Jenna Krajeski studies the lives of drones in popular culture in “Grim Reapers” for The Nation.

In recent years, not just in novels but in movies, television, poetry, video games and the visual arts, drones have taken on a life of their own. As a character, they are menacing, melancholy or gallant; beastly, blind, snub-nosed, noisy and fast—Predators and Reapers in real life, “Helicarriers” in Hollywood. They are the oversize hook at the end of a joystick, a militarized, antiseptic video game characterized by precision; or they are a weapon system proliferating at a breathtaking rate, and leaving a trail of destruction behind. They show off the military talent of their users, or they are an expression of unbridled hubris. They represent protection or extermination—and they carry out both things at once.

Founder of The Revealer, Jeff Sharlet‘s, new Instagram journalism was featured in “The Writer Who’s Using Longform to Take Instagram to the Next Level” by Eric Sullivan in GQ.

Sharlet went shoe leather. He began interviewing strangers, taking their snapshots, and composing beautifully wrought essays to accompany the images. (The app’s character limit on descriptions, it turns out, is 2,200 characters, or around 400 words.) On September 25th, he posted on Twitter: “It’s so simple. Hang out someplace. Ask people if you can take their picture. Phone, point, shoot. Talk to them. Voila! A true story.” And then, yesterday on Facebook: “These Instagram essays aren’t distractions from my work. They’re becoming my work.”

Brook Wilensky-Lanford does the hard work of generous rethinking in “Karen Armstrong, Caped Anti-Anti-Muslim Crusader?” for Religion Dispatches. 

But although a suspicion towards universalism has stuck with me to this day, I find myself feeling more warmly toward Armstrong’s work this time around. Fields of Blood has elements of Armstrong’s patented smooth-edged history. But it’s framed as a direct retort to the argument, often leveled by New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, that religion causes war.

Mary Valle sets the record straight on hipster preachers in “Carl Lentz Superstar” for Killing the Buddha.

I hate to burst your bubble, all news organizations that breathlessly report on the “hipster” preacher with his “rock concert-like” services, but…Catholics and Protestants alike began rocking out in the late 60s with slide shows, guitars and occasional dry ice.

In New York

In “Inside Hasidic Fashion” Asha Leo goes to Crown Heights to learn about Hasidic fashion designers Mimi Hecht and Mushky Notik’s modest clothing line Mimu Maxi.

Rachel Aviv has a powerful and thorough account of a what happened when an Hasidic man exposed sexual abuse in his Brooklyn community in “The Outcast.”

Kellner was still consumed by the case. It was as though he believed that if he recited the details enough times he might figure out exactly what had happened. Since his case, he said, the rabbis had become even less willing to permit victims to go to the police. Recently, when a father whose daughter had been molested asked for advice, Kellner told him, “If you go to the police, you’re probably going to end up with zero.”

In The United States

Miriam Gedwiser uses the Hebrew Bible to critique a Fort Lauderdale law prohibiting residents from feeding the homeless in “Slouching Toward Sodom” in The Times of Israel.

But what, precisely, was Sodom’s sin?  In American political/religious discourse it is generally presumed to be sexual, and specifically homosexual.  In the Torah, however, the wickedness of Sodom stems more from the fact that they wish to harm the visitors than from the particular means chosen.

Jews for Jesus has a opened up a new channel for proselytizing, “Kosher Joe.”

Hey, I’m Joe, my friends call me “Kosher” Joe – that’s because I’m Jewish and I care about being… well, kosher. And I’m Kosher sometimes, but not really. It’s only fair to tell you that some people say I’m not kosher at all. And they’re not talking about the food I eat or don’t eat… watch my episodes so I can explain.

Jia Tolentino‘s “The Truth About Witches” interview with Katherine Howe on Jezebel is fun and insightful.

Witchcraft is very much about power, and we continue to be interested in it because of that! Of course, what is threatening to an early modern religious system is not threatening in the same way today. We have different sources of authority. Back then, there was no difference between government and church and science; today, we’ve split those loci, but that question of power is still one of the reasons we find witches so intoxicating and enticing. What they represent is incredibly exciting: the idea that you have a set of secret powers that no one can perceive.

Amanda Marcotte examines why it’s a big deal that “The Mormon Church Finally Acknowledges Joseph Smith’s Polygamy” in Slate.

So why is this happening now? There are several reasons for this new emphasis on transparency, but as Goodstein writes, the Web is a big one: “The church’s disclosures, in a series of essays online, are part of an effort to be transparent about its history at a time when church members are increasingly encountering disturbing claims about the faith on the Internet.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Not only are we learning more about Mormon marriage thanks to the Internet, the Church of Latter-Day Saints has also recently opened up about underwear, reports Emma Green in The Atlantic, “Mormon Underwear, Revealed.”

Known as temple garments, the inner layer of clothing worn by many observant Mormons has been an object of non-Mormon curiosity for nearly two centuries, in large part because the Church has intentionally kept information about the garments private. Or at least until today, when the LDS church released a video on its website explaining the ritual purpose of temple garments, requesting that non-Mormons and members of the media to treat “Latter-day Saint temple garments as they would religious vestments of other faiths. Ridiculing or making light of sacred clothing is highly offensive to Latter-day Saints.”

In “Dispatch from the Front Lines of Orthodox Jewish Feminism” DeDe Jacobs-Komiar writes about contemporary uses and abuses of the mikveh for The Toast. 

Before Mayyim Hayyim, there was hardly anywhere in the world where an openly genderqueer or trans person, an LGBT couple, or even a bat/bar mitzvah girl or boy could immerse. Now it’s a normal, daily occurrence, here and at a growing number of community mikvehs around the globe. We’ve unlocked this ritual and given it back to the people.

“While what you see here may have been started by the actions of one singular moment, what it represents goes far beyond Ferguson,” Fort said. “This is ground zero for a new movement led by a new generation of young people demanding justice, not only for Michael Brown, but for the millions of black people whose lives are being disposed of.” – Nyle Fort

Also reporting from Ferguson, Ummah Wide and Medium.com bring us an interview with Mustafa Abdullah entitled: “The Muslim Community Rises with Ferguson.”

“my hope is that Muslims really begin to see that our own liberation, and our own freedom are intricately intertwined with the freedom of the youth that are on the street in Ferguson.” – Mustafa Abdullah

And on the edge between the U.S. and the rest of the world, in this case, Israel, here are two stories about a case currently in front of the Supreme Court: “Why the Supreme Court’s ‘born in Jerusalem’ case is such a tinderbox” by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post, and Nina Totenberg reporting for NPR, “Supreme Court Case Tests Status of Jerusalem.”

Menachem Zivotofsky and his father, Ari Zivotofsky, speak to media outside the Supreme Court.
Carolyn Kaster/AP

In the World

Thomas Fuller reports that “The Right to Say ‘God’ Divides a Diverse Nation” for the New York Times. 

Malaysia, with its collage of ethnic groups and religions, has a long history of tensions over issues ranging from dietary differences to the economic preferences enshrined in Malaysian law for the Malay Muslim majority.

