7 Minute Autobiography with One Lie

Dry heat and subzero blizzards savaged the Montana railroad town
Mom didn't want to marry a farmer
Dad was a good candidate, he had a railroad job
His Italian family was not what the Norwegians on Mom's side expected, or hoped for
Everybody got used to the idea, some time after I was born

We were railroaded from Montana to Minnesota then to Oregon
In elementary school I heard of the Puritans but visited the Plains Indians and their graves
By junior high we were in Minnesota
The land of 1000 Lakes and the Hamm's Beer Bear
Southern Oregon
In high school I studied math, physics, and football

The Vietnam war got me into college
I was a straight-A student
You don't have to believe that

Still, my years at the University of Oregon were a renaissance
I couldn't get over the girl back home, so I studied Shakespeare
We'd been to a festival in Ashland, Shakespeare under the stars
The bard wasn't the same without her, but I persisted
History, philosophy

I had learned to sing in church
A choir at the university opened my ears to Bach, Handel, and Mozart
I breathed deeper and rejoiced
Every day since, I've opened my mouth to sing
The war ended before I got a degree

But music followed me even working in Portland
A few years as a salesman, and I went to Seattle to sing opera
I drove a truck and moved furniture
Got married and divorced
Sold the business to save the house

Then my career as a singer really took off
Three years in the chorus
Tannhauser, Der Ring des Niebelungen
La Forza del Destino, The Marriage of Figaro
I was born to sing
In the shower

Operatic romance was better offstage
We hiked in the North Cascades
Buried my sister

I negotiated peace between music and business
And have lived happier ever after

I married another singer

Art and Truth; Is Truth Enervating?

Is art that is truthful will-shattering?  Art that reveals the meaninglessness and arbitrary violence of the world destroys the will to maintain an arduous struggle toward virtue or artistic elegance.  After Schopenhauer's descent into chaos and futility, Friedrich Nietzsche posed a solution to the dilemma of will-shattering truth. 

Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy describes the tension that he found in the Greek tragedies between Dionysian and Apollonian art.  Dionysian art embodies the chaotic energy of the world, which in Greek thought is antithetical to reality as differentiated by form delineated in Apollonian art and philosophy.

Nietzsche was for a time an admirer and promoter of the music dramas of Richard Wagner.  He saw in Wagner's music an illusion that could sustain the will against the chaos of Dionysus. 

Here are a few references that may be useful:
Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy
Arthur Schopenhauer
Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche; Art and Truth

To put the quesion in more contemporary setting, here is a link to my review of a book by Carson Holloway titled All Shook Up; Music, Passion, and Politics.

The question of art and will makes an interesting discussion.  How is an artist to persist against the banality and chaos of the world?

Fruit on Grafted Branches

In 1963 the railroad moved us to Oregon
Dad had not seen his cousins Sam and Savario since the war
It must have been during his six months at the Vancouver Barracks
After twenty years, we drove to visit them in Washington

At the table in Grandma's kitchen I'd heard their names
These sons of Italy and of my grandfather's brother
I knew them as well as I knew my grandfather
He died before I was born

Puget Sound and the Olympics were the only landmarks Dad needed
to find their houses on the Hilltop in Tacoma, a safer neighborhood then
I hadn't imagined they'd heard of me
But when we arrived, they knew my name

The Calabrese dialect was rich on the men's tongues
Ida and Yolanda, sisters-in-law, told the stories for my sister and me
I was fourteen and my sister ten
Ida told stories we didn't understand
but Yolanda spoke well

Of how Sam and Savario together built Savario's and Yolanda's house
The spacious brick house on Wilkeson Street
In the back yard they grafted apple, pear, peach, and plum branches into a single tree

Next door, on the corner, they built Sam's and Ida's place
A smaller, white wood-frame house

Savario worked as a longshoreman
Sam building cabinetry

Savario spoke jovial Italo-American
When English failed him, Yolanda explained

Mom tried to follow Ida in Calabrese
Dad remembered the dialect and explained both ways

If Sam and Savario were my father's cousins
What did that make their kids to my sister and me?
Julie, Patty, Joey, Cecilia, and Sammy
We got acquainted in the shade of Sam's fig tree

We saw that Joey's speech was slow
His eyes were full of love
But punks on the block bullied him
Sammy was then too small to intervene
Defending her brother, Cecilia was tough

The girls taught my sister a few words
The Italian for eggs, toast, a cup of coffee
In the morning Yolanda verified her nascent diction

We wandered to an elementary school yard
Sammy played in the sand
Aspiring to be in a muscle magazine
I did pull-ups on a galvanized bar

Domenic, their friend, was learning to drive
He came by and took Patty for a ride



Ten years after we went home to Oregon
the University of Washington brought me back again

I drove past the port, up to the Hilltop neighborhood
By the reservoir and elementary school

Savario and Yolanda hadn't changed
Sam had more English by then
The houses were the same
They knew my name

Both families came to my first wedding
The mafia, my former brother-in-law said
Sam offered to help with repairs to the old house I'd bought
Five years later the house was not my problem

When the families came to my parents 50th wedding anniversary, I had remarried
Julie and Patty had children of their own
In a Lutheran Church, we sang  love songs from Broadway shows
My Norwegian mother won the Reformation at home

How did another ten years pass?
We started getting together for funerals

The last time I walked with the men through the neighborhood
Sam said of Savario, "He forget everything."
My father was there, before he too began to forget

When Savario died, St. Rita's Church consoled survivors around his casket

Sam died in his chair, his memory intact, of a heart attack
Another line of people stood at the altar of St. Rita's

Sam's offer of help with my first house was not uncommon
Neighbors didn't call the plumber, they called Sam

A woman, whom as a girl, Sam and Ida had loved
Stood to lament the passing of her friend
She had frequently stayed for dinner

Her father was a deserter
Her mother worked nights
Sam always waited for her to put the napkin on her lap

He saved every ripe fig for Ida

Everybody worried about Joey, a still boyish, fiftyish man
The priest said, "You'll have to help your mother.
"Are you OK?"
Joey was calm and said he was OK

Cecilia and Sam Jr. check on their mom
Joey works part-time at the YMCA
He knows a lot of baseball statistics from watching TV
Occasional he goes to a Pilots' game
The house is the same

Not long after Sam's funeral, Yolanda began to forget
Julie and Patty, retired from teaching, cared for her
She seemed content until she was gone

Two years ago, we got together at Cecilia's for Christmas dinner
Dad and Mom came on the train
There was a football game on Art's big screen

Ida held my hand in hers again
Come and see us, she said

I said that we would
The crucifixes in those houses know my name

The Art of Family Photographs

Late 1940s photos from the family collection.

Eastern Montana landscape.  My grandfather was a railroad section foreman.

They couldn't keep my mother down on the farm.  Her Norwegian parents weren't prepared when she married into the Italian family of the previous photos, but everybody got used to the idea.

The Drama of a Grey Day

A Douglas Fir towers in the sky
Magnolia blossoms still cling to branches where they dried

Workmen in leather gloves raise the dust
A laboring engine pumps slurry under sinking concrete

In our friends absence
After seven or eight weeks, their house sold

Rao left supervision of a hundred engineers
To assist Nirupama during her father's heart surgery in India

The decision to sell the house...
Dissatisfaction with career, interviews with a competitor

Family concerns
The house has too many stairs if the parents move here

Recovery presumed, Nirupama's father abruptly died
Prayers to Jesus and the gods still hang in the air

Yesterday or a month ago, we laughed together
Their brown-eyed boy, Anniru, climbed my chair

Rao has returned to the apartment and work
Nirupama says later in September

After she settles her worst ordeal ever

Great Singing at the 7-11 Store

Perfect legato technique and the ability to sing high C are a not skills in great demand just now.  The pop music culture and Hollywood scene are almost as bad as the banking industry--drug money, phoney money, government money. You can't make your own kind of music in that show. The business end of a passion for art, or whatever, is real messy.

Now it starts to get good in this upside-down mad world. You're working nights at 7-11, even though you are pretty hot stuff at the YMCA and the Fat Chance Opera company. That voice! Rich bronzed horse flesh. You're better than the guy you heard at Harriett's piano bar. What was the name of that flea trap?

