A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

Tin Roof, Rusted
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

The Photo

I stumbled upon a website devoted to Thomas Pynchon just now and an article about Gravity's Rainbow reminded me of this photo I took a couple of years ago in Hiroshima. It is a photo of a tin roof--what was once a tin roof, anyway--another post-atomic bomb artifact.

The title of this entry, "A screaming comes across the sky," is the opening line from Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow. The line describes the sound of an incoming bomb or missile; in the book, as now, it is wartime. Despite this, Gravity's Rainbow is a beautiful book. Reading it is much like I imagine drowning to be. Reading it is like drowning in time.

Pynchon knows that nature (or the divine) is largely and blissfully ignorant of the concept of extinction; it instead embraces the power of transformation, which is itself an oftentimes destructive force. In Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon recognizes that the day we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, August 6, is also the day Christians celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ. On that day, Christ's face, it is written, did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light: All lit up, I imagine, like Hiroshima on that August morning.

Pay attention now: The Feast Day of the Transfiguration of Christ was an effort by the church to hijack a pagan feast day that celebrated Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and the rapture associated with sex. Aphrodite's feast day was a celebration of that old, sticky, troublesome trinity. Aphrodite herself was hijacked by the Greeks. Before she was Aphrodite, she was the Mesopotamian Ishtar, the goddess hailed as a prolific and often brutally destructive lover. Before she was Ishtar, she was the Levantine Astarte, goddess of sexuality, fertility, and war. Somewhere along the way we gained the association of love with sexuality and fertility, and lost the association of sexuality and fertility with war.

Over time, we became embarrassed about associating war with sexuality and fertility. We forgot about the raping in the raping and pillaging equation so that even now, as we engage in war in foreign lands, we somehow still believe ourselves capable of conquering a people and spreading our seed--the seeds of democracy, I mean--without the raping. Now we wage wars in the name of a celibate Prince of Peace.

History is a beautiful kind of shell game, isn't it?

Never The Twain

And now, just to wash the taste of Hiroshima, Pynchon, and Christ from your brain, here is a bit of timeless advice from Mark Twain's essay "Advice to Little Girls":

If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud--never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes. It is better to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results. You secure his immediate attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time your hot water will have a tendency to remove impurities from his person, and possibly the skin, in spots.

If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment.

You should ever bear in mind that it is to your kind parents that you are indebted for your food, and for your nice bed, and for your beautiful clothes, and for the privilege of staying home from school when you let on that you are sick. Therefore you ought to respect their little prejudices, and humor their little whims, and put up with their little foibles until they get to crowding you too much.

I adore Mark Twain. I have a thing for moustachioed men.