Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

As for the Jester’s daughter, the witless Goose Girl, she is slumped, desperately in need of a smoke, in the back row of the West Condon Township High School auditorium, scribbling idiocies in the notebook on her knees. This chilly spring day chances also to be (the world is suffocating in irony or else it’s the imbedded transgenerational odor of child sweat) Ascension Day, though probably few here other than the Catholic priest, the Lutheran preacher, and herself even know that. Because Tommy Cavanaugh has asked her to, Sally is attending the inaugural meeting of the New Opportunities for West Condon citizens committee, the very one (irony is lost on Tommy) that, thanks to his dear dad, has cost her dear dad his job and condemned him to the donkey stables at the Fort. So do me a favor, Sal… It was Tommy’s assignment to get the young people out to the meeting, and there are a lot of them in here — his old high school teammates and drinking buddies, all the stay-at-home losers, but especially Tommy’s fan club, his exes and wannabes, she of the bouncing tits among them. Tommy himself is back up at university, having had to drive there in a beat-up tangerine-colored Buick Special rented from Lem after his mom’s station wagon got nicked and wrecked over the weekend, so Sally is martyring herself unwitnessed, but she promised to send him her notes, and anyway it’s all mill-grist, is it not? See here how her restless plume flies blithely o’er the welcoming page. Her dad’s Chamber successor and new city manager (no one seems certain just how this has happened, least of all the mayor, who stares out upon the gathered citizenry from his marginalized seat at one end of the stage, his fat round face the very picture of bafflement; Sally makes a little cartoon sketch in her notebook: Simple Simon as a con artist) has just announced his first coup in office — he has interested a big-city consortium called the Roma Historical Society in the purchase and restoration of the derelict West Condon Hotel — and he has been duly applauded. Things are, on this day of Christ’s liftoff, looking up. That’s the message. The city manager is also the de facto chairman of this committee, and he goes on to describe in his crisp monotone all the legal actions they have taken against the illegal encampment of the cult at the edge of town, which is blamed for much that has gone wrong in recent times and which is now trying to steal the mine and its historic hill out from under their noses.

Backdropped by a huge banner in the school colors that says “NOWC” and surrounded by his varsity squad of preachers and politicians, Tommy’s father assumes the podium to let it be known that if the city can acquire the Deepwater property, he will ask the state for funding for a new hospital to be built on it or else an industrial park or a state prison or some kind of recreational facility, maybe a monument to the fallen mine heroes, his very lack of a clear project (he asks the audience for their own ideas, setting off a general brouhaha) evidence that the hill is not his nor will it likely ever be.

This is one tough ballgame, he says — but what he doesn’t say is that he is losing it. The Brunists already have detailed architectural plans for a big church up there — Billy Don has described them to Sally — with groundbreaking set for just a month from today, and apparently, thanks to mischievous Irene, they’re building it mostly with Cavanaugh family money. Which, Tommy says, has left his dad, also not an appreciator of irony, pretty fucking depressed.

Now, as the citizenry argue noisily about how to use land they don’t own and never will (some want to reopen the mine itself — there’s a whole lot of coal down there still, they shout — all the mine structures have remained in place in hopes of its reopening, the city should take it over and run it, it owes that much to the hardworking people who have made this town what it is today), she can see the dismay setting in on the man’s face like time-lapse aging, and he seems to be looking around for an exit just as she is. Somewhere she has written in one of her notebooks: It is the attempt to avoid fate which provokes the calamity. Now she opens her cogdiss page and writes: Calamity is the normal circumstance of the universe. Catastrophe creates.