It's the middle of the night. Verdi's Otello is in the CD player. Sing along. Why not! The last customer came in three hours ago, wasted. You brought down the house at the beginning of Act II. Your interpretation of Iago's Credo scared the leopard-skin bikini off the twitch on the cover of Hot Rod Magazine.

Credo in un Dio crudel  "I believe in a cruel God who has made me in his own image, whom I name in my rage... ."   Shakespeare didn't write that, but then, he didn't have a soundtrack like Verdi's score.

Well into the second act, you're singing, and you turn with a flourish toward the glass doors where a stick-up artist is coming in. For crying out loud, another interruption!

This crook looks a bit nervous under the stage lights. Obviously, he's inexperienced, but a two-bit 7-11 store should be an easy job to add to his short resume. Preoccupied, he is ignoring Verdi's music.

"Give me the money."

"Just let me get through the second act, will you?.  If you come back later there'll be more."

"You're joking, of course."

"It's been a slow night. Can you settle for about forty dollars and a couple of six-packs?"

"Well, certainly, I'll take whatever you can offer." A very courteous thief. "Throw in some corn flakes and a gallon of milk, and it's a deal."

"How about a pastrami sandwich for the road?"

"How do you expect me to carry all this stuff? I'm walking, man! Aren't you being awfully generous with your boss's merchandise?"

"Why fight the system? He's insured. I was a hero with the first crook who came in here, even more inexperienced than you. The guy looked like a pervert, so I told him I wouldn't call the police for at least an hour if he would take subscriptions to several magazines, his choice.  It was 4:00 PM, and customers were crouched behind every gum ball machine and cooler. He was unsteady with the gun. The boss said I should have just given him the money. `You want to get somebody killed?' He said.  But, I'm holding you up, holding me up."

This should be good for a chuckle, but try not to let it interupt the rhythm of the work. "So, what'll it be? The pastrami, or the corn flakes and milk?"

"I'll take the milk, for sure. Got a kid at home."  The crook has calmed down enough so maybe we can get this over with before Si pel ciel. But now he's listening to the music, and he notices the recording package on the counter top. "The Domingo/ Milnes duet is coming up," he says.

"Yeah.  Take a box of animal crackers for the kid. I'd like to stay in character. If I turn this thing off, I have to start my Stanislavski exercises all over again."

"You use Stanislavski technique? They taught us method acting at Eastman."

"Well it works for me. You know this music, eh?"

"We did a concert version at Eastman."   He looks like an Otello.  Big.  Black. With a high-pitched, big-man voice, he's a dramatic tenor if there ever was one.

"I sang most of Iago at the University of Washington in an opera workshop. Piano accompaniment only. With a faculty tenor. I was older than he was, I think."

"I'll be darned. You're a singer. Something told me you weren't the English-degree type one usually finds in these places."

"I'm a little under qualified for the literary magazines, but I had the right connections to get the job."

Verdi's brass ensemble vibrates loose trim on the countertop. The lights burn down from their tracking. Neither of these corralled horses is going to miss his cue. Here it comes.

""Si pel ciel marmoreo giuro... .""  Vengeance! Vengeance, by God! Vengeance

Rock Climbing September

Mount Byron's north face looked as though it had been violently hewn out of the mountain with a cleaver. Thrust up severely, harsh rock slanted toward a glassy sun. Rays of light broke over the ridge and starburst around Jim's careful figure on the wall. Clinging to just adequate finger holds, he had pulled out and up eighty feet of rope a few inches at a time. The nylon strand dangled from his waist, its sweep in the morning sky like the arc of a diving swallow.

Young doctors looked up with me at Jim. Larry, an intern at the University Hospital in Portland, said, "You'd get some interesting facial expressions with a telephoto lens on him up there."

His friend Hugh didn't answer. Cold, impatient, he swung his arms and flexed his manicured hands. We waited in the crooked fissure where a snowfield beneath us had melted away from the base of the rock face. Midmorning already, this was only the first pitch of the climb.

I kept noticing Hugh's white, physician's hands. They were scrubbed, dexterous. Mine were battered with scars and strawberries from weekends of climbing abrasive granite. Of course, Jim and I were the fanatics; we didn't have anything else. Just then, these guys with medical careers must have thought Jim was, at least, slightly insane. He had assaulted the first pitch of our climb in a way that made you think he should confine his athletic feats to a stadium someplace.

A pole-vaulter at the University of Oregon, Jim had lost his scholarship because he wouldn't cut his hair. The renowned Bill Bowerman was the coach then. A bit of an autocrat, he made Jim feel like he was part of a circus with trained animals who did their tricks on command. You could glimpse a mania in Jim's eyes. He seemed a wild ass of a man, but his gentle voice was disarming. Wine-soaking binges with disillusioned climbers in the valley didn't interest him. He was a seeker after enlightenment.  Up on that wall he could have no meditations, transcendental or otherwise.

Inner space at my end of the rope harbored its own reflection of existence, here so jammed at the horizons. Jim's vital spectacle had made an impression. Larry and Hugh had their reasons for being here. However we conceived this impulse to climb, there was exhilaration in the naked energy of rock and glacial ice. But climbing a north face in September was neglecting something basic. We had plenty of time to realize it as we stood waiting in this bone-cold notch. Jim had to take the proper precautions. But it was peevishly cold.

In general, the weather that autumn in the Tetons had been splendorous. The previous day, bush-whacking up the steep ravine south of Nez Perce Spire and the Grand Teton, we had grumbled about the heat as we thrashed through autumn-leaf vegetation and scrambled over acres of boulders.  We startled a bull moose in the brush, and he ambled instead of ran into the shade of the pines. When a cool spray began to light on us from whitewater on the rocks above, we paused and let it soak into our shirts.

We continued over moss-covered granite, and our packs strapping weight bore down on us. As we neared the top of the falls there was a sense of accomplishment. We slouched over the uppermost slabs and collapsed exhausted in the grass. A languid stream slithered around boulders then gorged the grizzly throat of the rapids that had thundered in our ears all afternoon.

Upstream, Lake Taminah was sheltered, remote, full of sky-deep reflections. The high brink of a glacier loomed over the west shoreline. Our clunking about making camp amid wildflowers was muted by the persistent sound of moving water. Drifting out of the lake like a soul leaving its body, the stream we had followed to its source sought its inevitable release in the rapids ecstatic rush.

From this vista we could see the entire length of the ravine in which we had hiked all day. It bottomed out to a flat expanse under the eastern haze--Jackson Hole. Above us, a presence like God, in every direction, were the granite-buttressed peaks of the Tetons, their wind thundering summits seemingly growing toward the sun.

Anticipating the stress of climbing, we had joked about the French explorers who named these peaks the Big Tits. After a trek across the continent, horny fur trappers projected libido on these beautiful mountains. It must have been a lonely journey.

Jim had tied himself to a flake of stone on a steeply sloping ledge. He squatted on his heels like a savage, and hauled up rope. I felt it tighten around my waist. When he yelled, I shouldered my pack to follow his lead marked on the rock by a trail of iron. It took a moment to loosen up. The rope was reassuring--at this stage all I could have done, even if I had fallen backwards, was skin my knuckles. I reached Jim's first piton and untied a loop of nylon, then hammered the pin back and forth until I could pull it with my fingers from the crack where he had driven it.

"Up rope." Jim took up six feet of slack.

The first charge of energy on a climb is strong enough to lift you out of the physical apathy in which most people live their entire lives. Under the influence of adrenaline, I glided upward effortlessly. I was where I wanted to be. In the rapture of it, I was going up and watching myself going up at the same time. Grasping the rock made heat flow into my fingertips.

A kind of counter-tension can be used to keep you on the rock. Trying to find the angles, I hesitated. Jim yelled, "Keep moving! Don't hang on the wall."

Being too careful will just wear you out. But I didn't spend all my time climbing; I had to think. I strained to get a boot up--a difficult move. Jim had nerve to lead this.

Balancing on a wet sloping foothold, I bang out another pin. Hot chips of stone fly at my face.

Climbing again. Higher! A careful balance move puts me on top of a sharp-edged pillar near Jim's perch.

"Good," he says. "Hang on, I'll give you the iron."

