“So help me Jesus” is funny, if Good
Friday is ever an occasion for humor. Good Friday always brings images of crucifixion
to mind, which are just awful and make me squirm—that’s the point, of course. I
was raised Catholic; I’m stuck with it. There’s the problem with bodies: On one
hand they’re foundation for the mind/emotions/spirit, or all wrapped up with
these wonderful things, and there’s the pleasures that come from having bodies,
like sleep, sex, athletic health, a full belly, sensory wonders like Chanel N°5
in a woman’s hair, an oboe playing Mozart, the twittering of a house
wren, Chagall’s stained glass in Rheims cathedral, and this chocolate muffin
and good coffee I just finished for breakfast, and so many of the other gifts with
which life festoons we physical humans. But then there’s crucifixion, being
burned at the stake, not to mention the lesser parade of ills we more fortunate
still must endure—hangnails, constipation, headaches, cuts and bruises, nausea,
sore throats, acne, bee stings, diarrhea, yeast infections, hemorrhoids, sunburn,
hemorrhages of the left ear, and columns more. We don’t necessarily die
physically first, but that’s most often the case.
While we live, we have our
senses. We have, for example, our ears. I have one that’s dimming, on the left
side. No bleeding. I’ll get a hearing aid one of these day if I can ever afford
a decent one, moving me one more step along the path to cyborg. If it takes a
machine to keep me tuned in, then so be it: I’m grateful to live during a
history when electric machines are following biochemical brains—eons behind,
but on the move—up the road to complexity, with sentience the faraway destination
and goal. The ear is a sensitive little machine itself, so it’s not so
far-fetched that we might devise another machine to support its activity when an
overworked bio-ear starts wearing down, the twitching responses of microscopic hairs
and intimately imbricated nerve cells that rush information to our waiting
nervous consciousness grow coarsened through the assaults of lifetimes of noise
and poison. So isn’t it amazing how those murmurings we detect—snippets of dim language—resolve
into voices that communicate: back-stabbing
plots, embarrassing secrets, nasty gossip, confessions of misbehavior, plans
and schemes, declarations of admiration, desire, love? Our intricate brains
construct so much from such subtle nuance, and it takes a well-tuned set of
sensitive ears to gather all that vibrational minutia. Working ears, like eyes
and skin, start physical, then here it comes! Aggregations of form and meaning
emerging, like radiant organizations of crystal forming out of dense chemical
brine. We’re so miraculously sensitive. My cat trills once and I recognize her
affection, knowing I may touch the softness of her luxurious fur. A lover
signals with a barely audible mmmm… inviting that next touch. Please. Songbirds in the morning stake
out the space and pattern and relationships of their lives with sound, and in listening, we discover ourselves enmeshed
as well in those same elaborate patterns.
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