Mafia

Sam and I had planned the whole thing days ago. It was while we crossed the canal into Venice city that I said to him, “Sam, we have to play the perfect game. We have to be the Mafia together, and we have to kill everyone.” We spent the next hour wading through the sea and plotting the perfect storm.

A group of college students were touring Europe, and to kill the travel time 20 or so of us played Mafia in the back of a bus. You all know the rules: an omnipotent narrator controls the village, having all the players close their eyes, while the Mafia is asked to awaken and choose someone to kill. They choose, someone’s life is in danger, and the narrator asks the Mafia to close their eyes again. Next the Sheriff is awakened, asked to silently point out and accuse someone of being Mafia; they are then given the affirmative or negative nod by the all-knowing narrator, and asked to sleep again. Next the nurse awakens, is given the opportunity to save anyone, even themselves, and then falls asleep. No one knows who anyone is except the narrator. No one knows who lives and who dies. Finally, the whole village is awakened by the narrator who informs everyone about who is saved, if anyone, who  is dead, if anyone, and asks whether or not one of the villagers should be accused and hanged as the Mafia. Accusations are made, defenses are given, quarrels arise, a vote is taken, necks are strung, and then another round begins. Those who live till the end are the victors, either the Mafia or the villagers.

“Everyone close your eyes,” said the Narrator. Sam and I threw a knowing glance at each other and shut our eyes for what we knew would be mere seconds . “Mafia awake.” Two days previous in the back alleys of the Venetian labyrinth, tucked away in a whisper I managed to get the Narrator to agree to make the two of us Mafia together.

We knew what we had to do. The first kill was obvious: it had to be Joy. We had observed that no matter what role Joy played in previous games, Mafia, Sheriff, Nurse, or regular townsperson, she talked too much. She stirred the pot and was too good at it. We couldn’t risk that sort of chaos. We were banking on our rhetoric and we needed to silence our main competition.

But that part was obvious. Was easy. Was a segue into the real genius of the plan.

Because the real crux of the thing hinged on the very moment everyone awoke, after the first death had been served, when the accusations began, when the Sheriff—Sam and I did not know who—was in for a bit of a surprise.

“Joy has been killed by the Mafia,” said the Narrator. And I remember to this day the wince that came across her face. For like all the dead things on this earth, she could no longer speak, no longer participate. She was to watch from the sidelines the utter ruin soon to follow.

Then almost before the Narrator finished his words, Sam enacted the plan. He yelped, “Everyone, look, I’m the Sheriff, and I just accused Kevin. He is NOT the Mafia. We can’t hang him”!

Sam had lied. He was not the Sheriff and I was not a villager. We two Mafia had risked everything on a single sentence. We braced ourselves for the fight. It was to be only a matter of seconds before the real Sheriff spoke up.

But the silence that followed had not entered our calculations. For all of our planning, all our ingenuity, we had forgotten one sublime possibility. We had not prepared for the best case scenario.

You see, the idea was for Sam to feign being the Sheriff, to falsely accuse me, to vindicate me, and then for the both of us to prepare for a battle of rhetoric with the true Sheriff. We were to have the upper hand in every way. It would be two against one, the both of us highly confident in ways of manipulation. Sam had also spoken up first giving us the advantage, the actual Sheriff’s simply wouldn’t have had a well formed argument given such an audacious claim on our end.  I myself was ready to give a short speech saying that I heard Sam point toward me during the Sheriff’s time to accuse. And were things to get really iffy Sam had prepared a monologue about how we had planned that if one of us were get Sheriff that they would accuse the other so as to be able to solidify the safety of at least one villager. The strength of the argument was not its logic, but its appeal to the villagers: by eliminating 2 possible suspects—Sam as Sheriff and me as, well, his Deputy—the villagers could focus on hanging others, thus increasing their individual odds of survival. The real Sheriff would have too much stacked up against them. We would overwhelm the villagers with rhetoric, and hang the real Sheriff then and there or we would kill them the next night.