I looked down the hundred feet of rock we'd just climbed, and beyond, down the steep striated snowfield sweeping out toward Lake Taminah. Cold air flooded out of the valley and in and out of my nostrils. Larry and Hugh were looking up at us. Larry yelled, "We're going to have to leave you. It'd take too long with four of us in the chute, and we're not equipped for a bivouac."

I yelled down, "Are you going up the ridge?"

"It's easy, class four," Jim added.

"Maybe we'll see you on top," Larry hollered back. A surgeon in training, he would understandably not want to risk freezing his hands.

To me, Jim says, "Can't blame them. This is no place for standing around."

"Too bad, though," I answer, "I'd hoped they could get in one good rock climb, so they'd have stories to swap over cadavers."

"We'll be the cadavers," Jim says, "if we don't get moving."

Larry and Hugh traverse west across the snowfield, miniature men with packs and ice axes. Their boots crunch as they pick their way in the shadow of our steep face.

"They'll get a workout on the ridge," Jim says. "Anyway, they climb for the same reason they run up stairs in the hospital--for the heart."

I suppose I was doing it for the heart, too, though in a different sense.

"Ten thirty already," I say as Jim puts the sling of iron over my head. I shift it under my arm.

"Not a good start," he answers.

"You ready for me to go?"

"Climb away."

Up! Iron jangles across my chest. The earth seems to sway far behind me, beyond the dangling rope.

On awkward ledges with loose shingles of stone, I veer west, creeping toward our objective, a broad fault opening hugely in the variegated granite. Once there we can climb about ten rope lengths up the most formidable section of the wall.

When the ledges peter out, and high-angle rock rears enormously before me, I take the best line up I can find. There are cracks to place pitons when I need them. I'm glad to get my feet off the trashy skree that collects on the ledges. Looking up into the sun glare, I can't plan everything, but the movements that take me up seem mostly under control. "Spiderman! On Christ the solid rock... . Mmmmmm. Stop talking to yourself." It's scary. Even the rock has the cold sweats. Beads of ice infest the handholds.

The rope begins to drag through the  carabiners in the protection I've placed. I yell, "How much rope?"

"Thirty feet."

Who started this waterfall in my ears? Two more moves! Up. Up. I opt to straddle an uncomfortable but solid bulge, and anchor in.

"Off belay."

Jim's answer is faint, lost in the gusts of wind that dust the face. He leaves his secure ledge. I watch as he climbs and try to keep the slack out of the rope.

"Rockfall! Shiiiiiit."

"Who the hell's dumping their garbage!"

A chunk the size of a bucket smashes down end over end, then the impact of one bounce explodes it into a barrage of odd-shaped projectiles that whine past and off into space.

"One of those would soften you up, man. That's meat tenderizer!"

By two in the afternoon we had established a position high in the fault. It opened sometimes, when you looked down, to nothing but blue sky. Struggling between the walls, I had scraped my back, and sweat burned in the scratches. In spite of a warming flood of air, we had reached that point on a climb where exertion and exposure make you reconsider everything. We had committed ourselves--it would now be easier to continue than go back down--to grunting up more than a thousand feet of granite, nothing but rope and iron to intermittently pin us to the wall. The rock felt solid, but I was an audacious interloper here. The shift of one block of the peak's enormous weight would crush me, a tremor shrug me off to be dashed to pieces. A pebble falling from the heights would air out my brain.

To control one's reaction to objective dangers with such monstrous force requires continuous effort. Jim goes out on the edge of the fault to get around blocks the size of gravestones jammed inside. There, he can see how out of hand things have gotten and mutters, "Good place for sky diving." He joked around like that. The worse it got, the funnier he was.

Up.

Up. He feels around with his free hand. His breathing hovers like the changeable wind currents circulating over the face.

Slamming a piton until its head sizzles, he works violently to get some protection between himself and the awful drop. The dust of his struggle falls in my eyes. His tense fingers fumble with a nylon hero loop. Then he clips the rope to it with a carabiner, and he's safe for his next few moves.

In the sun now, he goes up the corner of the fault until he can mount the highest chunk lodged in the opening. Thirty feet higher, he disappears. I sit in the shade playing out rope.

He takes it up and yells. I follow his line of rope.

When I can see him again, I say, "We're going to have to sprint. This crack would be plenty cold at midnight."

"A fucking refrigerator!" He answers.

I make one last lunge toward where he's waiting with the iron. He hangs it around my neck and says, "Keep on going."

I climb, and the wind drives tiny droplets of mist up the face. They seem to flow right through me. My loose nylon slings stand up flapping as I search the rock above.

Synthetic colors catch the eye instantly up here. At first I think the patch of orange I see is a climber. We could be overtaking another party, but I haven't heard any voices. Climbing signals seem to carry well to everybody on the mountain except the person on the other end of your rope.

The patch of color didn't move. When I reached it, I found an orange nylon rucksack caught right where I wanted to sit to belay Jim up. I drove in a piton and hung the pack and myself on it. While Jim climbed, I examined the contents--a few slings, an empty water bottle, an old can of tuna, and a down vest. The weather had faded the nylon; the pack had apparently been there many months.

When Jim got up, he turned over the spoils for himself. On the inside of one flap on the pack he found the owner's name--Rupert Warner.

"Rupe shouldn't have left this behind," Jim said. "I hope we don't find him next, if he's been up here as long as his gear."

We leap-froged up, extending the rope between us repeatedly. The fault widened to a windy couloir with occasional patches of snow. Sometimes I could scramble free for an entire rope length and save time. We weren't cold anymore. Even sitting, belaying, I scarcely had time to rest before Jim would come up beneath me, and I would have to start up again. We shouted signals back and forth, going as fast as we could, but our late start and the autumn shortening of days were against us. This north face was getting cold, even while the sun still shone on the peaks across the valley. Lake Taminah was in the shade of the ridge. I looked down to the glacier for movement that might be Larry and Hugh going back to camp.

When Jim comes up under one of my belay points, he is alarmed that I have climbed the last pitch without placing any pitons. "That was too hard to do without protection," he complains. You want to rip us off the mountain!"

"Win a few, lose a few," I answer. "I was just as scared following you down there." I point. Maybe he's not convinced. I give him the iron, and he's off. Why argue about it?

It seems this gully will never end. It bends above us toward the darkening sky. When we get over one bulge of stone, there is another. The sun glows momentarily on the tops of distant peaks, and then is gone.

Twilight overtook us as we engineered our assault on the first false summit. Several of these formidable blocks could have been the top. Finally, one of them cut away on the sunset side, and we scrambled up a climactic spire--the top.

New peaks were visible to the southwest, huge jagged icebergs in a black sea. The valleys were flooded with darkness. In the windless expanse of the sky, the clouds had retreated to the horizons or settled as mist on mountain lakes that reflected a last radiance.

We continued to wear the rope as we descended the upper west ridge. I wanted to rest, savor the elation of our ascent, and gaze on the mammoth earth in convulsions beneath us, but we had to negotiate our descent before it was completely dark. We ran down the blade-edge ridge, silent depths falling away on both sides.

A prominent geological formation that struck me, even in my haste, was a monolithic granite wall meandering along the crests of a range of mountains. It was like the Great Wall of China, but this Wall of the Tetons is more immense than the work of the Imperial Chinese. Though not as long as the Great Wall, it runs for miles, a geological formation so symmetrical you might be able to walk along its squared-off top, if it weren't for the abrupt drops that eons of the earth's breaking and folding have caused.

I hadn't time to stop and look. I had to keep lunging down the ridge. Some of it got too steep to scramble down forward, and we had to climb down, turning our backs again to the sky. Far below us was our objective, a broad sloping field of talus. To get off the ridge before everything went black was the thing. Then we could grope our way back to camp.

The rope went slack, and I came to the end of it. Jim had untied it for a faster descent. He apparently was even less interested than I was in getting caught up here for the night. I coiled the rope.

It was nearly flashlight time already, dark enough that I almost walked past Jim where he sat on a huge block at the top of the talus field. Startled, I looked up at his figure against the dim sky.

"We're going to have to cross the glacier on the low end to avoid the icefalls," he said. "We'd never find our way through the broken stuff in the dark." He'd been studying the glacier for a while, from the convulsed ice on the high end to the cornice that hung over the lingering sheen on Lake Taminah.