This page was opened after her meeting earlier this week with Reverend Konrad Dreyer of Trinity Lutheran, now sitting onstage with the other city fathers, smiling that sad patronizing smile that preachers bestow upon the damned. Sally was there to try to find out what it was about him that so baffled her parents and their Presbyterian friends. Without a minister, they’re obliged to go to church at Trinity Lutheran, which is damp and chilly and smells of mildewed hymnals, and that’s bad enough without having Connie Dreyer put them to sleep with his fustian monologues. You should only have to take a metaphysical once a year, as her father put it, twisting the cap off his after-church Sunday morning “spirituals.” Sally and the minister sat out on the church lawn where he’d been weeding dandelions and planting begonia and gladiolus bulbs alongside the broad front steps. He got out his pipe, meaning she was free to hit the cigarettes. Just to be provocative, she had worn her RELIGION IS MYTH-INFORMATION tee, even though it has a split seam under one armpit and wasn’t completely clean — to which he replied, acknowledging the line with a nod, Yes, I can see that. But a myth is not a lie, Sally. It’s a special kind of language used to symbolize certain realities beyond space and time. It is information. God’s a symbolist, you mean. No, on the contrary. Everything he is and does is just what it is and nothing else. You know: I am that I am. We earth-bound creatures use symbolism as one way of trying to understand God’s thought, which for Him is the same thing as His actions. For we and all we think and do and feel are only shadowy and scattered emanations of divine thought, action, and passion. Whereupon, when she asked about passion, he explained God’s love, quoting someone else to the effect that love, as experienced in eternity, is an incessant “dying to oneself” (she took a note, wondering if human love might not be something like that when it was really good), a prefiguring of which was provided by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, an act of divine love performed for us within the constraints of our own limited human perceptions of space and time, which are not those of infinity and eternity, but of mere extension and duration. He seemed so sure of himself. How did he know all that to be so? He gazed into his pipe bowl as though his thoughts were stored there, clamped the stem in his teeth, took a draw, then said: Well, Socrates would say by intuition, but for me it’s more a matter of faith. And faith in divine governance is just that: faith. Everything else, including church dogma or Biblical interpretation, is achieved by reason and so is susceptible to human error. But so is your first principle, Reverend Dreyer. No, it may be true or false — in this world we’ll never know — but it cannot be subject to error. He smiled. It is that it is.

She knew by then that it would be useless to question the historicity of the resurrection story or dispute the divine inspiration of the Bible or the prophecy of the Last Judgment and et cet, because he would just agree with her or say it could be so, we’re only human after all, and smile his benign smile, the smile he is casting now upon the auditorium, as though to say God’s love is flowing through him and he is sharing it with everyone. The smile of the terminally stoned upon the squares. So instead she asked him what he thought about the Brunists. Isn’t it curious that their religion only got going after what they’d prophesied didn’t happen? He saw through her instantly. You’re going to say the same thing was true of the beginnings of Christianity, he said, and it was her turn to smile. Well, it was, wasn’t it? Jesus told his disciples the end would come in their own lifetimes and it didn’t. He let everybody down, his little cult should have died, but look what happened. Isn’t that really weird? He nodded and said that it was and that there was now a quasi-scientific term for what causes that weird-ness. It’s called cognitive dissonance, which he explained as believing or wanting to believe two contradictory things at the same time, or acting or having to act in conflict with one’s beliefs, and suffering the mental discomfort of that. Trying to resolve these conflicts and ease the discomfort releases a lot of creative energy, for the mind is forced to look for new beliefs or somehow transform the old existing ones. In the case of predicting an event that doesn’t happen, for example, especially when you are publicly committed to it — when, not to seem a fool, you have to go on believing something that’s contrary to the evidence, as with the Brunists or, yes, the early Christians — the dissonance aroused is alleviated by making it come true after all, perhaps by redefining it or rescheduling it, or just by getting more people to believe in the original prediction. So now I know what you’re going to say, she said. If everything flows from God’s head, then He planted this mechanism to make things like Christianity happen, whether or not there even ever was a Jesus. The minister laughed and tapped the ashes out of his pipe. Yes, the Spirit of God, which is everywhere, working from within to influence human imaginations to produce Christ-like stories, symbolizing the truths of God, as a great teacher of mine once said. And if so, it means that something good can come even from the Brunists, in spite of their naïve confusions and most folks’ misgivings. Something intended by God — in effect, engineered by Him. And I will tell you something stranger, Sally. Studies have shown that the less the reward or the milder the punishment, the greater and firmer the change. When it’s more like a voluntary decision, it sticks more. Thus, the failure of Moses’ law tablets. He chuckled, pocketing his pipe. No wonder he had to break them: they were too extreme, too implacable, and didn’t work. The Jesus generation knew better. And the most important lesson of cognitive dissonance is that to suffer is to love. People end up loving what they willingly suffer for, whether or not it merits either love or suffering. They don’t want to suffer and so they have to find some sort of justification for having elected to do so. The more suffering we have chosen for ourselves, the greater the commitment to the changed beliefs that have led to the suffering and the greater the love toward the object of those beliefs.