What I feared was a return by Fat to suicide and if that failed, then another stretch in the rubber lock-up.
To my surprise when I dropped by Fat’s apartment I found him composed.
‘I’m going,’ he told me.
‘On your quest?’
‘You got it,’ Fat said.
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll just start going and Zebra will guide me.’
I had no motivation to try to talk him out of it; what did his alternatives consist of? Sitting by himself in the apartment he and Sherri had lived in together? Listening to Kevin mock the sorrows of the world? Worst of all, he could spend his time listening to David prattle about how ‘God brings good out of evil.’ If anything were to put Fat in the rubber lock-up it would be finding himself caught in a cross-fire between Kevin and David: the stupid and pious and credulous versus the cynically cruel. And what could I add? Sherri’s death had torn me down, too, had deconstructed me into basic parts, like a toy disassembled back to what had arrived in the gaily-colored kit. I felt like saying, ‘Take me along, Fat. Show me the way home.’
While Fat and I sat there together grieving, the phone rang. It was Beth, wanting to be sure Fat knew that he had fallen behind a week in his child support payment.
As he hung up the phone, Fat said to me, ‘My ex-wives are descended from rats.’
‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ I said.
‘Then you agree I should go.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I’ve got enough money to go anywhere in the world. I’ve thought of China. I’ve thought, Where is the least likely place He would be born? A Communist country like China. Or France.’
‘Why France?’ I asked.
‘I’ve always wanted to see France.’
‘Then go to France,’ I said.
‘ “What will you do,” ‘ Fat murmured.
‘Pardon?’
‘I was thinking about that American Express Travelers’ Checks TV ad. “What will you do. What will you do.” That’s how I feel right now. They’re right.’
I said, ‘I like the one where the middle-aged man says, “I had six hundred dollars in that wallet. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life.” If that’s the worst thing that ever happened to him –’
‘Yeah,’ Fat said, nodding. ‘He’s led a sheltered life.’
I knew what vision had conjured itself up in Fat’s mind: the vision of the dying girls. Either broken on impact or burst open from within. I shivered and felt, myself, like weeping.
‘She suffocated,’ Fat said, finally, in a low voice. ‘She just fucking suffocated; she couldn’t breathe any longer.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?’ Fat said. ‘ “There are worse diseases than cancer.” ‘
‘Did he show you slides?’
We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
‘Let’s walk down to Sombrero Street,’ I said; that was a good restaurant and bar where we all liked to go. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
We walked down to Main Street and seated ourselves in the bar at Sombrero Street.
‘Where’s that little brown-haired lady you used to come in here with?’ the waitress asked Fat as she served us our drinks.
‘In Cleveland,’ Fat said. We both started to laugh again. The waitress remembered Sherri. It was too awful to take seriously.
‘I knew this woman,’ I said to Fat as we drank, ‘and I was talking about a dead cat of mine and I said, “Well, he’s at rest in perpetuity” and she immediately said, completely seriously, “My cat is buried in Glendale.” We all chimed in and compared the weather in Glendale compared to the weather in perpetuity.’ Both Fat and I were laughing so hard now that other people stared at us. ‘We have to knock this off,’ I said, calming down.
‘Isn’t it colder in perpetuity?’ Fat said.
‘Yes, but there’s less smog.’
Fat said, ‘Maybe that’s where I’ll find him.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Him. The fifth savior.’
‘Do you remember the time at your apartment,’ I said, ‘when Sherri was starting chemotherapy and her hair was falling out –’
‘Yeah, the cat’s water dish.’
‘She was standing by the cat’s water dish and her hair kept falling into the water dish and the poor cat was puzzled.’
‘ “What the hell is this?” ‘ Fat said, quoting what the cat would have said could it talk. ‘ “Here in my water dish?” ‘ He grinned, but no joy could be seen in his grin. Neither of us could be funny any longer, even between us. ‘We need Kevin to cheer us up,’ Fat said. ‘On second thought,’ he murmured, ‘maybe we don’t.’