But silence. Complete and utter silence.

It hit us as immediately as it hit Joy’s wincing face. In that quietude we learned how dearly the Mafia gods loved us. By sheer luck we had killed the Sheriff in the first night. Joy was the real Sheriff.

I cannot explain how difficult it was to stifle our laughter.  The only point at which our plan could falter, the only point of risk, had been completely removed from the realm of possibility. As far as the villagers were concerned Sam was the Sheriff and I his Deputy. We were safe and reliable, trustworthy. If the village was to survive the onslaught of the Mafia it would be by our graces.

From thenceforward it was pure Sadism.

I spoke up, “Nurse, listen, you have to keep Sam alive. He’s the Sheriff, the more he can accuse the better chance we have of finding the Mafia.” Sam gave his bit of bull too, “Nurse, actually, even if you want to save Kevin, that’s fine too, at least he can guide the accusations when we’re awake.”

And so it was that the hands that fed them, fed them poison. I had the villagers arbitrarily hanging each other during the waking hours, and Sam had the pleasure of killing the villagers during the sleeping hours. But perhaps best of all we had the Nurse tending to the ailments of the Mafia. It was a massacre, an ambush, a Kansas City Shuffle if ever there were one. They died one by one, some near 20 people, without a single moment’s danger for either Sam or myself.

And what I remember most is the faces of the dead. Of course, when the Narrator said “Mafia wake up” for the next 7 or 8 rounds, the newly dead did not expect to find Sam and I’s eyes peering into the crowd, seeking whom we may devour. Sometimes there was shock, mouths agape, sometimes horror, other times anger, hands flailing violently into the air. They had trusted us with their lives because we made them believe we were trustworthy.

At one point someone even joked, “wouldn’t it be crazy if Sam and Kevin were Mafia”? They thought when we laughed we were laughing with them. We were laughing at them.

Of course Sam and I won. It wasn’t even a competition. Without doubt, after that evening the two of us never made it past the first two rounds. We were hung immediately and with malice. No one has trusted us ever since.

But it didn’t matter. We had played the perfect game. The game never to be surpassed.

First Paragraph of Religious Theories Paper

The footnote will probably make it to the trash bin—both because the beginning of a paper should not have an enormous footnote and because I should not start by treating my key interlocutor with blatant antipathy. But dadgumit, I find the guy irritatingly imprecise, and since my prof won’t be reading this footnote, maybe one of you will. That should make me feel better.

First Paragraph:

Wayne Proudfoot argues that religious experiences are constituted by language paradigms. More precisely, he believes that mystical experiences obtain their specific phenomenological character in part due to the logical apparatus inherent to a corresponding religious vocabulary. So, for instance, one of the conditions necessary for experiencing nirvana is the disciple’s familiarity with and, in some cases, adherence to predetermined doctrines specified by Buddhist’s dogma.[1] Proudfoot takes this basic argument and criticizes William James’ typology of mystical experience as it appears in The Varieties of Religious Experience. This paper aims to understand the extent to which Proudfoot’s theory is applicable to James and at what point the two thinkers are talking past each other.

