Abraham & Job, revised

ABRAHAM & JOB,

Revised.

With thanks to:
The Zondervan Corporation BibleGatway.com
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Revisiting Gen 18:20-33 and Job 1:6-12

The story of the Hebrew Lord GOD’s visit to Abraham and the prelude to the ‘trials of Job have been narrated as such:
Gen 18: 20-33
20 And the Lord said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grave, 21 I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry against it that has come to Me; and if not, I will know.”
22 Then the men turned away from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord. 23 And Abraham came near and said, “Would You also destroy the righteous with the wicked? 24 Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous that were in it? 25 Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should be as the wicked; far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
26 So the Lord said, “If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.”
27 Then Abraham answered and said, “Indeed now, I who am but dust and ashes have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord: 28 Suppose there were five less than the fifty righteous; would You destroy all of the city for lack of five?”
So He said, “If I find there forty-five, I will not destroy it.”
29 And he spoke to Him yet again and said, “Suppose there should be forty found there?”
So He said, “I will not do it for the sake of forty.”
30 Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Suppose thirty should be found there?”
So He said, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”
31 And he said, “Indeed now, I have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord: Suppose twenty should be found there?”
So He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of twenty.”
32 Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak but once more: Suppose ten should be found there?”
And He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten.” 33 So the Lord went His way as soon as He had finished speaking with Abraham; and Abraham returned to his place.

Job 1:6-12
6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan[b] also came among them. 7 And the Lord said to Satan, “From where do you come?”
So Satan answered the Lord and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.”
8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?”
9 So Satan answered the Lord and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing? 10 Have You not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. 11 But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!”
12 And the Lord said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on his person.”
So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.

(NKJV)

Let me tell you of an encounter I foresaw in the ‘Halls of the Immortals’.

Lucifer stormed through the doors of the council. “I’ve had enough of my name being damned and cursed by those wretched humans of ‘Terra’ (Earth). Let them incinerate themselves, but let them perish in the knowledge of the sins of THEIR doing and NOT by the misguided notions of my hand being involved!”

It was the Summer of 2013. The negotiations with the Iranian government over their nuclear waste had been broken off, due to the insistence of the Iranians to have the capability of not only uranium enrichment, but plutonium enrichment for their ‘domestic’ nuclear program. The Americans, the French, the British were adamant that such enrichment would not be put to the benign ends the Iranian government was claiming but would be used to supply their proxies to use against Israel and other Sunni states, if not the ‘Big Three’, themselves in some terrorist act, if not in some Iranian miscalculation of its own martial uses of nuclear weapons. Israel, for over ten years, had been giving Cassandra-warnings of the Iranian nuclear program. The Republican and Democratic Executive branches in D.C. had been seeking a negotiated settlement using ever increasing sanctions on the Iranian economy to coerce the leadership of Iran to end their equivocations on nuclear enrichment and to submit to the pressure being brought. Israel, which had been THE nuclear power of the Middle East, was poised to use its significant assets to destroy the Iranian military and nuclear capability. They were restrained by the lack of public support in the United States. Through members of the Congress, seeking to aggrandize their own campaign war chests or prevent challenges from even more stalwart champions for Israeli military proactivity, along with media outlets seeking to avoid the financial backlash of being labeled anti-Israeli, thus anti-Semitic and pro-neo-Holocaust, if not outright supporters of hawkish anti-Iranian lawmakers and critical of those who’d downplay the dangers of the Iranian stated intentions and activity, Israel did not have enough ‘friendly’ votes in the Congress to push the Executive Branch into supportive, if not coordinated action with the Israelis. The Brits and the French, whose economies had been waning since they gave up or lost their colonies during the last half of the twentieth century, were eager to have neo-colonial economic foothold in these new developing markets, if they could get a friendly government to help them for those ends. (Much like the scene from Godfather II where the Myron Cohen character, chairman of the mob syndicate, was extolling the virtues of the compliant Cuban government for their gambling and prostitution rings which they could have 90 miles outside the reach of the American Government’s Justice Department’s prosecutors).

Only Russia and China, both had suffered the indignities of economic and political repression by the Western nations: for China by the British in the 19th century and the Americans complicity with the British and French in the Boxer Rebellion in the early 20th century; for Russia, the Western nations’ support of the czarist and their sympathizers during the Bolshevik revolution, the delayed invasion into Western Europe and Normandy during World War Two, plus the plunder by the western-backed capitalist shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and before the rise of Vladimir Putin. They now had the economic and, secondarily, military leverage to obstruct a Western fait accompli attack on Iran.

The 2012 American Presidential elections  had been framed by the political parties and the media as a referendum on the course of the economy. Little to nothing had been said of the over-bloated military and the adventurism into other countries without the approval of Congress. Nor had the issues of silencing or detaining those who sought to expose the political and diplomatic duplicity of the U.S. Government with its allies and adversaries, or those who were organizing more than rhetorical dissent to the foreign policies of the government and the extra-Constitutional powers being allowed to the Executive Branch.  The winner of the American Presidential election along with an even more compliant and tail-wagging Congress to Israeli domestic and foreign policy had an implicit, defaulted mandate to do as they pleased in the Middle East and South Asia against ‘terrorists’ and whatever ‘Axis of Evil’, of the day.

Syria, which was in its second year of political dissent, ruthless repression, and increasing violent anti-government and rogue militia attacks, was a state only in name. Hezbollah, its ally-proxies in Lebanon, were taking advantage of the unrest and disruption from the flow of refugees from Syria to push harder on its agenda against a feckless government.  The Lebanese government, with little support of its population and undermined by nations in the Arab world and the West, was a low-hanging fruit in the way of the power players seeking to control the eastern Mediterranean.

The U.S. Sixth Fleet was in the Persian Gulf and a second task force was in the eastern Mediterranean as a ‘precaution’ in case a ‘humanitarian’ effort was authorized by the UN for Syria or Lebanon. The military chess pieces were being moved by the Russians, whose Black Sea Fleet was coming through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. A task force was in the southern Caspian Sea. China had ended its Middle Kingdom centrism of the past sixty years since the Korean War and had technical and military advisors in Afghanistan, assisting the still corrupt and money-lusting Afghan ‘ruling council’.  

Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis of fifty years prior had the world been holding its breath about the audacity of eagerness the leadership of the major powers of the world were willing to do in brinkmanship against each other. The cries and prayers were going up to the heavens. THIS immortal, Lucifer, was not going to let himself be the fall-guy for this narrative of apocalyptic doom.

“YOU must ACT”,  he bellowed to the Leadership Council made up of a collection of beings and entities from across the dimensions of vast geographical dimensions of space and their parallel dimensions of past, present, and future time.

“Luce!”, Reina explained, “EARTH will survive. That vector specie will decimate themselves to a degraded, radiation-poisoned mutated state that will have them less populated and no better than they were in their previous ‘stone age’ imbecility. We’ll send in our teams to do another bioengineering. This time we’ll keep them on all fours. We underestimated the use of their free hands with the apposable thumb. That and their more rapid, bi-pedalism allowed them to conceive the meta-technologies which differentiated themselves from their bio-environement. THIS time we will ensure that our parties don’t leave any artifacts which would give the surviving specie or those we send to incarnate that realm any preconceptions of specie exceptionalism which they developed in this epoch.”

“That’s all fine with you, Reina, who lives smugly stationed in the future, and who looks back on these matters as a dispassionate, academic who has no visceral interests in this situation that is little more than a board game for you”, Lucifer sneered.

“Luce, are you getting senile in your rages. As the archivist for Earth, you should know that my only beloved daughter, Precia, is on that miserable rock, finding her way against the clock of those wretched beings’ imbecile history the keys to her and the world’s transcendence.”

“My apologies, Reina, but I have counseled you and the other members of this council that carnal passions are of a cognitive dimension, which are an oxymoron to dispassionate analysis, let alone objectivity. Look at the history of this planet. Advances and leaps have been made the ingenious few whose insights and will have dragged these inertial beings from one level of consciousness to another. It is too much to ask of your daughter, let alone other, more green and younger souls, to be able to grasp the signs and symbols we seed their senses. Most fall into the snare of thinking that some form of sensory satiation. be it wealth, progeny, or pure hedonism to the point of gluttony is their existential fulfillment. If their gamers of probabilities were knowledgeable of this scenario to take wagers, your daughter and others like her would be long-shots for success in their world.

