Emails from Hell, part fourteen.

{beginning of email}

            As I walked along with Andrew, I asked him if there were any more important people I should meet down here in Hell.

            “Don’t get in such a hurry,” he said to me. “What part of forever do you not get?”

            “Sorry, but I was just asking.”

            “Well, here’s one now,” said Andrew.

            I saw a white man with a white beard. He sat at a table and looked into a microscope. He was dressed in nineteenth-century garb and his microscope looked pretty old. We approached him.

            “Oh, yes!” the man said in a weak voice. “Oh, look at that, will you!” He looked up at us as if he actually expected us to look. So we did.

            “Yuk,” I said. “What is that?” It was a little bit of flesh in a small depression slide. It looked like a miniature version of a chicken gizzard that got bile fluid spilled on it by a careless butcher.

            “That, sir, is a barnacle. And it is my favorite barnacle! What’s your favorite barnacle?”

            Since the old man actually expected me to answer, I said, “Barnacle Bill.”

            “I haven’t met him,” said the man. “But this one! This barnacle shocked the living daylights out of my fellow Victorians, and I don’t mean maybe. This is a female barnacle—you can see the little jointed legs—but the male barnacle has degenerated into a little parasitic lump on her side. He has degenerated so much that there is almost nothing left of him except the penis. It sounds sort of like my brother Erasmus. He just wanted to have fun with the women all the time.”

            “So, sir,” I said, “Who are you?”

            “I was the first man to bring an orderly classification system to the Cirripedia—that is, to the barnacles!” He smiled. “An evolutionary classification system,” he added.

            “Tell him what else you did,” said Andrew.

            “I also wrote the Origin of Species,” said the quiet old man.

            “You’re Charles Darwin!” I exclaimed. “Guess I’m not surprised to see you here. You shot God right out of the sky with your theory of evolution!”

            “Yes, well,” said Darwin. “I wasn’t trying to come here. I wasn’t trying to shoot God out of the sky. I wasn’t trying to upset anybody, particularly not my quiet and pious wife Emma. But, man, I couldn’t help it!” He stood up from the table. “In the Origin of Species, I explained how natural selection works. It is not my fault that natural selection occurs everywhere, all the time, with everything, not just organisms. Natural selection occurs even in languages, ideas, and technology. You can’t stop it! The best organisms, ideas, and technology always come to dominate the resource space.

            “I very much regret that this upset so many people,” Darwin continued. He said quietly, “Especially Emma.” Then he spoke loudly, or what passed for loudly in his weak voice. “But they were even more upset when I explained that a lot of evolution was due not to natural selection but to sexual selection. Male birds have colorful feathers because female birds choose them, and all that. Many of my fellow Victorians didn’t even want to hear the word sexual. I didn’t mean to upset them. I would much rather sit around the mansion—and I had a pretty good one—studying orchids and pigeons.”

            “And barnacles,” I said. “The religious conservatives depicted you as some kind of monster. But I can see you are one of the nicest, and gentlest, people I have ever met.”

            “Except for Philomena,” said Stonewall, who had approached us, arm in arm with the former history teacher.

            “Some people,” explained Andrew, “used Darwin’s theories to justify slavery.” He looked into the eyes of Philomena, who had been black when she was alive.

            “We used creationism to justify slavery,” said Stonewall, who had been very very very white.

            “Well, racists will use whatever they can, such as either creation or evolution, to justify oppression,” said Andrew.

            “And that,” said Darwin, “is what makes me angrier than anything I ever experienced. While I was on Earth, I was an outspoken critic of slavery. My whole family—and Emma’s—denounced slavery, and tried our best to not invest in it. Investing in it, while denouncing it, is miserable hypocrisy…”

            “Amen, bro,” said Stonewall.

            We left Mr. Darwin, promising to come by and talk with him some more.

{end of email}

Emails from Hell, part thirteen.

I couldn't wait for the next email. Here it is!!!!!!

{beginning of email}

            “Let me show you something,” Andrew said to me. “Bear but a touch of my hand,” he said, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Soon I was whirling at a great height, looking over a vastness of miserable humans, or former humans, in Hell—not suffering from flames or torture,  but suffering from the same thing they did on Earth. They were miserably poor people, huddling in rags. On Earth, if you are poor enough long enough, you starve to death; but in Hell, you can stay poor and hungry forever. The constant stream of busy people went around and around their cauldron of misery.

