Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 1
My dear Professor G.,
When I last wrote I had vaguely formed a plan of
reaching
It is now high noon on the Sabbath, and I rest as
Grandpa Moses commanded, sitting in an abandoned church yard on the banks of
the rolling river, still looking at the fence I crossed yesterday (a minor
adventure itself, but the tale will keep).
My Bible is before me, and I have just finished reading the creation
myth in the first chapters of Genesis.
Have you ever noticed that there He is one of “the gods,” like unto whom the serpent urges Eve to
become? Then later in the same chapter,
He says (presumably to the other gods) “Look!
That bad serpent gave the humans too much power, so I’ve put a curse on
the whole bunch! And furthermore I’ve
thrown them out of
Do you know who He reminds me of, sir? He reminds me of Thor! Or of Zeus, or Chronos, or Ouranos! He is the kind of god who doesn’t take any crap from anyone! When he decided the world was too far out of line (later in Genesis), he sent a flood that was much more efficient than the Totenkopf SS at destroying humanity, then started over again with a master race, the children of the good Noah. (I’m a bit too much of a student of myths to make much of a religious man, I’m afraid.)
Do you remember the
Of course there are differences in the myths. The Norse and Olympian gods let one husband and wife get away from the zapping. God let Lott and his wife go – along with their daughters, I must add. But Lott’s wife looked back when she was told not to and turned into a pillar of salt. I thought it was a beautiful portrayal of Lott’s lost love, much as the loss of Eurydice by Orpheus, who looked back when he shouldn’t have, and thereby damned his wife to remaining a shadow. Orpheus, though, went around lamenting with his guitar until even the women had heard enough and killed him to shut him up! Lott made out better, I suppose: He started drinking a lot and having sex with his daughters.
“God moves in mysterious ways,” say my Brother Baptists, who have tried for over forty years to Christianize me, “and God bless those of us who know His ways, and God damn anyone who doesn’t!” Pure fire and brimstone…
But you have long recognized that hellfire awakens a lazy audience, professor. I remember how you would show our auditorium full of students that Last Judgment scenes sculpted into Medieval churches.
“It’s sometimes difficult to imagine the ecstasies of heaven,” you would say as you clicked a slide, say, of the doorway of the cathedral in Autun. Heads would sag towards navels at the rows of pious saints admiring the Lord in celestial solemnity.
“Oh, are you ready for a change of scene?” you would ask. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is hell.” Head bobbed up and chuckles erupted, and you finished ‘em off by adding “It’s easy to think of interesting things to do in hell!” You clicked a new slide and a new scene appeared: Stone demons were devouring and deflowering the lost sinners on the wrong side of the outstretched arms of Christ. We howled with laughter and you smiled like Mephisto. Such a showman, my dear professor.
It occurs to me that, as travelers often do, I’ve taken up a campsite on the foundations of a demolished church, a place of pilgrimage. You explained to me a couple of decades ago that in digging beneath the foundations of European churches, archaeologists often discovered pagan ruins. Would Grandpa Jung say that I’ve discovered an archetypical notion of sanctity? I’m sorry to be troubling you with my radical ideas and questions, but every devil should get his due, and you helped me to think such aberrant thoughts in the first place!
Today I will practice my tae kwon do, which is the single activity that makes me feel closest to what most people would call religion. It teaches me the humility of daily pain – a true student of martial arts should become stoic towards the complaints of the flesh. It teaches me that there is a unity of physical and mental called Chi, and that faithful practice will reveal it to me in greater degrees, as I achieve greater harmony. It teaches me mercy to others, My teacher, Great Grandmaster Yu Yong Kyu (the Flying Dragon), is emphatic in his prohibitions against fighting. Himself a veteran of the Vietnam War, where he spent five years with South Korean Special Forces, he considers violence in a civilian context (such as a brawl in a bar) a demeaning failure for a martial artist. An accomplished martial artist seldom has to resort to his art.
If I may digress on this point of mercy, which I consider central to the soul of a martial artist, I teach it at the end of each class at my dojang (Korean for martial arts gymnasium) through a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which contains all that an honorable soul needs to keep it out of trouble. A couple of my ambitious students said they wanted to learn it in Latin after I recited it in that fine language at my Thanksgiving feast this year, but students are always full of the best intentions… So far the pater noster remains an English prayer for these disciples of the Brass Dragon (your humble student).
I had a tangible occasion to practice what I preach a few months ago, as I walked to a nearby forest for a stroll with my friend and dog, Dexter, a large, docile Labrador Retriever. His leash was in my left hand, and my walking cane (stout and effective, in the hand of an expert) was in my right.
As we trod the last hundred yards of road leading up to the trees, I saw a black man come from behind some bushes and stand out at the curb. Since this gentleman was on my left, Dexter (all hundred pounds of him) was on a leash between him and me. In my right hand was my walking cane, which I find to be a wonderful way of carrying a three-foot hardwood weapon without upsetting anyone. I was quite prepared, if the young man had made an aggressive move, to strike him on any number of places to incapacitate him.
As Dexter and I neared him, his right hand, hanging at his side, clicked and glinted with steel. He had pulled a switchblade! At long last your admiring black belt had a willing victim. He had pulled a short-range weapon against an opponent about six feet away and shielded by a large dog! To add to his predicament, his intended victim was a martial arts expert with a medium-range weapon. His arm continued to hang down as he turned the weapon this way and that to give it an impressive glint, not knowing that he wouldn’t have time to lift it an inch before a cylinder of oak shattered his skull.
It didn’t happen, thank God. Instead of killing him I burst into laughter. He was so inept that he was ridiculous. Between chuckles I told him that his was a very, very pretty knife, but that I thought he should put it away. I pride myself on having said all this with continuing good humor, not ceasing to chuckle until he timidly slipped the knife into his breeches pocket and went home, more like a petulant twelve- than a predatory twenty-year-old. I think that my reaction had convinced him that he had made the unfortunate mistake of trying to mug Thor. It was such good comedy that I remained benign as he turned away. Of course, the entire time I was chuckling I remained ready to give him a demonstration of tae kwon do, hapkido and stick weapons.
It’s hard having someone else’s life in your hands, and I can see why gods do such a messy job of dealing with us foolish mortals.
A pleasant postscript to my merciful moment: The young man’s uncle is a man of dubious
reputation as a gangster, but as is so often the case with such men, a sense of
honor. The next time he saw me he
greeted me politely, said that he knew I was a martial arts teacher, and had
spared his nephew. Then he presented me
with a gift: a formidable, spiked dog
collar for the ever-affable Dexter, the kind of collar one usually finds on a
fighting dog in
So much for my Sunday sermon. Lord knows, I have no pedigree as a preacher. I will go and practice my tae kwon do until my movements flow with force, then I’ll pound cement with my hands to make them as hard as stone. All of this, just to learn a little mercy…
I would like to extend my admiration for you and your wife, who kindly reads these letters to you. I believe the two of you have had a long marriage, blessed by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I am happy for you both. You are fortunate, professor, to have a companion who lets you hear what is hard now to see for yourself. I was so fortunate as to have you for a teacher, and you did the same for me. Every good teacher needs to open the eyes of the blind, starting with Socrates and Jesus and continuing up to you and me.
Finally, allow me to express my sorrow for the
looting of the
I’m sorry that this war has cost you some of your friends, professor. I know that you, like any one who served in the front lines of World War II, have lost many friends before, but each war seems to claim more, no matter who started it and for what, and the loss can never be easy so long as we are human.
Tomorrow I will ride through the
Sincerely,
Eric