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Thoughts on The Impossibility of Love in Advance of St. Valentine's Day

Disclaimer: The only perspective I can offer is one colored by X and Y chromosomes, and accordingly flawed. Much as I wish I could slip into a pair of Louboutin pumps, shimmy into a VS camisole, and feel for one night what it's like to be adored, I am helplessly male, and heterosexual, to boot. Therefore, I invite women and those of all sexual predilections to challenge, question, and counter my thesis.

I would love to be proven wrong.

Depth psychologists urge us to discover and explore our "personal myths," that is, those timeless stories and archetypes that lurk like long blue shadows behind the drama of our own lives. In most matters of existence, this works pretty well to lend a longer view. At various stages of life, I have felt myself to be Sisyphus, Job, Pan, Theseus, and on really good days, Dionysus. But the therapy fails when it comes to love. All the great myths and legends of l'amour recount passions that are short-lived and inevitably tragic. Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise, to name just a few. And I think this is for good reason. After many years of utterly non-scientific observation, I've come to the sad conclusion that the good stuff, i.e., genuine, world-shaking, soul-deep love is, to use a fashionable (and increasingly tiresome) term, unsustainable beyond a period of 83 days--roughly three menstrual cycles--the approximate length of time for which a woman's libido can remain congruent with her stratagems.

Not long ago, during a time when I was feeling especially wrecked by love, a smart, secure and enormously attractive Jewish lady friend of mine made the observation that while she had found a way to be "in love with life," I was "in love with love." As with many such pronouncements, delivered with the best and sincerest of intentions, there was a hint of reproach. Her way was better than mine. She was the grown-up and I was Peter Pan. But I could no more alter my condition than I could change the color of my eyes, and she...she was simply verbalizing the biological imperative of her gender.

From my experience, limited as it is by caste, family history, and physical endowment, no woman ever falls in long-term love with the actual, physically embodied, materially extended man so much as with the aspirations she attaches to him. He will "give her a better life," "take her to interesting places," "enrich her existence," "father her children," "illuminate her mind," "fulfill her desires." And as long as the physical actuality of the man is in synch with these projections (the 83 days), there will be bliss. This is the origin of the misogynistic "gold digger" myth. But no woman is really a "gold digger." Women are nobler than that. It's a life secure from want they are digging for. Women are just different versions of survivor, some of a higher order than others.

And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children's gratitude or woman's love.
--W.B. Yeats

The reasons for this have and will provide material for supposition in dozens of books on evolutionary psychology. For any man intrepid enough to explore the subject, there are humbling stats on "sperm competition," the "functionality of orgasm" (it's more intense and more likely to encourage fertilization with a tall dark stranger than a familiar), and the enduring erotic appeal of cads. But I think it comes down to a pretty simple calculus. It seems to me that a woman's love-sight is more teleological, i.e., more calibrated to future than present, more focused on what a man can promise than on who and what he is in the present, living moment. The man himself, in a somatic sense, doesn't exist. If you doubt me, go back and read Jane Austen. Even in a hot confessional like "The Surrender," the paean to the transformative glories of anal sex written by former Balanchine ballet dancer, Toni Bentley, the male figure is an identity-less agent of the author's epiphany, known only as "A-Man" (A for ass, I guess) The story is all about where he takes her. There is not a word about his eyes, his arms, his torso, his voice, or even his taste in movies.

In stark contrast, men fall in love--and often remain in love--with the physical immediacy, the tangible reality--of the woman, and never tire of extolling the wonders of her eyes, her hair, her breasts, her laugh, her walk, her tenderness. And they will see these qualities equally in the lowborn and the high, the classy and the classless, the stars and the gutter. There is rarely any thought given to "prospects," except with a certain kind of man who "marries up" and whose wife's temperature is usually only a few degrees above hypothermia. "Of Human Bondage," "The Prince and the Showgirl," Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, "Kane Marries 'Opera Singer'." It is beauty that slays the beast. Men are constantly being "leveled" by love, even abased. And in case you're inclined to the reductionist view that this is all because "with men it's just physical," bear in mind that romantics from Ovid to Scott Fitzgerald were as likely to worship a woman's voice, the tilt of her head, or the mischief in her eyes as the curve of her ass.

The most popular "women's television shows" of recent years have been "Sex and the City" and "Desperate Housewives." Oughta tell you something. Carrie Bradshaw has to be the most un-erotic character ever to stride across the screen in Manolo Blahniks, and yet she is adored by women (and, for some reason, gay men). Her sex is all about ratings and metrics and "is her or isn't he 'the One'." Other than Samantha, the women are bloodless. Are there truly any women like the lead in John Fowles' "French Lieutenant's Woman," who love because they can't help themselves, or is that a 19th century male fantasy?

I can remember the electro-chemical charge from every inner thigh my fingers have ever danced across and every pair of lips I have ever kissed. I can remember the texture and contour of every nipple. I can remember the warmth and the smell that every woman exudes from that lovely place just beneath the earlobe. I love the whole woman the way the French love making a meal of the whole animal. But I can't help but wonder if I am remembered by any woman in the same way. It seems to me that women do not love so much as aspire to love. I suppose what I'm asking for is to be loved by a woman the way a woman is loved by a man. Maybe, just maybe, this isn't possible.

I've been married twice, both "long-term" attachments. From each, I've received my 83 days, and the hope of reprise kept me in the nest a whole lot longer. I don't regret them. They were the best 166 days of my life. But just once, I would love to be loved for something essential and enduring: the taper of my fingers, the arch of my neck, the small of my back, the sound of my voice, the mayhem in my eyes. These things remain despite the rise and fall of fortunes. They endure long after the "thrill" is gone, and long after I have proven myself not to be Prince Charming, but just a man in love with love.

At somewhere around the age of 10, via grade school science class, we are first introduced to Sir Isaac Newton, alchemist, physicist, world-shaker. Of course, the thing that Newton is best know for--the first formal attempt to quantify "action" and "force" in the universe--will by then have been part of our experience of the world for a decade (maybe longer, if you count our nine months in utero). Like all true Renaissance men, Newton was an enormously expansive thinker, but his essential discovery would have leant itself well to the age of the internet and the notion of knowledge in a blink, because it can be reduced to his Three Laws of Motion. 1) in order for something to move, a force has to act upon it; 2) there is a relationship between how much force something has and how much mass and acceleration it has (think of a six-ton truck with failed brakes coming at you you down a 30% grade). The first two laws are no-brainers, a quantification of the self-evident. But the Third Law of Motion is a bit more counter-intuitive, as many great discoveries (e.g., the rotation of the earth) seem to be. The third law states that anytime force is applied, an equal and opposite force responds. This means, quite literally, that when you push on the wall, the wall pushes back. When you pull on the rope, the rope pulls back on you.