            “This is unbearable,” I said, covering my eyes. “They suffered on Earth; can they not get some relief after they have left the vale of tears?”

            “Poverty is a great burden,” said Karl. “More so for women than men. For them, it is a veil of tears.”

            “Stick to your Groucho jokes,” I told him.

            “But as I said in my book,” continued Karl, “poverty is the inevitable result of capitalism…”

            “It is the inevitable result of practically any economic system except living in small tribes,” said Andrew, “or living in communes the way we Christians did in the early first century.”

            “None of that matters,” I thundered. “They deserve some relief after death.”

            “That is where the Powers that Be would say you are wrong,” said Andrew. “They would say that poverty is the fault of the poverts.”

            “It is sometimes,” said young Stonewall. “My friends and relatives were pretty damn lazy, just drove around in their trucks with Confederate flags all the time. Odd jobs, but not enough to have an economically secure life. It was our fault.”

            “But,” said Andrew, “the Powers that Be would say it is always the fault of the poor. The poor are always lazy. They would say that there has never existed a poor person—not a single one—who was not lazy, or stupid, or evil.”

            “That’s quite a statement,” I said. “I’m almost certain that it is wrong.”

            “But it is Biblical,” said Andrew. “Look it up in the 37^th Psalm. In the original Bible, not the one that the white supremacists rewrote. Verse 25.”

            Philomena grabbed a Bible and read the verse. “I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging bread.”

            “Pretty clear, if you take it literally,” said Andrew. “No righteous people are poor, therefore no poor people are righteous.”

            “Most poor people do not like begging for bread,” said Philomena. “They do not want a handout. They want justice. They want opportunity. What they want is for bankers to not charge huge interest rates—usury used to be illegal, even in the Bible—which trap them in poverty. They want to work their way out of poverty. They want jobs, not handouts. You know,” she said, “it is bad enough being poor, but the worst part of it is to have rich people sneer at you and tell you to get your lazy ass up and do some work, even when there is no employment available. The rich hated minimum wages and loved investing in robots…” She started to become very emotional until Stonewall touched her shoulder, and she slumped into his arms.

{end of email}

Resurrection

Last night (March 12, 2016) I went to the Tulsa Symphony production of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection Symphony. The Tulsa Symphony, together with the Tulsa Oratorio Chorus, performed magnificently. The conductor was Benjamin Zander, who is also the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. I have carefully listened to this symphony for thirty years, but I still learned many new things when I actually saw the performance and listened to the conductor explain it.

Most people react to death by not thinking about it: by just going to the funeral and getting it over with. Mahler was not like this. The first movement of his symphony was not a funeral march; the inchoate march was always interrupted when Mahler stopped to agonize, or to appreciate the surprising beauty of life. With excruciating beauty, Mahler wrung out every last insight he could get from the fabric of life, death, and resurrection. Here was neither a facile atheism nor a shallow Christianity.

Mahler's music is not for everybody. I will admit that my writing, too, is not for everybody. I cannot write anything, not even a four-line poem, which does not somehow plumb the meaning of life, revealing both its agony and its beauty, sometimes simultaneously. I am trying to do for the written word what Mahler did for music.

I am not going to go into any musical details. I just wish to say that, as a scientist, I see resurrection all the time. You have to look for it and think about it, as Mahler did. Here is what I see.

On the cover of a vinyl edition of Bruno Walter's recording of this symphony, there is one simple image: a deep space nebula. A nebula is a resurrection. The old superstar explodes as a supernova and is dead, leaving behind a pregnant cloud of gas and dust. From this cloud, new stars and planets condense, and the second generation of stars ignite. This is where our solar system came from. Our sun is a resurrected sun. And there would be no planets were it not for the engine of creation inside the supernova, the only place in which there is enough temperature and pressure to create the larger kinds of atoms such as iron, phosphorus, and magnesium from which planets and soils are made, and uranium, a radioactive element the decay of which keeps the interior of our planet hot. Our planet is solid and warm-blooded because of the supernova, the death and resurrection, of an earlier generation of star. This is why our sun is only five billion years old, while the universe is over twice that age. Astrophysicists believe in resurrection. It is not the same star, resurrected back to life; it is a different star; but the star-life continues.