‘We just have to keep on truckin’,’ I said.
‘Phil,’ Fat said, ‘if I don’t find him, I’m going to die.’
‘I know,’ I said. It was true. The Savior stood between Horselover Fat and annihilation.
‘I am programmed to self-destruct,’ Fat said. ‘The button has been pressed.’
‘The sensations that you feel –’ I began.
‘They’re rational,’ Fat said. ‘In terms of the situation. It’s true. This is not insanity. I have to find him, wherever he is, or die.’
‘Well, then I’ll die, too,’ I said. ‘If you do.’
‘That’s right,’ Fat said. He nodded. ‘You got it. You can’t exist without me and I can’t exist without you. We’re in this together. Fuck. What kind of life is this? Why do these things happen?’
‘You said it yourself. The universe –’
‘I’ll find him,’ Fat said. He drank his drink and set the empty glass down and stood up. ‘Let’s go back to my apartment. I want you to hear the new Linda Ronstadt record, Living In the USA. It’s real good.’
As we left the bar, I said, ‘Kevin says Ronstadt’s washed up.’
Pausing at the door out, Fat said, ‘Kevin is washed up. He’s going to whip that goddam dead cat out from under his coat on Judgment Day and they’re going to laugh at him like he laughs at us. That’s what he deserves: a Great Judge exactly like himself.’
‘That’s not a bad theological idea,’ I said. ‘You find yourself facing yourself. You think you’ll find him?’
‘The Savior? Yeah, I’ll find him. If I run out of money I’ll come home and work some more and go look again. He has to be somewhere. Zebra said so. And Thomas inside my head – he knew it; he remembered Jesus just having been there a little while ago, and he knew he’d be back. They were all joyful, completely joyful, making preparations to welcome him back. The bridegroom back. It was so goddam festive, Phil; totally joyful and exciting, and everyone running around. They were running out of the Black Iron Prison and just laughing and laughing; they had fucking blown it up, Phil; the whole prison. Blew it up and got out of there ... running and laughing and totally, totally happy. And I was one of them.’
‘You will be again,’ I said.
‘I will be,’ Fat said, ‘when I find him. But until then I won’t be; I can’t be; there’s no way.’ He halted on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. ‘I miss him, Phil; I fucking miss him. I want to be with him; I want to feel his arm around me. Nobody else can do that. I saw him-sort of-and I want to see him again. That love, that warmth – that delight on his part that it’s me, seeing me, being glad it’s me: recognizing me. He recognized me!’
‘I know,’ I said, awkwardly.
‘Nobody knows what it’s like,’ Fat said, ‘to have seen him and then not to see him. Almost five years now, five years of –’ He gestured. ‘Of what? And what before that?’
‘You’ll find him,’ I said.
‘I have to,’ Fat said, ‘or I am going to die. And you, too, Phil. And we know it.’
The leader of the Grail knights, Amfortas, has a wound which will not heal. Klingsor has wounded him with the spear which pierced Christ’
s side. Later, when Klingsor hurls the spear at Parsifal, the pure fool catches the spear – which has stopped in midair – and holds it up, making the sign of the Cross with it, at which Klingsor and his entire castle vanish. They were never there in the first place; they were a delusion, what the Greeks call dokos; what the Indians call the veil of maya.
There is nothing Parsifal cannot do. At the end of the opera, Parsifal touches the spear to Amfortas’s wound and the wound heals. Amfortas, who only wanted to die, is healed. Very mysterious words are repeated, which I never understood, although I can read German:
‘Gesegnet sei dein Leiden,
Das Mitleids höchste Kraft,
Und reinsten Wissens Macht
Derm, zagen Toren gab!’
This is one of the keys to the story of Parsifal, the pure fool who abolishes the delusion of the magician Klingsor and his castle, and heals Amfortas’s wound. But what does it mean?