But there is probably no dispute more fundamental and more emotionally charged than who owns the word God.

Glenn H Shephard Jr. reviews The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy in “The Voice of the Shaman” for the New York Review of Books.

The Falling Sky is several things. It is the autobiography of Davi Kopenawa, one of Brazil’s most prominent and eloquent indigenous leaders. It is the most vivid and authentic account of shamanistic philosophy I have ever read. It is also a passionate appeal for the rights of indigenous people and a scathing condemnation of the damage wrought by missionaries, gold miners, and white people’s greed. The footnotes alone harbor monographs on Yanomami botany and zoology, mythology, ritual, and history.

Simran Jeet Singh argued in Time that “It’s Time India Accept Responsibility for Its 1984 Sikh Genocide.”

If we were to accurately update the language we use to describe the anti-Sikh violence, maybe we could then finally begin a proper discussion about accountability and reparations. Acknowledging the malicious intent underlying the massacres is the first step towards reconciliation.

And then gave a talk at The White House entitled: “Guru Nanak at the White House“

WenZhou gives a detailed account of the current status of religion in China in “Cracks in the atheist edifice” for The Economist. 

Christianity is hard to control in China, and getting harder all the time. It is spreading rapidly, and infiltrating the party’s own ranks. The line is blurring between house churches and official ones, and Christians are starting to emerge from hiding to play a more active part in society. The Communist Party has to find a new way to deal with all this. There is even talk that the party, the world’s largest explicitly atheist organisation, might follow its sister parties in Vietnam and Cuba and allow members to embrace a dogma other than—even higher than—that of Marx.

Any shift in official thinking on religion could have big ramifications for the way China handles a host of domestic challenges, from separatist unrest among Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uighurs in the country’s west to the growth of NGOs and “civil society”—grassroots organisations, often with a religious colouring, which the party treats with suspicion, but which are also spreading fast.

Deepa Kumar writes about “Imperialist Feminism and liberalism” for Open Democracy.

What explains this tendency among liberals to take positions that go against the interests of Muslim women and women of color? While there are numerous factors, two are worth noting—racism and empire.

Jason Motlagh reports for Al Jazeera on the Royingya Muslims of Burma in: “Outcase: Adrift with Burma’s Rohingya.”

With xenophobic currents on the rise across Burma, the inflow of refugees is not about to slow anytime soon. The government refuses to recognise them as citizens and there is still no talk of Rohingya returning home.

Br. Guy Consolmagno, SJ, President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation writes about “Science, Religion, and the Assumptions We Make” for The Huffington Post.

One of the great advantages of being a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory is that, since we are supported by the Church, we don’t have to worry about writing proposals, sitting on committees or even teaching classes. We can concentrate on doing interesting, long-term scientific projects.

Miscellaneous

The New York Review of Books published a conversation between Jorge Louis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari entitled: “Borges and God.”

Borges: At times I feel, how can I put it? Mysteriously grateful. When I have an idea that will later, sadly, become a story or a poem, I have a sensation of receiving something. But I do not know if that “something” is given to me by something or someone or if it bursts out on its own.

Patton Dodd counts “15 Ways the Onion Tells 1 Joke About God” for Faithstreet.

Actually, most God-humor at The Onion is is driven by the classic theological problem of theodicy: If God is good and all-powerful, why does evil exist? How can a good God allow bad things to happen? The Onion plays with these questions by answering them the same way every time, “God isn’t good. He’s evil. And the joke is on us.”

Megan Garber writes that “Interstellar Isn’t About Religion (and Also It Is Totally About Religion)” for The Atlantic.

The latest to explore the spiritual implications of space is Hollywood’s reigning philosopher-poet, Christopher Nolan, and his reigning philosophy-film.

Lastly, Look at this fucking martyr.

***

– Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Hasidim, Mormons, Borges, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

JULY 23, 2003. 6:32 AM > 00:00:00:00

Ravi yells, don’t go too far into the water—it’s deep and the stones are slippery! At the top of the steps, he is looking through the viewfinder of the video camera. He works in Pamban at a hydroelectric project and was sent to help me because I don’t know Tamil, the language spoken on this island off the coast; Ravi, who grew up in Andhra Pradesh, knows both Tamil and Telugu. I stop two steps from the edge and place my glasses on a dry patch of stone. The first step is green, from algae, and slides under my foot. I steady myself. The mandapam at the center of the tank bears the eroding couplets of the Thirukkural above the water.

00:03:00:00

The water stains the edge of my towel green. I splash it three times at my face. There is no way I will put my head under this water. There isn’t even a lotus flower in the tank. I know millions of Hindus have done this before me. Here. At this very tank. Their dirt floats before it settles. I turn around to see Ravi approach the water’s edge. He gestures for me to immerse myself. I take another step further down, close my eyes, and dunk my head. I do this three times just because of tradition, and one more time, just in case.

THERE IS A WAY to begin a ritual. You first talk to a guide, who introduces you to a pujari, who then approaches the superintendent of the temple services. We skip these steps because Ravi’s boss knows the superintendent. He says we have to be discreet. Everyone takes their share. Signs, posted on the stone blocks of the passageway inside, are in Tamil and English: “No non-Hindus allowed inside the temple.” They are very strict here in Rameswaram; even Sonia Gandhi had to request permission to enter though she was the wife of the prime minister at the time—born in Italy, she was not Hindu by birth, but had converted. The superintendent, whose office is next door to the temple, assigns me a head priest and takes 10,000 rupees.

At night, I return to the hotel, where my friend from Berkeley, Chris, is recovering from a cold. I tell him about my interaction with the superintendent, and he says, The spectre of your uncle follows us wherever we go in India. My uncle, a financial consultant for power projects, mostly hydroelectric, has a developed network of contacts, which includes Ravi’s boss. In the third bed, next to Chris’, Ravi silently reads the paper. Before I entered his life, Ravi would spend the day at the plant. At home, he would sit down to eat idlis covered in sambar, his son lost in the folds of his wife’s sari. At the hotel, the amount of pickle he uses reflects how much he hates the food.

YESTERDAY I FOUND OUT the exact time I was born and told the pujari. Another pujari, across the bridge in Pamban, produced my birth chart with his computer. They discussed the details. Where the stars shone when I was born. How they rested in the sky. They determined over the phone that there was no reason for me to do the naga prathista, but if I was going to do the ritual, I first had to wash away the misfortune of being born in America with the waters of the Lakshmana Tirtham.

MORE THAN A THOUSAND YEARS AGO in the Dandak forest, Ravana’s uncle Maricha used his maya to become a doe to lure Rama and Lakshmana away from Sitha. When he pranced through their encampment, Sitha called out to her husband. Look! What a beautiful doe. See how it shines in the sunlight, gently nibbling on grass? Can you catch it? Please? I’ll die without it! Lakshmana cautioned his brother: It must be a demon, because no deer could be made of gold with jewels in its hide. To which Rama replied, Haven’t you heard of the seven golden swans? Who are as real as you are? The world is full of wonder. If it is real, I will capture it; if it is a demon, then it will die by the shafts of my arrows! Rama was led deep into the wood before one of his arrows found its mark. The doe fell onto the dark leaves that littered the forest floor and cried out in his voice. Lakshmana, please help me!