Now, here's my ten-cent epiphany: if you truly understand Newton's Third Law, you understand just about everything. Why dogs pull against the leash. Why people tend more to argue than agree. Why women tend at first to resist the act of love, and why pleasure is inseparable from resistance. Why nothing is ever really easy.

Newton's Third Law goes a long way to explaining karma, too. For example, I have recently found myself the recipient of some good career news, coming almost directly out of one of the most stressful periods in my professional life. The specific action that created the good news is almost inconceivable without the preceding action that brought the bad news. The linkage isn't always this tight, but eventually, if someone pushes on you, you are going to push back. Knowing this makes things like getting dumped by the love of your life a little easier to bear. Newton isn't telling us that we're going to "even the score." The Third Law isn't about revenge. It's about how Nature seeks to equalize force. Nature is the great leveler.

The Third Law is the only possible explanation for the utterly surreal spectacle of the Republican presidential campaign. Who the hell are these people, and where on earth did they come from? Michelle Bachmann? Really? Herman Cain? Seriously? Rick Perry? Not a chance, unless the Republicans decide to nominate Elmer Gantry. What we're seeing this year is only possible as a massive reaction to the force of the Obama election, and specifically, its psychic impact on a certain type of nativist American personality. If not for the blowback from the rise to power of a mixed-race intellectual (and a Hawaiian, no less), we would be seeing a far saner Republican field: John Thune, Mitch Daniels, even Chris Christie. But those guys, I suspect, intuitively understand Newton's Third Law, and know that this is not their time. They'll wait for the forces to equalize and run in 2016. And speaking of forces being equalized, look at poor Herman Cain. Years ago, he pushed. Now the ladies are pushing back.

Newton's Laws, of course, operate in the world of what is called Classical Mechanics. In that world, it's possible to determine exactly where a billiard ball will go if it is hit by another billiard ball at a particular velocity and from a particular angle. If only it were that easy with sex, politics, and human history. These realms tend to operate, or be operated upon, equally in the domain of quantum mechanics, where the indeterminacy principle rules, and there aren't "laws" so much as a vast array of probabilities, some of them leading, perhaps, to alternate universes. Herman Cain may be elected president in one of those universes, but I strongly suspect it won't be the one I'm writing from right now. And even in the quantum world, nature seeks a balance. There is exactly as much negative energy in the universe as there is positive energy. So, if you're looking for a rule of thumb in life, you could do far worse than Sir Isaac's #3.

I was raised by a woman who found pretty much any expression of human cruelty intolerable. My mother could be mordant, even caustic when she was in her cups, but she was incapable of cruelty. When she was on the receiving end of it, as was often the case with my grandmother, an embittered and petulant woman, she responded each time with stunned disbelief, as if to say, "this cannot be happening." When she witnessed it in the world, as in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama or in the jungles of Vietnam, she did not shield me from it, but made sure to remind me that "man's inhumanity to man" was an aberration, practiced by people of poor breeding and inferior character. Thugs. When I came home in tears because someone on the playground had called me a fairy, a flake, a foreigner, or in the Midwestern parlance of those times, "a femme," she assured me that I was the better person, and due to my forbearance, had gotten the better end of the encounter. A soft answer turneth away wrath. There was no father in the household, no one like the Brad Pitt character in "A Tree of Life" to take me aside and whisper the harsh truth that although my mother was a good soul, the world itself was a hard place, survivable only by hard people. There was only mother, floating beneath the leafy boughs.

Needless to say, I grew up lacking certain survival skills, and to this day, common cruelty dumbfounds me almost as much as it did my mother. When I heard the Republican debate audience jeering the gay soldier and cheering Rick Perry's execution record, I felt less as if I were watching people of a different political persuasion than creatures of an entirely different species. When, not too long ago, I found myself the victim of academic skulduggery at the college where I've been teaching, it took me months just to absorb the fact that trusted colleagues do, in fact, behave like characters on "Damages" or "Desperate Housewives." I can't stand competitive sports other than those where the athletes are competing against themselves (hence my love for running. climbing, jumping things and loathing for anything that involves a ball). From my perspective, "Project Runway" and "Top Chef" are exercises in cruelty, and hearing Donald Trump say "You're Fired" makes my skin crawl.

For the past six weeks, I've been out of work, and for the year prior to that, my family has struggled with what the economists politely call "contraction." We live in a nice condo building in Lincoln Park which happens to have astronomically high homeowners dues, and recently, we've fallen behind and become the object of some scorn from the condo board. On that same board sits a thirty-something commodities broker with a square jaw, cornfed torso, and the same Marine buzzcut that my dreaded high school gym teacher, Bif Kreiger, used to sport. His condo sits two floors directly above our patio and my beloved jacuzzi (which, thanks to his efforts, is no longer swimsuit optional), and he's made it abundantly clear in the past that he finds my smoking on the patio noxious, notwithstanding my insistence that there's a far higher concentration of particulate matter in the typical gust of Chicago air than in the tiny filaments of cigarette smoke that might find their way into his third floor window. Last night, however, armed with the authority of his position as secretary of the condo board and no doubt predatorily sniffing out my weakened state, he decided to make his true contempt known.

In the dark of night, he appeared suddenly on my patio, a voice from the hedge demanding, "So when the fuck are you moving out, anyway?" When I suggested this might not be a great conversation starter, he responded with the cry of the verbally impotent everywhere: "Fuck you. Fuck you and your fucking smoking" "I said, "I want you to leave my patio, now." Then he gave me his best shot. "You little faggot," he spat, loving the way it sounded on his lips. "You little fuckin' pussy. Just come 'n try me." "I'm giving you one minute," I said, "and then I'm calling the police." That's when he delivered the coup de grace. "You sorry broke-ass motherfucker." I must have gone slack-jawed and all dumb-faced the way my mother did when my grandmother called her a whore or a worthless floozy. because he propped his hands on his hips, gave me an idiot's grin, and boasted, "Yeah. That's right. I said it." The only thing from the playground bully's repertoire he didn't add was, "And what're you gonna do about it?" Instead, he backed away, hissing, " We don't want you in our fuckin' building. Faggot."

