

One needn’t study the legend of St. George and the dragon overmuch to recognize the erotic metaphors. There’s a message in that George declined to marry the princess and moved on to fight other dragons because he had already quieted the flames of her beast outside wedlock – never mind that he introduced himself to the dragon as “a man of pure heart.” The legend encapsulated Dark Ages attitudes toward the feminine libido, and became the standard for dragon lore.

European dragons are evil because they are the feminine libido repressed. This is not to underplay the significance of a woman’s virginity – only that suppression and condemnation of any passion whatsoever in a woman creates an untamed and corrupt monster when it finally does find release. And in the polarized view of the feminine that developed in the Dark Ages, the dragon is usually provoked by men who attempt to steal her treasure.

Sexuality is external to a man, internal to a woman. Our coming together reenacts the divine mystery of the meeting of soul with spirit. To say that Augustinian condemnation of a woman’s passions should be corrected by unbridling the dragon is to invite unknown evils of the opposite extreme, to remold women in the likeness of men. There is a balance to be found. Ideally, when George took the maiden’s belt to tie her dragon’s neck, he should have handed the leash to the princess herself, not to her father. Then the dragon’s beauty could be made manifest to us above ground, expressing her spirit in its natural harmony in this world..

Tiger Milk

There were no windows which opened to the outside world anywhere in the prison, yet even there one could sense that the sun was setting. It wasn’t as easy to block the sounds of the outside community, too, but the warden covered them with elevator music, playing interminably throughout the sterile halls. Intentionally so or not, the hollow music also served to dilute the passions of the inmates. It was the evening prior to Jacob’s execution. This was a twenty first century city, governed by a benevolent aristocracy, and Anna and Brian were there to see to the proper performance of the customs and rituals of the event.

 Brian was Prince of the City. His office was all but fulfilled, his lieutenants having identified, captured, convicted, and imprisoned the monster Jacob; only the execution itself remained. Princess Anna had an equally important function to perform in her capacity as High Priestess. The condemned were offered a last taste of relative freedom and a few hours of normal human experience – as much as could be obtained within the confines of the prison grounds. Indeed, Anna probably originated this tradition; the unity she brought to the city would have been less genuine if it didn’t extend even to death row, and such was the depth of her vision that even the most heinous of human monsters could find no darkness to shield them from her loving gaze.

Whatever the custom’s origin, the damned were indulged their liberty by the temporary transfer of their spirit into another body, and such a thing could only be accomplished with the presence of the Priestess as catalyst. It was more than trivial symbolism that, just as a corrupt soul could be transferred to a healthy host, even so barbaric a thing as an execution could be given a humane skin. The officials and the representatives of the community and the media gathered in the lounge adjacent to the warden’s office before going to meet Jacob for the rituals. The forms of routine were there, but tension betrayed the city’s need for reassurance that the monster had in fact been destroyed.

Brian remarked to Anna, “We’ve never had anyone like Jacob here before. Do you really think the transfer is appropriate for him – I just don’t believe there’s anything human about him at all. It seems too risky.”

Anna answered, “If we don’t reach out to everyone, it’s a little less sincere when we extend to anyone. It’s not ours to judge whether our efforts do or even could bring any good results for another soul.”

 Brian observed that the golden aura about her face gave her a remoteness akin to the Sun – seemingly small in the distance, and yet her light defined everything in the room. Even her eyes were of so transparent a Mediterranean blue that it didn’t always occur to one that they had sight – unless they were caught directly in her gaze and found themselves within the clear depths. The group proceeded solemnly to Jacob’s cell.

Jacob was a serial killer. He wasn’t the ordinary murderer – someone who’s character was weaker than his passions. He wasn’t even the ordinary serial killer. The profile of such monsters is that they’ve sustained some great injury to their psyche, resulting in an emptiness which craves satiation with human blood. They feel a profound lack of intimacy with others, and some demon within them translates that into an issue of Power – never mind that intimacy is of the essence of Beauty. Such wretched souls usually carry some shreds of a normal psyche; it’s voice is too weak to confront their demon directly, but will find some way to signal others – help the police – to recognize their devil and stop him. Jacob didn’t fit the profile. In his late thirties, at first glance one would take him perhaps as a member of some academic community. He had that look of a researcher. In another time he might have found his way into an administrative role at a concentration camp, where he could conduct his experiments of terror on a helpless population. His was no perversion of the beast, but rather of an intellect too abstract, too detached to appreciate any distinction between the hypothetical and the lived experience of his victims. If one found grounds in his particular fascination with doom and dread to speculate that there had indeed been some ancient horror done to a child Jacob, the rational machine which thus developed in compensation was in complete command of the adult psyche.

