The Devil Never Sleeps

by Andrei Codrescu

  What is this poem? It’s a praise of God himself. It’s a mirror. God praises God. Still, God has to pass this mirror on to his people because it’s better if they praise him. Once more, it seems that God is lonely. He needs company, he needs Moses, he needs the people to read his own words back to him. He needs to speak of himself in the third person. There may not even be any Moses or any people: there may just be God speaking himself through the media of these fictions, these projections of himself that he chooses to call Moses, people, etc. In any case, it appears that either Moses made up God, in which case God exists only as long as people believe Moses, or God made up Moses, in which case Moses and the people do not exist.

  God’s fictions present a problem for him: As long as they are part of himself, they have no substance to engage him with. They bore him. In order for them to acquire substance he must feed them milk and honey and fatten them up. This flesh-producing food corrupts them and makes them forgetful. When they begin to forget their creator, his fictions become interesting to God. Perhaps only when they forget him do they engage his attention in the general direction of the purpose for which he has created them. So he feeds them milk and honey, which corrupts them, and brings them to a Promised Land, so he can keep his eye on them. Of course, this milk and honey and this Promised Land are conditional upon their worship, not at all like the original paradise, which was eternal (and boring). God, who is eternal, hates eternity because it’s boring, so he creates temporal paradises contingent on proper respect.

  So, you think it’s easy being his creation? Better that Moses made him up. After all, he was only a writer. Like some of us. The poem is not great, but I fault the translation. This poem was supposed to put into words everything that God wanted his people to worship him with, but obviously he did not have translation in mind. Moses’ translation was the only one God counted on, but since then there have been a myriad translations into many languages, and something leaked away every time. Which brings up another question: if God wanted his poem forever powerful, why allow its distribution and distortion? Once again, he gives the people free choice: Keep the meaning of this poem or suffer loss.

  In addition to being a mirror, this poem is also morality. This poem gives the people the essentials of Good and Bad. Good is to remember and praise God, Bad is to forget him. To put muscle on these notions, Bad is punished, while Good is rewarded (maybe). Of course, the people confuse these notions quite frequently, so the Laws (also written by God and translated by Moses or vice versa) have to back up the distinctions. The Devil, though still quite nameless, is fully present at the succession from nomad time to historical time in the form of amnesia. The Devil is an opiate, pure forgetfulness.

  Modern Attitudes and Masques

  GOOD NEWS

  Pope John Paul II announced that during the year 2000, people who quit smoking or drinking for even one day will get indulgences that will shorten their time in purgatory. This is good news at first, until you think about it. There won’t really be that many smokers and drinkers in purgatory because the majority of them are going to hell. Not because they smoke and drink, but because smoking and drinking are usually only part of a sin bundle that’s bound to have a lot of other grievous sins wrapped up in it. Unless I’m misreading this, and what the pope is really saying is that there is no hell. He mentions no time off from hell. There hasn’t been much talk of purgatory, or indulgences for that matter, since the Council of Trent in 1563. Martin Luther got himself excommunicated for protesting the business of indulgences. Other theologians questioned the whole notion of purgatory and advanced, albeit timidly, the idea that this life we are living right now is in fact purgatory. Beyond that is either paradise or hell. Other radicals, who were happily expunged from the Church even before the Council of Trent, maintained that this life is all three in one, depending on how much God you have in you. These people were called Gnostics, and most of them were burned alive or put to the sword by the pope’s armies.

  I have no idea what it’s like to be pope, or even infallible, but it must be nice to be able to give so much joy to your followers with news of an amnesty. The present pope, who has at times worked in a coal mine, written poetry, overthrown the communists in Poland, got shot at, and kissed Fidel Castro, is no slouch when it comes to worldly strife. And he’s no wimp when it comes to church doctrine, either: he won’t wink at birth control, he won’t let priests marry or women become priests—and now he reaffirms purgatory and the dispensing of indulgences. He’s got a firm grip on both worlds, this one and the next.