Inobis (Albert Einstein) spoke. “As much as I object to Luce’s cynicism, he is right about life on Earth. What ‘I discovered’ was as much as the serendipity from being acultural, as it was having the (pre-)conditions of family and historical environment, which allowed me to be predisposed to those insights.”

Motha (Atilla the Hun) concurred in a purring, seductive, non-verbal vibration, “My time there was one of the harshest and most brutal of aesthetics. Meeting that holy man on the path to Roma was no psychological change of being, except bring the fatigue of the entire previous experience (which I do suspect was this council working through Luce) to bring a weariness to the cathartic motivation I had previously. Otherwise, Roma would have been leveled, as it was allowed to be done within fifty years of my passing return to this realm”

Munka (Jesus Christ) appeared, “I heard this conversation, and came to give my support to Reina, though Luce speaks many truths. And I, who used his name in vain, as was the customs of that time and now, can admit as I proclaimed from the cross, ‘they know not what they do’. But I, Motha, and Inobis are of their past. You, Reina, have existed in the future these many aeons. Luce, being the archivist of Earth’s people’s passionate doings is too close to his own duties to be the judge of that specie who is no better to be guided than the cat species on which we sought to seed or genes. Let us go and enter the consciousness of one of ‘the better’ beings and judge these Earthlings and their moment through that being.”
Reina, Luce, and the other members of the council and the onlookers of these proceedings nodded their heads in agreement.

“Into what shall we incarnate and use as a portal?”, Ollgon the parallel dimension immortal asked.

“As we did when I with Jobine and Likey were on the Plains of Mamre with Abraham. We will let their ‘honest’ persons be the judge of themselves and their peers”, Luce offered.

“You spared them for the sake of Abraham’s beseechings, Luce”, Inobis injected.

“And but for his gentle demeanor, I was filled with an indignation of rage to devastate all in that city. What did I get for refraining from that, not only You, Munka, using me as THE avatar for all that is unholy, but even before that, the tales of me persecuting and tempting the hapless Job in the misery of his misfortunes, which were more the poor specie hubris and arrogance and companion ignorance of location and environmental conditions, than it was me having license over his welfare.”

“But though this specie has a habit of choosing ‘Judas Goats’, (winking at Munka) who damn them to conditions and calamities which we have now, there are those who though not with Reina’s Precia’s spiritual precociousness, have an honesty, if not total innocence by which we can judge this race and this moment.”, as Luce began to relax and find a seat in which to recline.

All nodded in agreement, and sent for the ‘Guardians’, those beings who normally do the seeding along with the acts of serendipity and synchronicity through the forces of nature were sent to find that honest person of this present epoch.

Their commission was to use emotional vibrations to locate the sincerest of the honest to be their intellectual and emotional sensory radar for them. They could use that person’s life history stored in the memory along with any concurrent sensory sentiments. They could not seed, serendipitize, or synchronicitize with the person, except to stir that person clear of circumstances not of their willful knowledgeable hubris.

As it turned out they found a female named Jerri Simmons in Baltimore, Maryland. She was sixty-three, but looked forty-five, attributable from her cleansing her life of tangible and intangible poisons to her body and mind. She lived frugally, simply, and anonymously as an everyday, though distinct persona. Her smile radiated as did her copper-colored skin. Her joy and laughter was infectious for those around her.  You could feel the energy increase from her words and actions. As when at the Farmer’s Market, she spotted an unshaven man in a raincoat covering a greasy maroon sweatshirt with Royal-U on the front. He was handling the cantaloupes as if he was massaging to fondling them. Jerri, being the irrepressible exuberant, cleared her voice as she moved over to whisper in the man’s ear, “If I wasn’t so scandalized, imagining what and why you are doing what you’re doing to those melons in your hand, I just might be turned on enough to go home and service myself.” The man dropped the melons and saw the steely eyed-twinkled look  she gave him, and he turned and headed for the exit mumbling curses under his breath. Ra and Cot, the guardians knew, intuitively, that this one was as good as any to be the sensory and mental judge of the times and the human race.

They entered Jerri’s being when she let down her consciousness to sleep and began to dream. Ra and Cot interjected themselves as one of the background characters of the dream, which was about a day in a high school similar to the one she attended in Central New York. Ra and Cot got a kick out of making casual remarks to Jerri, consistent with Jerri’s dream’s stream of consciousness. For all Jerri knew these companion male and female were just symbolic avatars of the personalities she knew back in Corcorham Tech, not knowing they were avatars from ‘Immortal Hall’.

Once inside her subconscious, Ra  and Cot went into her memory banks and began to view her life’s recordings and judgement of herself and her times. She was the second of three offspring. Her parents had been born in Syracuse as one of the first black families. Though Jerri’s awareness, which coincided with her becoming verbal and able  to label the phenomena about her, began around her twenty-sixth month of post-partum, her memory stretched back to the first sensings of her brain during gestation (though, she’d be seeded with hints of her prior life mixed in with her carnal sensations, postpartum). Her gestational and pre-literate sensory apprehensions were significant since they were totally non-acculturated responses to her environment. At this point of existence Jerri was just a physiological function of natural laws. What Jerri ‘ingested’ by way of physical nutrients and environmental ‘supplements’ showed that her mother was a conscientious caretaker of the being growing into a life in her womb. As Jerri’s sensory apparatus began coming on line, she picked up the joys, frustrations, tensions, and pleasures which her caretaker was experiencing. The joys and passions, such as song and rhythmic movement  from the 78-records her parents played for each other as they used the simulation of being in one of the roadhouses in Nedrow off route 11A, going toward the Onondaga Nation reservation, and dancing to the swing bands of the thirties and forties. The laughter the parents shared as they stimulated eachother with sensual innuendos which led to the seduction and Janie’s seeding by Joseph in the back seat of his roadster were pleasurably intense. Those moments of surrogate make believe increased the rush of blood, with its nutrients to Jerri’s gestating fetus body. These moments Ra and Cot found were usual to the domicile of the caretaker and her mate, plus around those with whom the caretaker shared empathy and sympathy. The tensions and frustration which put a constriction on the feeding line of the physical nutrients came in places away from those environments of empathy and sympathy. As, Ra and Cot were able, in mediums-like ability, to travel through the vibrations and sensations to their, now virtual, source.  They had the knowledge to comprehend what the caretaker and Jerri were going through. They saw how during Jerrie’s gestation, Janie had taken a trip downtown to the shopping district to get a new dress for her fully pregnant form for Easter. Arriving inside the department store, Janie was approached by a stern-faced woman, who asked, “Is there something we may do for you?”. The question was not intonated in the manner of one seeking to give assistance, but expressed like one was questioning Janie’s reason for entering the ‘sanctums’ of the store. Janie, knowing the woman could do nothing more, curtly and cavalierly replied, “No. Just see what’s worth my while in here.” The stern-faced woman’s face and neck grew pink by Janie’s dismissive tone to her, who believed Janie shouldn’t even be allowed in the store. The woman resolved she would follow Janie around and interfere with Janie’s browsing of the merchandise. Janie sensed the woman’s intent. Her first reaction of aggravation turned to a mischief resolve as she would lead ‘Mrs Snotty Sternface’ on a wild goose-chase around the store. Janie stopped at the jewelry counter to browse the possible accessories for the dress she wanted to buy. There were sparkling brooches and necklaces in the display case. Janie saw the jewelry attendant over by the side talking to another attendant. Janie waited a few minutes to give the attendant time to break-off her casual, non-work related conversation with her fellow worker. After a more than patient time, Janie cleared her voice loudly, calling to the attendant. “MISS, over here, please!”. The look on the girl and ‘Sternface’ was one of classic shock, hearing Janie addressing the young attendant like a common domestic servant, which they presumed she was. “I’m busy”, the girl replied, petulantly.  Janie was ready to escalate this. “Where is the manager’s office? He might want to know what his employees are doing on ‘his dime’ while customers are waiting to be served.” The young petulant was willing to raise the stakes of this showdown and pointed to the east-end of the store with a sneering smugness, “His office is over there.”

Janie had nothing more pressing to do. It was one o’clock. If things turned up sour here she could still go to the competitor across the street. Since she was willing to play this game of racial poker, she might as well be ready to play the strong hand of the ‘loud black woman’, if necessary. Janie entered the management office and saw that the door to the managers office was open. Not wanting to take a chance with another snooty, trifling minion, Janie walked right past the receptionist’s desk who hardly was able to get out, “May I help you?’. The manager looked up startled to see this young stylish, brown skin woman coming up to the other side of his desk. Before he could utter a word, Janie was interrogating, “Is it your store’s policies to have rude associates?”

