Pentimento: Chapter Five

If my portraitist were one of the old masters revising the image to reflect the past ten years or so, he would place a parchment and a quill pen in my hands.

I’ve always enjoyed writing, both prose and poetry (in the form of songs.) Over the years, I had submitted editorial letters and op-eds to the Albany Times Union newspaper. Many of them were accepted. One submission in particular caught the attention of editor, Rob Brill, who called me and offered to help polish it up. It concerned a New York State Supreme Court decision that ruled against the lawsuit brought by a couple of non-Christian town board members. They protested that all the meetings started with exclusively Christian prayers. My point, prescient at the time, addressed the politicization of religion, especially Christianity, in our nation. It condemned the tyranny of enforced religion and the dangers to democracy that have become so apparent in recent years as the boundary between church and state becomes ever less firm and as Christian nationalism takes on frightening momentum.

We found our collaboration mutually enjoyable. He commented on the strong nature of my essay, and I said, “You think this is strong? You should see the diatribe I’m currently working on.” It was an imagined address to us humans by God who made no bones about what an unworthy mess we had made of our race and of His Creation. Rob found it interesting and provocative and suggested I might want to turn it into a novel. Me? Write a novel? Wow. Now there would be a challenge.

When the student is ready, the guru comes. So it was that he and I embarked on the project. The initial goal was not to simply rant, but to tell, through dialogue and action, a story that would illustrate what God is disappointed about. The ultimate result was a trilogy of novels. Since most of you probably haven’t read the books (hardly anyone has), I’ll tell you a little about them.

One important point I wanted to make was that prayers are futile. God, if one exists, is either inept or just doesn’t care. Ultimately, we are on our own in a random universe. Our fate is a blend of the intersection of multitudes of random events over which we have no control and of the conscious decisions we make and actions we take in response to them. This makes life difficult but interesting. Heaven as we traditionally portray it, devoid of challenges and personal growth, must be the most boring way anyone could spend eternity. The heavenly hosts of my imagination fought off the monotony of their eternal existence by gambling on all the random events in the universe, the great Cosmic Casino. So as not to skew the odds, divine intervention was forbidden. That’s why prayers are futile.

Boss, chief honcho in Heaven, had started off the process of the evolution of the universe by hitting a blasting blues note on his guitar, the actual Big Bang, at a fateful concert by the Heavenly Band. (This reprised the historic Newport Folk Festival at which Bob Dylan debuted his electric folk-rock to a shocked audience.) Boss’s band had discarded their harps at intermission and proceeded to rock out. As the universe evolved, intelligent life forms came to be on countless planets. A cadre of gods, mid-level bureaucrats, were sent out, by the big Boss, to each planet that was inhabited by sentient beings who had developed spiritual awareness. Gods were charged with providing the “ten rules,” nothing more, and it was left to the recipients to practice them and flourish or ignore them and perish. The levels of competence of assigned gods were commensurate with the inhabitants’ levels of intelligence. As humans had the lowest IQ of all sentient beings in the universe, Boss decided to send us his drummer (in the music world, not really deservedly, drummers are often the butt of jokes,) the bumbling slacker, A. Lester Lord. I chose his name as a play on the words, “a lesser god.”

Lord was not happy. He despised us pathetic “human units” and looked forward to the day we would eradicate ourselves. Then he could return to his drummer gig once and for all. That was not to be, because Boss came to believe Lester had violated the cardinal rule against intervention when the Boston Red Sox miraculously won the World Series. Lester’s punishment was to be banished to Earth as a mortal. Seeing the world from our point of view, his jaundiced assessment of our race evolved over time into an appreciation of what it means to be human. In the process he discovered the true meaning of life. (Yes, the answer to that age old question is right there in the last chapter of “The Brief Long-Term Therapy of A. Lester Lord,” yours for a pittance at Amazon books.)

I had published the first book, “Cosmic Casino: The True Word of A. Lester Lord,” under a pseudonym partly because of its incendiary nature and partly because, having taken half the novel to begin to hit my stride as a writer of fiction, I was disappointed with the overall result. The second book, “The Brief Long Term Therapy of A. Lester Lord,” and the third, “Guitars of The Gods: The Redemption of A. Lester Lord” were more to my liking. I published them under my real name claiming the author of “Cosmic Casino,” Joseph D Nehemiah, had, on his death bed, urged me to finish his work. Joseph, a psychiatrist, became a character in the second book and its narrator.

The blog you have been reading these past few years was started in order to market the books, but soon evolved into the series of essays you are familiar with. Characteristically, I have labored to make them the best I can, revising each essay dozens of times over the week, striving (what else?) to make myself into the best writer I can be.

Your loyal readership has helped motivate and sustain me and has helped give my life purpose through the nightmare of this disease that, one by one, has stripped me of all my previous abilities. Thankfully, it did not affect my intellect. I will continue to write as long as I can.

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Some authorities claim sheer chance completely dictates the courses our lives take. Even if that were true, I would still choose to live in accord with the belief that struggles, choices and actions not only strongly influence the ultimate self-portraits we create but also drive the course of future events toward either the light or the darkness.

In the end, success is not defined by how our achievements measure up against others or against some arbitrary scale. It is measured by character, character heated in the flames of chance and forged on the anvil of our choices. As you know, the choice to strive toward a perfection that is ever out of reach, whether directed to personal goals or toward the welfare of others, played a large role in the development of my character, such as it is. I do not claim that it is the only worthwhile way of life, but I don’t regret having chosen it.

The interplay and ambiguity of the confluence of chance and action are expressed in a song I wrote about having adopted my daughter. In part it goes, “Passed along from one set of arms to another’s, somehow, some way you stopped in mine. Plucked by fate from the road you might have travelled, was it by chance or by design?……. “For what is fate if not coincidence we choose to believe was meant to be? And what is love if not our choice to cherish, the illusion that it was our destiny?…… Soon from these arms, you’ll pass to another’s and I’ll watch as you follow your desires. Embracing your fate and yearning to discover the choices that your destiny requires. Not down a road but flowing as two rivers, joining for a while then running free. Destined to part but mingling their waters and carrying each other to the sea.”

It is comforting to know that I have mingled my waters with family, friends, patients and with you, my readers, to our mutual benefits. As those waters continue to flow through time, they will carry on a small part of me. Of us. If there is such a thing as an afterlife, such a thing as immortality, this is what it must be.

And so, for better or worse, the portrait is complete. It will see no further revisions. It is surely not among the masterpieces that draw generations of admirers to the great museums. It will hang, along with countless others of ordinary people, hidden away in the dusky halls of history, quickly to be forgotten.

Yet, when all is said and done, I am comforted in knowing I need no longer repent. In the course of creating my portrait, I have experienced as full a life as anyone might wish for.

I’m unashamed to admit that while writing this series I have shed some tears. Some of grief and self pity, yes, but more of joy and gratitude. Fate granted me a precious opportunity to create a portrait. For the most part, my creation pleases me, and, if God should trouble himself to cast His eyes upon it, I hope He, too, will be pleased.