‘May your suffering be blessed,
Which gave the timid fool
Pity’s highest power
And purest knowledge’s might!’
I don’t know what this means. However, I know that in our case, the pure fool, Horselover Fat, himself had the wound which would not heal, and the pain that goes with it. All right; the wound is caused by the spear which pierced the Savior’s side, and only that same spear can heal it. In the opera, after Amfortas is healed, the shrine is at last opened (it has been closed for a long time) and the Grail is revealed, at which point heavenly voices say:
‘Erlösung dem Erlöser!’
Which is very strange, because it means:
“The Redeemer redeemed!’
In other words, Christ has saved himself. There’s a technical term for this: Salvator salvandus. The ‘saved savior.’
The fact that in the discharge of his task the
eternal messenger must himself assume the lot of
incarnation and cosmic exile, and the further
fact that, at least in the Iranian variety of
the myth, he is in a sense identical with those
he calls – the once lost parts of the divine
self – give rise to the moving idea of the
‘saved savior’ (salvator salvandus).
My source is reputable: The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1967; in the article on ‘Gnosticism.’ I am trying to see how this applies to Fat. What is this ‘pity’s highest power?’ In what way does pity’ have the power to heal a wound? And can Fat feel pity for himself and so heal his own wound? Would this, then, make Horselover Fat the Savior himself, the savior saved? That seems to be the idea which Wagner expresses. The savior saved idea is Gnostic in origin. How did it get into Parsifal?
Maybe Fat was searching for himself when he set out in search of the Savior. To heal the wound made by first the death of Gloria and then the death of Sherri. But what in our modern world is the analog for Klingsor’s huge stone castle?
That which Fat calls the Empire? The Black Iron Prison?
Is the Empire ‘which never ended’ an illusion?
The words which Parsifal speaks which cause the huge stone castle – and Klingsor himself – to disappear are:
‘Mit diesem Zeichen bann’ Ich deinen Zauber.’
‘With this sign I abolish your magic’
The sign, of course, is the sign of the Cross. Fat’s Savior is Fat himself, as I already figured out; Zebra is all the selves along the linear time-axis, laminated into one supra- or trans-temporal self which cannot die, and which has come back to save Fat. But I don’t dare tell Fat that he is searching for himself. He is not ready to entertain such a notion, because like the rest of us he seeks an external savior.
‘Pity’s highest power’ is just bullshit. Pity has no power. Fat felt vast pity for Gloria and vast pity for Sherri and it didn’t do a damn bit of good in either case. Something was lacking. Everyone knows this, everyone who has gazed down helplessly at a sick or dying human or a sick or dying animal, felt terrible pity, overpowering pity, and realized that this pity, however great it might be, is totally useless.
Something else healed the wound.
For me and David and Kevin this was a serious matter, this wound in Fat which would not heal, but which had to be healed and would be healed – if Fat found the Savior. Did some magic scene lie in the future where Fat would come to his senses, recognize that he was the Savior, and thereby automatically be healed? Don’t bet on it. I wouldn’t.
Parsifal is one of those corkscrew artifacts of culture in which you get the subjective sense that you’ve learned something from it, something valuable or even priceless; but on closer inspection you suddenly begin to scratch your head and say, ‘Wait a minute. This makes no sense’
I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. ‘You have to let me in,’ he says. ‘I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?’
And they answer, ‘Well, we read it and it makes no sense.’ SLAM. Wagner is right and so are they. It’s another Chinese finger-trap.