“Miss, I don’t know what you are talking about. Who are you?!”

“I’m an irate customer who knows John Bellows (the feature writer of the local newspaper), and I’m ready to tell him the  story of my treatment at the whims of your employees.”

“What treatment? What employees??”, Karl Farley, manager of Nigh Brothers asked Janie.

‘Some dried-up, witch-faced hag at the front of your store, and some fresh, wanna-be-slapped wench at your jewelry counter!”, Janie using hyperbole to take advantage of the opening Karl the manager had given her by his recovering question.

Thinking what “J.B.” could do with his polemical rhetoric to the store’s reputation, Karl wanted to nip this in the bud and get this Negro woman satisfied and out of his store without any further trouble. Karl pushed the button on his intercom to talk to his receptionist,”Mandy, will you ask Barbara to come to my office and bring Mrs Kerkoko and the girl at the jewelry counter to my office, immediately.”

Five minutes later Barbara Fitzgerald, the floor manager, entered the office where Karl and Janie were having a silent stare-down. “Barbara will you assist Miss...”
“MRS Simmons.”, Janie assisted and corrected Karl.
“Mrs Simmons to assist her in her purchase?”
“Yes, Mr Farley. I will.” Barbara turned to Janie with a faint smile, as she mused inductively, how this young black woman got to receive this special attention. “This way, Mrs. Simmons.” As Janie got up and departed Karl’s office with Barbara.  As she was justt past the ‘witch’ and the young ‘wench’, she heard Karl’s irritated voice bark out, “Send in Mrs Kerkoko and Miss Shitely to me!” It looked like they were gonna get their comeuppance which sent a cool relief through Janie which for Jerri was a burst of nutrition through the placental membrane.


From events as this, Ra and Cot understood how Jerri’s soul was the amalgam  of experiences meant to breed shrewd, humility, and equanimity since being a ‘black’ American was a psychological as well as a physical maze-gauntlet for which survival with some sort of integrity and dignity as Creation’s (for them GOD’s) child was a merciless discipline. Jerri’s, mother-Janie, had been  a prime example of the shrewdness of humility and equanimity.  Knowing when and where to assert or defer to get what she needed from an environment which favored such shrewdness in the absence of a system of equity or justice in the America of the first sixty years of the twentieth century. Cot and Ra gauged that the tensions and frustrations were from forbearance rather than from a low-tolerance to discomfort. They marveled, these two immortals from different dimensions, how such tolerance didn’t go into a melting breakdown and erupt in a rage, which they would see recorded by Jerri in her observations of people she knew directly and those she observed on the video boxes in their domicile. The wanton rage, reminiscent of the mayhem of battle they had seen in other beings memory, had them wondering what insults in this seemingly orderly dimension would precipitate such explosions of emotions.

Because of Jerri’s unique demographic status, which Cot and Ra inferred -was from the ‘karma’ of the historical dynamics, Jerri had a front seat on existential options. (Karma being the trend for correction of nature back to its evolutionary homeostatic equilibrium by the adherence to the natural order). Existentially speaking, black Americans as they endured and rose from the indignities of Jim Crow racism and bigotry, did not have a taken for granted sense of entitlement to their status. Rising from the injustice and inequities, they knew that the social order which they were overcoming was an emotional cancer in those who sought to repress their individual and collective civic and social aspirations. It was not anything close to natural, as being representative of nature, but representative of a cultural malignancy derived from the feudal aristocracies of Europe. They, black Americans, were the historical road-kill of the divine-right ethos expressing itself in national and racial interactions, than from what used to be the exclusive dominion of rulers of Europe.

Jerri learned this through the overheard conversations amongst her parents and their friends, and , later, in her studies, by reading through the lines of the culturally slanted history books of her high school. The ethics Jerri displayed validated her eventual disposition which transmitted out to Cot and Ra’s awareness.


The generosity shown by her caretaker for her and those of intense, shared sympathy and empathy was picked up by Jerri in her own smaller but growing circle of contacts.  From her primary school friends whom she was protective as a mother hawk, or her assistance to her classmates, when she shared answers on exams, so ‘no child would be left behind’ in her group, was part of her generosity to a fault. Jerri developing skills of voice and digital acuity on the piano did not change her disposition of humility and equanimity. She still showed her layman peers the nuances of ‘Chop Sticks’ and ‘Heart and Soul’s’ other chords during the interludes of choir practice. Jerri had a bit more aggressiveness to the shrewdness, since the social environment in and beyond Syracuse provided a greater latitude of expression for black people in America. The latitude enabled Jerri to put in perspective those of white elephant and anachronistic thinking and behavior and find associations with people who shared not only the same psychological experience of culture, but those who showed a comprehension of  her perspective.  Being the primary accompanist for the school choir made her the de facto gatekeeper for the ear of the choir director. People would engage Jerri for their mercenary ends, as well as the incidental necessity of speaking to ‘Big Momma’, the derisive oxymoron for the diminutive choir director.

One particular incident which Cot and Ra virtually observed in Jerri’s memory bank, was her liaison with the captain of the football team, Bobby Dorset. She knew of Bobby only by sight, though he was in her third period English class. When the Fall semester began, Bobby had an interest in having the sophomores and JV’s to sing the fight song, but in an off-key octave that would challenge their vocal chords. ‘Big Momma’ from her struggles with the head-shed to get partial funding for her choir trips, above and beyond the choir’s fund-raisers was resentful of the athletic department since the football and basketball teams were the usual recipients of the funds she sought. When she ran the study halls, the football players would catch hell and no slack from ‘Momma’ for their faux pas’s of decorum. Bobby was obsessed with getting a tape soundtrack of that off-pitched octave of the fight song. He spotted Jerri at her locker on the second floor before lunch and approached her, ‘Ummm, hi. I’m Bobby Dorset from the football team.”
Jerri was startled but regained her composure, “Aren’t you the captain of the team?”
“Yes, I am.”, smiled Bobby, relieved he wasn’t going to be pegged as some anonymous, white, fraternity jock. “I have a situation, which I was wondering you could help me with.”
“Me? How could be of help to you?” Jerri asked incredulously.
“Ya see, Jerri(?)”
“Yes.”

“We seniors want to get the JV’s and sophs to sing the school fight song for the team before we take the field for the first home game. But we want them to sing the song in an off -key and in a difficult octave. It would be funny enough to break the tension leading into the game.”

“Where would I come in?”, Jerri said with a grin as she imagined these vocally untrained jocks butchering the melody of the fight song.
Bobby continued, “If I could get you could play that fight song on a piano for me, I’d record it. Then we’d play it for the sophs and JV’s who’d have to sing it on the day of the game.”
Jerri’s sense of mischief was piqued, “Sounds like fun.”
“Do you think we could do this in the choir room?”, Bobby asked.
“Hmmmmm. “Momma is always there or close by. The time that she’s not there is my study hall time where she leaves me to practice the choir accompaniments. And she pops in to make sure that I’m not doing anything else, like homework or any other diversion from that. I have a piano at my home.”

Bobby’s face blanched. Not only was this a logistical time challenge for his schedule with football practice and homework, but he’d be going to a part of town he knew only by his indifferent attention while on a team bus or in the family car. His own relations with blacks were limited to those few blacks who were on the athletic teams and those blacks who made it into his fraternity-and who themselves were alien and estranged with the other blacks in the school, since they were from a different neighborhood. Even worse, his father was a virulent bigot, who often used racial slurs, which Bobby had learned to use. How could Bobby pull this off and overcome his own and his FATHER’S bias.

Jerri seemed to intuitively read Bobby face and his existential moment of personal crisis. One impulse which struck her was to let Bobby wallow in the drama of his sheltered, ethno-centric existence and let his biased kill  his idea into a stillborn death. Realizing how far Bobby had come to approach her for this favor and be willing to work with her under the utopian hopes of his original plan, Jerri suggested, “If you can get me a recorder, I’ll take the recorder home and do the recording for you.”

Color came back to Bobby’s face showing his normal slightly tanned skin. “Thank you, Jerri. Thank you.. If I can ever help.”