I am a botanist and I see resurrection all the time. I don't just mean the opening of tree buds each spring, a process that is in full swing right at this moment. Budburst is not really resurrection; the trees and flowers were just asleep for the winter, and are awakening. But every forest that I walk through is a resurrection. Every forest is one that grew in a place in which an earlier forest was destroyed. Longfellow wrote about "the forest primeval" in Evangeline; but there is no such thing as a primeval forest! Longfellow's "primeval" Acadian forest had not even been there a few thousand years earlier, when the land was covered with glaciers. The forest had grown back after the glaciers melted. A fire or mudslide destroys a forest, and then it goes through a slow process of what ecologists call succession: first weeds, then shrubs, then fast-growing trees such as cottonwood, and finally, after about a century, the slow-growing and long-lived trees such as oaks. This is a resurrection. The original trees are gone; perhaps the new forest is different from the previous forest; but a forest has grown back. It is not a miracle, any more than a nebula is a miracle; it is simply the natural laws of plant growth. To realize this, you have to look closely at the forest, and look at it in four dimensions.

These are the kinds of resurrection that, I think, Mahler believed in. He had a hard time accepting the death of the old, but his faith in the growth of the new was irrepressible.

Emails from Hell, part twelve.

Hell just gets curioser and curiouser, according to our informant from Hell. Read his twelfth dispatch here.

{beginning of email}

            “Let me show you something,” Andrew said to me. “It is a Bible.”

            I took the book from his hand. It was a little thinner than I remember Bibles being back when I was on Earth. Matter of fact, back on Earth I studied the Bible pretty closely, hoping to maybe get some better insight into the world. Some parts of the Bible were more useful in this regard than others. I found the book of Ecclesiastes very enlightening—in fact, one of the best pieces of literature I had ever read. I opened the Bible Andrew handed to me, and was surprised not only that Ecclesiastes was missing, but the books that remained there were quite different from what I remembered. I glanced over passages I thought I knew well—especially the parts of Amos and Isaiah in which the prophets cried out against the way the rich people oppressed the poor, and how rich people always made the decisions in government. Getting a little alarmed, I turned to the book of Exodus and found that the commandments for the Year of Jubilee and the Sabbath of the Fields were missing. (I wrote about these in an earlier dispatch.) I looked up at Moses. He nodded at me, fully aware of what I had just discovered. My alarm reached its fullness when I turned to the book of Matthew and discovered that some of Jesus’ most beautiful words were missing: “Consider the lilies of the field…Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”

            “What,” I said, even more dudgeonly than I had spoken previously, “is this?”

            “It is the official Heavenly version of the Bible,” said Andrew.

            “You mean, the fundamentalists rewrote the Bible?” I exclaimed.

            “They wouldn’t dare do it on Earth. Even the brainwashed Sheeple in their churches would not have put up with that. But up here, they finally had their chance,” quoth Andrew.

            “What did they change?” I asked.

            “First,” said Andrew, “turn to the Book of Abrasions.”

            “I don’t remember that one…Oh, here it is.” I glanced through it. “The whole book seems to be about how evil Muslims are.”

            “That is one of the foundational beliefs in Christian fundamentalism,” explained Andrew. “Of course, the original Bible (original, that is, after it reached its final form about 367 CE) did not mention Islam, since it did not even exist until the eighth century. But without scripture telling them to hate Muslims, the fundamentalists felt sort of lost. Now, turn to the Book of Contusions.”

            I did. It was a long prophecy, written by a man named Johnny who was in the spirit, or perhaps high on THC, on the Isle of Patmos. In his vision, Johnny predicted the discovery of a large continent on the other side of the vasty ocean to the west, a continent inhabited by dusky people, and which the Chosen People of God would conquer and create a Light Unto the World.”

            “This sounds like Johnny was predicting the United States of America,” I said. “This is ridiculous. The original Bible did not have any prophecies that could remotely refer to the United States.”