Left alone, Sitha prayed for her husband’s safe return. She might have closed her eyes. Or they were covered in tears. In Ravana’s flying vehicle, the Pushpaka Vimanam, she couldn’t watch the woods disappear into the earth below. Would he have abducted her if he had remembered the curse? Four yugas before, he had tried to steal Vedavathi from her husband, Vishnu, in a forest much like this one. He had grabbed her long black hair; Vedavathi cut it. He had reached for her arm—which turned into fire. Before she immolated the rest of herself, Vedavathi cursed him. I will be born again to destroy you, she said. I will be born from the earth.

Months later, when Hanuman led the brothers to rescue Sitha, they stopped at Rameswaram. They took a bath in this tirtham.

In Ravana’s garden, Sitha waited under a Sorrowless Tree coming into bloom.

THE PREVIOUS WINTER, Ammamma came from India to help my mother, who was sick. Her doctors weren’t sure of the cause—complications from giardia from Lake Tahoe years before was one possibility, while another was that her immune system was inflaming her colon because of a bacteria or virus. Ammamma didn’t think that that was why her daughter was sick. It was a symptom of the spirit, not the body. She decided to consult her seer, who was in India, by phone.

He helped them. The seer. But the title she addressed him with, Sharma, is really another name for someone like the pujari sitting before me next to folded silk cloth. Each piece has a use in the naga prathista that is never arbitrary, but rather an expression of balance and order. When doctors look at an x-ray, or when Sharma in meditation gazes at the idea of my mother, they see an expression of another magnitude, an image of uncontrolled energy or a dark mass, a reddening or flash of useless heat.

That summer, Ammamma and my mother returned to India, where my mother’s health recovered. In Benicia, we speculated on reasons why. Now that her children had left, she felt lonely. My sister and father pointed their fingers at the heart. I pointed to nature. Exxon, half a mile away, burned orange over the hills.

IN RISHIKESH, the sky is split with its own light. From the ghat, our flames drift down the river at dusk. The sadhus’ robes cover the steps in orange, and they sing and clap their hands in unison. Their robes were once white. All around them is the smoke of their pyre.

AT THE TRIVENI GHATS, I meet Ganesh, a sadhu who says he draws strength from walking by the water at sunset. Around us, people are gathering to release their deepums, little flames floating in ghee, down the Ganga. The river tumbles out of the mountains, clear with patches of green like the Feather River coming out of the canyon near Chico, California. We see a man lean down and drink water in the cups of his hands, and Ganesh turns to me and says:

See how much faith he has? He thinks it is safe to drink the water because it is holy.
I would never drink the water here. I saw wild elephants last summer on the other
side amongst the trees. They always drink where the water moves fast enough. 
So do I.

***

California-based writer Amarnath Ravva has performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts, and the Sorbonne. In addition to his writing practice, he is a member of the site specific ambient music supergroup Ambient Force 3000 and for the past eight years he has helped run and curate events at Betalevel, a venue for social experimentation and hands-on culture located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.

The post Excerpt: American Canyon appeared first on The Revealer.

Image via “Tender” Facebook Page

By Ann Neumann

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist and director of the new documentary Tender, the story of a community in Port Kembla, an industrial city south of Sydney, that decides to start its own funeral service. Tender follows the community as they learn how to take care of their own dead and it touchingly captures their grief and cohesion when they discover one of their members, Nigel, has a terminal illness. But Tender is also a story of resistance: Port Kembla is a company town; the film documents the Port Kembla Community Project’s efforts to take back the lives of it’s members from the industry that dominates its skyline as well as take back their deaths from the funeral industry. Marked by both humor and sadness, it is visually and aurally beautiful. Tender screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York at the end of October. I spoke with Wallworth by telephone last week. It was a Friday afternoon in New York and a sunny Saturday morning in Australia. We began our conversation by discussing how people try to avoid death and why.

The Revealer: We don’t have any way around death so we have to deal with it or identify the ways in which we don’t.

Lynette Wallworth: Yes, yes, that’s really true. There’s a big culture of avoidance, isn’t there? That’s what I thought about the funeral industry. It’s sort of supporting the avoidance of the experience of death in many ways.

TR: Wherever there’s Westernized medicine it seems this culture of avoidance has risen up over the past few decades. It’s a beautiful film and I don’t just mean that it’s important and that it gets at something very vital but also that it’s beautiful to look at. And I imagine in part that that comes from your good eye.

LW: Yeah, it comes from being an artist first I think. That appreciation of what a beautiful frame can do, not just on a superficial level, but on a deeper level. It can help you breath and relax. It makes the subject accessible maybe. Tender is highly sculpted in terms of audience experience so I think it’s surprisingly funny for people in the beginning. I cared very much about audience experience. My feeling is that it’s a difficult subject and I wanted people to relax. The laughter helps. You can actually open to the experience of the film, which is the opposite of avoidance. That’s what I was thinking in terms of the crafting of it.

TR: So Tender directly counters the avoidance of death we’ve developed in Western medicine?

LW: Yes, if you think about where it’s leading you to, especially those final image with the body.

TR: You said something after the screening at the Mead Film Festival here in New York about your decision to use still photos to show the preparation of Nigel’s body. You felt they were more powerful than moving images?

LW: I come from a background in photography, visual arts and presentation galleries. I know the power of the still image intimately. I know that if you really want to be able to see something, still image is more powerful than moving image because of the way we are able to hold it in our minds afterwards. That was for me the singularly most important moment in the film. To be able to present images of being with the body that were classically beautiful and compelling and that would do something to take away fear. I don’t mean something fictionalized but something that we know to be true. That was my goal; that the film would always contain something that showed you that this was possible, that this was not something to fear. If you could imagine it, you would be more likely to be able to do it.

TR: The closest thing I can recall, not from our era, are Victorian photos where the dead are dressed and posed for photographs.

LW: I know it in my bones that if you’re unable to hold the images, if they are fleeting, they can’t be seared into the memory. I wanted them to be remembered. Stills were just the most powerful way to do that. To offer that moment.

TR: Does seeing the body help one to avoid protracted grief?

LW: Yes. Purely on the basis of all the interviews I did when making Tender—and there are many interviews which don’t make it into the film—it was clear to me. It was like a refrain. I could hear it in people’s voices when they had some simple time with the body of someone they loved. The sense of knowing—I would say of knowing in heart and mind—that this had happened. It seems to me that there is something about having touched the body that tells us through our hands that the person is gone. It’s so clear that the person we knew is no longer there. What remains is more like what was holding them, but they are gone. People said over and over again almost the same words. They would say, She was gone.

When the body was whisked away and either the person had no time with the body at all or they got a phone call telling them the person had died and next they’re at the funeral… here we don’t have open caskets and we don’t have viewings. Maybe those things do help people but my feeling is that the intimate moment just after death really helps people. There’s a different kind of sadness often still there, the mind and body still struggling to accept that death has happened. I have no other reason for saying that except from listening to people talk about their experiences, hearing the state that they’re in now in terms of a kind of calm and peaceful acceptance of the reality of death or an ongoing sadness that feels to me like a grief that hasn’t resolved.