Now, as everyone who knows me knows, I am a dyed-in-the-wool hetero. I'm still trying to figure out what people liked about Madonna, let alone Lady Gaga. I generally don't like to sit next to men in economy class because their pheromones give me the willies. And I fall in love with practically every woman who says, "Hey, there" to me. But at this moment, I stand proudly in the lineage of all those who've ever been told, "We don't want your kind around here." At this moment, I am proud to be a faggot.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer” -- D.H. Lawrence

It snowed 20" in Chicago this week. The city shut down for the better part of two days. Being the type who habitually looks for the romantic in even the bleakest circumstances, I decided it would be a good time to break out the cross-country skis I'd purchased before leaving L.A. in order to take full advantage of the heartland's winter wonderland. Until this week, opportunities to use them had been infrequent.

Skiing down Cleveland St. in upscale Lincoln Park, face against the wind, lost in some daydream of myself as Dr. Zhivago or Admiral Perry, a horn blared behind me. It had the timbre of the claxons on those big Ford or GMC pick-ups, so I sidled over as quickly as I could to let it pass. "'the Fuck!" the driver growled. "Whaddaya want me to do, asshole? Follow you?" And as he spun past, spitting slush, it hit me again for the thousandth time:

Most Americans aren't romantics. Never were. Never will be.

No, the American people--that great body of corpulent flesh, clenched muscle, and acid reflux--the same body that presidents and pundits are obliged to call "wise," "patient," and "generous," are mostly big jerks. Poor Barack Obama. He's trying to "connect" with them, but he doesn't really have a clue. He's so obviously refined, so clearly of a different species that it's no wonder the Birthers think he was born somewhere else.

I first noticed what has come to be called "the coarsening of American culture" with the coming-of-age of the generation born in the mid to late Sixties, the kids who were bitter about having missed the era of free love and compensated by making their girlfriends wear Frederick's of Hollywood bustiers and respond to questions like, "Who's Your Daddy?" But it isn't a generational thing, and truth be told, people my age bear more than their share of responsibility. Martin Scorsese, for instance. Credit where credit is due: he is one of the half a dozen greatest filmmakers of his age. What I can't forgive him for is making Joe Pesci not only a star, but an icon.

Nothing against Joe personally. Anybody who could play the rattiest character ever on screen--conspirator David Ferrie in "JFK"--is probably a truly self-aware guy. No, it's the Scorsese characters he raised to apotheosis and who now sound exactly like the dude in the next office cubicle. Lowlifes. Thugs. In short, assholes.

We are swimming in assholes these days. And, believe me, not all of them are men. Take Nancy Grace, for instance. Or Michelle Bachmann. And if you want someone from the left end of the spectrum, Keith Olbermann. Oh, wait. He's a guy. Well, those of you in Hollywood can look at any number of women running major production companies. They all lay on their horns when something gets in their way, swear like sailors, and generally fit the description of the nastiest characters played by Barbara Stanwyck in 40's and 50's B-movies.

Everybody talks like a gangster these days. I remember once hearing Michael Eisner, who was raised on Park Ave and attended prep school, say of a recalcitrant producer, "Fuck 'im. He's a dead man." Right, Michael. Now say it in Compton with the Mouseketeer hat on. Not only are we fascinated by Tony Soprano--we IDENTIFY with him, and with his long-suffering wife who knows her husband kills people and continues to sleep with him. And then there are the characters who populate Judd Apatow films, such as any played by Seth Rogen, surely one of the least charming men ever to loom from the silver screen. "Why? Why? Why?" I kept asking myself throughout "Knocked Up," would she sleep with him? Maybe it goes back to Andrew Dice Clay. I remember a very bright and attractive young woman telling me that she thought the Diceman was "honest about male-female relationships."

Really? Silly me. I thought the way to get a woman into bed was with charm, wit, erudition, and maybe a little bit of worship. You know: chivalry. Lest you think that I'M the one who's envious now--that is, of the guys who can score by texting drunken booty calls at 2 in the morning--let me set the record clear. If I could use a text message to get laid, believe me, I would. But it would probably say something like: "I can't stop thinking about you." I wonder. Would a twenty-four year-old woman even respond to that now, or would it be too subtle, like the inability of people who pour hot sauce on everything to taste the cherry and rose blossom in Pinot Noir?

No, I'm not letting gansta rap or the elevation of pimpdom to masculine paragon off the hook. They've played their part. But it's white American pop culture that drove a lot of it. If Al Pacino hadn't looked so natty in his fedora in "The Godfather" or said, "Say hello to my leetle friend" in "Scarface," I'm not sure NWA would have hit so close to the American sweet spot. We like cons. We like bad boys and bad girls. We like self-made kingpins.

And that's all right by me--as long as the cons and kingpins have class. As long as they know how to treat a lady, order something besides a hamburger, and punctuate a sentence. This ties into the current rage on the right against cultural "elites." Another example of the mainstreaming of the lowbrow aesthetic (if it can even be called an aesthetic!) George W. Bush and Sarah Palin have actually TRADED ON their ignorance. Hey, dimwit: to be in the elite of one's profession, craft, or calling is a GOOD thing. What the Founding Fathers you claim to so revere wanted was for every American citizen to both aspire to and be eligible for membership in the "elite."

But, in her heart of hearts, I doubt that even Sarah Palin would want Bristol to marry an ignorant jerk. And maybe one day it will be stylish again to be "cultivated." In the meantime, it's really no surprise to me that neither the Eqyptians nor any of the world's aspiring people look to America as the hope of civilization. We created "Jersey Shore." In fact, if the progressive elite wants to understand the rabid, frothing, incoherent anger of someone like Glenn Beck, it might look to the despicable characters it has created as dramatic avatars of its dark side. The Glenn Becks of the world don't get the irony, and can only return the poison in kind. Along with the recent calls for a "new civility," I'd like to offer a "new chivalry." In the old sense of the word, we should "suffer" to be kind to one another. It should hurt to be in love, and we should wear hairshirts when we do something awful. And if you encounter a crazy romantic on skis in the middle of the road, honk gently. He'll move.

If you boil it down to the vapors, Christmas is a ghost story. Charles Dickens knew that, didn't he? It's also a mystery, although not the sort Sue Grafton writes. Mystery with a capital M. Spiritual noir. And like all good noir and most good ghost stories, the Christmas story is also a cautionary tale. A tale about what happens if we deny the poor wayfaring strangers room at the inn, or fail to set a place at the table for the Uninvited Guest.