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[1] To say, as Proudfoot does, that when the Buddha characterizes nirvana as ineffable or St. Francis characterizes communion with God as ineffable that these two tokens of ineffability are not phenomenologically isomorphic experiences fails, in the end, to say much at all. If we bracket the harder points of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, and assume, as everyone does, the real possibility of inter-subjectivity, no one may be said to share a phenomenologically isomorphic experience under any conditions. To use Husserl’s terminology, the horizonal content—retentions like memories or past experiences (including language) and protentions like present appearances or future possibilities—is always different for everyone. Falling in love for Bob or for Jane may be called the same thing by both, but that love appears differently to both people. Analogously, the ineffable mystical experience as it appears to any individual is inevitably different—whether due to the religious language employed or merely a difference in point of view i.e. both being part of the horizonal content. Given Proudfoot’s criteria, the same criticism might be applied to states of nirvana, i.e. that the Buddha experiencing nirvana cannot be the same as some other Buddhist experiencing nirvana in virtue of the two Buddhist’s differing language armamentarium. If Proudfoot wants to go the reductionstic route, he must either tell us where to stop or keep going to the logical conclusion. So far as I can tell, he gives no hints about stopping, only insisting that ineffability for Buddhists is different from ineffability for Christians. Well, of course it is! But if the criteria for these differences is merely the phenomenological character of an experience constituted by a language—where all persons have a different set of horizonal language games constituting the appearance or experience of mystical states—then, like ineffability, no state of nirvana is alike: no nirvana is the same as the original state of nirvana. Why is Proudfoot willing to critique differing religious paradigms and not homogenous religious persons where the criticism can apply to both groups? Why is Proudfoot comfortable keeping nirvana in tact and not ineffability? It all sounds vaguely Derridadian to me.

As The Deer

“and I said you can shirk all things and he said Ah can you”---Faulkner

As The Deer

My pillow lies over on the empty side where Kara used to sleep. I stretch to pull it toward me, noticing the fan unplugged in my peripheral. I sigh. The multiplication of little things unhinges a man. Silence multiplied by stray pillows multiplied by unplugged fans is equal to… nothing but the arbitrary combination of words. Every explanation, every story amounts to nothing but the arbitrary combination of words.

How long have you slept with a fan Kara asked. Since I was fifteen, I said, when my dad’s salary dropped after becoming a pastor and we moved to Florida in a smaller house where I had to sleep in the garage for a summer. I still sleep with it in Pennsylvania, I said noticing her look, because I am too used to the sound of the hum. Then she asked whether the rhythm of her breathing would be enough to replace it and I said I hoped so.

The fan plug lies on the floor behind a leather chair on the empty side. I roll out of bed to go plug it in. The feat of rolling out of bed is the same as in, only reversed. Like when Jesus rolled the stone away, only reversed. That there is a grave at all is a miracle let alone the resurrection; all of it an accident of consciousness. Jesus is an accident of consciousness, an attempted therapeutic amalgamation of words that’s no more therapeutic than anything else.

The clock reads 11:50 on the bureau a few feet off the foot of the bed. Six months at 11:52. He stared at his at his watch, reaching for the sheet with his right hand while starting at the watch on his left. We were shivering from the cold but Kara was not. Then he looked up from his watch to say to the driver. 11:51, the clock clicks another minute as I walk by the foot of the bed to go plug in the fan. I knew what he was doing when he started at his watch.

Before the ceremony my father said of marriage that it amounts to a commitment to the annihilation of selfishness. She was a nurse at St. Mary’s and already had that advantage on me. That’s why she drove us to and from breakfast, because she knew that’s what I needed. Doubting Thomas she said do you need to see Jesus’ hands and feet? What evidence do you need? She chewed her waffle. Her eyes. What do you need, she said. I need to sleep before class tomorrow I said we should go, and she said she’s driving. Kara was tired when we drove for home and so was I, but she didn’t work till second shift and I had classes.

My gait gradually lowers like in those evolution pictures where amoeba changes into man, only reversed. Now crawling to reach the outlet. The decline of being concomitant with the incline of amoebas. Stuck on a memory; stuck on the arbitrary combination of words. Keep still, I said; don’t talk. Keep your eyes open. Wait. Wait. Keep your eyes open. Her wide eyes. Her lashes, she used to wink; her wide eyes watched the world. The carpet curves around my knees, my hands leave tracks like deer tracks.

My fingers trace the boarders of the mattress over Kara. Just think I said about how Jesus would hesitate to wash those uglies, and she said ugly feet are better than hairy feet. She wiggled her toes. She smiled. I trace her legs and her back, ivory and smooth and sensitive. I trace around her ear, her hair, blond and wavy when its wet.

But nothing but the sheets and Kara’s smell on the sheets. Cotton blossom she called it. Called it. Past tense active indicative. Words.