  The only thing the pope doesn’t have such a firm grip on is pagans, who keep acting as if there was no pope. A friend of mine writes that for my saint’s day I have to rub my door, the doorknob, and the window frames with garlic, and I have to sleep with a garlic clove under my pillow. Next day, I have to put some wheat grains in a dish with water and let them sprout until the Epiphany. I will be as prosperous as the sprouts. Now, this may sound Christian to some people, but it’s pure paganism. There is only a short step from such advice to the deliberate practice of witchcraft, wicca-craft, voodoo, Santeria, fire dancing, oriental body twisting and breathing, sword swallowing, all-night dancing, oracle spouting, entrail reading, fetishism, interpretive art, threesomes, and table turning.

  For most of us secular wretches, such notions as purgatory have the arresting effect of an incense stick in a slaughterhouse. Sure, it’s nice to get time off from the slums just outside the gates of paradise, but meanwhile famine, terror, murder, and torture go on. To his credit, the pope also gave indulgence to anyone who alleviates the suffering of others for even one day. Those who do this can keep on blowing smoke.

  Approaches to the Soul

  What’s better for your soul: silence or rock and roll? The Mormons have one answer, the Catholics another.

  A recent edict from the Mormon Church has banned e-mail and faxes as ways for its missionaries to communicate with families and friends back home. Young Mormons between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two go on two-year missions to recruit for the Church. Some people have called this communication ban cruel, coming as it did on top of the fact that the young missionaries can only phone home twice a year, on Christmas and Mother’s Day, and are only allowed to write one letter a week.

  At the same time, a dispatch from Rhode Island says, “Catholic officials are looking for new priests … on MTV and cyberspace. Hoping to boost recruitment, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence has begun running ads on the cable music network and created a Web site (www.catholic-priest.com).”

  Well, here is the difference between a recent cult and an old religion. The Mormons are strictly patriarchal and, until now, they’ve had an unshakeable belief in the moral fortitude of their young people. There was no mollycoddling, nor was there any fear of the outside world. The Mormons wanted their young to think for themselves (after brainwashing them real good before they left), and so they cut them off for a while with nothing but the Book of Mormon and their hormones to guide them. What Mormons did with their hormones is not very well known, but it’s a safe bet that they battled them in silence. (They probably swatted them with the Book). What is certain is that their temporary banishment gave them a tough handle on their souls. It’s probably no accident that the FBI used to recruit mostly Mormons.

  But now, the new communication technologies have made leaving home a nonevent. You can stay so plugged in, you’ll hardly know you’re somewhere else. It’s easy to avoid the tough discipline and soul-searching meant to turn an adolescent into a responsible community member. The Mormons won’t have it, and I have to admire their resolve.

  Such stern soul-shaping goes against the grain of American society now, when adolescence lasts until about the age of fifty. Most young Americans stay kind of unfinished for a very long time, with their identities tied to advertising and entertainment. You’d think that they would be happy in the Garden of Consumerism, but they are not: they are angry and pissed at something vag
ue, as if expecting God (or the Economy) to banish them any minute now. They suspect that something stole their souls and that suspicion is all over their music and Web sites.

  The Catholic Church is acknowledging this shaky state of the world and the fact that the young are in limbo. In going to MTV, the Church is recognizing also the desperate spiritual quality of much popular music. There is so much anguish, millennialism, and symbolism jumbled in pop culture, it is fertile ground for recruitment.

  The Catholic Church has always accommodated the world just the way it found it, skillfully wrapping its beliefs around people’s habits and styles. Most Catholic holidays occur on the dates of older pagan holidays. Pre-Catholic beliefs were rarely obliterated by missionaries, with the notable exceptions of meso-American cultures, which were done in with exceptional brutality. And the Inquisition was no picnic, either. But for all that, the Church has always had a keen eye on the ethos of the masses and on technologies of mass distribution. Rebellious factions within the Church have even sided militantly with the wretched of the earth, claiming souls for social activism before God (who gets the side benefits, in any case). Communication is the soul of activism.