The legend of the Uninvited Guest is one of my favorite Yuletide spook stories. Like "The Woman In White/​Hitchhiker Ghost" story thread, it's universal and comes in many versions. The gist of it is this: an unexpected knock comes at your door on a bleak Midwinter's Eve (or any suitably inclement night). A stranger stands on the threshold, often in rags, a soiled hoodie, or some garment that not only provides inadequate protection against the elements but identifies him as coming from "somewhere else"--maybe even another world. There is something unsettling about him. If you're white, he could be black; if you're rich, he's probably poor. If it's a modern variant of the story, his car may have broken down and he needs to make a phone call. In any case, he's the last person you want to let into your house at this hour of the night. But all he asks is a little shelter from the storm. Reluctantly, you allow him to enter, on the condition that his stay is brief.

Time passes with little conversation. The shivering stranger sits by the fire rubbing his hands, but can't seem to get warm. For one reason or another, you take pity, offer him a blanket, and permit him to spend the night on your floor. It's a risk--after all, he could rob you blind or murder you in your sleep--but some mysterious force compels your generosity. When you awake in the morning, he is gone, but has left something wonderful behind. Perhaps a sack of gold coins, perhaps the money to pay for your operation, maybe a pair of concert tickets, or maybe just an aura of grace. Whatever the case, you know who the stranger was. It was Jesus. Or St. Nicholas. Or Bruce Springsteen. There are versions of the story with all of those and more. You are changed by this encounter, and from then on, you set an extra place at your table, just in case he should happen by again.

Common to every variant of the story is the uncanny and slightly threatening mien of the stranger. I'm not an expert on folklore, but my hunch is that this tale may go all the way back to the Jewish dybbuk legends, where the dybbuk is a disembodied soul in search of a body to attach himself to for one more crack at living a good life. The later version might be a New Testament spin on this, wherein Christian charity overcomes the fear of being possessed and delivers a boon. Whatever the case, I think the story captures the essence of Christmas.

Let me tell you two true stories. One happened to me, and the other was related to me by Laurent Eyquem, a terrific French film composer who has recently moved to Los Angeles. Both are Christmas ghost stories.

Once, on a bitter Christmas Eve, I drove out to western Maryland from my home in Washington, D.C., in search of a part I needed to repair my furnace. The supplier was located in a strip mall in the boonies, and I'd failed to check on the store hours. En route, a ferocious winter storm blew in from the north, dropping the temperature nearly twenty degrees and bringing blizzard conditions. When I finally found the strip mall, I wandered for what seemed a long time in driving snow, looking for the shop, which turned out to be closed and dark. Moreover, the entire strip mall was closed, the parking lot deserted, not a soul anywhere. In the blizzard, it took at least fifteen minutes to find my way back to the car, cursing all the way. Stupidly, I'd worn only a pullover, and the temperature was now just above zero. The worst was yet to come: due to the sudden change in temperature, the locks on every single door of my car had frozen solid, and I could not get in. After ten minutes of trying, my fingers were as blue as the twilight snow, and I began to panic. The parking lot might as well have been Siberia, and "D.C. Man Dies In Snowstorm Fifty Yards From Shelter" was the headline I saw in my mind's eye. That was when he appeared, materializing right out of the raging blizzard. My angel. He was dressed even more poorly than me--a short-sleeved t-shirt and a worn zip-up hoodie is what I remember--and had a few days growth of beard and very little meat on his bones. He was no more than twenty-five. He saw the fear on my face, flashed me a wide, gap-toothed smile, and held aloft the instrument of salvation: a Bic lighter. He went to work immediately, using his scrawny body to deflect the wind while with flick after flick after flick of the lighter he warmed my car key up little by little. With each degree of heat, he'd slip the key into the lock, wiggle it, and wait in hopes that the mechanism had thawed. He had no gloves, no hat, no boots, and no reason to risk his own well-being. After twenty agonizing minutes, the lock finally gave. "Let me get the car started," I said, "and I'll drive you home. God bless you, man. I owe you big time. Jump in." But he did not jump in, and when after the ignition had wheezily turned over and I went to look for him, he had disappeared back into the blizzard, asking no thanks and expecting no reward. Wherever you are, friend, God bless you.

The story Laurent told me (and which I hope he won't mind me relating) takes place on a deserted two-lane highway in the winter woods of northern Maine. He was at his wit's end, down to his last dollar and his last gallon of gas, illegally in the country and hell-bent for the Canadian border, driving 88 mph and half-hoping that an icy curve would end his misery. Kind of like George Bailey with a French accent, believing he was "worth more dead than alive." Everything that could have gone wrong in his life had gone wrong. He saw the cherrytops in his rearview mirror and gradually slowed to pull over for the Maine Highway Patrol, resigned to his fate. Without a proper visa or driver's license, he was headed for at least one night in jail. The patrolman was alone, and seemed barely old enough to drive himself. A frail, skinny kid who was dressed more like a homeless person than a state cop. "Do you know how fast you were going?" he asked. "You could have been killed and left your little girl an orphan." There's mystery number one. There was no little girl in the car, but there was, indeed, a little girl. "May I see your license?" A few tense minutes passed as the young cop examined the French license. "They spelled your name wrong," he finally said, handing the license back. "It's missing the 'y'." There's mystery number two. The cop, of course, had no way of knowing the proper spelling of the driver's name. "Slow down and live," the young cop said. "And Merry Christmas." When Laurent checked his rearview mirror before pulling off the side of the road, the patrol car had vanished, and the snow had already covered the tire tracks.

Keep the door open to the otherworld. You never know who might walk in. Especially at this time of year.

Sometimes a snapshot is all you need to see, and sometimes a blurt is all you need to hear. When Congressman Randy Neugebauer shouted "Baby Killer!" at the dramatic peak of last Sunday's health care debate, he not only defined his movement, but his sub-species. If and when video replay becomes available, I expect to see the congressman with hand cupped to mouth as if at some savagely contested youth sporting event. If Neugebauer had a grandson playing middle school soccer, he'd be one of those leaping from the bleachers to berate the coach. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that babies annoy the hell out of him. Rep. Randy and his cohorts in the Tea Party and Patriot movements are deeply, deeply unhappy people.