"I don't want to get close to that lip," I said.

Jim looked at the acres of boulders ahead of us and said, "You might not care after a mile of this graveyard."

We felt our way and crawled through the talus in the dark. My shins and knees were taking a beating. It was like trying to hike in a herd of buffalo. If you moved too fast, they stampeded. I couldn't see Jim, only the spot of light ahead of my flashlight. When the batteries went dead, the stars blinked at me from above the towering silhouettes of the peaks.

Finally, out of nowhere, Jim whopped, "Aiee, a springboard into the lake!" We had reached the glacier. "Start sliding, and make a high dive when you fly off the edge. You can swim back to camp."

"I don't even like the thought of it. How close to the edge are we anyway?"

"You'll know if you find it."

"Want to wait till morning? We could walk this stretch in half an hour in the daylight."

"Who wants to shiver out here all night!"

We rope up again and take it nice and easy. Granular snow crunches under our boots. The broad surface under us glows eerily, confusing my eyes.

"I wish I had an ice ax," Jim says.

"I wish I were an Oscar-Meyer wiener. Let's just get this over with."

"Don't rush me."

We carry a few loops of rope to delay the shock if one of us slips. I could probably stop him, if he started to slide, or he could stop me. Probably. Twenty minutes or so of stepping and slipping got us across the snow. Then it was off with the rope, and back into the rocks.

It's a wonder these high lakes aren't filled up by the landslides that tumble down from the peaks. Our seemingly negligible progress is exhausting. Jim waits for me, and we sit down panting, trying to get enthusiastic about the rest of the ordeal.

"Another mile?" He asks cynically.

"You can see the campfire," I say. "They're trying to make it easier."

"All I see is black rock and ice."

"Don't get hostile."

We drain our last water jug. Jim says, "At least we got off the mountain. If we poop out now, the night won't be nearly so cold."

"If we had been slower?"

"We'd be up there getting numb as tourists at the South Pole."

"When we were still below eight thousand feet at noon, we should have rappelled off and gone back to camp for a pot of soup."

"They serve three meals a day at those dude-ranches in Jackson."

"We played it loose this time and came out all right, but I think we should at least consider there being a more conservative way to climb."

Another hour or so bungling, half the time on our hands and knees in the dark, put us on the meadow above the falls. The water rumbled out there someplace. I hoped Larry and Hugh and the rest of them had left something to eat. I was as beat up as a football player after the Super Bowl.

They heard us coming, stumbling through the brush, Jim poking about with a stick he had picked up to feel his way like a blind man. Jack Barrar who was then a freshman climber came out to meet us. We could see his lanky body against the red glow. He has since outdone all of us in the mountains.

"You could at least have picked a moonlit night," he said. He handed me a plastic bottle, and I gulped the cold water.

Jim said, "Sorry to keep you up waiting, Mom."

Jack chortled.

I give Jim the jug as we clump toward the fire. He washes dirt and sweat from around his eyes. Larry and Hugh are standing by the fire. A pot of food steams over the coals.

"Dark out there?" Larry asks.

"Why don't you two take up spelunking!" Hugh adds.

"Just pass the botch, Doctor," Jim says. "What is it tonight?--cirrhosis of liver?"

They grin at me in the red light, both of them in down parkas. Larry is wearing a knit skiing hat. In only a wool shirt, I'm still sweating. I throw the coiled rope over a boulder beside one of our tents. The aluminum pan I fill with rice and beans quickly transfers heat and singes my fingertips. Jim and I stare at one another through the flames.

The Story on Georgi

            The flimsy house shook as the would-be pianist struck the wall several times with his fists.  Maybe Naomi Taylor was right and music is demonic.  This musician looked and acted possessed.  Stringy hair fell over his shoulders.  His shirt was stained with the sauce of whatever he'd been eating.  Abruptly he turned toward Ben and swung a wild right at him, close enough that a gust of air made him blink.

            "Don't flinch!" he cautioned, "I can control it that way."  Ben was on his feet now but too stupefied to make his way to the door.  "It's the disease," his assailant said.  "As long as you're still, I can control it."

            A fire blazed in the grate, and it seemed hot in the old farmhouse now.  Ben had brought enough firewood to last the rest of the afternoon, but keeping warm seemed the least of this guy's problems.

            He had introduced himself as Georgi, and then acted offended when Ben waited for a last name.  Eventually he muttered something that sounded Eastern European.  After Ben started the fire, he had talked impatiently about his problems for an hour or so.  A pianist, he'd been a student at Julliard, but he was diagnosed with a poorly understood neurological disease that ended any chances he might have had of a career as a performing artist.  His family, he claimed, was wealthy but they had more or less disowned him when his erratic behavior started.  He hadn't been good for much of anything for more than eight years.  How he ended up in the Pacific Northwest was anybody's guess.

            That was the first visit on a cold day in January.  Ben went back with more firewood, and then he started bringing groceries.  His feeling of obligation to people in need was the reason he was a becoming a minister.  He had made some hard choices about his future before becoming an intern at the church in Woodinville.  A Christian, his vocation seemed unavoidably to revolve around the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew.  In this rendition of the gospel, the final judgment hinges more on acts of compassion than on doctrinal orthodoxy or devotion.  Feeding the hungry, and so forth, amounted to the same thing as loyalty to Jesus.

            If Georgi seemed demanding at times, it could be that eight years of trouble had taken all civility out of him.  Ben listened for many hours, trying to understand and demonstrate concern.  All the same, the conversations were taking him away from his studies.  When he had applied for the internship, it was understood that it would be part time.  He had completed most of the academic requirements in seminary for a Master of Divinity degree.  Though he still had some doubts about professional ministry and was losing ground financially, he enjoyed engagement with the academic work.  He did not enjoy many of the people who came looking for help at the church, some of them outright frauds.  After spending many afternoons with Georgi, he asked for some money from the deacons' fund to fill his oil tank.  It would solve his heating problem for the rest of the winter, and Ben wouldn't have to keep bringing him firewood.  Other members of the church contributed more groceries and some of them a little money.

            When Georgi started coming to church, people were on the one hand, impressed.  On the other, he was a dismaying presence--with his seizures and his imperious manner.  He didn't make things easier for himself by openly discussing the times he had been in jail or institutionalized, even restrained.  Maybe he was a mad genius, but suburban Presbyterians were having enough trouble raising their children without Georgi hanging around behaving more like a rock musician than a disciplined artist.

            He could play the piano well enough to back up some of his claims.  His technique was rough, but he had clearly studied.  Rev. Morland asked him to play an offertory selection one Sunday.  It was a bit too grandiose for people who mostly preferred singing choruses accompanied by one or more of the guitar pickers in the congregation.  Most folks had Georgi's best interest at heart, but occasionally somebody would patronize him in a way that infuriated him.  Then he'd storm out, leaving people wondering why they had bothered to try to help.

            "What he needs is a good kick in the ass," Bill Freeman said one day while he was helping Ben around the church building.  It was late April by then.  Leaves that had soaked up rain all winter were rotting in the gutters.  "Fine, he's a serious musician.  That's about as much use as being a totem pole carver in this day and age.  Ask any Indian downtown Seattle if he would share his tobacco with one of his kind who's still cutting eagle beaks on trees?"

            Ben went up a ladder toward the eves of the cedar-paneled church building.  It was the kind of day nothing could bother him too much--sunny, if still cool.  The mist had lifted from among the evergreens.  Beyond the hills the snow-crested peaks of the Cascades were visible.  He would rather be looking at them from the window of his study, but Bill's company was making the maintenance work bearable.

            But, Bill couldn't see any reason Georgi wasn't working for a living.  "He could be a cashier at the hardware store, or flip hamburgers.  Or something!" he said.  "John Wheeler is letting him live in his old place for practically nothing.  Even on minimum wage, he could get by."

            "What if he freaks out during a rush?  Ben asked.  "He might hurt somebody.  In a fast food joint, he could get into hot oil or something?"

            "Well, maybe he shouldn't be under pressure, or meeting the public, but there are jobs he could do."

            "He gets some money from somewhere," Ben recalled, "Disability benefits of some kind."