Jerri grinned, devilishly saying, “It may be a price you may not be able to pay.”  She said it quite whimsically, with no real intent on HER part. The next day, Thursday, Bobby was running late. He overslept his alarm and only little brother, Larry, peeking in on him, when coming out of the shower, got him out. He just got out the door and into Janet’s car to catch his ride to school. They were half way down Euclid Ave, when it hit Bobby that he didn’t have the tape recorder on him. “Damn!”, he grimaced. He got to school and looked for Jerri in the hall. Because they were running late with the unwanted aid of the morning school bus traffic, he had just enough time to get his jacket in his locker and grab the books for his pre-study hall classes. Between first and second period classes while standing in front of the hallway leading to the back exit to the athletic fields, talking to some of his frat brothers and waiting for Suzanne, his aberrant choice from his father’s ranting bigotries, he spotted Jerri.  He abruptly excused himself from his frat buddies and moved down and across the hall, calling out to Jerri (and drawing the wide-eyed wonderment from his ‘broes’ and on-lookers). Jerri turned around and smiled at his blushing from the adolescent looks and cat-calls he was getting. Only the passing slap on the shoulder from his normal antagonist, Hank, the black senior who’d he’d known as a contrarian to his racial attitudes since the seventh grade-the past five years-whispered to him about the gawkers and cat-callers, “They’re assholes. You know it.” Bobby gave Hank a quick semi-grin of acknowledgement for that ‘Hankism’ wisecrack.

Reaching Jerri, who, herself, wondered what her choir-mate and cousin’s buddy, Hank, had said to Bobby for him to break into a grim grin from the blanched look he had from the looks and cat-calls. “Jerri, I rushed out of the house and left the tape recorder at home.”

“Oh”, in down-crested disappointment. Being the proactive optimist she was, “You can drop it off after school and practice!”

This was becoming a matter of credibility and honor for Bobby, who prior to this had been indifferent to the other blacks in his high school and homeroom-with the exception of wise-ass Hank, for whom there was developing a sibling kinship from the racial rivalry. “YES. This can be done! Where do you live?”

“I live just over the hill to the west of Manley off Hull-the fourth street on the left. Just before the train underpass and the on-ramp to the interstate. If you get that far, turn-around and make the first turn to the right.  575 Treehaven Ave.”

“I will.”, Bobby said with emphatic resolution.

“Cee-Yaa.”, Jerri said with a mischievous wink as she spotted Bobby’s trophy girlfriend, Suzanne, approaching Bobby from his rear towards the way  she was facing in Suzanne’s approach.

Bobby was left to disabuse Suzanne’s  unwarranted, suspicious interrogations.

About seven p.m., Jerri heard through the screen door a car door slamming and Bobby shouting back to  a red-faced middle-aged man behind the steering-wheel of the car. (Cot and Ra were able to determine that the older man, Bobby’s sire, was distressed by being in the neighborhood and Bobby having a transaction with a female in this neighborhood). The doorbell rang and Jerri came to the door. She could hear the profanities and the slurs coming from the car. Bobby’s face was  an angry blanche, unlike the uneasiness and embarrassment she had observed in the other situations.

“Sorry, You had to hear that.”, apologizing for his father’s shouts.

“My sympathies for YOU. His actions are nothing new or surprising for me, for Syracuse, or my ‘black American experience’.”

Bobby nodded in acknowledgement, hearing wise-ass Hank as the echoing avatar of those words. “Got this tape player for you. I hope all the hoopla generated by this grand idea of mine makes the end product worth it.”

Jerri smiling,”The process you’ve had to endure from all of us has made it worth more to you than you may realize.”, kissing her hand and putting it up to his cheek.

One could hear an explosion of shouts and profanities coming from the Lincoln after that. Bobby, blanched, rolled his eyes, gave a bashful smile, “I’m gonna hear it now!”, as he turned towards the Lincoln at the curb shouting back and cussing back at his father.

By the time Jerri left high school and Syracuse for newer and broadening experiences, she had developed an attitude which affirmed the egalitarianism toward other human beings as her modus operandi. The times were changing and  reinforcing this equality of status. The celebratory nature for these times and the life possibilities were reflected in Jerri’s development. From what was a dependent fetus to what was now an independent, collaborative, symbiotic, and synergistic being, Jerri’s world and consciousness had grown beyond her creature comforts and conveniences. She had a world view. With a few tokes of one of Terra’s herbs she had developed a transcendent-Earth view in those moments.

In college she worked at the campus-radio station as a D-J’s assistant. It was a blast for her, since she got to hear the demos of the music that would be the signature hits of the time. Her main challenge was resisting the sexual entreaties and social offers the D-J’s made to her because of her easy-going and open-minded, non-judgemental-ness. The D-J’s were a clique unto themselves with associates as wild and free-lancing along the lines of drugs and sex, too. One of their associates was a crazy guy from Omaha, Vince, who reminded her of Hank of Syracuse in his intuitive feel for the words that needed to be said. It was Saturday and Vince’s hallway over at Harknes Dorm was having a floor party. Vince’s room was notorious as the place to go for weed and other mind-altering substances. Vince, carried the epithet of ‘the Spaceman’ for his insightful depth of inductive thinking, as well as his legendary highs on marijuana. Unlike many of the other doers of drugs, Vince didn’t push or pressure people, he just left it out there for people to grab and use, like candy left in aunty’s dish at her house. As Jerri entered the entry way the aroma from the weed struck her in the face. She thought how thankful she was that the campus cops were more glorified protective uncles than law enforcement officers. As she got to the landing of Vince’s floor she could hear ‘The Temptations’ ‘I can’t get next to you’ finishing up. As she walked into the room, a chorus of voices rang out her name, ‘Jer-eeee!’. The sound of the next album could be heard dropping on the turntable and the needle cueing itself on the grooves. Marvin Gaye’s, ‘Thinking about My Baby’ started to play. Jerri felt a hand on her hand pulling her to the dance floor to dance. ‘Let the fun begin!’, she thought. There was such spontaneity at these moments. It was such an irony that this institution which hoped to train and educate us, Jerri mused, to be calculating and circumspect actors for their establishment institutions had admitted an aggregation of the most immediate gratifying group of brilliant impulsives. As she completed that thought, Sly Stone’s ‘Higher!’ started playing. Jerri was by the couch where Vince had jumped up on his cushions and grabbed her hand to join them bouncing up and down to ‘Higher’ and to the refrains, “higher, higher, higher, higher, hiiiigherrrr!’

Training for a career and income for  her household did not diminish her conviction for sharing in humility and equanimity, even though she was more remote from her original nuclear, postpartum base.

Those person who had obstructed her path or betrayed her trust on her way to this young ‘maturity’ were forgettable episodes now that she had found the treasures of her sharing soul. Community was more than the proximal distances of her mundane and weekly activities. Community was having sympathy and empathy with those struggling across the globe. She was with Vince up in the Hollows when a member of the Black Panther Party whom Vince knew apporached.
“How ya doin’ there youngblood”, the Panther said to Vince. “Hey, Charlie, how are things going?”
“Giving ‘Power to the People’, Blood. You up for a donation?”
Vince smiled wryly, pulled out two dollars and gave them to Charlie, “Charlie, whatcha doing later?”
“Got an ‘After-school tutoring’ session at 4 at the St Mark’s Hall, then meeting of the ‘Central Committee’ at 8.”
“You, the Panthers, are doing tutoring, also?”, Jerri queried.
“Yes, young sistah. We try to pick-up where the racist system has failed our community and other communities that suffer the repression of this economic order of greed.”
“How old are you? You can’t be that much older than me?, Jerri was offended by the patronizing tone, than her admiration of the community outreach, of which Charles spoke.”
“I’m 24.” Five years senior to Jerri and Vince.
Realizing her self-conscious reaction and the contrast of paths, Jerri acknowledged, “I see.” Turned to Vince and said, “What are you doing after four.”
Vince looked at Jerry in askanced anticipation of her next coming question and said, preemptively,”Really or seriously.”
“Be serious!’, Jerri snapped.
“Sleeping til dinner!”, Vince snapped back.
“Skip that and let’s help out at the tutoring at St. Marks.”
Charles gave Vince his social-obligation-guilt look.
“Geeezuss. You guys are killing me!”, Vince said in relenting to their combined unspoken will.
“Giving back to the people will bring you back.”
‘Yeah, yeah.” Vince’s spirit was willing, His flesh was tired-from too late smokers the night before.

The engagement with the Junior High and High Schoolers was reviving to both Jerri and Vince. The hopeful innocence of the Hollow neighborhood kids renewed the idealism that had become bruised and warped with the on-campus posturing and jockeying for suck-up position to the ‘icons’ and other authority figures at Royal.