The debate over health insurance reform has laid bare the great schism in American society. I don't mean Democrat vs. Republican--although those labels have now become emblematic--or left and right, or even the collective vs. Ayn Rand's cult of the sovereign individual. The split I'm referring to is Eros v. Thanatos. The life force versus the death urge. Love against nihilism. Curled like a tapeworm within the worldview of a Randy Neugebauer is a more startling and terrifying kind of identity politics, a politics which--I'll venture to say--issues not just from nurture but from nature and maybe even from a particular human genotype. Let's bring back a great old English word to describe this genotype: these, the Randy Neugebauers of our world, are the Misbegotten. The misborn, or rather, those poor, unfortunate souls who carry a recessive gene of suspicion, deep down in their corroded hearts, that they should never have been brought into a place as nasty and brutish as the world, and that if they have, then, by God, they may as well be just as nasty and brutish. Their battle is with the world itself, the whole sweaty, steaming, yearning mass of it, because they do not feel at all comfortable here. Just beneath the topmost layer of their skin lies an affliction, a prickliness that becomes inflamed when the lives of the grateful born entwine with theirs. By grateful born, I don't mean well-born, or "chosen," or even biologically selected. I mean those who think that life is, all things considered, a pretty good deal, and that it's generally a better deal if its bounty is shared by all.

"Government takeover." "Socialism." "Hand-out." "Humanist." And from the same snarling mouths, "Nigger," "Fag," "Communist." "Freeloader." Nothing new here. Nothing that wasn't heard during the days of the civil rights movement, or before that, The New Deal, or before that, the Reconstruction. All code words for contempt, all semphore for "Thou Shalt Not Cast My Lot With Theirs." My take on Barack Obama is that he's just a guy who wants to use his transitory power to make things a little less harsh for the rest of us, because he is one of us. He's not the social animal that Bill Clinton was, but he was a community organizer, and community is the keyword. He embodies the old idea of noblesse oblige, that those who have should give, and the misbegotten absolutely hate that. They hated it in Kennedy and killed him for it. It messes deeply with their notion that people are intrinsically fucked. Want more code words? Take "Liberty." Forget the original Latin. Among the Tea Party and Patriot Movement crowd, liberty = property and "Don't Tread On Me" equals "Don't Take What's Mine." Self-described centrists on the airwaves are making excuses for the Teabaggers ("People are angry out there...angry and confused.") You bet they're angry, but "confused" is the wrong word. "Conflicted" is what they are, as anyone who does not feel at home in the world would logically be. Watch as the videocams bob and wobble past the crowds of epithet screaming protesters. These are not especially attractive people. I don't mean to suggest that the grateful born have a monopoly on beauty (take one look at Barney Frank's mug), but an empathetic face is always more pleasing to look at than a bitter one, isn't it?

Finally, ask yourself this question: why is it that the misbegotten identify strongly with just two types of human being, 1) the unwanted unborn; and 2) corporate cutthroats? Cruel though it may seem, I think they identify with the unwanted unborn because they themselves feel unwanted, and suspect that had their mothers had their druthers, they might have been aborted. They reserve their shallow pools of empathy for the unborn at the expense of the living because loving the unborn requires no positive social action. Moreover, the unborn occupy the uncorrupted realm before delivery into sinfulness, and are therefore, in a sense, better than the rest of us. The misbegotten's affinity for robber barons, oil tycoons, crony capitalists, and all-around scumbags is a more complicated thing. This is a masochistic love affair, conceived by Ayn Rand and nurtured by a full-bore social Darwinism that's downright bizarre considering the movement's general rejection of Darwin. What they like about these guys is their ruthlessness, cynicism, and immunity to shame, all of which give evidence of a shared belief that the world is such a fundamentally irredeemable place that it deserves to be raped and pillaged for all it's worth.

But the strangest thing about the misborn is their unshakeable conviction that God is on their side. All the great religions recognize humankind's common plight; none celebrate individuality, enterprise, or success at the expense of one's fellow man. All were conceived as comforts, as salves for the pain that inevitably touches us as we pass through life. Why would someone who quite obviously feels none of Christ's compassion for the poor, the wretched, and the wayward embrace Christianity? Why would a man who spends his breath railing against the flesh evangelize for the most carnal of religions, the one that made its savior human enough to die? Here's an idea. For many years, I've had a fascination with what is broadly called Gnosticism, a maverick outgrowth of second and third century apocalyptic Judaism and early Christianity. A Gnostic seeks the gnosis, which is the realization that we carry within us the spark of our divine origin--a little piece of God--and that our life's work is to fan that spark and, ultimately, to carry it back to the place from whence it came. This is a surpassingly beautiful idea, and all in all, strikes me as a pretty groovy way to think. But there is a flipside to Gnosticism, a darker current, and in a troubled mind (and in an era lacking all intellectual subtlety) it can take a malign form. In this view, life is hell, the earth is a place of exile, and the only thing worth longing for is annihilation, because that puts us back where we started. Much of America's native religion derives from a sort of bleak Calvinist gnosis, wherein anything that makes life on earth more pleasant, less dangerous, or more sensual is looked upon as a denial of the hard knocks truth of existence. To be out alone on the high prairie, under the merciless sky, prey to wolves and reliant only on one's own resources, is real and manly because it reflects the harsh fact of our exile. To be in the city, among people, cocooned by a social safety net, is effete illusion. And those goddamned Democrats...they just keep trying to make life sweeter.

Because these light and dark twins of gnosis (the glass half-full and the glass half-empty) stem from the same realization--that we are far from our spiritual birthplace--I am not without sympathy for the misbegotten. I don't much like the idea of abortion and I think that prayer is generally a good thing. I, too, sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange land. The misbegotten are often charitable on an intra-tribal level. But I can carry my sympathy only so far. I have never been able to tolerate bullies. John "Jack O' Lantern" Boehner, to name just one, is a classic schoolyard bully if I ever saw one. Who called Central Casting anyway?

The misbegotten are fond of deceptive labels like "pro-life," and of words like freedom, and liberty, and sovereignty. But don't be fooled. Their deepest impulse is anti-life. They are the assassins among us. If they deny global warming, it's because they yearn for the planet to fry. More than anything, they remind me of the pod people in "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers." When Randy Neugebauer yelled "Baby Killer!" at Bart Stupak, he might as well have been pointing his finger and shrieking "Die, Human!"

In France They Kiss On Main Street

Today, January 6, is Epiphany in the old European calendar of Christian feast days. In the Eastern church, which stays a little truer to ancient timelines, it's Christmas. Oh, goodie. I get to do it all again.

People talk these days about having "epiphanies" all the time. "I had an epiphany at work today. My boss is a cross-dresser." Etc., etc. It's another word that's been stripped of its magic, like alchemy. Like "mystery."