            "So why are we buying his groceries?"

            "He spends most of his money on CDs," Ben admitted.

            Ben explained, "Recordings--symphonies, operas, and that kind of stuff."  Bill removed his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief.  Many years taking care of business had set the furrows in his brow.  He may have been thinking about all those years he'd been an auditor with the Department of Labor & Industries.  With grown children, and now grandchildren, it had probably been worth it.  He quietly let the whole issue drop and went back to bagging the leaves Ben had thrown down from the galvanized rain-gutter.

            No doubt there were jobs Georgi could do.  He couldn't hope to be a performing artist anymore, but he must realize that it would have been a long shot even without his neurological disorder.  With his parents' money behind him, he might have had a shot at a career in performance, but there were a lot of other talented pianists.  He seemed to think working at an ordinary job would be an indignity or simply too much of a distraction.  He was composing music now, trying to find a way to engage himself creatively.  He worked things out mostly in his head, then on the piano at John Wheeler's house, which was on property adjoining the old place where he lived.  Lately he had started working at church.  His halting progressions at the piano made it harder for Ben and Rev. Morland to concentrate.

            In a way Ben envied Georgi.  Who wouldn't prefer to spend every day on his passion, for music or whatever?  Ben would rather be doing a Phd in philosophy of science than becoming a minister.  For a course on the Pentateuch, he had followed a lead in Whitehead about the connection between the lawful regularity assumed in the Hebrew bible and the epistemology of science.  In spite of the sense of obligation that required loving others better than he was permitted to love himself, he would be on academic track if there were better prospects for employment.  Instead he was pursuing an M-Div.  Having gotten involved with Georgi, in addition to his pastoral duties, he was having trouble even keeping that up.

            He discussed his frustrations with Rev. Morland while they were driving to the food bank with boxes of canned goods and macaroni products in the back seat of the car.  Doing things for others seemed to be costing him all sense of going anyplace in life.

            "All of us have to share responsibility for the plight of the underclass," Rev. Morland said.  "The trouble with a high-tech economy is that it benefits only the educated and the highly skilled.  There are winners and losers."  He didn't have to press his point because about that time they parked where a hundred or so people were lined up on the sidewalk.  Many of them were able-bodied, if ragged, young men.  But here they stood, waiting for a free meal.  Some of them smoked.  A few looked accusingly at Ben and Rev. Morland who now squirmed uncomfortably in their leather seats.

            Ben had to concede that most of these guys, though they were healthy enough to work, wouldn't have what it takes to get through a physics course.  So is this what it comes down to?  Those of us who can pass physics, or get a reasonable education of some kind, if we're Christian enough to care, have to deny ourselves and try to salvage some of these chain smokers whom we have beat down by our success?

            It wasn't that simple.  Though Ben was educated, he hadn't made money.  He didn't swing a lot of weight as a white male or as a member of the old-boy's club.  Did it make sense for him to relinquish even his capacity for achievement to help these men of about his age--he was about to turn thirty--who had fallen out of the system, or who had dropped out.  It was painful to think about the engineering program at the University of Washington.  He could have gotten in.

            Georgi, in spite of his ill health and money problems, was working quite productively.  Throughout the spring and summer he talked with Ben only when he needed human contact, musical composition being for all practical purposes, submersion in an alien substance.  He wrote a cycle of art songs he called Psalms of David for Ann Mc Kutcheon, an attractive soprano who occasionally sang with the church choir.  She and Georgi honed this composition until it was ready for a public hearing, then Ann found an accompanist who was up to the rigors of performance.  They scheduled a concert for a Saturday night in September at the church.  Announcements went out all around the area.  Ann invited her friends from the Seattle Opera chorus.

            Everybody knew this was going to be a fairly controversial occasion.  There had been concerts before at church, but this was headier stuff.  The texts of the songs were taken from the Bible--Psalms and The Song of Solomon, some of it quite sensuous.  When couples, flamboyantly gay, showed up from the opera subculture, eyebrows were raised.  Bill Freeman commented, "The sexual-ethics committee from the General Assembly ought to be here and get a load of this."

            Somebody who knew the stage-lighting craft had enhanced the lights on the platform that evening.  Ann came out to sing in a dazzling white dress.  Her hair flamed from her head like the burning bush.  Ben had heard enough serious music to know this song cycle was pretty torturous to perform.  Just getting it right technically, Ann was preoccupied, but at the same time her voice and presence were stunning.  The pianist had style.  By the intermission people were either lavishly aroused, or offended.  Many stood to applaud.  Some stormed toward the narthex for a breather.

            Georgi was animated in the presence of people he held in esteem.  His usual arbitrary manner in abeyance, he was loquacious and smiling.  He wore a pinstripe suit-coat, mismatched with his trousers, and a green tie.  Ben circulated in the crowd gauging the amplitude of response, which, as he found, was extreme.  Most of those present had been expecting something like the sober piano recitals John Wheeler's wife used to do once or twice a year.  She was up in years now, but it was her sympathy for Georgi that had softened John up to let him move into the vacant house on their property.  She held forth among a coterie of other women who took such things seriously.  This showing had in a sense vindicated her judgment, and since it received her distinguished approval, it was all right with the other women.  There were others standing around who were unimpressed.  They slouched with their glasses of punch in groups of three or four.  Some smirked or commented obliquely that the pianist was "grandstanding",  or that Ann certainly had made an impression with the "culture vultures from downtown"--and with whomever might want to take her up on the signals she was sending in that slithery dress.

            Ben certainly wasn't dead to sexual innuendo, but he didn't think the energy he was getting from the platform that night was sexual.  The effect was more one of elegance--eros, yes, but not erotic, as in modern parlance.  He used to get something of the same jolt from a neat convergence of mathematical calculations.  Georgi's musical scores even resembled the graphs on which he had plotted physical phenomena.

            Rev. Morland agreed that eros or, perhaps, arete were the Greek terms that applied to the performance, and furthermore that eros and arete were more, implicitly and explicitly, than sublimated sex drive.  He added the qualification that the church has never known quite what to do with either.  "Christian art and symbolism dates from as early as the church of the catacombs," he said.  "The iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries engaged some issues, though that debate was complicated by prohibitions of images found in the Mosaic law.  The prominent place music has in the Bible hasn't restrained theologians of the stature of Calvin and Bonheoffer in their disdain for complex harmonies and vocal artistry.  Performers, of course, being performers..."  He seemed to realize he was verging on opinions that would be uncharitable in this context.  "...Tend to perform," he concluded, to laughter.

            Sunday in church, the morning after Ann's and Georgi's premier of Psalms of David, a lot of people seemed determined to define themselves in relation to the previous evening's undeniably impressive showing.  Ben learned from Joan Langston, the organist's wife, and a source he considered beyond question, that something Elisabeth Arnold had said to Ann in the choir room before the service had provoked angry shrieks.  The two women had even, as she delicately put it, "engaged in a little bout of hair pulling."  Elisabeth and her husband were longstanding members of the church.  She was a good singer and a frequent soloist with the choir--a formidable woman, Betty.  She was prone to take control of any situation given half a chance, but nobody thought she was capable of brawling over who was the prima donna around here.  It sounded horrendous. Both women somehow pulled themselves together to appear in the choir loft.

            Before formal worship began there was a period of chorus singing.  Many people enjoyed this breezy folk music.  Some clapped in time with the opening songs.  Then Brother Simmons, the worship leader, changed the mood.  While strumming casually on his guitar, he suggested that a special effort be made to enter into communion with God.  Sunlight filtered through stained glass windows.  A roseate glow spread in the sanctuary over people inspired to a crescendo of earnest praise.  With each repetition of what, it would have to be conceded, were trivial texts, traditional Presbyterians became more and more uncomfortable.  Ben was among those who found themselves embarrassed by this effusiveness.  If this building had been designed by architects no more skilled in their craft than these musicians were in theirs, the structure wouldn't keep out the rain.  His face was exceptionally hot when he stood to welcome visitors.  He got through his opening remarks, but skipped the announcements.  In lieu of that, he reminded everybody of the schedule of activities on the back page of the bulletin.