TR: So many changes have taken place over the past few decades. Medicine has institutionalized death. The structure of our families has changed. Women are not necessarily the ones who are full-time care taking at home. Multiple members of the family have jobs. The “traditional” family structure is changing. I was most interested in how Jen and her colleagues created a family around Nigel. The gay community in the 1980s [during the AIDS epidemic] had to make their own families because people were shunned or put out of their blood families. The hospice movement is very good at this, creating community, but to see the Port Kembla group surround and care for Nigel was moving.

Image via “Tender” Facebook Page

LW: A lot of the people who use that community center are, in some way or another, estranged from their families. When women who were on the street died, sometimes from an overdose, one was murdered, their families, who they were estranged from for many, many years were called upon to reclaim that body in death. Family, who they possibly had nothing to do with for twenty years were now being given the responsibility of farewelling that person. These people were part of the Kembla community but they had no right to care for them in death. Had they had the money to or had the organization of this funeral business [been already established] they would have been able to say to the family, “We can do this together because these people made a community here, they made a family here.” That was one of the community project’s big motivations.

TR: In the film Nigel’s brother was taken in by the community, right?

LW: Yes. They weren’t estranged. Nigel’s brother just lived a very different life and I don’t think his brother saw him very often but you see that happening so beautifully in the film. The richness of Nigel’s life in this community. Many of us live that sort of a life where we don’t form a traditional family unit. We have this other family. What’s interesting in Port Kembla, and I completely understand it now, is that now they’ve taken on board to manage funerals for one another, an enormous stress has been taken out of that community. Many people there are, for one reason or another, alone. Now they have no fear about their death. To know in death they won’t be alone is a tremendous salve.

TR: One of the great sadnesses of life is fear of being alone.

LW: Yes and I was really aware of this with Nigel those last weeks. It was almost like I could contain in my mind a parallel film where he would be, if not for that community, dying in a very isolated way. I could see the void of community—and the richness that he had at the end of his life. That’s what many people are looking at, you know, they’re looking at fearful isolation and the horrible imagining of a funeral with no one at it.

TR: Knowing that the community center was there to take care took a stress out of the entire community?

LW: Yes it definitely has. It comes back to avoidance and it makes me realize that a lot of that avoidance is just about fear. People are not comfortable to talk with one another about their own funerals, to make plans with one another. [The community center] removes the fear. These are not people who are sick. These are just people in the community who are alone and who don’t have family. By default we bequeath it to the people we’re leaving behind, but I don’t think that’s the best way to do it.

TR: Because the visual landscape is so prominent in Tender, those moments where you show the skyline and the rusting industry, it seems to me you’re making a broader statement about —and I don’t want to reach too far here—but you’re making a broader statement about, say, capitalism, or corporations. The community is taking back this work from corporations.

LW: There was a great comment from one of the workers that didn’t make it into the film. She said, “I’m happy for the corporation to build my car but I don’t want them to do my funeral.” And you do feel that when you see the industry and you realize that with especially the men of the township. Their lives were gobbled, swallowed up into that megalith corporation that dominates that town. It swallows up the lives of the people. To me still the most moving moment in the film is when I ask Nigel what he would have done in his life had he been able to choose. He said, “Something with nature.” We spend a lot of this film watching the opposite of nature which is this industry that dominates life. Which dominated his life. It is really pertinent and it does overshadow the film and you’re not wrong to make that analogy. What these people are trying to do is counteract the impersonal. Any industry where time is equated with money. That’s the antithesis of what you need when you’re grieving.

TR: In a recent interview Keith Gallasch summarizes something that you’ve stated, that the community’s funeral service perhaps allows the community to “retrieve everyday ritual.” It’s a counter to the impersonal aspects of business, whatever he meant by ritual, it seems as though this community is building a ritual.

LW: Yes, they do it in various ways and they are bringing ritual back to the heart of the community, bringing back markers in time. The very first scene we filmed was their Christmas party. The party every year involves the naming of everyone who has died that year from their community and the planting of a new tree for each of those names. So at the end of each cycle of a year they recount to themselves the people they’ve lost and they plant new life on their behalf. They’re creating such strength in themselves through those rituals. It relaxes—it seems like such a strange word about this, relaxes—something in you. To just be calm in the fact that you know you’re in a group of people who are going to support you in making a mark around this moment, around your loss, around your grief, around another period of time. They’re going to be around for the new beginning. They are instilling those cycles in their community with ritual. I would say it’s created great strength and resilience.

TR: In my hospice experience I’ve seen families look to not just medical practitioners around them but also to clergy as authority to tell them how to get through it or how to overlay a ritual onto this process. You’ve said you didn’t know Nigel as well as everyone else and so that slight distance allowed him to talk to you about things because he didn’t worry in the same way about hurting you.

LW: It was a revelation to me. I was watching all the people who loved Nigel dearly desperately trying to talk to him and being unable to find that inroad to opening up that conversation around the fact that he was dying. Even with all the knowledge they had and with their devotion and interest in wanting to have that opening up. He made that very difficult for them. It was apparent to me—this is important, I think there’s something useful in this—that while it was difficult for me, it wasn’t impossible. And certainly I had the feeling that Nigel did want to talk about this. He struggled to talk about it, but it was much easier for him to have that conversation with me. I wasn’t the closest person to him and it made me wonder if sometimes we come at this in a way that doesn’t help necessarily. We think that that person’s going to talk to the person who’s closest to him but really if we want to give them an opportunity to talk about their fears and their worries it may be someone who’s a little bit removed. I have the feeling that Nigel was testing out saying these things to me. That having said them once and heard his own voice saying them, because there was a lot of emotion in saying them, that he onward could imagine saying that to his friends.

TR: In some ways it seems as though the camera helped that. Where he could say these things to the camera and you and he wouldn’t be judged for them. He wouldn’t be blamed for giving up or for being morbid or not having more hope or all of the things we hear when people do want to talk about these issues.

LW: Anyone who works with a camera knows this is true. I had the experience many years ago where I worked in a place in the city for people who had come from the country or regional Australia for cancer treatments. I took a video history of an elderly woman. She went back [in her memory] and she told me a lot and she just gave so much information. She wasn’t talking about her death, she wasn’t thinking about death, but she put her life in front of the camera. The next day when I came to work my manager took me in to her office to tell me that the woman had died in the night. It was unexpected because of where she was in terms of her illness. My manager, knowing that this was probably going to be distressing for me, spent time talking with me. She said, “What you gave her was the opportunity to have someone holding her life story somewhere.” And then my manager took me up to her room to see this woman lying dead on her bed. Subsequently, when I studied photography, a photographer who would often spend time in the hospital told me the same thing. That you have to be conscious when you bring the camera to some people. That is what they’re waiting for. They’re waiting for the knowledge that someone is holding them somewhere and when you give them that, it may let the living go easier.