Charles came over to Jerri and Vince. “The kids really took to you. You’re real people. Not like those who come on as if they have no connection to being black in these neighborhoods.”

“Two to six years ago, we WERE these kids, in our own way, Charles. Our families didn’t have the money to send us to that university. We had to grind our way through grammar and high school with the little help and encouragement from a few. We’re just making our down-payment of payback for those who helped us.”, said with Jerri’s growing confidence and passion.

“How is it that what you’re learning and what they’re teaching you over there is going to be of any use to these kids here in the Hollows?”

“We were recruited to be ingesters, who’d be swallowing all that they gave us in the hungry desire to be the black versions of them,” Vince continued, “We’ve seen that what they have to offer is shallow symbolism. An illusion of something efficacious which only fuels our ego and enhances our ‘CV’ (curriculum vitae), our resume.”
Jerri added,”If we can pass on the attitudes of discipline and curiosity of ‘Knowing to Be’, then we have pollinated and seeded a potential that will have its own center of virtue, which will be hard to be corrupted or compromised to accommodate itself, easily to lower or lesser goals.”

Charles added, “You could be more productive working out here than ingesting their mental poison.”

“For those who are into pre-med, math, and science this is the most efficient system for us to obtain the skills and certifications to practice those skills. We just have to keep in mind that we do walk the tightrope across the gorge of self-importance and smugness of titles and honors bestowed by the system to induce us that to think that things aren’t as bad as we see here in this neighborhood and other hoods from which we came”, a more seriously minded Vince, asserted.

“What you do here is the necessary social triage and preventive maintenance that is sorely lacking. We all, incidentally, as layman, have an ethical duty to others. Those who gain professional degrees will have a moral as well as ethical fiduciary duty to be the conservers of hope and promise. We feel fortunate to have transcended the mental traps and illusions which the conditions of privilege and convenience tempt others into compromise and cooptation.”Jerri pointed out.

“Having a low draft number, for me, makes the remaining years and months to soak up all the relevant knowledge and sources of knowledge which the university does provide”, Vince interjected.

“You could go to Canada, Brother”, Charles brought up.
“It’s a tempting alternative, but the struggle is within myself in the midst of the alluring distractions of the ‘Belly of the Beast’ “, Vince’s homage to George Jackson’s description in Soledad prison.

Jerri was connecting the domestic struggle and its repression to the foreign oppressions in which those home-boys of hers were being herded up to fight in a  land where people had been struggling for their own national dignity, not much different in seeking their dignity as black people had been experiencing concurrently, even though they were using weapons provided by countries who had developed authoritarian to totalitarian methods with the human corruption such methods enabled. People, about whom she knew and learned, whose own lives were deprived and circumcised in her nation were asked to risk their lives killing these foreign insurgents and guerrillas, in the name of loyalty, to authorities who were agents of  their domestic repression.

Though indignant about the unjust irony of these social conditions, Jerri continued her sense of extended community through the different groups and organization protesting their dissent and creating community systems for members of their virtual ‘community of the spirit’.  Still thinking she was a pretty good pianist, she was allowed to use the St Mark’s piano and organ to give Saturday instruction to the kids of the Hollow and the other neighborhood, Winchester. The basics  of some classical pieces, and the chords for some jazz and funk tunes were her ‘syllabus’, until graduation. Her empathy extended into her style of instruction, as she saw her own gropings, when she was first learning, in the efforts of her young charges. “Don’t press.” “Don’t get so emotional and frustrated with your mistakes. No one but Mozart and Chopin were born a Mozart and Chopin, and even they had to practice through their own noviceness.’

Graduation put Jerri in an entirely new social atmosphere as well as geographical environment. Her majoring in Fine Arts gave her a  strategic perspective of her possibilities from her study of the spatial tactics used visually and aurally by the masters. Not wanting to be a cog in the grinder of school or school board politics as ‘Lil’ Momma’ was in ‘Cuse, Jerri eschewed going into teaching, and sought positions with civic foundations supporting galleries and the symphony in Baltimore, plus working on a Masters degree in Cognitive Therapy through the Arts. The aesthetics of extended family and community faced the challenges from the ‘nouveau riche’ whose vanity of themselves and their possessions made their service to their work secondary to their own self-serving interests. Jerri’s memory banks contained a thread concerning this one supervisor who was more concerned with finding fault and opportunizing on others mistakes than being a mentoring leader trying to enhance the production. Jerri got the part of the pianist in a revision of ‘Cats’, featuring an all-black cast. What should have been a work of joy, became its own guerilla theater of posturing, back-biting, and undermining. The solidarity of the writer’s intent, became a showcase for for egos and verbal abuse of the support staff. The production was degenerating into a networking bridge for the next role or business connection.

As this thread continued in Jerri’s memory she remembered, ‘There were a few diamonds in this pile of bullshit.’ Dillian had been financing the production as a rehabilitation to his former tradings in contraband substances and rental rip-offs. He was doing the promotions with the TV and radio stations with interviews. “I know someone”, was his answer when the question of needing some resource came up.  He learned ‘finance’ on the streets, selling weed and swapping contraband with other retailers, wholesalers, and consumers in the Baltimore black market.. He knew how to get ‘seed  money’ from the times he bought weed wholesale and broke it down to individual blunts to recoup his investment from fifty to 200 per cent. Success for him wasn’t a network connection since the director and the lessors, considered him their errand-boy and fetch-puppy. Dillian was just happy to see a creation other than a made drug deal. His contributions to this production were giving him instruction on long term patience and planning, beyond a 24-hour window he’d had with his buyers. Seeing Dillian’s talents and capabilities for making deals and garnering ‘equity’, Jerri started thinking of Dillian as a possible investment advisor for legal commodities. “Dillian, what could you get for this convection oven?”
“In its present state as an appliance, probably no more than ten dollars. If it was broken down for scrap metal, we’d be talking about twenty dollars. I know a guy...”
‘A suave looking Fred Sanford!’, popped into Jerri’s head. “What could you do with that twenty dollars, then?”,  giving leading questions to Dillian to see how his mind would respond.

“With a couple of other pieces of scrap exchanged, I could rent a vehicle and do jitney-rides (giving taxi-fares without a permit) and make one-hundred and twenty dollars for the fifty to seventy-five dollar, total investment expense.

Jerri did a quick calculation in her head: a sixty per cent capital gain. “Where was Raymond when he was needed now?? (Raymond was an economics major who went on to finance for his post-graduate degree).

Since the production’s funding to pay for the building lease, costumes, and props were an on-going issue, Jerri decided to bring up her vision of Dillian-based ‘fund-raising’ to the director and producers.

They were in the office relaxing before the arrival of the rest of the cast for rehearsal. Gloria Washington, the co-production manager; Shaka Afrikka (aka, Roy Butler of Philadelphia) , the director; Barry James, the executive and other co-production manager. Barry and Gloria had been promoting concerts and local events in the Baltimore area for the past ten years from their experience as DJ’s. Their connection within the Baltimore-Washington D.C. social and cultural communities gave them a leverage over the overbearing Shaka. ‘Shaka’ had been a part of different repertory companies and minor productions in Philadelphia, and was the theatrical expert, which he made clear to the point of obnoxiousness.

“Hey, Gloria, Barry, Shaka”, as Jerri interrupted the banter in the room. “I have an idea. We could be self-financing through Dillain. He’d receive leads from your contacts of items which they no longer desired. Dillain would pick them up exchange them for cash or barter them for items for our production.”

A pregnant pause was broken by Gloria remarking, “How much would Dillain be asking for these services?”

“I haven’t discussed it with him. I wanted to run it pass you-three first.”

‘Could he get us what we needed to our specifications or would we be getting some street junk?”,  Shaka asked.

“More importantly, with Dillain’s checkered past, should we be trusting him  with the names of our connections?”, Barry threw out.

‘You’d have to make up your minds on Barry’s question before asking Dillain directly on the first two questions.” Jerri responded.

Barry put the question to Gloria, “Aren’t you ‘familiar’ with that stock broker on Charles Street who does IPO’s (initial public offerings)?”
“Keshawn? My gawd, I was trying to forget about him!” As her memory of a long, boring dinner date of listening to Keshawn name-drop his ‘connections’ as he talked about himself through the evening.

“Yeah. This is for the production, not for your trophy mantle.”