 And there was only the most remote chance that some fragment of common humanity within him set the wheels in motion for his identification. More likely, he simply got careless, choosing at last a subject with whom he could be connected. Jacob had been administrator at a health club. He’d also taught a yoga class there. In that capacity he’d selected his last target – to all appearances, a healthy, sincere young woman. Master at psychic manipulation, he’d used her fantasies about yoga masters to first tear down her self esteem and then make her utterly dependent upon him to reshape her. With cult-like logic, he’d brought her to willingly participate in a satanic ritual of her own death. The detectives had interviewed Jacob about her simply while gathering background on this latest victim. When they learned from others in her yoga class that she’d had a much more involved relationship with the instructor than he had divulged, they began to examine him more closely, and soon enough became certain that they’d found their killer.

When the prison party approached Jacob, they could see no trace of anxiety in his face. Not exactly amused by the sobriety of the group, it seemed more that his curiosity was aroused by their attitudes, that his intellectual fascination with the human reaction to mortal dread could even include himself as a specimen.

Anna addressed him, “Jacob, you have been condemned by the city. Yet we offer you one last opportunity to live for an hour like a normal man. Do you wish to accept the transfer of your soul into another body?” Anna had that indefinable beauty some few women accomplish which makes it impossible to assign an age to her – she appeared to have the wisdom it takes fifty years to develop, yet there was also something adolescent in her eyes. She makes no demand, yet people behave more decently than their norm in her presence, perhaps because her gaze makes them feel more decent, more beloved.

 Such charm had no effect on Jacob – it doesn’t matter how lovely one might be if another simply lacks the organs of sight. He blinked away his contempt for the word, “normal,” by quipping, “My soul? You still believe in those?” He smirked at the group’s indignation for his disregard of ceremony before confirming, “Yes, I look forward to the transfer.”

 Following protocol, the group walked Jacob to the room where the transfer would take place. Brian showed an inclination to walk ahead, to lead Jacob like he would a whipped dog, but Anna quietly touched his hand, drawing him back to walk alongside the condemned as though he were a peer. Jacob took note of the influence which body language had, both that of Brian and Anna. The procession began, the monster Jacob managing to lead by half a step, Brian to his left, Anna to his right, and the others trailing behind.

The other prisoners lined the corridor outside their cells, witnessing that the damned was indeed receiving his promised right. Normally the hallway had that clean, anemic brightness of whitewashed concrete block, but the thick rows of convicts on each side darkened the passage, giving it the atmosphere of a decaying tunnel beneath some ancient castle.

Passing Winston, Jacob said to him in a matter-of-fact tone, “Look out for strangers – once I’m in the other body, I’m going to seek you out and cut your throat.”

Winston was just another inmate, and had probably done nothing to earn Jacob’s disfavor, or even his notice. Jacob simply selected him with the randomness of a researcher taking an arbitrary rat from a cage on whom to study the psychic effect of impending doom. Winston was quite a large and powerfully built black man who had always possessed confidence in his ability to defend himself. But all the populace knew that Jacob was no ordinary felon, that if he made a threat it was certain to be fulfilled. Even as they shuddered for Winston, they felt personal relief to be passed over.

Anna ushered Jacob into the room where the ritual was to take place. The one who’d offered to be host body was alone in an adjacent room – it offered some measure of privacy to the volunteer in so intimate a procedure that the damned didn’t meet his host prior to the transfer. Brian, the other officials, and the reporters walked around the corner to the observation room on the other side.

 Such was the authenticity of Anna’s priesthood that the damned would usually enter their trance as soon as they stepped into this room – the mere suggestion of what she would accomplish was credible enough of itself to accomplish the task. But, developed and hardened personality that he was, it took longer with Jacob. He looked about the room, noting the feminine taste in the burgundy chair and matching divan. Lavish as they were in so ascetic an environment, they were appropriate to the service of the Priestess, and her furnishings somehow always fit naturally in their setting. After Jacob elected to assume his place reclining on the couch, she took her seat. With a final glance telling her that he was choosing to submit to her spell rather than succumbing to it, he closed his eyes.