            The first lay reader brought a starchy formality to her lectionary text.  It seemed to cut through the squeamishness Ben and quite a few others were feeling.  In spite of the clash between heartfelt choruses and classic hymns, Rev. Morland had insisted, since this pop-music trend began, that his congregation continue to worship together in one major service on Sunday.  People had left the church in disgust with both extremes of opinion--some wanted more freedom of expression, others more substantial theology and, explicitly, better music.

            Rev. Morland preached from some of the same texts that Georgi, who was conspicuously absent that morning, had so provocatively set to music.  He made some ethical points that had no doubt been missed in the previous evening's sensation.  In the Song of Solomon he found devotion where Georgi had accented sensuality, but he also explained eros for the benefit of those who thought it was a term mainly to be applied to pornography.  All concerned seemed satisfied that he had affirmed certain essential facts their counterparts of the opposite persuasion had missed.  This made it possible for some folks who might have been prone to carry on as Betty and Ann had in the choir room to be civil to one another at the coffee hour.

            Fall lingered that year, as it often does in the Northwest, in still afternoons and red evenings through late October and into November.  Out on Puget Sound whales were sometimes visible from the ferries going to Winslow and Bremerton.  The silvery sheen on the water didn't disappear or cloud over in a gray chop until one day Ben got out of his car at a gas station and a cold wind slammed into him.  His joints ached, and he felt irritable in a way he hadn't felt all summer.  Probably it wasn't really very cold, but after long stretches of mild weather, it was a jolt.  When a drenching mist flooded over the evergreens, he realized the deciduous trees had lost their cover, and they began to look as stiff and barren as he felt.

            He knew he would have to ask the deacons to consider funding another tank of oil for Georgi's furnace.  He attended a meeting one evening in November with this purpose in mind.  While reports of activities and expenditures were presented, he fidgeted and thought about Georgi trying to ignore the cold and continue his work in Wheeler's thin-walled farm house.  When there was an opportunity, he brought it up.  Somebody objected right away.  "If he won't work for a living, we're just abetting his dependency by supporting him."

            "We wouldn't be supporting him," Ben countered.  "Three or four hundred dollars in assistance to get through the winter isn't a lot of money.  At least Georgi is a known quantity; we wouldn't have to risk giving the money to deadbeats."

            "He has a point," Bill Freeman said.  "We know Georgi.  He's a little weird, but he's not on drugs."

            "It would be easier if he wasn't such an elitist," somebody else said.  "Why should we support him in his enthusiasms?  Only snobs listen to that kind of music.

            "He needs to go to work," added another.

            "He works," Ben offered.  "You have no idea of the effort he puts into his compositions, or how he concentrates when his problems aren't getting the better of him.  He's difficult, but some of that is the result of his illness."

            "I'm not sure we're interested in becoming patrons of the arts," Curtis Becker said, looking rather irritable.  In this Ben felt some kind of personal challenge.  "We especially don't want to encourage art that makes an exotic spectacle of passages from the scriptures."

            "Oh for God's sake!" Ben groaned.  "We've got people every Sunday swooning over religious choruses that could mean anything.  At least Georgi set canonical texts."

            "People worship through those choruses," Curtis said emphatically."

            "Whom do they worship?"  Ben sputtered.  "Judging by the flimsy theology in those songs, it could be Baba Hahoola.  And the music is spineless."

            "Spiritual!" Curt corrected.  "Music should inspire people to spiritual worship.  Georgi boy's program in September was carnal, Ben.  And arrogantly ambitious.  The impression it had on most people was one of unregenerate physicality."

            Ben tried to be conciliatory.  "What we are addressing, at least what I think we are addressing, is a physical problem.  Georgi can't afford to fill his oil tank, and if he doesn't have heat over the next few months, he will be jeopardizing his health, making a bad situation worse.  And he can't work at his craft when the temperature is forty degrees in his living room."

            Bill sat up straight and forward on his chair.  "Maybe we better let this one ride for a week or so," he said.  A veteran of a lot of church wrangling, he knew how to ease out of a confrontation.  Thank God for him.  Ben had probably been strident again.

            He didn't sleep very well that night.  After about four AM he couldn't doze off again until shortly before the clock radio sounded.  It was tuned to an FM station that used to keep the chatter to a minimum.  Lately it sounded as hyperactive as any pop-music station.  He wanted to turn the noise off and sleep for another hour, but he knew he would feel better if he went out for a run.

            He got up, dressed in shorts and a windbreaker, and went out.  Groggy and stiff, he totted along a flat stretch of road in the darkness.  It was a cool morning, the sky overcast.  A truck pulled out of a parking lot and accelerated past him.  By the time he got to where an old logging road that he often followed met the asphalt, he was starting to feel better.  He stopped to stretch for a few minutes, and then started up one track of the seldom used road.  It was a little wet.  The grass shed moisture when he bumped clumps of it growing between the wheel marks.  Running cleared his mind.  Why did it invariably make him feel better, no matter how aggravated or depressed he might be?

            Curtis was right that the program last September had been physical; that was its glory.  But don’t physical exertions require spiritual resolve--more, spiritual finesse?  And everything spiritual Ben knew of necessarily involved physical things.  Love was supposed to be spiritual: God is spirit; God is love; two values equal to a common third value are equal to one another.  Ergo, love is spiritual.  Try to love anything spiritually!  Try to love a woman spiritually!

            There was a woman whom he had loved.  For a while maybe it had been a spiritual love.  It might have been said he loved an ideal, or, if you prefer, a woman of his imagination who resembled the Norwegian blonde with whom he had actually gone sailing on Puget Sound.  Maybe it was spiritual, until he sat across the table from her one night in a restaurant and her eyes ignited him inside as though he'd had too much wine.  He could remember her perfume, the silky resilience of her skin.  Was her voice spiritual or physical?  The things she said ideal or actual?

            Then at the University of Washington, he had been preoccupied with vector spaces and wave mechanics.  It kept him in the library nearly every night.  His constancy for this woman, in a spiritual sense, was unwavering.  But she wanted his physical presence.  He did everything he could to make up for lost time when he was with her, in a physical sense, which of course didn't help.  Physical love alone is no good either.  But it only took about six months of a spiritual relationship before she got tired of waiting around.  He had intended the rigors of his work schedule to benefit both of them.  He lost out to guys who were there for her, virile savages many of them.  Half the track team had been interested in her.  Try to run against that crowd on the strength of a spiritual ideal!

            The clouds on the horizon let a few blades of sunlight through.  Starting to feel his stride, he followed the road on an easy slope along a hillside.  If spiritual values are ultimate to God, why an incarnation in human flesh?  Why would Jesus heal a palsied hand or give sight to the blind?  Why proclaim liberation to the oppressed?  Why, finally, the cross?  And the resurrection?

            Did Curtis love Georgi spiritually?  Did he care for his soul so much that he couldn't encourage a passion for musical form incarnate in the steel of piano strings and Ann's vibrant flesh?  Or did he just love the virtuous feeling he gained intending to help without ever trying to understand what Georgi needed or wanted?  A genuine interest would want to help him rise above subsistence.  But, most of the deacons seemed to feel that helping would be fine if he were starving on the street, but expenditures that sustained his musical creativity were unnecessary.

            Is that all you were about, Lord, taking on human flesh to give us only enough relief to subsist?  Is our only work proving we are loyal to an invisible world while we renounce this one?  Is that the "living sacrifice" to which Paul commends us?

            If God ultimately despises everything physical, I have no reason to climb this hill, he thought.  But as he ran, the clouds parted and a brassy sun blared out of the sky.  He heard tympani in the beating of his heart, and the rivers of his blood sang an erotic anthem.  Where the road crested between piles of logging slash, Jesus thundered ahead of him, naked and virile, on a powerful horse.

            He was undisturbed in his study that morning.  A passage from Isaiah absorbed him for two hours, even though he was losing his Hebrew literacy.  It had been three years now since he had done much study.  He looked at a commentary and tried to work what he found into a paper he was writing.  After lunch there was a pastoral call that couldn't be avoided any longer.

