The Sin of Judah, The Stuff of the Flesh

Of all the Bible verses that excite me the most, let’s start with the badass motherfucker. Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.”

The line is spoken in the movie Pulp Fiction by a character in a sparkling afro named Jules portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson. He says the line twice in the movie, once toward the beginning wearing a black suit before unloading led on a man killing him pretty savagely, and again at the end of the movie, wearing women’s soccer shorts and a baby-blue t-shirt depicting elementary cartoons in graphic font, and telling a robber at a diner with his pistol pointed to the robber’s cheek that he’s trying, he’s trying real hard to be the shepherd before deciding to give up his professional trade for wandering the earth like Moses.

There’s a book by literary critic Robert Alter called “Pen of Iron” that discusses American authors and the tradition of how they weave the Old Testament in particular into their works, Herman Melville taking on the leviathan from Jonah and taking on all poetry and prophets of the Old Testament in his epic, “Moby-Dick” from Job to Psalms and Proverbs back to Moses, and Faulkner adapting the story of David for his novel “Absalom, Absalom,” casting this character as a villain rather than hero we’re so used to studying, to set into motion a wickedness of self-profit in the creation and exploitation and destruction of the world that is the American South to come, and even Abraham Lincoln, a self-described struggling Christian if even a Christian at all, tracked down the phrasing and language and poetry of the Bible to deliver speeches among a broken nation as though his words themselves were iron hammer and nail. The book, “Pen of Iron” comes from Jeremiah 17:1, “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart, and upon the horns of your altars.” It reminds me that I don’t come to the Bible because I’m a damn fine Christian, I come to it because I want to write damn fine American letters. This, and I want mercy. Afterall, some of the finest American Christians of all time owned humans in the name of Jesus Christ. Writing American fiction requires an awfully strange sense of humor, which can also be found in the Bible.

Of course I can’t hardly write about American storytelling without mentioning that son of a bitch and Nobel Prize Laurate for Literature, Robert Zimmerman, or as the world recognizes his name, Bob Dylan. Even before he converted to Christianity after a motorcycle wreck put him on the operating table where his organs were dissected and he nearly died, he still scoped through the King James Bible for his lyrics to put down from pen to paper. One of his finest songs in particular, “All Along the Watchtower,” is littered with the stuff of the Book of Isaiah, particularly from Chapter 21:5-9. “Watch in the watchtower.... Chariot with a couple of horsemen.... He cried, A lion... I stand continually in the watchtower.... And behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen.” What does all this mean, well, that might be the wrong question.

Besides the LSD trip of poetry that is Revelation, Isaiah is my favorite book in the Bible. It personifies what I find fascinating in the material of the Bible as a whole, the interpretation is nearly impossible and yet the possibilities of interpretation are practically infinite.

Now, Bob Dylan snubbed out, in my humble opinion, for the Nobel Prize, my daddy, Mr. Cormac McCarthy. One of his most underrated novels is “Outer Dark” about a brother and sister in an incestual relationship, and once the sister gives birth to their child, the brother takes the child and buries it out deep in the Appalachian woods of nowhere. The sister tracks through this unknown region filled with nightmarish darkness to come and find the child she brought forth into the world. The title of the novel comes from Mathew 8:12, “But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

McCarthy ended up writing the Western to end all Westerns, tracing the Bible from Genesis to Revelation to portray scalp-hunting in the Old West, and one of many efforts in the novel, Blood Meridian, the author achieves composing what is now considered an American Bible of the material world.

One of the finest Western pictures I’ve ever seen--in fact as a tradition my brothers and I used to watch it every Christmas Eve--is The Proposition, with a screenplay written by Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave. He also wrote, for a series called The Pocket Canon, an introduction to The Gospel of Mark.

There’s an American writer from Mississippi named Barry Hannah, who never achieved true commercial success in his time, but in one fine moment, published a story in The New Yorker which captures a scene of a Christian shaping his life in the image of Christ who succumbs to depression so great that he shoots himself in his bathtub in a trailer home that he doesn’t even own, and is a story which can be heard still on the magazine’s podcast, as read by George Saunders. Barry Hannah struggled with severe alcoholism throughout his life and while teaching creative writing at the University of Alabama he would be fired for pulling out a loaded pistol while piss-drunk and fired it in the classroom, and most importantly, he’d be solicited to write an introduction for the American publication of The Gospel of Mark. If I remember correctly, he highlights one of his favorite moments in the entire history of poetry from this world, and Mark happens to be the only Gospel to mention the scene and it occurs in chapter 14, verses 51-52. “And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, having fled from them naked.” It reminds me of belligerence and sin and redemption and grace in one moment, one breath, an entire life, one sentence.