 Anna began to chant. Her voice was gentle, timeless, and crystal-clear. It filled the space between them. Imperceptibly, his heart adopted the pace of her tambourine. There was just an anxious moment in which he drowned in the air which had just left her lungs, and her melody dissolved into his bloodstream. Her golden silhouette became orange through his closed eyelids. Jacob entered trance.

Opening his eyes again after an eternal moment, he knew that he had successfully transferred; he was now in the adjacent room. He felt heavy at first – clumsy while his will settled more completely into this host body and learned its coordination. Oddly, his host had been lying on his stomach during the transfer. He felt the presence of his host’s personality, contained and sleeping in a corner of this foreign psyche. The presence was more distinct than Jacob had anticipated, but he dismissed it as simply part of the alien experience. In Anna’s city there was always some altruistic soul with a sense of civic duty and tradition sufficient that he would volunteer to be host. Not a trait which Jacob respected.

 Brian led the gallery back around to Jacob’s door once they’d witnessed the transfer, and opened the door to usher Jacob back out into the hallway. Anna joined them to walk back past the other prisoners who were still in their ranks along the walls, witnesses now to the completion of the rite. The procession maintained the ceremonial dignity of silence, and Jacob hadn’t yet tested his voice in this new body. He took note that the reverence the prisoners accorded Anna now had a touch of awe, a murmur even of fear, seeing what she had accomplished.

In a movement so swift that Brian had to take a second look at its consequences to be certain of what he’d seen, Jacob turned and slashed Winston’s throat as he passed him. As though they’d already accepted the inevitability of this, other than the initial shock there was only minimal reaction among either the procession or the inmates. Winston dropped to his knees, his moan muffled in the gurgle of blood in his trachea.

 Brian motioned silently to a pair of guards to take Winston to the prison clinic for what care could be provided. Anna took note of the depth of Jacob’s darkness. There were no guidelines as to how to respond to a criminal act by someone during the hosting. The transfer was to be of such short duration, and confined within the prison compound, that such a thing simply wasn’t anticipated. It didn’t even evoke Brian’s police instincts. Winston was just an inmate, after all, not someone with citizenship and its concordant rights within the community. In any event, the demands of ritual during this time kept any reaction suppressed – Jacob was in his evening of liberty and would be indulged.

The public formalities observed, the prisoners were for once anxious to return to their cells, and the procession left Jacob alone in his liberty. Had the damned any family or friends, he would be allowed a visit – even a conjugal visit – but Jacob had no such connections, and was free to just prowl about the prison grounds as he wished.

Brian waited in the lounge for Anna to spend her moment with Winston. When she returned, he said, “We’ll never agree about capital punishment. I understand your perspective, that all belong to the One Spirit, and all are valuable to Her in a way that we mortals can’t understand. But surely Jacob is the best example yet that, if indeed we are all One, such an element as he within the Spirit surely contaminates us all, and shouldn’t be suffered to live.”

Anna answered, “I understand your perspective, too, that the ideal should bend its knee to the sometimes harsh realities of this world. I have no argument in defense of his life. It’s not Jacob, but rather the next to be accused who concerns me. Practical justice is decided by men, and so long as that’s true there will always be room for error and corruption to slip in, for the spoken legalisms to conceal mortal judgements based on personal malice, envies, politics, or prejudice. Whatever you argue is accomplished in the execution of the guilty, it seems impossible to balance the death of ten corrupt souls against risking even one innocent. Yet, even if we disagree, I don’t compete during the performance of your office.”

Jacob was acclimating to his host. He began to appreciate the power and grace of this body, and entertained a certain respect for the host who’d developed it. He’d never intended to surrender the body back to its owner. Others among the damned may have also had such fantasies, but their relationship with the body would soon begin to deteriorate – within a few hours they would feel it as a growing sleepiness, and when they awoke they would do so in their own bodies, to wait out their final moments. Such was the cohesion of Jacob’s personality, however, that he had the strength to sustain his integration within his host, probably even through sleep.

It hadn’t occurred to him that the attributes of his host might affect him, and yet the very style with which this body seemed inclined to move impressed him that the influence of body and soul could be reciprocal. He’d intended to resume his old way of life once he’d taken possession of his host. And he would be free of the legal system because the penalties of law applied to his old body, not this, and there’d never been occasion for the government to prepare a response to the theft of a host body.