            Naomi Taylor, a black woman of nearly ninety years of age, was prone to launch herself into vociferous tirades about almost any event getting current media attention.  There were some subjects that could set her off even without timeliness.  Though she had been in a number of mental hospitals, she wasn't crazy.  Her former husband had committed her back in the forties when all that was required was the testimony of three of his friends.  She and her husband had been living in Chicago.  While she was struggling in hand-to-hand combat with psycho-ward attendants, who she said were trying to kill her, he took off with the kids for the west coast where he married another woman.  She had Jesus in her heart with a vengeance.  More than once she had told Ben how she survived the loony bin.  "You can't kill me," she raged at white-coated attendants who were holding her down with a broom handle across her throat.  "God is in me!"  God had put up a good fight.  She was out of there in a few months and followed the bigamist husband to Bremerton.  She started a lawsuit against him and could have won, but she backed off for the children's sake.

            At eighty nine years of age she still had Jesus and plenty of vigor.  Ben knew it had been a mistake when he mentioned music.  Now he was going to be here for another hour at least.  She chewed her toothless gums and barked, "It's the devil!  Look what it's doin' to my Sweeney.  Paying three alimonies, he's got babies from women he hardly even knows."  One of her sons was an arranger and band manager in Vegas.  He was making big money, but Naomi thought his success was demonic.  Ben agreed that it was vulgar, to say the least.  "Now they're bringing those guitars in church," she yelped.  "Last time I was down at First Pres, there was a wedding reception goin' on right on the premises.  That raucous noise and women gyreating were enough to conjure up every kind of pagan lust.  I told Rev. Barnard he had violated his sanctuary"

            "Appalling," Ben agreed absently.  It didn't matter what he said.  She could go on for a long time with or without agreement, or even comprehension.  He had even nodded off one time while she was holding forth.  She'd patted his cheek and apologized meekly for wearing him down.

            He went out dazed as usual today, but he did feel considerable affection for this old pantheress of the housing project.  She had the right idea about music--its current pop incantations anyway.

            When Ben got back to the church, Rev. Morland had received an insistent phone call regarding the previous evening's meeting.  He was mildly amused, but invited Ben into his office.

            With graying hair and neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, Rev. Morland was an old ivy leaguer--Princeton 1960.  The diplomas hung behind his desk.  He nearly always wore his black suit and clergyman's collar.  This suburban church was a plum, affluent, upper middle class.  The building was a landmark in the area, and the mortgage was paid down.  It used to be dignified, before the guitar-players’ invasion.  The Rev was a little overloaded for the intellectual capacities of most of the folks out here.  Social justice was the prophetic mode he favored.  He always asked about Naomi, though he couldn't listen to her for very long.

            Since coming west, he had developed an interest in Native American culture.  Arrowheads, framed under glass, hung on the wall with his academic credentials.  He had a bronze of Chief Sealth and a parchment lithograph of one of the speeches the chief made as an old man, a document that was something of a cult object among Northwest environmentalists.  When Dances with Wolves received the Academy Award, Rev. Morland had cheered.  Ben never tired of ribbing him about it.  He had walked out of that ridiculous, if politically correct, movie.

            "You really must have pushed Curt's buttons," Rev. Morland said.

            Ben wasn't surprised that he had upset some of the deacons.  What he said when he was trying to make his unpopular opinions understood was often inflected by impatience or annoyance.  "I suppose I should have been more diplomatic," he answered.  "It just seemed they were unwilling to consider Georgi's problems because his life revolves around music, rather than family or business."

            "It's too bad what he writes is so DWEM," Rev. Morland said.  "If it was ethnic, or feminist, we could probably get him a grant of some kind.  The Regional Assembly is helping fund Daybreak Star Center."  He smirked and added, "There's a young buck over there who wants to stage what he calls The Operatic Interpretation of the Evoluton of the Bison."

            Rev. Morland tossed his car keys over the desk.  "How about making a run to food bank for me?  The stuff is all loaded."

            Ben took the keys and went out to the parking lot.  For a man who had feigned repentance on the Columbus Day Quincentenial, Rev. Morland certainly had a taste for Western technology.  His car was a sleek Le Sabre.  The greed and imperialism of Dead White European Males might explain the accumulated wealth of their descendants in Western Europe and North America; it didn't explain the science and technology.  Did the marvelously engineered machine gleaming even under an overcast evening sky just evolve like one of Darwin's beasts out on the Galapagos Islands?  Head bashers like the armies of brutes in Dances with Wolves didn't design this car.  The Rev was doing all right for himself, pulling down about ninty thousand a year if you included his expense accounts--the car allowance.  That kind of money would make you a lot more negotiable when somebody starts talking nonsense, whether it was the radical prophets at the Presbyterian General Assembly or Curtis Becker.

            Driving the new car was like flying a Lear jet.  The rush hour had peaked and lulled.  In twenty minutes Seattle's skyline jutted up from the gloamy Sound.  Through the slant of the windshield, lights along the freeway had the luster of images in an optician's lens.  He glided down an exit under Freeway Park, past the Columbia Center, and other high-rise buildings.  A few more blocks through the financial district, and Pioneer Square's totem pole slid past among trees and wrought iron.  When the tires hit cobblestones, Ben stepped on the brake and came in for a landing in front of Union Gospel Mission.

            It was going to take several trips into the Flea House to unload the food.  He unlocked the trunk and started carrying in boxes.  Three trips emptied the trunk.  Inside there was a religious service going on.  One hymn after another droned resonantly out of the chapel doorway as he passed.  More than a hundred ill clad, grimy, wiskery men finished singing Down at the Cross, and somebody called out another hymn number.  They cranked up again.  “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine/ Oh what a foretaste of glory divine.  /Heir of salvation, purchase of God/ Born of his spirit, washed in his blood."  They weren't bad--better than a lot of congregational singing Ben had heard lately.  They kept calling out hymn requests, one after another.  Ben made another trip to get the stuff from the back seat of the car.  When he was finished, he stopped again to listen at the open doorway of the chapel.

            At the piano, an effeminate man in a rumpled sport coat was rolling the chords.  A muscular conductor in overalls and boots beat time to lead the singing.  He looked up from his hymnal occasionally at the wayfarers seated before him in crooked rows of chairs.  Ben stood there in the warm, high-ceilinged vestibule and listened longer than he should have.  He remembered the back door of the car was still open outside.

            He went out to close it.  A cold wind he hadn't noticed earlier was blowing up from the waterfront.  The smell of urine on the sidewalk, mingled with stale beer, offended his nostrils.  As he grasped the car door, he saw upholstery lining bulging out of the back seat.  He bent to look inside.  Somebody had slashed three times across the width of the leather seat and once across the back rest.

            He slammed the door.  The ugly mess in the back seat hadn't satisfied the vandals.  On the hood was a grisly swirl of gouges left by a screwdriver or a can opener.  He looked around Occidental Square at the ragged street people settling in for the night.  A couple of Indians brown-bagging on a bench looked up at him.  He had been inside no more than ten minutes.

            He went back into the vestibule, an oppressive ire flooding over the green tile before him.  The woman at the desk, whom he thought would be impervious to this kind of thing, was sympathetic when he told her what had happened.  She handed him the phone, and he called the police, then Rev. Morland.  He'd been getting along well with the Rev.  This would be the end of the good will he had managed to accumulate.  The car was insured and it could be repaired in a few days, but the facts of these kinds of things never seemed to matter.  He had been driving the car, so he was responsible.  Relations with Rev. Morland would henceforth have a restrained formality.  No more joking about Dances with Wolves.  He shouldn't count on being rehired at the end of his internship.

            The car went in for repairs.  Ben had to come to work, though he couldn't accomplish much.  He didn't have any influence, other than with people who didn't have any either.  He knew the matter of funding Georgi's fuel bill was a dead deal.  Bill Freeman called and offered a lead on a job that Georgi might be able to handle, but Ben knew what the hermit composer was likely to say to that, and the explicit language he was likely to use.  He got the details anyway and a phone number.  It wasn't a bad deal actually, answering phone-order calls for a friend of Bill's who was in the mail-order business as a sideline.  He sold smoked salmon and a few other specialty foods from a catalogue that went out three or four times a year.  There was a big rush of calls around Christmas and Father's Day, but most of the time the order clerk just sat around between intermittent calls on the 800 line.  Twelve bucks an hour.