Professor Davies says that we wear the Holy Spirit like a Halloween costume. People and people like him have these habits of saying what they do not know they mean. A Ghost somehow inside us and in us and with us. Prepositions. Words. Sometimes the fan blows under the sheets lifting them body-like above the mattress, and I am haunted by the space Kara used to fill. Comfort that was beside me and across me. Cotton blossom comforting me. Yet still we call Him Comforter. Professor Davies also says that as the deer panteth after the water so his soul panteth after God. How can one drink on God and hope to be sated when he is thirsty only for his wife of two short years? More words. Professor Davies drinks what he calls life, and thinks he is filled when all he is, is distracted with words.

Because ever since that night I have believed that life and death are siblings not strangers, the offspring of that accident of consciousness we call hope. Among other accidents. I cannot shake unbelief, I said. She smiled her nurse’s smile. Let’s go get breakfast since we’ll be up talking anyway. Her eyes. I have class tomorrow I said I need to sleep, but she whisked back the sheets, and I smiled and turned off the fan, grabbing the keys off the nightstand.

As the deer panteth across the road, so my soul after You.

I do no heal bodies, I heal despair she said sipping her orange juice. Patients press the nurse’s button, and I must be as ready for death as for turning the sheets. And there really is no difference between the two; death is just as much a practical matter in the end as anything else. Ask the elderly dripping into their bed pans or signing their last will and testament.

She paused and drew a circle in the syrup with her fork, smiling. Hope like waffles must come in increments, she teased, must be commensurate with the appetite, be it a hope for clean sheets or salvation from God. And whether you choose to hope or believe in it or just desire it doesn’t matter so long as you have it, a bite at a time. And even if it is an illusion then it is a pleasant fantasy because it is sweeter than the alternative. And I asked what she thinks is the alternative and she said an empty stomach.

My head is propped against the chair, the fan in my peripheral. I can hear my hair scraping against the leather through my skull while stabbing for the outlet. I can hear the heater too, vibrating, breathing. The plug goes in and the fan is already switched on, pointing in the wrong direction toward me on the floor. I know because I can feel the air; and I can hear it and had heard it before and would keep hearing it. And I remember anew the white noise and the unmeaning. It blows fresh against my face, like the feel of her breathing while she kissed, only not. Kara breathed heavily and with a pitch in her voice.

She shouldn’t have turned the wheel. The headlights cracked and windshield and my ribs. She shouldn’t have turned the wheel. As the deer panteth across the road, so my soul after You.

I do not have the luxury of bricks or birds where the wind and the weathering don’t because they can’t. The fan and the white noise and the unmeaning. But I have class tomorrow I said, and she smiled, so I smiled. Words, words, words. Unmeaning doesn’t mean unmeaning. It can’t; I can’t.

I push myself off the carpet, smelling to see if she’s still in the sheets. One should never stick their necks out for giraffes, I kidded, and she laughed, her wide eyes and the orange juice everywhere. The waitress got a good tip. Nighttime breakfast and the waitress poured her more orange juice. The wind and the weathering and the waitress got a good tip. Keep your eyes open, I said. Wait. Wait.

The clock reads 11:52. I stand up, the fan breathing, and scud back around the bed, tracing the border of the mattress with my finger. Her wide eyes and that dip in her neck, that cotton blossom dip, in the valley of the collar bone, the valley of the shadow of death. And her breasts and waist, ivory and smooth and sensitive. Then her legs and feet.

She’s not breathing, he said, and I mumbled words I do not remember. Time of death, he said, 11:52. I do not remember what I said, and it would not matter if I did. The fan and the white noise, and I call it silence not her breathing, and I call it the unmeaning and the hum of the fan as if that’s not a meaning. And I, bending over, retrograde, smell her in the sheets again like in the evolution pictures, only reversed. Stuck on a memory, stuck on the arbitrary combination of words.