But he recognized a primitive attitude at some instinctive level within his flesh that he realized would make him different in some way. It wasn’t the personality of his host – he could sense that safely bottled up by the mysteries of the Priestess. No – Jacob began to appreciate that consciousness was bidirectional. There was indeed some spiritual something which could form an affinity for a body, yet was independent of it – not just his restrained host, but Jacob was himself obviously some such thing which had been moved from his old body to this. But there was also that consciousness of an entirely different character which rose up organically from his new genes. As he was only just now integrating within this body, it was quite noticeable to him – an instinctive and powerful awareness, clearly indued with the passions and the motivations of life. In some ways his host body was like himself, except that this flesh had none of that abstract curiosity with which Jacob had so perversely toyed with his victims. No, this consciousness was immediate – too primitive to be self-conscious, but distinctly aware of its own internal needs and the relevance of what it sensed in the environment through which Jacob now strolled. And it felt good to walk – as though it were his feet grabbing the Earth’s skin which powered the planet in its daily spin.

Acutely aware of this unexpected element in the transfer, it was thus less startling that it might have been when Jacob’s thought, searching through this flesh, realized that his host was a tiger. No – a tigress, because she – they – were pregnant. He felt the fetus within himself, felt the instincts which developed and nourished it. Of course he’d assumed that his host would be a man – not that much was ever said or written about the liberty of the damned, but in fact he’d never heard it specified that the condemned would be indulged his freedom in a human body. Past the initial surprise, Jacob felt a wave of respect, even admiration, for the choice the Priestess had made for him. Now he had a label for the instinctive consciousness of his new body. The High Priestess must understand him quite well to blend him into a creature of such power and majesty that she was a law unto herself, that morality was at last dismissed as simply whatever interested him. In the end, his diabolic experiments with people had left him dissatisfied – people bored him with their preoccupations with yesterday and anxieties about tomorrow, with the petty worries about their ties with others – family, friends, work. Now a tigress, he was Nietzsche’s Superman, and all reality was defined in terms of his thought, his fascinations.

 Brian was becoming restless in the lounge. “The transfer should have been over hours ago. I warned you that Jacob was like no other we’ve ever imprisoned here. I don’t think he’s going to surrender his host. It’s past time – we should go find him.”

 Anna said, “The tradition doesn’t allow us to interfere with his liberty.”

 ”And yet the hour of his execution approaches. What will be the consequences if he does not return?”

Anna answered, “The time and your duty are clear. Your law makes no allowance for these circumstances.”

 And so the execution was uneventfully performed on Jacob’s comatose body at the appointed time.

 Jacob stretched out atop the wall next to a guard tower. He looked into the streets below, into the rough, decaying neighborhood around the prison. It occurred to him that he would need to find an abandoned house – somewhere he could deliver his cub, safe from the neighborhood dogs during his hour of vulnerability. He thought contentedly of the days and weeks ahead, of nursing his cub, the life flowing from his breast to its hungry mouth. He looked about for a route down to the street, realizing that he shouldn’t take the leap the tigress would normally accomplish quite easily, for fear of jarring the developing cub too violently.

That last protective impulse jolted Jacob back into a more familiar sense of who he was. He couldn’t resist these maternal instincts, yet they repulsed him even while coursing through his mind. His old self wanted to continue his experiments, to dissect life, yet now he also hungered for experience, and to live. The self-giving instinct of this animal consciousness was something Jacob could not abide. Life had become important – not specifically his life, but life itself, now flowing through him into another. The attitude inhered in the flesh itself, in its genes, and could not be driven out so long as it comprised a living organism. Jacob could not endure becoming such a creature, and so while he still could he chose to let himself drift away, drift to sleep and surrender his host. His revulsion at the feelings that were becoming his outweighed even his certainty that his own body no longer lived. Jacob found it preferable to resign himself and dissipate into nothingness. As if this spirit of darkness could choose to ignore the first rays of sunrise penetrating him at the last.

Brian had stayed with Anna throughout the night, anxious about the outcome of Jacob’s transfer. At dawn they walked to the cafeteria together for breakfast. He said, “As worried as I was about the transfer, it made the execution itself that much easier – my staff was spared having to look into the living eyes of the man they were strapping to the table.”

 Anna had been notably quiet throughout the night. She had probably remained linked in some way to the transfer, so long as it was sustained. Now that it was over, Brian noticed that her skin was becoming luminous again. How lovely she was. Wishing to change to a less formal, more personal conversation with her, he said, “What are you drinking, anyway? You seem to be really enjoying it.”

 Her eyes sparkling and lips straining to conceal wisdom’s mischief, she replied, “Tiger milk.”

Robert C. Flanders

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