Or perhaps I’m missing the point. What we have here is a Zen paradox. That which makes no sense makes the most sense. I am being caught in a sin of the highest magnitude: using Aristotelian two-value logic: ‘A thing is either A or not-A.’ (The Law of the Excluded Middle.) Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked. What I am saying is that –
If Kevin were here he’d say, ‘Deedle-deedle queep,” which is what he says to Fat when Fat reads aloud from his exegesis. Kevin has no use for the Profound. He’s right. All I am doing is going, ‘Deedle-deedle queep’ over and over again in my attempts to understand how Horselover Fat is going to heal – save – Horselover Fat. Because Fat cannot be saved. Healing Sherri was going to make up for losing Gloria; but Sherri died. The death of Gloria caused Fat to take forty-nine tablets of poison and now we are hoping that upon Sherri’s death he will go forth, find the Savior (what Savior?) and be healed – healed of a wound that prior to Sherri’s death was virtually terminal for him. Now there is no Horselover Fat; only the wound remains.
Horselover Fat is dead. Dragged down into the grave by two malignant women. Dragged down because he is a fool. That’s another nonsense part in Parsifal, the idea that being stupid is salvific. Why? In Parsifal suffering gave the timid fool ‘purest knowledge’s might.’ How? Why? Please explain.
Please show me how Gloria’s suffering and Sherri’s suffering contributed anything good to Fat, to anyone, to anything. It’s a lie. It’s an evil lie. Suffering is to be abolished. Well, admittedly, Parsifal did that by healing the wound; Amfortas’s agony ceased.
What we really need is a doctor, not a spear. Let me give you entry #45 from Fat’s tractate.
#45. In seeing Christ in a vision I correctly said to him, ‘We need medical attention.’ In the vision there was an insane creator who destroyed what he created, without purpose; which is to say, irrationally. This is the deranged streak in the Mind; Christ is our only hope, since we cannot now call on Asklepios. Asklepios came before Christ and raised a man from the dead; for this act, Zeus had a Kyklopes slay him with a thunderbolt Christ also was killed for what he had done: raising a man from the dead. Elijah brought a boy back to life and disappeared soon thereafter in a whirlwind. ‘The Empire never ended.’
Entry #46. The physician has come to us a number of times under a number of names. But we are not yet healed. The Empire identified him and ejected him. This time he will kill the Empire by phagocytosis.
In many ways Fat’s exegesis makes more sense than Parsifal. Fat conceives of the universe as a living organism into which a toxic particle has come. The toxic particle, made of heavy metal, has embedded itself in the universe-organism and is poisoning it. The universe-organism dispatches a phagocyte. The phagocyte is Christ. It surrounds the toxic metal particle – the Black Iron Prison – and begins to destroy it.
Entry #41. The Empire is the insti
tution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
Entry #42. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.
Entry #43. Against the Empire is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician, which we know as the Holy Spirit or Christ discorporate. These are the two principles, the dark (the Empire) and the light (the plasmate). In the end, Mind will give victory to the latter. Each of us will die or survive according to which way he aligns himself and his efforts. Each of us contains a component of each. Eventually one or the other component will triumph in each human. Zoroaster knew this, because the Wise Mind informed him. He was the first savior.1 Four have lived in all. A fifth is about to be born, who will differ from the others: he will rule and he will judge us.
In my opinion, Kevin may go ‘deedle-deedle queep’ whenever Fat reads or quotes from his tractate, but Fat is onto something. Fat sees a cosmic phagocytosis in progress, one in which in micro-form we are each involved. A toxic metal particle is lodged in each of us: ‘That which is above (the macrocosm) is that which is below (the microcosm or man).’ We are all wounded and we all need a physician – Elijah for the Jews, Asklepios for the Greeks, Christ for the Christians, Zoroaster for the Gnostics, the followers of Mani, and so forth. We die because we are born sick – born with a heavy metal splinter in us, a wound like Amfortas’s wound. And when we are healed we will be immortal; this is how it was supposed to be, but the toxic metal splinter entered the macrocosm and simultaneously entered each of its microcosmic pluriforms: ourselves.
Consider the cat dozing on your lap. He is wounded, but the wound does not yet show. Like Sherri, something is eating him away. Do you want to gamble against this statement? Laminate all the cat’s images in linear time into one entity; what you get is pierced, injured and dead. But a miracle occurs. An invisible physician restores the cat.