But there are genuine little epiphanies, falling a few degrees short of the revealing of the Son of God to the Magi, that come our way, usually when we find ourselves in altered circumstances, as happens when we're traveling in foreign lands. I spent the holidays in what's at once the most foreign and familiar of places: France. Specifically, in Paris (though I did get out to the hinterlands a bit). Paris is familiar because, well, you know, it's "every man's second home." It's foreign because they eat snails and because the Reformation never took hold there. There isn't a drop of Protestant baptismal water in the Seine. Even a non-practicing Catholic is still a Catholic, and Catholics get to be bad and good at the same time. In Paris, you get to have your cake and eat it, knowing you can purge it with holy fire.

I was felt up by a beautiful woman in a Paris bookstore. In all my years in America, living and working in crowded cities, taking crowded subways and buses, boogying on crowded dance floors, I have never once been unabashedly groped. But there I was, on the Left Bank just opposite the Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame, standing at the bookshelf in the venerable Shakespeare & Co. bookstore (first publishers of James Joyce's ULYSSES) with a Michel Houellebecq novel in my hands (it seemed like the right thing to pull off the shelf, but I now realize it presented something of an invitation), when I experienced the unmistakeable sensation of fingers passing over the left cheek of my ass, dropping lightly into the crack, and lingering on the right cheek before departing. I finished the paragraph and then looked to my right with some trepidation because, of course, I figured it was probably a guy and that I would have to give him the universal I'm not gay sign and that would hurt his feelings and embarrass me. Gay men sometimes think I'm one of them because I'm small, keep my hair cropped short, wear an earring, use words like "sublime," hate professional sports, and do things like standing in Left Bank bookshops reading Michel Houellebecq novels. To my great surprise and delight, I found myself eye to eye across six feet of otherwise empty plank floor with a beautiful, petite blond woman in a red coat, more German or Danish-looking than typically Gallic, the faintest flush in her cheeks, the loveliest of smiles on her lips. She stood in place for a beat or two, awaiting my response, and only after I dropped my gaze did she turn and disappear into the crowded back room of Shakespeare & Co. I'd let her go. Had to. I was traveling with my wife, whom I insist on adoring in spite of it all, and was in the company of our nine year-old son, who had just come to my side to beg for the latest installment of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. But for that moment, everything had been possible, and that was enough. In a counterfactual world, we'd started with Sancerre and oysters, talked about the sterility of Houellebecq's fashionable nihilism and Catherine Breillat's feminist pornography and how there is still room for romance in the world if only you can see the angels on the willow branch, and then gone back to her one-room flat in Odeon and fucked crazily against the wrought iron bedstead before finishing with a kiss and strong coffee.

A little epiphany. God wrapped in red wool and draped with blond curls. ibn Arabi would know just what I'm talking about--he had the same vision while circumambulating the Ka'ba. So would Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote Oh, Russet Witch after a similar bookstore encounter. These things happen rarely and only in places like Paris, but they are the water of life and, along with mountain mornings and the laughter of children, maybe the only reason to put up with its crap. I lit a candle for her in Notre Dame. Not for the dead, but for the ever-living.

While my son and I were in the cathedral, we passed an illuminated wood carving of Jesus appearing to his disciples after the resurrection. "What's going on there?" Nathanael asked, and I told him the story as I knew it. "Could that have really happened?" he asked. "Could he really come back from the dead?" I answered, "If you're a Christian, you believe it happened...and that there's another world after--or maybe right alongside--this one." Now, Nathanael has never been baptised and has set foot in a church only three or four times in his young life. No Sunday School, no prayers before bedtime. And yet, at that instant, he spontaneously dropped to his knees in front of the wood carving in Notre Dame Cathedral, with crowds milling all around him. There was nothing showy, or stagy, or ironic about it. Just a kid being wowed by the power of the numinous, as I had been only thirty minutes earlier when that gentle hand had grazed my derriere. Take. Eat. This is my body.

September 29

If you've gotten a kick out of the Raszer series, subscribe to FORTEAN TIMES or STRANGE ATTRACTOR, or just plain have a yen for the fantastical, check out this site: http:/​/​www.phantasmaphile.com/​ It's run by Pam from Brooklyn, the new home of indie rock and Bohemian (in the original sense) culture.

Some news: Counterpoint Press will reissue a new and updated version of the second Raszer book, THE LAST DAYS OF MADAME REY, in winter of 2010. It's my personal favorite of the three books, mostly because of APRIL BLESSING, the woman who steals Raszer's heart and maybe his soul, too.

As ambivalent as I am about the whole POLANSKI affair, I have to say that this is one of those cases where law and art are in irreconcilable conflict, and we ought to come down on the side of art. Polanski did his penance with thirty-two years of creative output. Artists, like the shamans of tribal culture, are IN society but not OF it, and if we value their trips to Hell on our behalf, we must sometimes grant them a pass back to the land of the living. That doesn't mean forgiving the act, but forgiving the actor, So, SET ROMAN FREE. Besides, the whole thing went down at Jack Nicholson's house, so Polanski can honestly say that the Devil made him do it.

August 1

If you ponder the question: "Why does woman love a mystery?" for long enough and in a suitably altered state...you may experience a kind of satori. Or if you prefer, gnosis. Try it.

I learned this past week that Johnny Depp is reading my TESLA screenplay, and it feels like fate. Now, no one knows better than me how ephemeral the promises of Hollywood are, and I no longer bate my breath when this sort of thing happens. But I swear, this is the role he was born to play. Thank you, Ryan.

July 11

ROCKIN' IN THE NEW AGE

Gary Lachman, a founding member of one of my fave 80's bands, BLONDIE, has written a very cool book called POLITICS AND THE OCCULT (Quest Books ISBN 978-0-8356-0857-2), available at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, where I'll be signing my own flaps this Thursday evening. Just goes to show the ever-present connection between rock 'n roll and magick. It's said that no less a personage than Elvis kept a copy of Manly P. Hall's THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF ALL AGES on a bookstand in the main parlor at Graceland. A king is a king, after all. No accident that "Mystery Train" came out of those pipes.

June 26

HOW I MET THE GODDESS

The pretty girl came to me on the playground with a folded note in hand. She was 13, I was 13, so we were equals in age if not in experience. Girls are always older, no matter the age. "Don't open it yet," she whispered, with more than a hint of mystery. Mystery in the ancient sense of an unfathomable thing. She was gone with a swish of skirt around bare legs. She was the new girl in school, having come from Paris, where her father had been the rep for Carnation Milk. For whatever reason, she'd singled me out: the shy boy who kept to himself.

It's probably fair to say that my course as a future writer of speculative fiction was set that day, as I haven't since stopped asking myself, "What if?"