  The Mormons just want to stay Mormons, even if it takes recruiting the dead to swell their ranks. (They tried retroactively converting Jews, but they gave up under protest.) There is no e-mailing the dead—yet. The Catholic Church wants everybody to be Catholic and is (pragmatically) sticking to the living, even if they have to pluck them from morally ambiguous cyberspace.

  Elvis 20/20: Concluding Remarks at the Third International Elvis Conference in Memphis, Tennessee, 1997

  ELVIS=LIVES=EVILS

  The fifty-three Australian Elvis fans on Northwest Flight 52 from New Orleans to Memphis, wearing white shirts that said: MEMORIES STILL PLENTY/EVEN AFTER 20/AUSSIE FANS REMEMBER, had no idea that the crew on Flight 52 would run out of Elvis Pepsi cans halfway through the flight! They had no idea that half of the group would never get to carry back to the Australian continent the commemorative cans that said around the rim: STILL ROCKING ELVIS 20 YEARS, and down farther around the picture of the King, PRESLEY’S MEMPHIS—126 BEALE STREET: UNPRECEDENTED ENTERTAINMENT & CONTEMPORARY CUISINE. WWW.ELVISPRESLEY.COM. INSPIRED BY THE KING OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL: ELVIS AND ELVIS PRESLEY ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF ELVIS PRESLEY ENTERPRISES. VISIT PEPSI WORLD ON THE INTERNET.

  This isn’t the first time we find Pepsi at the cutting edge. In 1965 in a small communist country behind the Iron Curtain, I read a typewritten poem by Allen Ginsberg, in translation. It said in this poem, “You’re in the Pepsi generation.” One year later, when I emigrated to New York, I saw this in a subway in three-foot letters: YOU’RE IN THE PEPSI GENERATION. What a grand country, I thought, they are quoting the poets on the walls! One year later, my teacher in things American, Ted Berrigan, pulled me aside and said proudly: “I am the first American poet to put Pepsi in a poem!” Ted drank a lot of it. It probably killed him. I didn’t have the heart to say that Allen did it first. Or maybe he didn’t, I don’t know.

  Around the same time Allen Ginsberg was putting Pepsi in his poetry, my Australian seatmate had heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” and then, as she put it, “I had to get married next day.”

  She had to. Dig it. Elvis gave millions of women around the globe their first orgasm, the reverberations or aftershocks of which are still with us. Their fidelity forty years later testifies to the magnitude of the earthquake and, as Douglas Brinkley put it, the coming groundswell of the sixties. In fact, had my Aussie seatmate been ten years younger she might have gotten her first orgasm from Jimi Hendrix and would have found it unnecessary to get married the very next day. So, yes, Elvis did that thing by saying “It’s all right, mama,” but then most of the girls did get married. Eisenhower world was all shook up but it didn’t fold. Ten years made a lot of difference to Elvis and to America: He was so startled by what he’d wrought that he wrapped himself in the American flag when he heard that hippies were making love on it.

  What the Aussie fans did not know was that, in addition to the lamentable dearth of Pepsi cans on Northwest Flight 52, they were traveling to Memphis with a professor going to the third annual International Elvis Conference at the Memphis College of Art. Had my seatmate known, she might have felt that small pang—like a needle through the eye—that feels like nothing at the time but a few moments later, bang, there is a huge loss. Her Elvis, the people’s Elvis, was being taken over by academics and theologians.

  At the Memphis College of Art during the Elvis conference, two representatives of the people’s Church of Elvis, a modest congregation of fans headquartered on the Internet, demanded the removal of two paintings in the exhibit downstairs. One of them was a representation of Elvis sans loincloth, feeding greedily at the Pamela Anderson—like breast of a saucy madonna. The other was also a Christlike representation of the King crucified sans cloth. The organizers of the conference accommodated the protesters and removed the pictures. Bravo, and good for the humble reps! Had this been some seriously secular-humanist dwelling, they might have had to bring with them their fellow Christian fundamentalist kin and start praying on the steps. As it was, their predicament was well understood and the madonna holding the Christ-child Elvis and the crucified hunk in the other picture were repudiated. The crucified hunk was rather well hung, which brings up the rather interesting question of Elvis’s penis. At a time when America’s national imagination was filled with penises—including that of the president—Elvis’s penis, Elvis’s sacred penis found itself repudiated by the very people to whom it, through gyrations and writhings, granted liberatory orgasms in 1957.