TR: I know this from my current hospice patient. I was called in to help her write her memoir. But as soon as she began talking to me about her life she stopped talking about the book. Maybe all she needed was someone outside of the intimate people in her life to know her story, to listen.

LW: It’s so powerful, isn’t it? And also it’s important to be aware of the impact of that. It’s a powerful tool.

TR: Storytelling.

LW: Yeah. It’s essential, isn’t it?

TR: Storytelling matches the fear of death with the pragmatics of it.

LW: Yes, they’re incredibly pragmatic. And that’s the thing, you see, it’s a part of that community. And that’s why they were the perfect community for doing this. There’s nothing precious about them, which they say, and it’s just that incredible pragmatic way of looking something in the eye and deciding what it would take in order to grapple with it. That is what’s funny. That they don’t turn away from any of it.

TR: Funny and brave. There’s a quote on the Tender site from the community group. I wonder if you can tell me about it. “The project will seek to realign the care of our dead with the changing values of our culture.” In this quote, the term I’m interested in is values. So I guess my question would be what are those changing values and why must this realignment take place?

LW: I can’t say exactly what it was that they meant but the changing values are in one sense to accommodate various religions which require their own expression at the time of death. What the corporate funeral industry does is the template, the one–size–fits–all funeral. That doesn’t work because what needs to be expressed is so various. There are cultural differences you know, or you could say religious differences or spiritual differences, all of which come into play at the most essential points of life, like death. A corporation cannot meet those needs because it can’t get at the heart of what is specific to that person in that moment or that family in that moment. We can’t go to a one-size-fits-all model for grace.

We don’t want to see ourselves as just consumers. My parents are very religious and what that gives them is the sense that they are valued and embraced as specific individuals within their community. That’s what a lot of religious life is: belonging to a community. Community recognizes and holds those individuals. Port Kembla is not a religious community but it often offers the same kind of support. People are held and they know they will be cared for. In Australia there are many people who don’t participate in a religion but have the same need and the same longing to belong somewhere.

Image via “Tender” Facebook Page

TR: So instead of a church community they’ve made their own community. Is that where  the title came from, the community?

Tender? I really struggled with the title. I thought of that title before I made the film. It’s on the very first supporting documents when I was trying to get the film made. It’s such a beautiful word and because it’s a difficult subject, it needed that softness. It needed that gentleness in the title, I thought, in order to let people in. It’s interesting that the community was going to call their funeral services Community Undertakings. They changed it to Tender Funerals because Community Undertakings was maybe not soft enough when you think of someone needing to find you in grief. I think it’s the same with Tender. There’s a kindness about it that I thought would maybe make it easier to come to this film. You write a couple of statements about a film and that’s what people read. Often I read them and think, “I would never go see that film.” You say something about death and it’s a struggle, you need to see the humor there. The word itself involves exactly what they were doing. The tending to one another.

This interview has been edited for length.

Special thanks to Faye Ginsberg.

***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

Moral Highs and Lows

Old Philosophical Certainties

On Suicide

Reading HuffPo’s “Hospice, Inc.”

The End of Eating

Wakeful Unawareness

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

***

Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann‘s book about a good death, SITTING VIGIL, will be published by Beacon Press in 2015.

The post Tending to One Another appeared first on The Revealer.

Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo              (Random House, 2014).

By Jared Malsin

A reporter sets out to cover a devastating war across the ocean. He encounters the war, but also tedium, loneliness, and brutality.

This is the rough outline of the story told by Ajnan Sundaram, a former stringer for the Associated Press in Congo, in his book, aptly titled Stringer. It is that rare book where the writer’s personal observations are original, startling, and compelling. And this holds true for matters both vast and minute, from monstrous war in Congo, to a dead rat he finds decomposing in his bedroom.

After graduating from Yale in 2005, Sundaram turned down a PhD program in mathematics as well as a job with Goldman Sachs, to pursue reporting as a freelancer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I had left for Congo in a sort of rage, a searing emotion,” he writes. “The world had become too beautiful. The beauty was starting to cave in on itself, revealing a core of crisis.” His serene campus life and the abstractions of advanced math seemed an illusion.

The war in Congo beckoned. In comparison to the scale of the conflict—five million have died since 1996—media coverage of Congo, was, and remains, spotty. Sundaram is indignant about the hollow state of foreign reporting. “This great event in human history has produced no sustained reporting. No journalist is stationed consistently on the front lines of the war telling us its stories,” he wrote in a recent op-ed in The New York Times. The violence in Congo, not to mention the country’s contentious politics, often was, and is, reduced to 200-word wire reports. Sundaram argues righteously that such a vast and deadly conflict ought to be covered in depth.

So he set out to do what reporters do, flying to Kinshasa on a one-way ticket, in hopes of capturing some of this epic story.

In careerist terms, his time in Congo was a success. He was picked up by the Associated Press and the Times. He became one of a handful of journalists reporting day to day on the war, a major presidential election, rioting, and earthquakes. But what is most remarkable about his book are the otherwise dull and painful moments that came before, and in between those successes. Sundaram excels at describing the moments of unfathomable tedium, petty crime, and long stretches of solitude.

These moments, beautifully rendered, draw back the curtain on the making of foreign news. They fill in some of the messiness, the long hours of grinding work and waiting that are condensed into those 200 or 800 words of wire reporting. For journalists who see war reporting glorified, it is refreshing to read a book that embraces and does justice to the fact that swashbuckling can be a grueling and underpaid business.

The book captures all that is unglamorous, even infuriating, about foreign journalism. Preparing to file an important article, he sits in the darkness after the electricity cuts out in the apartment he shares with a working class Congolese family in Kinshasa. His phone, containing hundreds of irreplaceable contacts, is stolen by a street child. He struggles with sickness and at least one bout of paranoia. He pursues important stories that, due to logistics and circumstance, he is never able to complete, wasting weeks of his time and his own hard won money. He struggles with his editors in a relentless battle to prove that what is happening here is news. This battle is acute in central Africa, where the international media are perpetually delinquent. The contemporary conflict in the Central African Republic, for example, has killed more people than the Ebola epidemic, but the violence has been covered inconsistently and with none of the same urgency.

The battle to convince editors to devote limited resources to foreign news is a struggle that stringers and freelancers everywhere will recognize, and one I relate to. Like Sundaram, I left America shortly after graduating from Yale, two years after he did. I, instead, went to the Middle East. And I can relate to many of his observations about the trials of foreign reporting.

Unlike Sundaram, I enjoy the relative luxury of covering a region that is, compared to central Africa, blanketed in foreign journalists. American geopolitical involvement in the Middle East means that news from Cairo, Beirut, and even Baghdad is more robustly covered that news from Sub-Saharan Africa is.

Sundaram’s book lives in the moments of grime. He waits. He sits crammed on busses. He wanders strange cities, sleeps in strange guesthouses. Sundaram’s eye lingers on every ant that crawls across his path. His surroundings and his subjectivity come into sharp relief.

Take for example, this description of his arrival in the city of Bunia, in Eastern Congo. “Arriving in such a state, without a specific destination, with only an idea, one found oneself relentlessly looking: the mind was like an antenna that probed, that latched onto small emotions,” he writes.