“He did name-drop the right names.” Gloria resentfully admitted.

“Would you get in touch with him?”, Barry pressed.

“He would be no where as inexpensive as our in-house financer”, Gloria said with sarcasm.

“We’d have some ‘collateral’ recourse against him if he acts up, unlike our poor man’s J.P. Morgan, Dillain.” Barry said.

Without answering her question directly, Shaka, Gloria, and Barry had dismissed her suggestion.

This was the problem between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, particularly within ‘the race’. Those who were left behind to fend for themselves because of bias against them and for the possible donors own status and cliques, are socially persecuted, then prosecuted for fending for themselves.

Jerri didn’t have the means, but she resolved to do what she could as the opportunity presented itself. This became her mantra. Through her church she taught piano on Tuesdays, before bible study. She took her nieces and their friends to the galleries she did work for. She kept in touch with Dillian when she came across items she wanted to convert for cash or other ‘investments’.

Post-college and graduate school life had reached a regular routine. Activity and work buddies she had. Jerri was still driven by the momentum of her undergrad studies to want some career definition and let any domestic benefits come incidentally. Dillain,though 20 years old was into the over-exuberance of needing  excitement, which was fine, but his needs left little time and less common interests for Jerri to view him as anything more than a cordial and occasional confidant and utility. The men of church were, mostly solid characters, but very much into ‘old school’, paternalistic thinking, where the women was, at best, patronizingly, tolerated but primarily the vehicle of utility for their male posterity and prerogatives. This was NOT Royal with the anarchists of the radio station or the maniacs of Harknes Hall. She was going through the slow psychological withdrawal of that student life of mental and its derived visceral stimulations.

On a bus ride from Baltimore to Syracuse for the ten year high school reunion of her class, Jerri had the last open seat next to her for those boarding in Baltimore. A soldier in his Army greens with E-5 sergeant’s stripes came up the aisle dragging his duffle bag. “Is this seat taken?”, looking into the pleasant smile and eyes of Jerri.

“Oh, NO. It isn’t taken”, moving her things she had presumptively placed in the chair.

The soldier sat down in the seat and made himself comfortable, giving a quick, polite smile and a scan of Jerri. “Quite pleasing” ran through his thoughts.

Jerri was somewhat flushed and self-conscious sitting next to this soldier. It made her remember Vince and back at Royal.
“How long have you been in the Army?”

“Just starting my third year of my three-year enlistment”, matter of factly.

Looking at his name tag, Jerri remarked, holding out her hand, “I’m Jerri Simmons, Sergeant.....?”
“Hawley. Call me Chris.”
“OK, Chris. Where are you headed?”
“Harrisburg, then south to Carlisle Barracks.”
“What do you do there?”
“I’m an archivists at the War College.”
“Is military history your interest?”
“Only coincidentally with this assignment. I’m a bookworm-literature fiend of English and French Literature.”
“Did you go to college for that?”
“Yeah. My draft number of 39 short-circuited my academic plans. Getting to be the archivist was so much luck. I was a regular admin-person at a battalion headquarter, whose filing system needed a major over-haul. They had so many areas that filing cabinets were taking up space and being black-holes for lost documents. Seeing the floor and wall space the cabinets were taking up, I mentioned to the ‘Exec’, a lieutenant-colonel, that I could do the job with wall racks, cartons, and file labels. After I broke down the files in categories and sub-categories, I created a directory for them. The rest was just the mechanics of labeling. It took me a week on my off-time. Made the Exec look like a genius. He remembered me when he got the command at Carlisle.”

“So you can be obsessively organized, ehh?”

“Necessity is the father of means. For all the time I was in the stacks searching for books and documents misfiled, I became a de facto librarian out of self-preservation.”

Chris continued, “The literature is my passion.”

“What did you find particularly compelling?”

“The way the words were used. Such as this poem By George Moses Horton                                 
                        
                                        

I lov’d thee from the earliest dawn,

    When first I saw thy beauty’s ray,

And will, until life’s eve comes on,

    And beauty’s blossom fades away;

And when all things go well with thee,

With smiles and tears remember me.

I’ll love thee when thy morn is past,

    And wheedling gallantry is o’er,

When youth is lost in age’s blast,

    And beauty can ascend no more,

And when life’s journey ends with thee,

O, then look back and think of me.

I’ll love thee with a smile or frown,

    ’Mid sorrow’s gloom or pleasure’s light,

And when the chain of life runs down,

    Pursue thy last eternal flight,

When thou hast spread thy wing to flee,

Still, still, a moment wait for me.

I’ll love thee for those sparkling eyes,

    To which my fondness was betray’d,

Bearing the tincture of the skies,

    To glow when other beauties fade,

And when they sink too to see,

Reflect an azure beam on me.

Jerri blushed turning a chestnut color. “You have an ear for words, Sergeant Hawley.”
“The proper moment is always the good accomplice”, smiling and reclining back in the chair. “What do you do?”.

“I’m a consultant and independent musical and artistic contractor. I work with repertory groups, theaters, and galleries.”

“That must be interesting.”

“It can be. The people are what makes it too interesting, if you know what I mean.”

They both chuckle at one another’s  common vocational curse.

The time had slipped by. The bus was pulling off of I-83 to enter Harrisburg.

Chris asked, “What’s your destination?”

“Syracuse and my tenth high school reunion. I’ll be returning to Baltimore on Sunday night.”

“Perhaps we could see each other one weekend. Let’s keep in touch.”

And they did, into a marriage that lasted twelve years. A post-surgical embolectomy killed Chris, leaving the grieving Jessi Simmons-Hawley a widow at age forty-one. Now a mother of three children: 11, 9, and 6. Chris had left active duty but remained in the reserves, and was able to get a civil service job as a the archivist at Carlisle. Jessie moved to the northern suburbs of Baltimore to Cockneysville-a 70 minute commute to Carlisle and a 30 minute commute into Baltimore. The insurance policies and bank savings gave Jessi a cushion of security.

It was 1992. In the passage of time from  1978 to then saw a modification in Jerri’s focus, thus attitude. Being a mother put the welfare, caring, and concern for Chris and her children-Aaliyah,for her first and elevated status as the first; Marlowe, conceived while watching an old Bogart detective movie; and Noel, a Christmas Eve birth, Jessi found other portals of connection through her reading on pre-natal care and child development. Though she had serious issues with B.F. Skinner psychology, she was not whole hog on Calvinist doctrine. What one chose was consequential, but HOW one chose was determinative. For Jerri, the concurrent social forces out in the public media were so invasive that she had found herself being one of the lemmings of general trends. Her purchase of consumer goods, such as appliances, home repair, items, plus birthday and holiday gifts on credit reduced their take home disposable income, and put them in jeopardy when a major domestic repair or medical bill occured. She and Chris realized their folly and went to cash, and diverted their excess money to paying bills rather than entertainment and pleasure. Chris’ passing increased that austerity, during the probate period. Jessi realized in the experience that desires were truly psychological slippery slopes to poor habits to psychological dependencies. Trying to translate that to kids, who faced the wave of social conformity pressures at school, confirmed her suspicions that environment and the signals of the environment were social conditioners to the unmindful. The ego-centered, me-80’s had reduced people to the maintenance of the false esteem of trappings they hoarded. Jerri’s college experience and her observations of Chris’ discipline to duty for the active Army and the Reserves, had begun a renaissance of counter-cultural practices, than just counter-cultural posings.