She stopped laughing about the orange juice. The antlers nicked the mirror on my side. Her wide eyes. Don’t turn the wheel. Headlights. It tipped. The sound like crackling fire. It rolled, and only I was there. She was there and then she was not. The sound like crackling fire, like splintering wood. The windshield and my ribs. Powder from the airbag. My ribs. It rolled again.

The sheets are cold, so I make friction with my hand and slip back in. Then the fan isn’t blowing on my face so I turn it toward me, and the sheets feel cold again. I pull the covers over my head, forgetting and not forgetting to turn the lamp off, forgetting and not forgetting about the light. She’s not breathing, he said.

The windshield was not there, and she was not there. I crawled out on my elbows, my shoes scrapping against the glass and pavement, like the crunch of walking over acorns during autumn, only not. I looked back into the jeep, then looked at my hands, and back into the jeep. She was not there. I tried to stand, pulling myself up by the door handle.

Then came the pause and the drop and the ineffable. She lay on her back on the ground some 20 yards away, heaving, her waist wrapped around a tree. I ran, autumn beneath my feet. A man stepped out of his car watching me run. I fell on my knees next to her. My ribs, and I pulled her toward me. The orange juice stained my shirt and the blood stained the orange juice. Keep still, I said; don’t talk. Keep your eyes open. Wait. Wait. Keep your eyes open.

Words, words, hollow words. Silence is a sound the second you say it. And it was silent when she went limp and I say it, and it is silent now in the white noise of the fan and I say it. The banality of words. The banality of the dead. The banality of that goddamn deer. The drama banal par excellence. Therapy is Lethe or death or her alive. Not prayer, not Jesus. It is not even therapeutic to say there is no therapy. Just words. From an is to a was, a thou to a that. Calling it languor doesn’t accustom you to the fan.

The covers are over my head, but the light still sneaks through. I remember the lamp. Me trying to sleep in the darkness, but the light always shining through. The little things unhinge a man, like stray pillows or unplugged fans or kindled lights. I pull the covers back squinting in from the brightness, and stretch to pull the lamp chain. It slips a bit so I shift further over to get a good grip and tug.

It is dark now; I close my eyes. But even now I see. Somehow my eyes always have patterns, though less so than when in the light. How can I see colors on the back of my eyelids when there is no light? What am I seeing if not light?

Of the Aged and Aristocratic

If you were to say that old people love me, you would be understating the point. Old people coddle me, adore me, wink at, joke on, hug, and talk to me as if I am simultaneously their only grandchild and best friend. It has something to do with my silent charm, I think. It might have something to do with the fact that I listen to them--something I find easy I might add. Old people are as a rule quirky because old people as a rule no longer give a damn. Who doesn’t find that interesting?

This week in particular sent me into the circles of the aged and the aristocratic. I had my usual chit-chat with Henry, an 87 year old Upenn Professor emeritus of psychology, on Thursday. But instead of the normal hour and only Henry, we spoke for almost three hours alongside Tony, an 85 year old sociologist. A psychologist, a sociologist, and a philosopher walk into a bar... And in a way, it was a joke. Here sit three men talking metaphysics, abortion, and lets not forget about (as Henry put it) “the seriousness of jokes.” It’s fun being the religious youth of the group.

Last night continued the trend. I had dinner and a show with Betty, Mo, Bill, and my grandparents. I ate crab cakes, they were the show. Mo, I think, is the youngest—somewhere in his early sixties—the rest are in their seventies. We ate at Ludwigs, a restaurant both as pretentious and delicious as it sounds. Once again I am the only youth present. The first half of the night consisted of me listening to their stories—ones I’m certain had been repeated amongst themselves at least 5 times. The second half of the night consisted of them listening to me blather on about the history of philosophy, the current sentimental state of my generation, and the psychology of love.

The difference between these two sets of people is undoubtedly drastic. Henry and Tony are raving atheists while the other bunch are raving Christian fundamentalists. (No one can tell me my life is uninteresting.) And I have no pithy remark to make concerning the violence of this juxtaposition. I just wanted to recount the week.