The scenes are vivid, the prose muscular. Sundaram paints vast emotional landscapes that he would never have been able to squeeze into a wire report. His publishers note that he writes in the style of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V.S. Naipaul. The comparisons are valid; Sundaram recalls being given a copy of one of Kapuscinski’s books as one of his inspirations to make the leap to Congo. He follows Naipaul’s urge “to hold oneself in constant readiness for adventure or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried along, up to a point, by accidents; and consciously to follow up other impulses.”

This is perhaps the riskiest part of Sundaram’s method. At one point, he follows a lead that leaves him stranded in the middle of the jungle, with little money, frustrated editors, no story, and no clear direction anywhere. But whereas wire journalism might have constrained him, the book gives him room to expand on these mundane moments.

Like Kapuscinski, Sundaram attempts to make bold, vivid observations about the world around him. Like many writing in his genre today, he is forced to boil down decades of history into a few pages that get interspersed with the story of his personal journey in Congo. As a result, there are times when his efforts at describing the situation in the Congo verge into the realm of pop sociology and pop history and moments when his commentary leans too heavily on generalizations. The result is that the history feels broad brush. Everything is beautiful prose and attempts to seize the iconic moments, but the larger political story feels hazy at times.

On the other hand, Sundaram earned his insights the hard way, through experience. The book is, in a way, a testament to the importance of longform journalism, and books in general. It comes at a moment when budgets for foreign reporting are squeezed even further than they were when Sundaram set out on his voyage. These days foreign stringers and freelancers are expected to write pieces that will generate web traffic. We are compelled to unearth stories that are not so much newsworthy, as Upworthy.

***

Jared Malsin is a journalist based in Cairo. He has contributed to TIME, VICE, The New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. He tweets at @jmalsin.

The post Review: Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo appeared first on The Revealer.

I can’t do anything on time these days. I get ghosts in November.

My Brooklyn street is lined with bare branches. Rent’s past due but nobody cares. I’ve seen my landlord twice — both times at a distance.

It’s getting cold at night. The corners are clearing. During the day, when there’s no sun, the stoops stand empty. No talk, no cars. Just the long streets whispering, near silence. Wind and trash and bicycles.

I sit in a bare spot on the hardwood floor, leaning against the wall. The place is trashed.

Jack’s here.

“What are you working on?” he asks, shuffling through the papers on my desk.

“The column,” I explain. “You’ll like it — it’s about Dungeons & Dragons again.” We played together.

“Really?” he asks. A purple-covered pamphlet among the notes and clippings catches his eye: A Christian Response to Dungeons & Dragons: The Catechism of the New Age, says the cover. Beneath the title, a snarling dragon reaches for unsuspecting kids. Jack picks it up, smiles incredulously, and then begins to read aloud. “It’s Christmas morning,” he says.

“Brimming with excitement Junior opens his first gift, a Basic Dungeons and Dragons set. Inside he finds a rule book, some graph paper and an odd set of dice. No game board. No little ‘men’ to move around. He checks the wrapping paper for missing pieces, then begins to open the other packages, hoping to find ‘the rest’ of his game.”

Jack turns to me, excited. “Is this real?” he asks.

“Good question,” I say. The way his eyebrow sags into its socket disgusts me. I wince, and try to stop myself from wincing. Don’t they sell patches where he’s from?

Jack returns to the pamphlet.   

“But, Junior has all he needs to play Dungeons & Dragons,” he reads. “The game, you see, doesn’t take place on a board. Instead you play in your head. In D&D, the basic rule is, ‘Use your imagination. Stretch it to the limit.’ Game boards and little men can be so confusing.”

He laughs. “Who wrote that?”

“A couple of Presbyterian ministers,” I answer. “Peter Leithart and George Grant. They’re pretty active writers. Have been since the eighties. Leithart has done some commentaries — Kings and Samuel, I think. Grant does rightwing political stuff, mostly. Lot of attacks on Planned Parenthood. In 1992 he wrote a whole book about Ross Perot.”

Jack is still thumbing through A Christian Response. “Really?”

“Yeah.” I brace my hands in the air, outlining an invisible marquee. “Perot: The Populist Appeal of Strongman Politics,” I say, with grandeur.

“Great title.”

“It is.”

“So why’d they write about D&D?”

“Well, A Christian Response was released in 1987. Throughout the eighties there was a lot of concern about D&D in the media. Evangelical media especially. You remember how it was, back when —”

Jack interrupts, grinning. “When I was alive?”

“When we were kids,” I correct.

He laughs. “Whatever.”

James Dallas Egbert III

“These days, D&D gets treated like any other nerdy hobby,” I say. “But in the eighties and nineties, it had a patina of troubled youth. Isolation and suicide, they said. All because of James Dallas Egbert the Third.”

“Who was that?” Jack scoffs. “Sounds made-up.”

“No! He was real. A bright kid who played D&D in the seventies. In 1979, he was sixteen years old and already a sophomore at Michigan State University, taking courses in computer science There’s a picture of him in that pile, there,” I indicate some papers on my desk.

Jack shuffles through them, finding the photograph. “Good looking kid,” he shrugs.

“Nobody liked him, apparently. He was younger than his classmates — socially awkward. Gay. His best friend at school was a girl from the dorms named Karen Coleman. Dallas nicknamed her ‘Mother.’”

Jack shakes his head. “Yikes.”

“No, no… I mean, yeah, it’s embarrassing, but we have to own that kind of thing, right? I grew up playing D&D, and you played with me, at least a few times... I’ve been doing it for twenty years, now. And I’ve played with more guys like James Dallas Egbert the Third than I care to admit in mixed company.”

“Newsflash,” Jack says. “Nerds play D&D.”

“But being a nerd in 2014 is very different than being a nerd in 1994,” I say. “The Avengers made more than a billion dollars at the box office two years ago. Everybody’s on the Internet, now. Nerd culture is just culture. The old stigmas are being dismantled by apologetic writing. You’ve probably seen some of it. Headlines like ‘Videogames Make You Smarter and Healthier,’  or pieces like that one about writers playing D&D that ran in the New York Times this summer. Ethan Gilsdorf wrote that one. It’s pretty good, actually. In it, he lists off all these creative, successful people who played D&D when they were growing up. Fantasy writers like China Miéville and Cory Doctorow. Stephen Colbert, the T.V. comedian. Even Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic. They all used to play. The message of the piece is that the kind of imagination involved in D&D helped these people strengthen their creative muscles. It’s not just a game for losers, Gilsdorf implies. Winners play it, too.”

Jack shrugs. “You disagree?”

I think for a second. “I disagree with the terms of the conversation.” A breeze whips at my windows, clattering the naked trees. “In this particular place and time, I’d rather lose than win..”

Jack grows serious. “So, obliquely, I’m a loser?” The skin arches above his missing eye.

I can speak my mind to people in his situation. “Yeah,” I nod. ”You’re a loser, I’m a loser — who cares?”