The note burned in my pocket through fourth period, and passing to fifth, I ducked into the Boys room and opened it. "Will you go to the woods with me?" was all it said. The fifth period bell rang. I stared at those eight words with no less awe than if I'd been considering a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My skin knew what they meant. The flush in my cheeks spelled it out. But my brain wasn't quite ready for the message. It scared me to the marrow, and I knew from that moment I'd been stung and would remain stung forever. I see the words in front of me every time I sit down to write, and every time I write, I write to right the wrong I committed that day. Because I didn't go to the woods with her. I went home with a fever and tossed and turned and puked all night.

My youthful lack of intestinal fortitude has had its upside. Practitioners of tantra know all about the rewards of sexual sublimation. The serpent power Kundalini rises through the chakras, ultimately exploding through the crown of the head in a mushroom cloud of ecstasy. You "make the Ganges River flow backward," which is to say, you invert the orgasm, dam up the flow of semen. Cool things happen. Creation happens. If I'd gone to the woods with her, there's always the chance that things would've gone badly and I wouldn't still be thinking about those eight words today. At least that's what I tell myself to chase away regret. Of course, goddamnit, I should have gone. When a girl invites you into the woods, you go, even if there's a chance you'll never come back.

The pretty girl from Paris stayed only for a semester and never spoke to me again, but as I grew older and finally lost my fear of sex, my mental image of her matured and morphed along with me in fantastical ways. She lived in the woods. She grew out of the forest floor, part of the foliage, but more exotically blossomed than any of the local flora. Her fair complexion darkened, her cheekbones rose, her breasts ripened, and she acquired a scent that was part wild honey and part damp fruit cellar. I went back to the woods again and again to find her, and each time, her message was the same: "You let me down once, baby. Do me right this time. Worship me." Then she'd raise her sword and say, "Kneel, motherfucker, and let me knight your sorry ass."

Thus did I come into Her Majesty's Secret Service. She demands a lot, but when she gives back, she gives.

I believe there's a bedrock vision at the trailhead of every fantasy writer's career. For some, it's a safe place, a spired and shimmering refuge from whatever shit surrounds them at home or at school. For others, it might be a cliff's edge and the twin urge to step back and fall forward. Or a bejeweled cavern diminishing to a point that is both end and beginning. For me, it's the woods, and the presence there of that dark, sly sylph/​sprite/​nymph with the soil between her toes, vines in her hair, and a strawberry patch where thigh meets belly meets thigh.

I write about spiritual bungee-jumpers. People who want to get lost in order to find--to be taken to the edge of themselves. And I write about the guy who brings them back from that edge because he knows it so well. They sell me as a mystery writer, but it's only mystery in that very ancient sense of the note being passed to me on the playground before I was old enough to understand what it asked of me. I write stories that are equally fact and the most extravagant fantasy, because what lies in the middle ground--what they call "fiction"--doesn't interest me very much. You see, when it's all over, I want to go to the places I write about. When it's all over, I want to go to the woods with her. I hope to Christ she'll still be there, and I'm still sorry I didn't go the first time.

June 23

The whole world thinks it knows Los Angeles, but almost nobody does. It is at once the most exposed and most hidden of cities. People who say they hate L.A. wear their disdain like a merit badge, and even those who say they love it feel they need to add a note of distance. "I love L.A., in spite of...well, you know," and we're all supposed to know. This isn't about the traffic, or the smog (long since surpassed in places like Denver), or even the presumed superficiality and duplicity of the people, particularly those living west of La Cienega. It's about the fact that Los Angeles is home to a peculiarly American form of native religion, a creed rejected by right- thinking rationalists everywhere: the belief that we can transform ourselves from the inside out. "We are what we are!" cry the realists. "We are what we can imagine ourselves to be!" protest the ladies of the canyon and the countless script and song and headshot and prophecy-carrying waitresses, bank tellers, bag boys, and messengers. Now, granted, a belief in the vulgar truth of this leads to all sorts of human silliness, from boob jobs, vaginal rejuvenation, and penile enhancement to Scientology and A Course In Miracles. But singling out this stuff as evidence that the whole thing is a sham is like citing the Christian Coalition as evidence that Jesus was a blowhard. I can testify as one born-again in the hidden laurel groves of L.A. that it's all true. At certain times of day, the air shimmers with the potential for transformation the way Star Trek's teleporters did in the midst of beaming up Kirk and Spock. The unsolid earth heaves and moans with the ancticipation of our germination as something closer to the sprouts we were meant to be. Out here, said Jim Morrison, we is stoned, immaculate. Out here, we get to be who we thought we were before somebody told us different. That's why I keep coming. Never the same river twice, and never the same face in the mirror. Lord, make me over.

Mystery. From the Greek Mysterion. Dictionary definition 1. a religious truth that one can know only by revelation and cannot fully understand. Dictionary definition 2. something not understood or beyond understanding

I'm not sure I'll allow my work to be marketed as straight mystery again. I think the word has lost its meaning and is now code for "procedural." I think I write fantasy, or myth or Yankee magical realism. Or something. Just not mystery...even though I love the word and hate to give it up. Mystery readers like plot. They expect to be led on an evidentiary trail to gradual suspension of disbelief, whereas fantasy and horror readers know that behind every armoire or broom closet is a secret passage to the shadow side of oneself, and are ready to crawl in with the slightest inducement. Mystery readers need the blood evidence. They could never accept "If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit," which I thought was pure artistry. Mystery readers need to be seduced over a long and arduous night of dry martinis and drier wit, and I've never had the patience for seduction. I prefer the smoldering look across the crowded dance floor that says instantly, "We were made for each other--at least for tonight." I have a theory that fantasy people are Scott Fitzgerald people and mystery people are Hemingway people. Romantic that I am, I never should have tried to Trojan Horse my way into their hard-boiled world. Mystery people like "L.A. Confidential" and sci-fi/​fantasy people like "Mulholland Drive." I think David Lynch is a fucking genius, and that Philip K. Dick is Jesus, and that hearts are best worn on sleeves. And so, right here on this blog, I hereby announce that I am officially bidding a fond farewell to the mystery genre and declaring myself a...a.... Oh, hell, you decide what I am.

