Already Bound For a Brighter Unknown by Holly Hunt

Molly Des Jardin CC




Already Bound For a Brighter Unknown


Practicing Zen can bring balance and peace, but sometimes it cannot always spare us from the raw evil of planet earth. Dr. John Locke, a professor and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Arkansas, a Zen devotee, was murdered in his office by an angry graduate student who had been tossed out of the program for lack of attendance and  performance. This murder shocked everyone at the university because Dr. Locke had always been an agent of measured cordiality who had helped many students develop equilibrium and calm in the midst of academic pressures. He could dissipate horror. His demeanor was sedate, his stature was tall, and he lived inside his patience. Even so, enjoying his presence was not an easily acquired taste.

I always felt guilty for not admiring him more, because his lotus poses irritated me on those occasions where we poets and novelists were not behaving lotus-like. We were not subdued by Zen. We were thinking about who we would dance with, drink with, sleep with for the week-end. But there he was, in a side room, on the floor, hands at his side, quietly explaining in long passages, to a handful of captivated, moony-eyed learners surrounding him. He never felt the need to zip it up about Zen and what it would accomplish. Sometimes I thought he was as preachy as any tv Holy Ghost evangelist. For me, his life lessons bordered on pedantic as he considered the unenlightened, pathetic people who failed to grasp the essential lessons he espoused. I never warmed up to him, and it was maybe my loss. 

It was not the first time I felt daunted by someone else’s spiritual conviction. It used to happen in the presence of a local Missionary Baptist deacon who visited our house when I was a kid in elementary school. He would arrive in his dress pants, his pressed shirt and tie sit down in our living room and be served his coffee the way he liked it, beneath the brass plaque of the Lords Prayer that hung on our wall. Every visit, he would pour out his deep ennui for our lack of intimacy with Jesus Christ, the kind he and his church members a little farther down the two-lane highway touted as the purest peanut butter. He would bear forth for two hours, holding his Holy Bible as if his holy was better than ours. He grieved at our inability to see that we were missing a closer walk with the Lord.

Even though my parents were Christian, they didn’t seem Christian enough for him. He thought we were not quite saved enough. We did not hold the magic key to the Penthouse Suite up there in the Kingdom. We were going to end up down below him in Heaven, in the lacking-faith folks projects, where our reward would be less brilliant than the members of his Missionary Baptist Church.

I always regretted that he was so upset that we were not willing to join him and that band of true Baptist saints. My parents just let him go on and on, offering him a box of Kleenex, and I would be excused from his monologue as he intended to rescue us from the lower level of Paradise. This was maybe not the great loss he imagined for us.

My husband has never been regularly plagued by such an intense visitor. He was raised by wolves in California, wolves and the Grateful Dead, somewhere around Santa Rosa. His grandparents were northern Italian Catholic wolves, and Old World Portuguese, all who had faded into non-serious half-believers, into gambling aficionados who found illumination under flashy neon. In his later teen years, he was even baby-sat a little while by the Hell’s Angels. He had a wreck on a big Harley when he was still a minor. A bloody emergency trip to a dental surgeon was involved. 

 When I just happen to mention a prayer or a passage of  KJV scripture, my husband flies out of the house and grabs a weed whacker or some other lawn blade. If I am not following him quickly enough, he’ll cut the hydrangeas and gardenias so far down to the ground they may never come back. God-talk really gets his goat. He flinches like I have stuck him with one hundred tiny quilting needles. I’ve finally realized that I am trying to feed birdseed to a Golden Retriever. It isn’t right for me to push him just because I’d like to have him sitting by me in a church pew. I have dragged him with me sometimes, and he seems to handle it fine until halfway through the sermon. His body tenses up and he twitches like little fire ants are eating him alive. He hates it. I don’t even allow him to go to church anymore, even when he suggests such a thing. It might cause him to have a bleeding ulcer in his stomach lining or cause his heart to spike. We can’t afford that kind of hospital bill. 

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, but what if one has never walked in that darkness? I have begun to think that he has never walked in it or feared it at all. From all outward appearances and inner searches, it doesn’t appear that such darkness has ever bothered him. 
  