Outside, a garbage truck rattles down the block, big and hollow. “The reactionary literature about D&D in the 1980s, misguided as it was, still had a certain empathy to it,” I continue. “In 1991, a minor Christian television personality named Joan Hake Robie wrote her own entry in the genre, a seventy-six-page booklet called The Truth About Dungeons & Dragons. She dedicated it to ‘all the gifted young men and women’ who play D&D. ‘May your eyes be opened to the truth,’ she wrote.’ I think that’s kind of sweet. At least she cared enough to write.”

Jack shakes his head, disagreeing. “That’s not empathy,” he says. “That’s a pitch.”

I shrug. “Take what you can get,” I say.

“Whatever.” Jack’s eyes return to the photograph. “So what happened to him, exactly?”

William Dear

“Oh, right. James Dallas Egbert disappeared on August 15th, 1979. He got stoned, had lunch with ‘Mother,’ and then just vanished. He was missing for almost a month, and the press had a field day. A young genius missing, maybe dead. The Egbert family hired a private investigator named William Dear to help find him.”

“This guy?” Jack asks, holding up a photo from my mess of notes. “The dude with the tommy gun?”

“That’s him.”

Jack shakes his head, still looking at the picture. “This all seems fake.” 

“Oh, it’s real. Or real as anything in print. Dear was flamboyant. In the introduction to his book The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert the III, which came out in 1984, he bragged about some of his exploits being turned into episodes of Simon & Simon and Matt Houston.”

“Never seen ‘em,” Jack says.

“Detective shows,” I explain. “Dear started interviewing the kids who knew Dallas at Michigan State. He found out that the kid was playing a strange new game called Dungeons & Dragons. He also found out that Michigan State, like a lot of colleges, had a network of steam tunnels running under the campus. Sometimes, Dear learned, Dallas and his D&D friends would play the game in those tunnels. The detective thought maybe Dallas had gone down there by himself one day and gotten lost. The press ate it up. They thought D&D was to blame.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jack says. “That’s like blaming chess or something. Dungeons & Dragons is a game, you play it around a table and roll dice.”

“Yeah,” I acknowledge. “But it’s an imagination game. It’s not confined to a board, and each session links up with each other session. D&D games can go on for months — years. You know how hard it is to explain that to anyone who hasn’t played.”

“Not really,” Jack says. “I never explained it anybody.”

“I don’t know if I have either, really. I’ve tried.”

“Yeah, I read your column every month.”

“Really?” I say, not believing him.

“Oh sure,” Jack answers. “I keep up with the internet like crazy. They’ve got a fiber-optic line in Hell.”

He laughs uproariously. I don’t.

“ Seriously,” he says. “Nobody reads your column.”

“The point I was trying to make last month is that D&D is a game so large, and so complicated that it has more in common with a model of reality than Checkers or Risk… It’s a space where modern people play at things that their real lives make difficult or impossible.”

“Like believing in God,” Jack says.

“Or talking to ghosts,” I answer.

“Whatever.”

“Now, imagine you’re a writer for the New York Times, or the Dayton Journal Herald, in 1979. How do you explain something like D&D in a paragraph? The game was less than a decade old, at that point. The people who played it were part of a tiny subculture of hobby gamers. Information on the topic wasn’t exactly easy to get. As a result, most of the stories about Egbert focused on the superficial, talking about how D&D contained hideous monsters and magic spells. People thought it was witchcraft.”

“I remember that,” Jack says. “What was that old comic? Dark Dungeons? The one where the girl starts playing D&D, and gets sucked into a witches’ coven or something?”

“I’ll get there,” I say. “Dark Dungeons comes later. The immediate aftermath of the James Dallas Egbert disappearance is stuff like that Rona Jaffe novel from 1981, Mazes and Monsters. They made it into a T.V. movie the next year, starring Tom Hanks as a college student who gets caught up in a game like D&D and then goes insane. He ends up trying to jump off the World Trade Center, thinking he can fly.” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfxXug5ZMdk]

Jack giggles. “I have spells!” he quotes, pathetically. “That movie’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, it’s funny,” I say. “But people were scared. In 1983, a woman named Patricia A. Pulling started an anti-D&D advocacy group — Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or B.A.D.D.. Her son played the game at a school club, and when he killed himself in 1982, she blamed it and sued its publisher. “60 Minutes” did a whole segment with her and one of the game’s creators, Gary Gygax, in 1985. A real he-said-she-said thing.”

Jack shakes his head, disbelieving. “This whole thing is so strange,” he says. A pause. “Did Egbert commit suicide?”

“Eventually.”

Jack sucks air behind his back teeth. “Tcch!”

“Dear, the detective, tracked him to an oil town called Morgan City, in Louisiana,” I explain. “This was mid-September, 1979. Dallas had been working on a derrick. By September 13th, he was back with his family. Dear and the Egberts never really cleared up where the kid had been, or why he’d left in the first place. The D&D theory was all anyone had. About a year later, on August 11th, 1980, Dallas put a pistol to his right temple and fired. He never regained consciousness. Died five days later.”

“Poor guy,” Jack says.

“Poor guy,” I agree. “Now, look back at A Christian Response to Dungeons & Dragons. The first line of the first chapter.”

Jack finds the little booklet, retrieving it from a confusion of scraps. “Parents are concerned,” he reads, aloud. “And well they should be. Our children are growing up in a very hazardous world. Not only are they forced to pick their way through a complex maze of conflicting values at school, in the neighborhood, and out in the marketplace, but they are even being assaulted in the ‘safety’ of their own homes.”

He chuckles. “By Dungeons & Dragons?” he asks.

“By Dungeons & Dragons,” I affirm. 

Jack puts the book back, smiling. “So, these Christian authors didn’t really understand it, right? The game?”

“Some of them tried to,” I said. “Leithart and Grant actually do a pretty good job. Better than Rona Jaffe, anyway. Their problem with D&D, as they put it in A Christian Response, isn’t really that the game contains magic or monsters. They were more concerned by the imagination involved. Here, give me the book.”

Jack hands it over. I flip to page five, and read from section titled “The Moral Dilemma.”

“Of course, not everyone who plays the game becomes suicidal or homicidal,” I read. “One of the chief defenses of [D&D] is that [it stimulates] the imagination. This is undeniably true. The question is whether we want our imagination (or that of our children) to be stimulated in this particular way.”

“Jesus,” Jack says.

“Exactly. D&D allows players to imagine a miniature world, where God is just part of a game system, a piece of the whole, like a rook on chessboard. For Leithart and Grant, that goes too far. It’s blasphemy.” I thumb to the book’s conclusion. “Scripture encourages leisure, play and even role-playing, though always within the limits of moral Law,” I read aloud. “In the context of these standards […] our imaginations find true freedom. Like the sheep to which the Scripture so often compares us, our freest play is within the fold. Outside, there is only the bondage of fear that allows for no real leisure.”

“It’s about control,” Jack says.

“It is,” I agree. “But, on this point at least, Leithart and Grant aren’t too far from the position taken by Rona Jaffe, or any other ‘secular’ person caught up in the D&D panic of the eighties. The premise of the whole fiasco was that the imagination is a dangerous place. James Egbert got lost there. He never came back. There were a whole slew of secular and religious books saying roughly the same thing, all the way into the early nineties.”