Socially, the circle of contacts had become constrained. In these pre-internet, email years the occasional written letter or the phone calls from those passing through town was the extent of her former extended community family she had in college. The world of family and relatives were her cocoon, until she went to a comic book convention with her nine year old, Marlowe. While there she encountered a pair of sisters, Davia and Vickie. They were a fussing, wise-cracking pair of women. When the crowd handlers told the crowd they’d have to go through the metal detector. Davia leaned over to Vickie saying quite loudly, “Is that three-fifty-seven Magnum still in your purse?” Jerri was close by and joined in the cavalier irreverence, saying to Davia,”Lucky for me I left my m15 rifle in the trunk of my car.” Davia continued the farce,”We could’ve used the cover it would be for us.” Further conversation revealed that Davia and Vic were transplants from Bogota New Jersey, a little enclave just north of the I80-I95 junction and on the southern edge of Teaneck. They had moved south to Maryland when Davia found work with a graphics company in Columbia. Vickie followed soon thereafter. Davia soon began informing Jerri of esoteric developments within the industry and the magazines and comic book sites which were dependent on the graphics Davia’s company employed. What struck Jerri was that was a cohort of people who existed in their iconoclastic niches, and who could be found in the magazine archives of the public libraries. Jerri was resolved to investigate this phenomena on her next visit to the library with the kids.
Jerri headed to the microfiche machine which had the directory for magazines. Jerri had esoteric interests in the auditory and visual arts, unlike the more iconoclastic interests of Davia and Vickie. She located the ‘Arts’ category and began her search. Being fascinated by the use of symbolic meanings in art and artifacts, the articles Jerri found on MesoAmerican artifacts, along with the art of surrealism and realism gave her access to the authors of those articles. Even better, were the advertisers in the classifieds in the back of the magazines. The world was not so circumscribed as she had begun to resign herself to believe. Jerri wanted to dialogue with the artists to understand the motivations for their techniques. One correspondent, Leona Angelea, had arrived at conclusions which asserted that all nature, and we by our psychological predisposition, were affected by signals and symbols. For the signals in symbols that went beyond the physiological automatic reactions, humans and other sensory processing beings were facing long term conditioning, as surely as there are physiological effects to chemical and radiation on the human body. The extensive spectrum of initiators was mind-boggling to think about. So many of the sources were common treats and pleasures, which defined relationships with others, as well as Jessi’s individual nutrition and perception. At the same time things, to which Jessi had had a seemingly whimsical aesthetic affinity, had a clearer function and meaning to Jessi. Sifting and filtering through this metaphysical genome of hers was her next frontier and personal adventure.

Cot and Ra followed the memory thread to the thread to the time prior to September 11, 2001. Noel, the youngest, was 14. Marlowe was beginning his junior year in high school. The past decade had been a triaging of her own tastes and habits, so that she was a credible witness and example to her three, very precocious children. The superficiality of things, even with the advent of the internet, was making Jessi a daily believer in mass conditioning on the general public and the seemingly docile, herd following of the many, as well as the eclectic diversions of the few into unique, plus violent, expressions. The latter group provided a stark contrast to the former, very much more docile class who populated the community about her. The former class’ docility was producing more insidious venal consequences than those of the more eclectic latter whose horrific excesses were making the headlines and the topic of discussion on the cable channels. The vanity adornments of the 80’s had become the ingestive gluttony of the 90’s. People could no longer afford the toys and bling, but they could find that satiation in food. From summer barbecues to holiday dinner settings, the communal feast of gluttony was becoming an art form, along with other substance abuses. It was difficult enough keeping the kids away from the ‘wrong crowd’ and drugs. The sensual and visceral satiation was something she had to control on herself, from the hyper-dramatics of TV shows to the dinner table. The excuses and enablings of others for the life-quality degradations occurring with their peers and mentees forced Jerri to whittle away and purge herself of activities which were common convocations with family and others in the past.

She remembered hearing on late-night radio how society was moving to a homogenized, consensual thought which would make the tactics of the novels ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984’ moot. Jerri thought that those who’d be affected would be those who gave attention and participation to those detrimental qualities. There was a social correctness that existed from provincial speak to parochial talking points of conformity. Serious discussions were degraded to this level if not avoided or diverted to other topics. Jerri saw and felt the limitations with which people were suppressing themselves to have some favorable standing or status with others. It was rather pathetic since the standards were seriously flawed. Jerri chose to refrain, and sought in her trollings in books and on the web those who weren’t part of the apathetic or herd-speak.

The general shock of the 9/11 attack came from its audacity. After seeing the towers fall like the demolitions she had watched on TV and in person, then hearing the official version of its explanation, the old college cynic in her started rising. By the time the Congress had voted for the resolution to give President George ‘W’, the authority to do what he pleased to do in Iraq, Jessi was becoming more a B.F. Skinner-phile than ever. People were so other-directed that they had defaulted their own individual proactivity to tangible ‘low-hanging fruit’ for the grabbing, forsaking any macro-prerogatives for their will or empirical discernment. Inner-drive for the masses had turned to sensory indulgences and gluttony which further degraded their sense of discernment. The drama consequences of being ill-disciplined and practicing poor habits became the purpose and entertainment of their attentions and passions.

By the year 2005, Jessi was getting weary encountering the reruns of life imitating banal art as her social and cultural world of people she knew and observed. Her practice of mind-attentions had distilled her focus to those signals and symbols that were empowering. She didn’t collect them and have them as physical, visual clutter but they were personal affinity reminders for any time a similar signal would occur. The LIFE Magazine pictures of the leopard in action and the victory statue of Stalingrad

Jerri was noticing more and more things were occurring as her cynicism or skepticism of events or circumstances reached an apex. There was a time when she was between consulting gigs. She was called by her banker to inform her that her mortgage check was late. Jerri told the banker that she had made the payment online. The banker in a skeptical tone said he would check and get back with her. Jerri went out to do some errands. She visited the noisy farmer’s market and the fish market at the harbor. When she got home she was concerned about her mortgage check, and pulled out her phone to navigate on it to make the call to her bank. Before she could go to her call log to click on the number from which the banker had called her, her voicemail menu popped up. A bit annoyed by this interference, she still obligingly clicked on it. The voice mail was from her banker. It played, “Mrs. Simmons, this is Chad at First United Bank. I wanted to tell you what happened at the bank while we were verifying your claim. The reconciliation transfer of checks from one of our branches was missing. They swore it had been placed on the cart that was picked up by the armor car, but it was missing when the armor car reached the depot. It turned out that there was a duplication of bag serial numbers-there was more bags listed than existed. In a converse way with you, your check was given a duplicate code in an anomalous mistake by our computer. The code given was for another mortgagee.”

Not only did Jerri feel vindicated. but she felt confirmation in those forces of serendipity. She realized that her good fortune was not entirely by her efforts or good virtue, but part of a grander continuum that she should give homage to in her dealings with others. Like when she was at the market and saw the guy fondling the fruit and wanted to let him know how public he was doing it, but that there was an empathy of sensuosity for him. Jerri smiled to herself, wondering if she would see him again.

(Simultaneously, the man from the Farmer’s was wondering about that sassy black gal who teased him at the market, and wondered if he’d see her again to ask for a date.)

Ra and Cot had completed their scan. The people who were anonymous without the leverage of status and standing to affect hardly anything, even their proximal environment were not the deadly curse to Terra. Though many of them gave lip-service to the belief to a particular cosmological order, many lived in a secular arrangement of ethics with their protagonists. There was not the zero-sum aggrandizing as with the Geo-politics. The pleas ‘to the Heavens’ and the pleas of saving their lives from the doings of Lucifer (Luce, Terra’s archivist) though misdirected at the wrong subject, were from a race playing out the string of an illusion which had been allowed, laissez-faire, to exist because of the convenient paradigm that helped to keep order over what had been anarchic genes out in the general cosmic dimensions.

Could people like Jerri be allowed to be obliterated, because of the maniacal momentum of enabled historical logic? Cot and Ra knew the answer should and would be ‘NO’. They transported back to Immortals Hall. The immortals had already read their souls and nodded in consensus to Ra and Cot’s conclusion.

Munka (Jesus) spoke. The monotheist are praying to expect a singular entity come to redeem them. It is time that we disabuse them of this. If we do this in inscrutable ways, they will infer the same partisan interpretations they have done in the past. Raina, you the avatar of the future plus icons of their past need to make an appearance in the land of blood, they ironically call the ‘Holy Land’. Show them the future of their present path. If they refuse to heed your words, Cot and Ra can return to dispatch those with such destructive aggrandizement and ‘remove’ them in a rapture that WILL be OUT of THIS world.”

The normally stoic group smiled as if being told to go out for recess on the playground. In ways, this was very much what was going to be occurring-being able to caricature themselves. The immortals existed in a world ruled by responsibility to duty. One’s talents determined one’s duty. The duties for those on the commission were to monitor the training of the different cohorts supervisors. Those of ‘promise’ were sent to all the corners of the dimension on assignments such as Luce or Cot and Ra had. If a serious decision was needed it was brought to the council of immortals for an explicit decree. For the council members to be doing this ‘road trip’, as serious in consequences was its imperative, was like a jail break for Raina, Bodo (Cleopatra), and Mazur (Tao-zen). Luce would remain invisible and continue his role as archivists for the coming events.