I might add though that I’m used to the feeling of violent juxtapositions. Age/youth, educated/uneducated, wealth/poverty, religious/non-religious. A friend of mine in Penn's classics Ph.d program told me last week, “My parents said I could be either the president or a basketball player or a lawyer, and it all just makes me want to curl up and work at Starbucks till I’m dead.” I repeated the sentiment in different terms last night to Mo and my grandparents, “everything is available,” I said, “and we don’t know what’s worth owning; everything is knowable, and we don’t know what to believe; any identity is possible, and we don’t know who we are.”

Whether illusory or no, our grandparent's generation could at least feel they had an object toward which they aimed. Whether atheist or Christian (or whatever), they have their definitives and absolutes. And sitting there listening made me re-realize the attractiveness of that sentiment, that modern sort of comfortability with the world.

On Meetings With Old Men

Every Thursday at 2:30 I meet with former professor emeritus of psychology at Upenn Henry Gleitman. We discuss, well, really most anything, but have both shown a particular interest in ‘religious experience.’ Henry is a pleasant old man, clearly sophisticated, but not pretentious by any means. You might say that he, at 87, knows himself very well, and is content with his talents and weaknesses. He is, as he put it, “a staunch agnostic,” unbending in his conviction concerning the explanatory power of empirical science. Clearly, he's comfortable among the modern materialists, though thankfully not a sentimentalist like so many during his time.

I liked him immediately after meeting him. Agnostics tend to be my favorite brand of people. They have a similar temperament to my own, never taking one particular idea more seriously than another. Once you’ve read enough, been exposed to the world, as it were, academic hero worship vanishes, as does the sensation arising from a new and possibly true philosophy. All philosophies are possibly true to the agnostic, and he feels it.

It’s interesting, I think, that Henry and I have such similar psychological propensities considering we fall into two very different camps of agnosticism. When after only just meeting him he said, “moral ambiguities, despair, the inevitability of death: you know, the usual things,” I knew I had found a comrade. “Yes, the usual things,” I thought. He is 87, myself 25, yet both of us have concluded not only that hope and absurdity lie at the essence of human experience as important issues, but that they are “the usual things.” There’s a kind of indifference toward the whole procedure of internal dialects once you’ve gone through them enough. A kind of ‘worn out-ness’ on the cyclical nature of what is probably unknowable, in the epistemological sense anyway.

To say with this in mind that I have lived on the fringe of Christian belief over the past 3 years would be a dramatic oversimplification. I have not and will not commit the intellectual fallacy of assuming that because most Christians I have known have a certain bland naivety—even the most intelligent among them—concerning despair (and all it entails) that Christianity is false. Christianity, whether true or false, at the very least functions therapeutically to remove that despair, and perhaps the very possibility for that despair; that function is of its essence. (Of course, no worldview, not even that of Absurdism—however hard it tries—,can successfully avoid the narrative of hope. It may change the object of hope and thus the character (and value) of hope, but not the impulse to hope). That most people are naïve about this aspect of their own psychology, and theology, does not sully the truth or falseness of those beliefs. It does not even remotely suggest sullying. Totemism is not false because its adherents are too emotionally attached to a giant stick in the ground. It is false probably if for no other reason than worshiping giant sticks as opposed to Omni-attributed Beings is silly. I thus reject the popular sentiment that because normal Christians are naïve that the creeds of Christianity are naïve. In any case, who could accuse Dostoevsky or Kierkegaard of being naïve? Yet they certainly believed.

The questions up here in the stratosphere of being are, in my view, the most significant of the bunch. Those down to earth quibs over the minutia of some theological point, over types of baptism or denominational differences, even of heaven and hell, I leave to the experts. What concerns me and what has always concerned me is a Christianity which leaves none of the data out, now matter how upsetting, and yet, somehow, by some roads—familiar or foreign—demonstrates itself to be at the very least tenable.