Houston 1

March 5, 2010

Asheville Regional Airport. A man speaks broad Scots into his cell phone. A girl plays with a stuffed giraffe. I arrived so early I walked back to my car in the parking lot and bade it goodbye again after I checked in.

On I-26, I was in the right lane, a white van athwart me in the left. Suddenly a dark green van swept around the white van on my left, on ITS left, raising a dust from the dividing grass. It narrowly missed the white van and then narrowly missed me trying to settle into a lane. The green van stopped in the left lane and almost made the white van crash into it. I looked into my rearview mirror and saw the vans stopped side by side on the highway, blocking both southbound lanes, their headlights flashing. As long as I looked in the mirror, until the turn-off to the airport, I saw no vehicles that had moved around the vans and on their way.

I feel sad for my cats to be four days without me. I feel sad for my car sitting among strangers in the Long Term parking. I anthropomorphize frantically.

Ninth floor of the Sheraton Galleria, Houston. It’s a suite. I have two TVs. I see a sparse city and a teeming highway from my window. The flight from Atlanta was inconsequential (which means I slept all the way) but the flight between Asheville and Atlanta was strangely horrible. I sat beside a charming 19 year-old African American girl, who’s taking distance courses in some bible college I had not heard of, and who was grasping a textbook on Apologetics. We had ordinary chit-chat for a while, and I thought she was sweet and eager, but then she launched, before I realized what had happened, into what can only be called cult-speak, an as-fast-as-possible, never-take-a-breath outpouring of mingled Sunday School faith, shoddy scholarship, murderous bigotry, innocent misunderstanding, cheerful deception, radiant self-satisfaction, all with the open exuberance of a ten-year-old-with a new toy. There was, literally, no break in her presentation from lift-off to the first announcement of the approach of Atlanta . My left ear ached. Even when the engines roared or the stewardess made an announcement, she didn’t pause. It was like the constant chatter of Satan in Lewis’s Perelandra, I’d at first thought she was just eager to share her new learning, but I realized, with a mingling of resentment and sadness, that I was being witnessed to–no, no, far worse; I was being mind-raped by a cultist who-- though her understanding of Christianity was, at best, idiosyncratic-- was flawless at the instruments of brainwash. She was a cultist, and I was the–very unlikely–mark. It was sort of interesting to analyze the rhetoric as it flowed, as much as one could, it being specifically designed not to let the mind dwell too long or too critically on any one point. I would have tolerated all that had it been presented as an expression of faith, but the argument tried to cover too many bases at once, pretending at once to be scientific and above science, to be logical and outside logic, to be experiential while denying all experience but a that of a very select number– Saint Paul, it pretty much came down to, though Paul himself has to be made equal with Christ in order for that to be accomplished, The few observations I attempted early on, when I thought we were in an ordinary conversation, were met with a clearly pre-prepared response, which need not be adequate because it was an improvisation to lead to the next rote point. The presentation was specifically designed not to allow scrutiny of individual points, and absurdities, factual errors, passages of breathtaking bigotry were inserted as lightning bolts of superior insight, or instantly passed over that they might blend seamlessly with the hermeneutics of the whole. I might have considered the argument–as I did for maybe two minutes–if it hadn’t been so preposterously misinformed, error or bible-speak emerging, as if some self-destructive compulsion, even in sentences which might otherwise have past the truth test. When a creed presents itself as all-encompassing and infallible, even one error is negation. But it wasn’t a creed. . . it was a weapon. It’s not something you believe, it’s white noise to justify a belief unexamined or fearfully doubted in the inner self. I wonder if it crossed her mind, even for a second, that her actions were Satanic, whatever her impulse might have been? I gathered that she was trying to convert me, The bible does suggest that innocent faith confounds the wisdom of the wise, but here there was neither innocence nor faith, but a parody, a violent burlesque of the wisdom of the wise, meaning to pass for it, to supplant it with impassioned ignorance. At the end, when I was clearly looking away, and had been for ten minutes, she said, “I’m sorry if I bored you.” I said “You didn’t bore me,” but what I meant was that boredom was way down the list of horrified responses.