            Georgi wouldn't be interested, but Ben had to restrain the impulse to call the phone number himself.  He could probably get more reading done between calls than in his current employment.  Around here, he might be able to salvage things, but the real question was whether he wanted to be a minister in this church or any other?  In fact, he had never wanted to be a minister.  He felt called to minister, though this didn't necessarily mean being a clergyman.  He'd had a lot of advantages in life, not that his family was wealthy, but he'd had a family.  His mother and father stayed together and they loved him.  They made sacrifices and encouraged him, as people used to be more prone to do for their children.  He seldom saw his brother and sister, but they were in touch.  Any of them knew where to reach the others in a matter of hours if something came up.

            His longstanding conflict boiled down to the denial of his strongest and best impulses in response to the severe teachings of Jesus.  He said take up the cross, for God's sake!  Follow him to an execution!  When you take a martyr as your ideal it's hard to justify a motivation to accomplish anything.  Better take the servant's role, turn the other cheek, and go the second mile.

            So what about Georgi's oil tank?  It must be empty by now.  Would he ask for help, or wait for Ben or somebody else from the church to take the initiative.  Should he be taking the initiative?  Was he, in fact, making Georgi worse off in the long run by helping him?  It seemed that it all depended on what Georgi made of the help that was offered.  Nobody could know whether he would be helped, or if he would be damaged by others who enabled him to go on with his music only to get more and more dependent in every other area of his life and eventually becoming incapable of managing his own affairs.  If he was already incapable of managing his own affairs, as much because of his illness as any irresponsible behavior, shouldn't he still be helped?  But why the hell didn't he save some of his money when he had it?  Do artists have to sacrifice everything for their craft and die like Mozart before they're thirty years old?

            Ben was at the end of himself.  Whether he helped or didn't help Georgi, he risked doing damage.  It was probably better to err on the side of compassion.  He prayed, Jesus, don't let me blow this one, and called the oil company.  The bill wouldn't be as much as one course at the seminary, and he knew he would have to pay it himself.  It made him feel a little better about sitting in his study reading.  At least a little of the money people contributed that paid his salary, would go toward benevolence of the sort they must have intended.

            During the next few days he made a couple of hospital calls and worked on a study he was preparing for the winter-quarter Christian Education series.  He had to admit he was tempted to call Bill's friend about that job.  He could jump the ministerial career-track altogether and go back to engineering if he wanted to.  He knew what he could do when he was intent on something.  It wasn't too late.  Still, he hesitated.  He loved the church.  In any theology worth its salt, the world was headed toward a consummation in which there would be time for him to work in the fashion he craved and in which there will be material with which to build.  In the millennium, there will be structural engineers.  The foreseeable future was a little less inspiring, but he may yet get to do something in theology and the philosophy of science.  The church was going to have to do some work along these lines in an era of probability and chaos theory.  If he could eventually salvage as much time as Rev. Morland spent studying Native American culture, he could do a Phd.

            Next morning he was alone in the building.  Having finished the church newsletter in a couple of hours, he thought he would be able to read until lunch.  But his phone rang.  He could ignore it.  The thought of young ministers he knew who were touchy because they spent their time studying or circulating in restaurants while living on a salary made him reach for the receiver.  He didn't want to end up feeling guilty or insecure because he wasn't doing much.

            It was Georgi.  Could he come over for a short visit?  A visit with Georgi, long or short, could cut the middle out of his day.  In the past it often had meant several hours of fairly intense conversation, interesting but... .  He stalled while making up his mind.  He couldn't keep Georgi waiting too long because he knew he had to call from a phone at the gas station a quarter of a mile from his house.

            "Did you get your fuel tank filled?" he asked.

            "Yeah," Georgi answered.  "Don't know when I'll be able to pay the bill though.  Hey, listen!  I have a gift for you and the rest of those hoary Calvinists over there."

            "Is it musical?" Ben replied, amused.  "Your last gift was a time bomb.  It must have made Calvin turn over in his grave."

            "This is different," Georgi insisted.

            Stravinsky was blowing the walls off the disreputable, paint-peeling house when Ben got out of his car.  He recognized the Rite of Spring because Georgi had explained some of its wild images to him on an earlier visit.  Almost a year had passed since that cold January day when Ben came with firewood in response to a more distressing phone call than the one he got today.

            The door was ajar, so he rapped loudly, but he didn't wait for an invitation as he went inside.  It was warm.  The major furnishing in the living room was a faded overstuffed chair.  In addition there were cardboard boxes full of musical scores and CDs.  A modest disk player lit up by a graphic equalizer rested on a scratched and cigarette-burned coffee table.  Speakers on the floor pounded out Stravinsky’s savage rhythms.  Georgi sat in the adjoining kitchen with an open manuscript before him on a wooden table which had long ago been painted white.

            "I haven't got all day," Ben said to get his attention.

            Georgi looked around and grimaced, the equivalent of a smile for him.  He got up and went to turn off the recording.

            "Where you been keeping yourself, man?" he asked, "I thought you had lost touch with the human race."

            "I've been busy," Ben answered.  "Say, Bill Freeman has a lead on a job.  You wouldn't be interested would you?"

            "Doing what?" Georgi asked.  He pushed a tangle of hair off his forehead.

            "Answering the telephone for a mail-order company."

            "Nahhhh!"

            "It's an easy job, except for a few weeks before Christmas.  If you learned the products through the rush, you could sit and listen to music until June."  For a moment this seemed to interest Georgi, but then he dismissed the idea with an imperious wave of his hand.  "If you aren't interested, I'm thinking of applying," Ben concluded.

            "What?  And give up that cushy deal at the church!  You only work on Sunday.  Are you crazy?"

            "I still think about going back to engineering.  I suppose I'm conflicted.  And it's hard to get anything done at church."

            "What would you know about it?  There are all kinds of interruptions here to take up my time.  I have to eat, you know, sometimes even cook.  And lately there hasn't been enough good light to copy my scores."

            "I don't want to keep you," Ben offered.  "So what are you up to this time?  Where is this gift you promised?"

            "Oh!"  He leapt around and went back to the table.  When he got there, he waited for Ben then motioned for him to sit and examine a musical score.

            Ben sat down before the sheaf of hand-copied notation on the table.

            Georgi said, "I thought you needed something to make the music interesting at church."

            "What is it?"

            "What are they teaching you in seminary?  Don't you recognize an oratorio when you see one?  This will get people interested beyond your Sunday service.  It's music..."

            "For the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and chorus!" Ben finished for him.  "You know we have a small choir and a lot of people who prefer folk music.  Who's going to be able to sing this?"

            "They'll be able to sing it.  It isn't as complicated as it looks.  Langston will play the hell out of the organ part, and I've used some of the tunes your people already know.  I even put in guitar-chord reductions."

            "What does it sound like?"

            "It's right there in front of you.  Can't you read?"

            "Georgi... ".  He looked down at the score in his hands.  The music, of course, was mute to him in notation form.  It would be like handing a page covered with mathematics to a musician to decipher.  The texts he recognized:

Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings,

Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength

Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name

Worship the Lord in holy array.

The voice of the Lord is upon the waters

The God of glory thunders

The Lord, upon many waters

The voice of the Lord is powerful

The voice of the Lord is full of majesty....

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord

Though your sins are as scarlet,

they shall be as white as snow

Though they are as crimson,

they shall become like wool....

Why do the nations conspire,

and the people plot in vain?

The kings of the earth set themselves up,

and the rulers take counsel together

against the Lord

and against his anointed,

saying, Let us break their bonds asunder

and cast their cords from us.

He who sits in the heavens laughs

The Lord has them in derision

Then he will speak to them in his wrath

and terrify them in his fury

saying, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.

He will tell of the decree of the Lord:

He said to me, You are my Son,

Today I have begotten thee

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage

and the ends of the earth your possession

You shall break them with a rod of iron

and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel....

It shall come to pass in the latter days

that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established

as the highest of the mountains

and shall be raised above the hills

And all nations shall flow to it

and many people shall come and say,

Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob

that he may teach us his ways,

that we may walk in his paths.

For out of Zion shall go forth the law

and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem

He shall judge between the nations

and shall decide for many peoples.

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares

and their spears into pruning hooks

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation

Neither shall they learn war any more.