FURIES or EUMENIDES? TRUE STORIES?

When I was in high school, I baby sat for a family down the street. They were a young couple whose small child was always asleep when I was there. The house was very basic, like many houses on that street, a kind of farmhouse. I was always eager to sit for these folks because the wife subscribed to endless piles of “True Story” magazines, a sort of women’s version of the Police Gazette my father kept hidden behind the clothes hamper. My mother pretended not to know about that and if she had known about these other trashy mags, she wouldn’t have let me babysit there anymore. In fact, one night the couple stayed out until 3AM when they were supposed to be back by midnight. Both my mother and I thought they’d been killed in a car accident, but they came home drunk and that was the end of babysitting. True story.

These “true” stories were always about girls who fell madly in love and then were beaten, made pregnant, married, kidnapped, kept prisoner, reduced to crawling in the streets, miscarried, discovered their true mother, and so on. I knew vaguely that the stories only pretended to be true but I also knew, equally vaguely, that among people I didn’t know personally, there was no doubt that all that stuff happened all the time. My mother’s idea was that if one didn’t know about it, it didn’t happen -- or at least it would never happen to us. It appears now that this is a widespread opinion, at least among publishers -- at least once an outcry and demand for names, dates, addresses, medical records and social security numbers has revealed it is all a HOAX. Until then, they appreciate the sales of “the love story of the century.”

The biggest lie in our culture is that anyone can have anything if they just want it enough. That noxious lie blames people, makes it their own fault if they’re not the king of the world. If they are sick, broke, in the wrong part of town, uneducated, insane -- well, they just didn’t want it enough. (Being caught under a bomb is a little harder to explain.)

Tim’s story about Pascal is a story about humanities psychology, the belief that knowing the great stories of the world will at least tell you you’re not alone. (Of course, those Greeks were SHOCKING and pornographic and transgressive and deserved whatever the Furies gave them. People have skipped reading the Eumenides in which the Furies, those harpies, repent what they have done in the name of vengeance.) Is Pascal a real human being with an identity card? I don’t know. Did Pascal really attempt suicide? I don’t know. Did Tim really take him to the Louvre and is he really on the train with him? I don’t know. Do I worry about that kid? Hell, yes! Do I care? Absolutely.

Here’s what I know: it’s a very good thing to take a kid in trouble to the Louvre and use the images there to explain life. It’s a very good thing to know enough about art, train schedules, and weather to see at once that it’s feasible to extend that visit to a museum into a visit to a place, and just DO IT, which means sitting together quietly on a train together. What a VERY good thing it is to sit alongside someone you care about on a train, going somewhere. I hope someday we all take a troubled kid alongside us to see something.

I take a teleological view of this truth issue. What good is it to believe this story? It models a way to behave. A use for culture. It makes me feel GOOD to read this story, though Pascal is suffering. The fact that Tim is willing to be with him is very powerful to me and makes me think that someone would want to be with me, if I needed it, or that I could be with someone else needy if the occasion arose. Isn’t that good?

Let’s walk onto REALLY dangerous ground. The Bible is not true. Most of it is stories handed down with a lot of political torque put on them. They’re exercises in manipulation, even in the New Testament -- all those miracles. (Thomas Jefferson didn’t believe them. Are you smarter than he was?) But teleologically, in terms of offering patterns and ways of behaving, you can find good stuff in the Bible. As it happens the Revised Standard Edition was published about the same time I was babysitting for the lady with the True Story magazines. I decided to read the Bible. When I got to Noah inseminating his daughters because he was drunk -- even True Story didn’t go that far into sensationalism.

So why do all these cynical city-dwelling chatterers get their knickers in a knot over some girl throwing apples to a prisoner? Why are they selective about who they demonize, usually picking someone from outside the identified in-people? Because they need to feel superior and they aren’t capable of actually doing superior work, so they pick out someone to patronize.

They are on the order of the young man who listened to me tell about Blackfeet history. When I told him about buffalo bones littering the plains and how people gathered them into huge piles along the railroads so they could be sold for sugar refining back east, this guy told me flatly I was lying. I showed him a photo in a history book. “Oh, Photoshop,” he sneered. That was his reality: suspicion, blame, never repentance.