Luce advised ‘the embassy’, “Since the human fictionalists had overdone alien spaceships and hosts coming in from the clouds, you should employ a different ‘advent’.” The commissioners decided a ‘Star Trekian’ simultaneous holographic transport into the councils of all the major armed parties, and showing the parties the hologram of themselves and their other downloads of themselves would give them religious humility towards this embassy. They thought, “Why just visit the protagonists of this ‘Armageddon’? Let’s visit all the capitals and seats of power at the same time” Luce added, “So they don’t keep your visitation a secret from their people and so their people may witness, what I am sure will occur, the damnable arrogance of their leaders , their world has these giant video screens which project images upon them in their major cities, as well as in their capitals. We’d be able to take over those screens functions and project our visit to their leaders for the mass of their citizenry. They will see their leaders for what they have been: corrupt, self-serving, aggrandizers of little, altruistic principle.

On Earth the commanders of the forces were sending coded messages back to their capitals of how their armaments were suffering unexplainable dysfunctions. The more psychopathic rulers were believing that their commanders were losing their nerve and sandbagging them with these incredulous excuses. They sent back threatening invectives to those commanders. Cot’s and Ra’s visitation and return to ‘I-H’ had been so brief that by the time the rulers were sending their invectives back to their commanders, they noticed they had unauthorized presences in their midst. Raina being the senior delegate spoke,”Earthmen. We have been monitoring your race since the beginning of what you call the Mesozoic era. We are the ones who are responsible for your presence on this planet. You are the successful (I say that with a caveat) engineered gene placement with the zoology and botany of this planet. Your race is an amalgam of different races whose worlds were despoiled in the same way that you are despoiling this planet. Those races had the capability to go beyond their star system, so we did an ‘interference’ and removed them from those planets. We planted their genes in different species of plants and animals on your planet, so that they would not have the imminent or short range facility to be as lethally dangerous to other star systems as they had been to their home planets and the planets of their star system.”

“The cosmos is an order of radiating knowledge. The knowledge radiates out, in and from points in between. Where the waves cross in resonance the knowledge on those waves gets broadcast to the those proximities in greater intensity than those areas more tangent and remote to the line of travel of those knowledge waves. You have had the random fortuity to have individuals whose cognitive faculties were uncluttered enough by your parochial and provincial mind-clutter to be affected by those waves. With the seeds of wonder left by our engineers to give your developing species paradigms to which to focus and orient your attention, those whose faculties were less affected by your cultural distractions were affected by the knowledge waves passing close to or through your planet. The accumulation of knowledge from these individuals and the technologies developed from them account for the advances of your species from their arboreal source to the metropolitan centers of your present, as the surrogate artifacts to what were your arboreal origins. You lost the inherent humility of a vulnerable prey once you learned the efficiencies of existing beyond the protection of trees. Your numbers were small, so your predations on the other zoological, botanical, and mineral resources were overlooked, since this ecosystem had the means to heal itself from your vector-like infections upon it. The narrations in your what you refer to as the destruction of Sodom-Gomorrah was NOT because of the unique forms of conjugal relations of the men and women of that region with anything which could give them sensual satiation. That was just an idiosyncratic symptom of a hubris of license which those having a leverage of power over another entity could do anything they desired to that entity. It was for the horrific brutality they inflicted on the weak and meek that Luce, the one you know as ‘Lucifer’, ‘Satan’, ‘the Devil’ was sent with two of our ‘Guardian’ enforcers to see this venality and meet extreme punishment, if necessary. Only the chance meeting Abraham had with Lucifer  and the Guardians on the Plains of Mamre qualified the intent of our resolve. The encounter with Lot and his family and the crowd that gathered confirmed our suspicions for the need of that mission by Luce, plus the pleadings of Abraham for the few ‘good men’. The region was not totally devastated as dramatized in your sacred texts, but there was enough venality to have a general conflagration from the irradiating of those foolish enough to confront Luce and the guardians with aggressive force. The floods from the tales of Noah were the response to the actions of the civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria. Their technologies rivaled and surpassed your civilization. Their limited numbers (ten million or less) were not an obstruction to the brutality and wickedness they inflicted on the people of their regions. They saw each other as competitors who needed to be eliminated. Their weapons of destruction, radiation lasers, would have destroyed the Earth’s fauna and zoology. Lemuria was located in the southern hemisphere and Atlantis in the northern hemisphere.  It was a very expedient thing to use the Spring-Summer thaw of both hemispheres to inundate both locales by the defrosting of the north and south polar regions. Both civilizations drowned and lost by the extraordinary rapid rise of the sea levels accompanied by some ‘infortuitous’ mid-ocean seismic events that dashed the rapidly rising waters across the kingdoms in calamitous and horrendous destructive power. Lemuria and Atlantis had jealously guarded their knowledge with all the proprietary possessiveness they could devise. The rest of the world, your Eur-Asian, African, and ‘western-hemispheric’ Americas land masses were unaffected by those cultures. In fact you suffered by the raids of Atlantis and Lemuria seeking minerals and slaves. With Atlantis and Lemuria dispatched and only a few thousand who managed to escape, survive the more ‘uncultured’ regions in which they settled, this world was able to do the needed organic mending from those two cultures.

Ages later, we of the Cosmos Order were doing a review of this region and inquired of Luce, your satanic-devil of mythical sacred legends to give us a report. Luce said that your planet had settled into a manageable cultural evolution, and that except for the puny despots who scavenged off the effort of the many, most people were seeking simple ethical and virtuous subsistence within the clueless paradigms of your world. Job, and the story told of him was anecdotally typical of the state of men. Their specie arrogance, hubris, and ignorance, along with their innate aggression made them victims of their own follies. Some of those follies they were so cluelessly blind about that they attributed them to supernatural forces of ‘good’ or ‘evil’ ala the deities they created in their own image and the demons, being personified by our brother-being Luce, who is only the archivist for this region of the Cosmos. Job’s trials and tribulations were not the doings of outside divine or demonic forces but from Job’s and the humanity of his time inconceivability to comprehend the natural forces of the physical world and their underestimation of the venality of human nature. The dialogues on Job losing his religion over his ‘misfortunes’ were amusing since his religion was based on the serendipity of natural events and the altruistic cunning of your Moses (now,our Brekki) to use his leadership influence to forge tablets of ethical commandments. Moses’ time in the wilderness before coming to Egypt had given him the cognitive openness to receive the knowledge radiations and transmissions which were in ‘Earth’s’ vicinity at that time. His time on Mount Sinai allowed him to practice those disciplines to pick up the themes transmitting through and near to be inspired for the ‘Commandments’.

By the time of the great martial empire of Roma, the ethics being accepted and derived from the notions of ‘might makes right’ and the ‘ends justify the means’ with the social and cultural accommodations that were derived from it, had its equal and opposite reaction to it with those who had isolated themselves from the cultural interactions of the time. Your Jesus, (now, our Munka) had the benefit of the accumulated knowledge of Egyptian and western Asian archivists who had been accumulating the inspirations picked up from the transmissions of the Cosmos. His meditations brought him the insights and powers he was able to affect. His ‘resurrection’ after his crucifixion was our holographic interference to honor his efforts and promote the virtues of his teachings.”

“Alas, the narrative of your history and development was dependent on the few and the anonymous, not those with the means of power. Again, your civilization has posed itself  as a danger to this planet and the meek and humble who exist in your lies of illusions-ethnocentric, provincial, and parochial. We will not allow this. We will not allow those who have their clue-less faith in holiness to perish because of you who have a reckless regard and hubris to those who are meek and humble, as well as the biology and zoology of this planet. With we and the citizens and media of your world as witness, you leaders will sign this charter to stand-down your forces and reorganize your societies along the lines we have dictated. If you do not, we will hold you personally accountable and responsible for any adverse occurrences after twenty-four hours from this moment.”

Most of the leaders were dumbfounded into terror by the appearance of the embassy and the digital transmission of the ‘Charter of Obligations’. The stupid few who fired upon the holograms saw their pawn operatives decompositioned before their eyes. With the world populations through the media boards and cable networks witness to this power of retributive justice a bowel-emptying quaking fear went through the masses.

Raina added to the world masses, “If it was not for a female being whom we detected in one of your markets making sibling sport and support with one whose loneliness had reduced him to his affinities with the sensuousness of the produce, and then learning of her life; we would not be as confirmed in our conviction, that ‘the Meek should inherit the ‘rights of the world’”

Jessi, on hearing that wondered,”Were they talking about me?”