© Jack T. Chick and Chick Publications

© Jack T. Chick and Chick Publications

© Jack T. Chick and Chick Publications

“So, what about Dark Dungeons? That was a Christian thing, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, sure,” I say, getting up from my seat to browse through a shoebox of old papers. Dark Dungeons is a tiny, illustrated pamphlet, something like a flip-book. Its author, Jack T. Chick, is a reclusive evangelical cartoonist who’s been screaming from the margins of American religious life since the early sixties. His “Chick Tracts,” including Dark Dungeons, tell simple, frightening stories in pictures, with the ultimate objective of bringing lost souls to Christ. Chick’s Christian readers distribute his tracts far and wide, on missionary crusades and in any public space that accepts free literature. Their method is to win souls through horror — to literally scare the hell out of people.”

“Dark Dungeons was released in 1984,” I say, retrieving my copy from the scraps. I pass it to Jack. He scoffs.

“I remember this,” he says. “This girl, Debbie, starts playing D&D with a creepy looking woman named Ms. Frost. Eventually she joins some kind of cult, where she learns to ‘really cast spells.’”

“And her friend Marcie gets so wrapped up in the game that she kills herself,” I add. “Just like Egbert.”

Jack pauses. “Here’s what I never understood,” he says. “This idea that the magic and stuff in D&D is real, that it’s all some kind of training to join a Satanic order or something.”

“Chick was always into conspiracies,” I explain. “He really believes that his tract making has made him the target of Satan’s agents on Earth. Chick thinks they’re everywhere, hiding in plain sight, operating through an endlessly complex series of clandestine organizations. In the end, it all goes back to the Vatican.” 

“The Vatican?” Jack asks.

“Well, Chick isn’t a formal member of any Christian organization, but he’s definitely protestant. His view of the Catholic Church would fit into a Thomas Pynchon novel. Or Robert Anton Wilson.”

“So D&D is a Catholic conspiracy.”

“Yeah, roughly. Or part of one. Debbie, the main character of Dark Dungeons, gets saved at the end of the tract by a lecturer who encourages her to burn her game manuals and rock and roll records in a bonfire, right? That lecturer was based on somebody Chick knew — an anti-occult crusader named John Wayne Todd. Todd used to travel around speaking at churches about ‘the occult‘ in the late seventies and early eighties. He organized bonfires like that. For him, the almost all of ‘secular‘ pop culture was a satanic power play.”

Jack points to a page in the booklet — a picture of the curly-haired man putting his hand on Debbie’s shoulder, saying “In the name of Jesus, I order you spirits of the occult to leave Debbie.” Sure enough, the girl’s body is being vacated by disconsolate ghosts. “Lord Jesus, I repent,” she says.

“That was a real guy?” Jack asks.

“Well,” I shrug. “John Wayne Todd is a little slippery. He claimed to have been raised in a coven, and maintained that his family was highly placed in the secret, Satanic cult that ran the world. He called it the Illuminati, of course. Todd was saved, he said, in San Antonio, Texas, back in 1972. Apparently he had just seen The Cross and the Switchblade, an evangelical movie starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada. On the way out of his screening, someone handed him a Chick Tract.”

“Crazy,” Jack says.

“Maybe,” I acknowledge. “Or made up. Todd and Chick worked together for a decade, and cartoonist put out a lot of comics and pamphlets based on Todd’s stories of the witch-cult. Dark Dungeons was part of that.”

“You can tell they sure never played the game,” he says, closing the tract. “Just the way people in this thing talk about it… ‘I’m fighting the Zombie. Tell her I’ll see her tonight,’ or ‘Debbie, your cleric has been raised to the 8th level.’ It’s all just — wrong.”

“‘I used the mind bondage spell on my father,’” I say, quoting from Dark Dungeons. “He was trying to stop me from playing D&D.”

Jack giggles, crinkling his wound. “Right,” he says. “There’s no divide between the game and the real world in here. And all Todd’s conspiracies are true.”

“He ran with some serious people, apparently,” I say. “In interviews Todd claimed to have seen George McGovern kill a girl during a ritual sacrifice. Todd  was the ‘occult advisor‘ to the Kennedy’s, too, of course.  All before he got saved.”

Outside, the wind picks up. The sun is almost set. “Does this thing go all the way to the J.F.K. assassination?” asks Jack. “I mean, of course it does.”

“Well,” I say. “J.F.K. wasn’t really assassinated. Todd says that was all a sham. He used to hang out on Jack Kennedy’s yacht in the seventies.”

Jack rolls his eyes. “Of course.”

We sit, reading separately. It gets dark.

“What are we going to do with all this?” Jack asks.

I pause. “Well, as I see it, this is all about secrets and games. Stories and imagination. Systems, ‘real’ or not, that have places set for humanity, and politics, and God. We think there’s a division between fantasy and reality, but there isn’t. It’s all a big mess.”

I look around, at my apartment, which I haven’t cleaned since I got my Master’s Degree, at the end of the summer. Papers everywhere. Paper and trash. “This is the world we live in,” I say. Jack looks out the window. It starts to rain.

“You know what really happened to James Dallas Egbert?” I ask.

Jack’s expression doesn’t change.

“He was young. He felt pressured. His mother, his real mother, had driven him to enter college early, and she wasn’t satisfied with anything but perfect grades. Dallas felt trapped, like he was in a game whose next twenty moves had been worked out ahead of time. So he left. He went into the steam tunnels, first, but not to play. He went to be alone.”

“How do you know all this?”

“The detective, William Dear, put it in his book. The Dungeon Master.”

Jack nods. “Sure.”

“Dallas tried to commit suicide in the tunnels,” I explain. “It didn’t work, so he crawled to a friend’s house. From there, he got pawned off on friends and friends of friends, until he ended up in Louisiana.”

The rain gets harder.

“But before that, when he was alone, Dallas felt, for a minute, like he’d gotten away. ‘I sat down against the wall, so I could lean against it,’ he told Dear. ‘It was chilly and I was wrapped in my blanket. I had food within reaching distance. It was heaven.’”

We sit for a while. The shadows lengthen.

Finally, Jack faces me. I stare. “What do you think really happened?” he asks. “To me, I mean.”

“Well,” I say. “I think you were bright kid, but a little weird. We met in the fifth grade, but we weren’t really friends. You played the game with me.”

“Sure,” he shrugged. “Right so far.”

“I think you started shooting up in high school. And then you dropped out. We saw each other a few times after that. Someone cut your face in that flophouse on the East side. That’s how you lost the eye. Eventually you just — got away. The cops found you in that drainage ditch.”

“Eh, pretty close.”

***

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

Sulamith Ish-Kishor

Salem Kirban, Part 2

Guide to Survival (Salem Kirban, Part 1)

Monster in My Pocket

The Power of Source 

Carman, Part 2

Carman

Speak Out!

Fear of Death Removed

Good Ol’ Job

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

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