The consequences of such cynicism are on the front page of the newspapers every day now: the bones of investors, piled up along the railroads, and what good are they? True story? In the end one CHOOSES Truth and that Truth will not necessarily set you free, but it will surely guide your choices in the future.



the unknown night -- tim barrus
Pascal Released

The Louvre is open until 10pm tonight. The looney bin released Pascal. Back into the artful arms of humanity. Or mine anyway.

I did not know if Pascal was ready to be released. But there were limits to how long the looney bin could keep him.

Eavan would deal with Tristan. I would have Pascal. Tristan was more or less stabilized. Eavan would help him walk down the hall. Tristan's IV hooked to the coat hanger thing on wheels. Tristan more or less connected. You can never be all that sure with Tristan -- connected to what -- it wasn't like Tristan shared all that much about what is or is not actually going on.

You cannot assume nothing.

So Eavan would deal with Tristan and I would pick up Pascal and his ditty bag. What I would do with him was anyone's guess.

Supposedly, he was no longer suicidal. I did not want him back if he was suicidal.

It spreads faster than the flu. Among boys with HIV/AIDS, it's not a joke. It dances boy to boy. One way to deal with it as an epidemic is to not let it in the door.

But the looney bin had had its fill of Pascal. Most institutions throw him out.

He hugged me. Usually, after he hugs you, he warms up and he has something to say. The one joy he was always about was his ability to articulate a banter that was the kind of reciprocity that could disguise itself as a sort of light that hesitates around him. He reveled in that light.

But now the light was gone. The eyes were glazed. Flight. Collapse. Flight. Collapse. Deep enough to overlook his death. Pascal is twelve. Pascal is thirty. Pascal is as old as the hills.

He keeps waiting for puberty to hit him but that train has not yet arrived. He has tried killing himself any number of times. I no longer count them. The light no longer hesitates around him. As he bends against some near and haunted sky, the light forms a shell of silence whose echoes and corridors are now a swallowing.

The Louvre is open late. I frequently use it as my office.

It's simple. We find some piece of art that attracts the kid and we go from there.

Fransique-Joseph Duret was the son of a sculptor of the same name. Duret was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1818. He spent time in Italy. Worked in Paris. Classical forms and subjects. His Grape-Picker Extemporizing caught Pascal's eye right away.

"He also did Orestes Mad," I said. I think it's in Avignon.

"Who was Orestes," Pascal asked. He had lost a lot of weight.

"Just another mad Greek story about just another mad Greek pursued by the Furies whose duty was to punish him. You know, murders, treachery, incest, infanticide, sex, heresy, all the usual. Orestes took refuge in the temple at Delphi much like you did at Cinematheque. But Apollo was helpless to protect him. Apollo ordered Orestes to kill Orestes' mother as punishment for her crime of murdering her husband. Though the Goddess Athena absolved him he still had to pay a penance to the Goddess Artemis (Orestes' mother had killed her husband because he had sacrificed their daughter to Artemis in the hope of gaining the Goddess's favor -- the story of Orestes involves generations of murder and abuse). Thus Orestes wandered the world carrying a statue of Artemis. Finally, he felt the insanity leave him, and he dared to put it down. He set it in a riverbed and walked away. Two Spartans passed by. When they saw the statue staring at them, horribly, from the water, they went mad. We all go mad, Pascal. It would be insane not to."

"Orestes just walked away."

"He dared to put his burden down. Or so the story goes. We could go to Avignon if you'd like to see the head."

"You mean -- us?"

"Why not us, Pascal."

"Aren't you afraid I might want to kill myself again."

"Yes. But at some point, you are going to do what you are going to do. The Furies at your heels. All I can do is point out to you that no one in his madness is all that mad alone. Orestes had lots of company."

Pascal stood in front of the Grape-Picker for a good thirty minutes.

"I would like to go to Avignon. I want to see the head."

I am writing this on the train. Avignon is cold this time of year. It gets about as high as 50f.

Pascal is asleep in the seat beside me. The light from the quickly-moving train pulsates all around him in flashes that seem to almost penetrate his skin. The new Pascal. In his new shells of silence.

I know this: I will take him off these meds.

It will be dangerous. But these corridors of his current swallowing are deep enough to overlook his death. As he bends against some near and haunted sky, we flee, collapse, flee, collapse. Pursued by Furies. Punished. Absolved. Flying headlong into the unknown night.

Tim Barrus