            “Well,” said Andrew, “even here it is not referred to by name. That would be too much even for them. America was named after Amerigo Vespucci.”

            “Which means,” said Karl, “that there was a fifty-fifty chance that your country might have ended up being named the United States of Vespucci.”

            “And you will notice,” said John, “that everything I wrote about love has been left out. On Earth, they gave lip service to love, but when the fundamentalists got to Heaven, they could quit pretending. Turn now to the book of Concussions.”

            I did. It was all about how glorious it is to shed one’s blood for the fatherland, and how true Believers were not to show any mercy to the enemies of The Nation.

            “I was not a great admirer of the Bible while I was alive,” said Karl. “But compared to this swill, the original Bible was a real gem.”

            Everybody said Amen.

            “And furthermore,” continued Karl, “at least it is a book. I like to sit and read books. You know, outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

            “Wrong Marx!” we all yelled.

{end of email}

Emails from Hell, part eleven

Yet more amazing adventures awaited our correspondent in Hell!

{beginning of email}

            “PSST!” I heard from somewhere off in the mists, which is what Hell has instead of clouds.

            We were all surprised. I was no longer the only one who seemed clueless about what was going on. We all looked around to try to locate the source of the sound.

            “Over here,” came a loud whisper.

            Philomena had returned from her conversation with Pope Francis. She had very acute hearing and located the person who had made the sound.

            “Why, look what the cat dragged in!” she said, as she pulled a spirit person out of the mists and into our circle of camaraderie. It was a man whose clothing had been made from a Confederate flag. “You must have done something really bad, to be a Confederate who ended up in Hell,” she said.

            The man introduced himself. “I am Stonewall Beauregard,” he said. “And, I will let you know right away, please keep me hidden. I have been condemned to Heaven, and I’m not supposed to be down here. But, I just needed to talk to someone who actually thinks about things. Say, Ma’am. What’s your name?”

            “They called me Philomena, and I was of African descent back on Earth.”

            Stonewall smiled broadly. “I am so glad to meet you.” He knelt down. “Please forgive me for siding with the Confederates. And all of the rest of you: Please forgive me.”

            “I forgive-a you,” said Pope Francis.

            “Me too,” said Philomena. “My ancestors were still in Africa during the Confederacy, so my forgiveness doesn’t mean much. I was born in Benin. I suffered a lot of prejudice when I moved to America, but not from Confederates.”

            “Ah, there’s where you err,” said Stonewall. “I did not live during the Confederacy of 1861-1865. I lived in Oklahoma in the twenty-first century. I was one of those Confederate sympathizers. I drove a big truck around with Confederate flags flapping from it. Then I had a little too much to drink and ran my truck into a ditch. Soon as I woke up, there was a welcoming committee for me in Heaven. The Confederate sympathizers who had gone before me were playing in a big band. Dixie, of course, but also The Bonnie Blue Flag. I should have been happy but, you see, I felt guilty when the welcoming committee greeted me. I did not feel forgiven for the way I had lived, until this very moment. What joy you bring me, Philomena, and—who did you say you were, sir?”

            “Call him His Holiness,” said Karl.

            “Don’t-a call me that-a,” said the Pope.

            “I’m so ashamed of the way I behaved on Earth,” continued Stonewall. “And I’m even more ashamed of the way the other guys behave up in Heaven. You know what they do all day?”

            “Yes,” I said. I have described the daily ritual in Heaven in an earlier dispatch.

            “I’m going to have to get back before they miss me. Back on Earth, I used to slip into the bushes to read inspirational books by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King. I told everyone I needed to go see a man about a dog. But up here, we don’t have bowels so I can’t make that excuse any more. But I am so glad I found all-y’-all.”

            “Please feel free to come by for a visit when you can,” said Andrew.

            “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for a whole pot of crawdads,” said Stonewall. “And especially meeting you, Miss, or Ms., or whatever…I forgot your name…”

            “Philomena,” she smiled.

            Stonewall pronounced her name like it was a delicious piece of chocolate spread all over his spiritual teeth. He and Philomena held hands a little longer than was necessary before he shot back up to Heaven.

{end of email}