I do not speak out loud about my spiritual journey to just anybody. It makes some people uncomfortable. They may be composed on the outside, but I can tell they are squirming around on the inside. And I know how they feel! Sometimes I don’t like hearing about spiritual extravaganzas from others, and I believe in the miracles of saints in Heaven! If anyone is supposed to open her heart and mind to the blessed supernatural, it should be me! But sometimes somebody else’s big chub of barbecued spirit baloney is just too hard to swallow.

My neighbor, Melinda, belongs to a New Age angel-oriented collective. She follows some guy named Jeff who is visited regularly by the Archangel Muriel. Muriel has informed Jeff to pass onto his followers the practice of using tuning forks, special incense and healing oils, all blessed items available for sale on the spiritual group website. Hundreds of the Jeff-ites meet on mountain tops and make formations, hold hands in circles, and sing songs, to get closer to the Archangel.

Whenever Melinda talks about the late breaking news that the Archangel Muriel has bestowed upon Jeff to pass down to her and the other Jeff-ites, I have an urge to jump through a window in a quick getaway. Even I, who have had my share of supernatural visits, feel a tad queasy, wishing she would turn on the radio. But she has told me that she knows she can share this faith with me, because I will not shut her down like her family and other friends. 

I’ve never told her what I think. It seems so fluffy, bedecked with purple glittering mist and transparent silk ribbons in the air and roses falling from everybody’s fingertips. It is all truly beautiful for her, this news from the Archangel Muriel, and her eyes mist with grateful emotion for the special knowledge. 

Oh, Lord, forgive me, I want to run over to the radio and turn it up so loud the windows vibrate. Maybe I could just splash her face with a little ice water. Please, not another direction for a new table placement blessed with original candle scents and statues directly from the angelic realm website! I look wistfully at the draperies. If I was a cat, I’d climb right up them. I try to think about the fish in the fish tank. Do they feel as trapped as me? I try not to look down or away. I keep pulling my eyes back to her, reminding myself to be the generous listener that Saint Francis of Assisi wants me to be.     

The real deal stone-ground cornbread I do not veer away from. Saint Paul called it Glory. He himself was a verified recipient of Glory, and he encountered believers who had eaten big chunks of it: the Anti-Baloney. Those Pauline experiences do not translate into anything similar to Dr. John Locke’s Buddhist lessons, nor do they resemble the Baptist deacon guaranteed a top floor in Heaven. The Anti-Baloney is not for sale like those fragrant monthly installments to followers from the Archangel. Saint Paul tells me, in a blanket, cover-all command, Despise not prophesyings, but can I be just a quarter-cup annoyed by some of them? 

About the other three-quarters, I do know where Glory comes from. When I was ten, in the summer my mother was dying of cancer, at the bottom of our hill that was backed by the wild woods of the Ouachita foothills forest, lived the Foremans. Their house was a little three-bedroom asbestos siding frame thing set up on concrete bricks. They were Pentecostal. They spoke in tongues and cried out with emotion in a one-room church and at prayer meetings in their house. Mr. Foreman worked in the barite mines. Mrs. Foreman stayed home and crocheted rag rugs and cleaned house, cooked, and took care of their two girls, Molly and Ann, who were two and three years older than me. They wore their hair long because of an unyielding, denominational biblical interpretation. They wore longer dresses, never mini skirts, shorts or pants. They never said a word about it. They were not boastful of their way. They whispered only once to me, “This is just what we do.”  

I loved them. They would look at me and laugh, “You’re a crazy NUT!” But they were the real cornbread, like that pale golden baked in the heavy black iron skillet, the kind baked fresh every single night, with that dark amber killer crust that only can be taught by somebody’s serious grandma waiting for the Second Coming and a stick of butter to melt.

Their maternal grandma was a stalwart root vegetable, a necessary carrot-peeler of a woman. She was a skinny, drawn up frail thing with her shoulders and back bowed from osteoporosis and her dull yellow-white hair wound up on her head in a tight little knot. She had a tight little knot in her heart, too, which did not allow for any spoiled rotten kid nonsense. Nothing stopped her from speaking the hairless, butt-naked truth. She never smiled at me. The moment they introduced me to her, I broke out in a big grin. She said, right then, in a solemn revelation, “Lord! That child has the biggest mouth!” 

Nobody had ever said that to me before. I started looking at myself in the mirror differently. I would practice my smile because I wanted to be pretty with the right sized mouth. Maybe I did sort of look like a large-mouthed bass, the kind Daddy caught on Lake Ouachita, with a mouth stretched open so wide it could swallow a bullfrog. 