There's a great story that legendary film producer Robert Evans tells about the first distribution of Robert Towne's "Chinatown" screenplay. The movie, as everyone knows, is an enormously complicated tale of corruption of body, soul, and spirit in 1930's Los Angeles. Long before the cameras rolled, the script went out for a weekend read by studio executives, agents, financiers, and other people critical to the project's approval. According to Evans, half the readers loved the script and half hated it, but the comments betrayed the fact that not a single one of them had understood it. In both cases, opinion flowed from a desire not to be perceived as unhip. Those who said they loved the script saw virtue in its obscurity and wanted to be "in the know,", while those who hated it felt shut out of the clubhouse and wanted to punish Towne for making them feel stupid.

Nobody wants to feel stupid, least of all book reviewers. A critic's authority rests on the perception that he or she is, if not superior, then at least intellectually equal to the work being reviewed. This makes writing about all things obscure, occult, and arcane an extremely hazardous occupation. There are two common ways of presenting such material, and both risk the critic's most pointed barbs. You can do it in the breathless, gee whiz! style of a Dan Brown, in which case the reviewers dismiss you as simple-minded, or you can handle the esoteric from an insider's perspective, in which case they're likely to get good and pissed off.

I write about hidden things. Hidden things have always fascinated me. Locked rooms, diaries, double lives, cabals and conspiracies. I write about small, highly secretive groups of people who hold privileged information with potentially world-altering implications. It's taken me three books to figure out that if you're going to write about secret societies, you are obliged to let the reader in on the password. This goes double for reviewers. They have to be invited to the party, or they're not going to have anything nice to say about the hors d'oeuvres.

Because the whole point of my books is to share secrets without spoiling their mystery, this is something of a tightrope walk for me. If you shine too much light on numinous things, they have a tendency to evaporate. But in the new Stephan Raszer book, NOWHERE-LAND, I've struggled to find a balance. No doubt the critics will let me know to what degree I've succeeded.

November 18 (from NOWHERE~LAND, A Stephan Raszer Investigation):

The laptop’s screen came up with a file icon flashing against the Moorish desktop pattern. He opened it to a hypertext version of Revelation 14, with underlined passages linking him to pages of exegesis by scholars and theologians from the 5th century on. The passage Monica had highlighted in red was from Verses 1-4:

"AND I looked, and lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads."

"And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the Elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth."

"These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins."

He clicked on the hyperlinked word, virgins, and was taken to a display of related passages from Revelations, as well as a quote attributed to Jesus in Matthew 19:12:

Hearing his pronouncement against divorce, the Pharisees had protested to Jesus—in so many words—“if we’re not free to dump our wives, maybe it’s not such a
great idea to get married in the first place,” to which Jesus replied in cryptic agreement:

“All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. There are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heavens’ sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

Raszer read the passage repeatedly and with increasing speed, until its archaic syntax morphed into a kind of non-verbal vernacular, a direct feed from page to brain. It was a technique for reading sacred texts he’d been introduced to when first undertaking his study, and now he did it automatically. The fact was that unless you read the original Greek or Hebrew, Sanskrit or Arabic, everything was bastardized by the translator’s biases, and even in the maiden tongue, most scripture and sutra was secondhand news and at least twice-removed from meaning. The real meaning was esoteric. As Jesus had said time and again in the Gnostic Gospels: “He who has ears, let him hear.” If this was not the case in the matter of eunuchs, it was surely true of an even stranger quote Monica had pulled in from the Gospel of Saint Thomas:

“When you make the male and the female be one and the same, so that the male might not be male nor the female be female—then you will enter the Kingdom.”

In just two degrees, Raszer’s separate queries about the identity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ “Little Flock” of 144,000 and the history of sacramental castration had been drawn together in a way that put a new spin on Aquino’s virgin sex ring theory. Suppose virginity—of one sort or another—was a factor, but suppose it wasn’t about the lust of middle-aged men for young girls. Suppose it was about devotion. Or control.

He left the thought there, reminding himself only of what he’d already learned on so many previous cases: that given half a chance, the predators would always use the tools of religion to augment their power over the prey. It was the same story with every clique that deserved the pejorative of “cult,” whether it was Manson’s Family or Jim Jones’s Temple or L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. There was always an agenda, and if it wasn’t about personal power it was about power on a broader scale.

The castration material was more extensive and more eye-opening than he’d expected, and there would be a few nights’ work in digesting it. Several items, however, jumped out of Monica’s hastily assembled list of bullet points:

• The earliest evidence of ritual castration was found in Sumerian texts from the temple of goddess INANNA at Uruk in present-day Iraq. A sample quote from high priestess Enheduanna, dated to 2300 BC: “Inanna turns a man into a woman and a woman into a man.”
• The priests of the cult of Phrygian mother goddess Cybele, instituted around the time of King Midas (725-675 BC) and fashionable in Rome of AD 295-390, were known as the Gallae, and castrated themselves in imitation of her divine son/​lover Attis, who had done so in penance for his betrayal. According to myth, the birthday of Attis was December 25. Unlike other pre-Christian Mother-Son cults, the cult of Cybele and Attis was a cult of abstinence.
• Origen, the great scholar and theologian of the early Christian church, also “made a eunuch of himself” for the kingdom of heavens’ sake.
• In the mid-18th century, an ecstatic Christian sect known as the Skoptzy or Skoptji arose in the Oryel region of Russia, with ritual self-castration as its badge of membership. The sect attracted military officers, merchants and the nobles of St. Petersburg, and by 1874, counted 5,444 members (incl. 1,465 women) and tens of thousands of sympathizers. The Skoptzy claimed that they were following Christ in Matthew 19:12, but that their mission would not be complete until their numbers had reached the 144,000 of Revelation 14:3-4.
• Just as castratis had guarded the harems of the caliphate, the Holy Ka’ba of Islam and its black meteorite are to this day secured by an elite guard of eunuchs.

Raszer poured himself another glass of wine and lit a cigarette. The business about the gelded priests of Cybele he’d vaguely recalled, and it had been on his mind since seeing the morgue photo of a neutered Henry Lee laid beside the black “baitylos” rock on Aquino’s desk. But Raszer hadn’t been able to make the connection to Iraq until seeing that the Sumerian Inanna had also demanded the family jewels. And the gospel passages with their bizarre echo in the Russian sect seemed to suggest a trail of cognitive cookie crumbs that led right to the door of the Witnesses by way of their belief in the special status of the 144,000.

Could a cult of sexual negation born at the dawn of history have survived, like a viral spore, into the twenty-first Century? Monica’s accompanying weblinks seemed to hint that it could have, because there were sites—many related to the transgender community—with names like alt.eunuchs.com and Men Without Balls. He who has ears, let him hear. Sex and gender had always been big issues in religion.