No Country For Old Writers: TRANSIT VISA: Conversations with John

CONVERSATIONS WITH JOHN 6/30/11, Berlin

The day after I received the fantastic gift from Terrence Mallick, his film ‘Tree of Life’, I quit my daily intensive German course at Albert Einstein’s Volskhochschule, and gave up on my impatience and mounting fury at the German grammatical declensions, which no amount of explanation or charts could remedy – after all I am an intellectual, not a code breaker. I surveyed my situation from the film’s loving and broad perspective and saw that my time management problems were also of a spiritual nature. With limited time on the planet, increasingly cut in on by depression management, money management, relationship management, time carved out for writing was a critical issue and vital to my survival. My consciousness was raised by the film’s narrative to such an extent that I again pledged to devote myself to the written page. My writing to me, I realized, was as much of a gift, if not to the world at least to me, as Mallick’s vision and articulation in cinema form were his. But he could also change worlds. I reeled in amazement that such a feat could be accomplished in one small lifetime. With all odds against us and in our limited span, miracles still occurred.

Two weeks later I was rested and ready to see the film again. John and I sat in the Odeon Cinema, a wonderful, stinky old place, on a brutally hot afternoon to revisit Mallick’s country, where there was no dividing line between light and flesh, between time and immortality, where the water from a garden hose was the Virgin Mary’s vital element. I wept again the second time, sitting on the concrete steps outside, my head in my hands. All a fiction of light and shadow, only a rhythm projected against a dark screen – a seminal spiritual experience of my life.

Of course we went to have one of our long coffees and talked into the sun-drowsy night in the café society of Berlin. (I envy him his discipline of one coffee, enforced by the government dole. Europeans qualify for this social gift, this safety net, while Americans live in fear of old age.) The coffee arrives in glass tumblers, strong and so thick with cream that your spoon can stand up. This is where I write, think, and talk. To talk with John is to engage in a giant thing. On some days our minds are so simpatico that 2 or 3 hours are nothing, and we don’t even put a dent in all that we want to say.

We visited Mallick’s film again and pondered over his digitally created dinosaurs that appear smack in the middle of the film, the fact that human beings and human speech do not figure as the main subject of the film: John’s Evangelicalism, in Germany read: Catholicism, and his wish to hold both ideas of creation in his head simultaneously; the Nazi ideal, the carefully selected clothing, the Egyptian swastika turned backwards, Leni Riefenstahl’s films of the Berlin Olympics, all of this careful PR for the ideal; Eugenics, the building at the Free University where Mengele sent his body parts, now a classroom building, but which still sports a giant metal Teutonic head over the main door; John Gotti’s old social club in Little Italy where I used to see him standing outside and wonder at the cliché costuming of gangsters in general – if they don’t want anyone to know, why do they dress like gangsters? – and onto Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the incarnation of evil and yet wearing their banal costumes, the dark suits that mimic the international businessman’s ideal; the looting of the Iraqi museums while the oil fields were guarded by US troops, the loss of the history of the Mesopotamian civilization; Mit Romney and the inherent contradiction between his candidacy and his religion’s pledge to always be at war with the US government; JFK; the Bin Ladens; Nixon losing to Kennedy because of his nervous sweating on the televised debate; our favorite televangelists, mine being Creflo Dollar, and one of both of our favorites, Janet Meyer; Dr. Phil; hoarding reality shows and their metaphor for emotional and spiritual change; the use of narrative and music in raising consciousness; Joseph Smith and the Mormon’s beginnings in divining and counterfeiting; black coffee vs. coffee with cream, the difference in the DNA between northern and southern people’s and their ability to digest dairy, John being half Swedish and half Lebanese he still prefers it black; emotional boundary demarcation; the 10^th step out of the 12; emotional sobriety; and finally sugar and it’s contribution to Candida and depression.

John tells me that the marshmallow is the most complete of all the sugar foods. I instruct him on the making of S’mores and he is rather disgusted. He explains, in his perfect Birmingham English, that the marshmallow is the closest thing to the mother’s breast. I am astounded. He says it’s because it fills the whole mouth. This is why it gives the closest approximation of the total and fulfilling bliss of the infant gratified at the mother’s nipple. I instruct him in the procedure for making sweet yams with baked marshmallows that Americans serve with their Thanksgiving meal.