  It’s a knot of mystery. We have, on the one hand, a sexualized generation that has grown old and conservative and which has emasculated its liberator. On the other hand, we have a younger, liberal theological-scholastic institution that is hosting a conference dedicated for the most part, if I heard right, to restoring the scepter to the King. Yet this latter camp feels so unsure about the depth of its faith—whether in art or in its subject—as to cave in to the revisionists. Is this an art issue or a religious one?

  Well, it is neither. It is a case of agreement. The job of institutions, notwithstanding the hopeful scholars, is to emasculate God, in whom they don’t have much faith anyway. So the aims of the pious Elvinists and the Memphis Art theologians coincide in the end, no matter what their class differences. The two groups have the same aim: to deprive Elvis of his penis. The very material of both institutions is composed of God’s chopped-up penis. Lest you think that this is an idle metaphor, let me remind you that Napoleon’s penis was sold at auction in London in the nineteenth century and was bought by an English collector who cooked it and ate it. This was no mere English grudge-gourmandise but a concrete ritual of empowerment.

  Of course, Elvis himself had offered his penis to the masses, who used it to sexually empower themselves. By so doing, he divested himself of it and became something else, a transformed being who had no choice but to become a gender-ambiguous icon. An Elvis without a penis is a saint—and the tabloids aren’t shy in saying so. The elasticity of gender, indeed!

  And once again, lest you think me fanciful, I saw a concrete instance of it myself. Patti Carroll, bless her heart, took me into the Elvis impersonator world, a worldwide competition taking place in conjunction with the conference. One particular Elvis impersonator was a wheelchair Elvis, a handicapped Elvis with a beautiful voice. He was paralyzed from the waist down, having no practical use of the very part that made Elvis Elvis. The audience applauded him heartily in the generous spirit of the nineties, just as they had applauded, wildly, an impersonator from Japan. So Elvis impersonators and their fans have reached a level of understanding of their craft, which involves parody, tolerance, and quite a distancing from the source.

  The Elvis impersonators’ audience was composed in equal parts of self-consciousness and nostalgia. For some of the older folk present, the impersonators were the Doors of Meat w
hich led to their past. They hurled themselves relentlessly against these Doors of Meat, hoping to dislodge them and return to paradise. The younger audience self-consciously appreciated the campiness of it all.

  Now, clearly, the fundamentalists who succeeded doing away with the art here do not have the degree of self-consciousness or good humor of the impersonators’ audience. Or perhaps it is just a matter of degree. I have ascertained, on the basis of first- and secondhand reports, that, from the point of view of the principals, it was an Elvis issue, not a God issue. That is, the people who wanted the pictures removed thought that they were an insult to Elvis, and the people who removed them thought that might be true. Which makes it an Elvis issue for everyone involved except for the artists who thought that the separation of church and state in this country is real. I believe that for the artists it is an economic issue: The people who allowed their pictures to be removed were not very good competitors in the marketplace because they folded before the agents of fundamentalist Elvis kitsch.

  But enough of this. I have been told, by other shaky liberal humanists, to stay away from eschatology, so I will. I will say only one more thing about it and then move on to other issues. When the Christian God exploded at the end of the nineteenth century, his shards landed and continue to land on fourteen-year-old prepubescents. I have no doubt that one of these landed on Elvis—and he was created from that Big Bang. When Elvis himself exploded, a number of shards landed all over the place, entering hundreds of impersonators and others. We can call this second Big Bang the Gang Bang. This mystery continues to generate more and more Elvis all the time at an increasing rate. Eventually the whole world will be Elvis.