If you had a big nose, you could have a nose job someday and take care of that. And if you had elfish, stick-out ears, you could have even those reshaped. But a big mouth? Hopeless! Shortly after my neighbor’s stone-faced granny had spoken so fatefully, my mouth started looking like the opening of Carlsbad Cavern, a brand-new awful fact of my appearance.

I went down the hill one day to play some Monopoly with Molly and Ann. I loved playing board games with them more than anybody else. We also opened up the Hi-Fi and played a stack of old rockabilly singles and albums that their older brothers had collected before going into the Army.  

They did not worship Elvis. They looked askance at him on the Harum Scarum album cover. We sat on the pink popcorn chenille bedspread and whispered that his hair seemed to have been permed in a beauty parlor. His face was smooth with a creepy, nearly fake tan pancake foundation. His eyelids were shaded with shadow; his eyelashes mascaraed in some exotic corner of existence. He was a radiant, sweet and fancy Elvis. Sweet fancy types, male or female,  didn’t sail by without some concern in Pentecostal households in rural Arkansas. 

What I did see, which actually worried me, was a vulnerability, a weakness, in the face of this Elvis. You don’t look deep into a face like that and not feel some vague reason for pretense. He thought he needed something. Powder, eyeshadow. Was he really somebody that would always need his mama? Did she wipe his butt until he was school-age? Ouch, a harsh question. Yet in keeping with the tradition of classic rhetoric, Pomp and Circumstance, comparison and contrast, I have to admit it: my mama did. It takes one to know one.

Elvis was forever going to need some serious extra support to maintain (what I later learned to be) a modicum of equilibrium. It was clear as the blue June sky that his egg was not fried quite long enough and that the white was still too wiggly. Money and fame could not put that fragile item back in the skillet. I only learned to love him later, as an acquired taste, when I figured out that everybody’s egg-whites come out a little too wiggly sometimes.

On one afternoon later that summer, when I came in the front screen door, Mrs. Louetta Foreman, the mother of Molly and Ann, was smiling in a different way. Her whole being was a vibrant feeling of lovely. I could feel it and it made the hair raise on my arms. Her joy startled me, and I stopped just inside the door. I could not take a step further into the room.

She said, “Something happened.” Molly and Ann were sitting on the sofa, and they looked up at her. Mrs. Foreman told me I was the first neighbor to hear it. She and Delbert had been asleep in the middle of the night, and something woke them up at the same time. Somebody was singing outside their house. It was more than one voice. There were many voices singing. She said, “I asked Delbert, did he hear it?”  He said he did hear it. They heard singing voices above the roof of the house. They both got up immediately and ran to the front door, the door I had just come through. She took me by the arm and walked with me onto the front porch. 

She said, “We stood right here.” They had stepped outside barefoot onto that little concrete pad of flat porch. And up in the night sky, as far as they could see, the sky was filled with angels singing praise to God. They stood on their front porch and the angels sang for a few minutes, and then they all began to fade away into the night sky. She and her husband cried and prayed together for what they had seen.

I have always believed the singing angels were present. Nobody called the press. Nobody got a contract with the Sci Fi channel. The world fell away from that living room. It faded and fell to pieces like the planets will fall to pieces in so many billions of years. But what happened on the little front porch, the angels singing above, will never fall away.  

It was not like the Missionary Baptist deacon whose pleading voice told us we weren’t good enough. It was not like my neighbor who received interior design instructions from the Archangel Muriel. It was not like Professor John Locke, the generous leader who tirelessly espoused the advantages of Zen.  

For my neighbors, and the angels that sang above their house and filled the sky that night, I didn’t feel squirrely or craving escape. They were not trying to convince me of anything. It was way beyond that; neither did I feel trapped by their experience.

I was opened by it, and I will never shut that door. 

​


Holly Hunt is from the Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas. She lives with her cat and her husband who has been in recovery for 25 years, who survived the streets of Portland, Oregon. Her poems and essays are in journals across the US. Her MFA is from the Univ. of Arkansas. For two years she was advised by the amazing James Dickey, who told her, I am a shaman. A Patterson Fellowship for Women, the Univ. of South Carolina. 




​Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

donate