The Monk and the Skeptic. Frank Browning
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the presence of God in your life are as common as Rice Krispies and Twitter. No serious presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter, neither Democrat nor Republican, has dared present himself to the public without professing the critical presence of God in his life. But in continental Europe—apart perhaps from Poland—such sacred visitations are not the stuff of common conversation. Indeed, they are as rare as poetry inscribed with the quills of carrier pigeons. For Brother Peter, who was raised in a Mediterranean family with no tradition of religious observation, being struck by the light of God was as arresting an experience as it would have been for my grade school classmates to expound on the Heisenberg principle. All these doubt-refracted filters were present in my mind as I listened to his testimony, the sheets in the bedroom rumpled and my tape disk spinning.
“I found myself in a personal, living, real relationship with God and I went to the limit of what this relation would mean for me, which meant committing myself to a religious engagement and accepting ordination to serve the church, to carry forth the word of the Gospel. But the thing that always interests them [the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence], which is at the heart of the question when I talk with them, is that I don’t defend the institution of the church. The formal structure doesn’t interest me; I am there as a witness for God, the God who is love and who cares for and watches over all of us. So, they find out that I think more of what God says than the temporal heritage of the church. We can talk about how the church works, but what has always seemed the most interesting for me—and for them as well—is the authentic spiritual or mystical dimension of that history.”
“You mean that aside from gay militancy, you find a mystical, spiritual nature with the Sisters?” I asked, credulous.
“I don’t say that I found it. I say that they pose the question and that they are keen to encounter someone who lives it.”
“And your encounters have never been hostile?”
“I’ve never had a hostile reaction.”
Our conversations frequently returned to Brother Peter’s sympathy, even respect for costume, performance, transvestism, leathermen, and the dodgy exuberance that is at the core of what the gender theorists call performative identity—after Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and perhaps most approachable, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. They all, from a distinctly secular perspective, saw the gendered clothes we wear as fashioned from the fabrics of social constraint and possibility. Whatever our genes have given us in the apparent biological form of our flesh, the way we present and clothe that flesh comes as a result of the unfolding human story by which we invent our lives. In the heyday of French critical theory during the 1980s, I found myself deeply moved and motivated by the philosophical elegance and zest of its great master, Michel Foucault, already dead (by AIDS). Foucault’s key work—at least from my point of view—was his 1960s study of prisons and penitentiaries, Discipline and Punish, which argued that the rise of bourgeois capitalism demanded the creation of a self-policing industrial working class. The unified powers of state and capital won the collective good behavior of the workers by inculcating in them a fearful respect of being continually observed and judged for correct performance: timeliness, family duty, deference to authority. Even more than prisons, the public schools were the great enforcers whose primary mission was not to teach literacy but to discipline the young and thereby police the unruly desires of “the dangerous classes.” (For a portrait of just how dangerous those classes appeared to polite urban society, take a look at Patrick Suskind’s 1985 best seller, Perfume, which perfectly portrays the upper-class fear of what can happen when uncontrolled senses are married to the animal taste for blood.)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the best of the queer theorists, wrote movingly of just how provisional our perceptions of masculinity and femininity are, of the hunger of the flesh for the same and for the other. Little by little, however, I came to find all the derivative graduate school discourses that followed in the wake of Foucault and Sedgwick terribly arid. Hundreds of doctorates earned by the followers of the followers of the followers of Foucault were filling up English department faculties across America. Their convoluted sentences and impenetrable paragraphs crafted in the form of Immanuel Kant seemed to me like intellectual arthropods supping on the desiccated corpses of forgotten desire. They had neither dared to take on a nun’s habit nor screw or be screwed by a happy priest who revered both his leather and his robes. When at last, without searching, I came across such a monk, I realized that as much as I had benefited from the genuine insights of the gender theorists, I was more touched by the wings of myth that were the stuff of my priest’s daily routine.
Myth. The word, derived from the Greek mythos, set apart insight into the uncertain from the hard facts described by logos, the sort of knowledge that could be determined by cold, philosophical reasoning. Logos was the realm of the elite rulers and thinkers, mythos the belief system on which ordinary folk relied to guide them through the torments of dreams, desire, suffering, and hope. We moderns, descendants of Descartes, Locke, and the triumph of rational doubt that was the Enlightenment, have come to take myth as a synonym for false belief. We speak of myths as beliefs that reason cannot sustain, even as we blithely refer to the myth of Sisyphus as the original ancestor to the modern existential crisis. The loss of vital myth, I fear, has produced —and this is where Brother Peter and I most clearly converge—a dreadful loss. To live a life devoid of myth is like crossing a Kansas winter in an Eisenhower jeep. The English writer Jeanette Winterson, whose Dantesque tales cross the boundaries of gender, physics, time, and galactic space, speaks as movingly as anyone on the human necessity for myth. Years ago she told Bill Moyers on his PBS series Faith & Reason that while rationality “has freed us from many cruel superstitions, many nameless terrors . . . it’s not sufficient. There is a mythic truth, which is an imaginative truth, an emotional truth, a way of understanding the world which is not about the facts and the figures, but which is nevertheless valid.” Later, following what she described as an arid literary decade, she spoke to an interviewer for the British daily The Guardian about the necessity of guarding—though not obsessing about—the ever-present personal wound “that gives you the strength to go forward.” In that act of going forward from the wound, she said, you learn that “there are so many separate selves.”
To touch those separate selves on a daily basis, as Brother Peter does, or as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do, or as the Greeks who prostrated themselves at the Apollonian temple at Delphi did 2,500 years ago, is to allow yourself to be sucked up into zones of mythic comprehension of human contradiction where reason alone is no aid. It is to give yourself over to what for lack of a better word is the zone of the soul, even as reason tells you that there is not and will not be any way of confirming that souls exist. If it seems contradictory to speak of the soul without being able to marshal the evidence of its existence, then so it is with the place of myth as well. Christian myth, Buddhist myth, Horace, or Harry Potter. We continue to generate greater and lesser myths because, as Winterson has said, they enable us to confront and ruminate on the fierce emotional and educational confusions of our existence that no amount of learning seems able to tame. They give us, or most of us, rocks of stability in the ongoing flow that is never the same from one second to the next. For my own taste, the all-knowing, all-powerful Christian deity that inhabited Brother Peter one day in his eighteenth year is a hoary old critter. I find him far less compelling than the Olympian panoply that called on the Greeks to choose a personal guide from among them and who then marked the earth with mounds and crevices where that god’s force was made manifest to his or her followers. Like Brother Peter, who doesn’t restrict the idea of grace to his own god but supposes that all those who track a path of decency toward one another will find habitation in the greater soul called eternity, for me it doesn’t matter much which mythic force you embrace. All that matters is that it respects the multiplicities that drive us to become inquiring human beings.
Or in plainer talk: To be alive and alert is to perform in an endless drag show, its artfulness measured by how gracefully we change our outer robes of identity.
Nowhere have I been more taken by the mythic zone than in contemporary Naples, whose sexual subculture I wrote about at length in A Queer Geography. The late magnificent actor Marcello Mastroianni said shortly before he died that Naples would always remain his favorite city because more than anywhere else, it had successfully