March 9 - Saint Laurence, Comic Skeptic and Innovator

I was told I was almost never born because my mother kept yanking my father’s John Henry out to see if the muffins were done.  Not that it would have mattered because she always burnt everything¾even my father’s John Henry, which he told me she took a hot iron to after he preached a sermon about the virtues of adultery.  But my father was always yakking away about things he never did; for him, all the fun things in life belonged to other people.  In his own perverse way, he needed to be a bad man, but couldn’t be¾so he made faithfulness the worst sin and himself the worst sinner.  But my muffin-burning mother¾she was another story.  Even the bishop caught her with everything down (or up, depending) in the stagecoach from Southwark to Canterbury, doing the Ancient with the Archman himself.  So he joined in¾why not, if the boss was going at it¾and the coach almost toppled over with all that heaving and farmers from far away as Lewdes in Sussex saw smoke from all that ecclesiastical exertion, as the biggest workout they usually got was raising God’s ounce of flesh above their two tons of bombast.  I have about a thousand half-brothers and sisters, but who cares about them¾this day’s about me.  I don’t believe the muffin story though, since a cousin told me a better one on my last birthday on this scurvy and disastrous earth, when my own John Henry looked like an undigested prune that had passed through the Devil’s ass¾she said I was almost never born because the St. Mary’s bake sale was going bust.  Mrs. Sinicky, the fat priest’s aunt who raised the bastard to be the head pedophile of Clonmel, was drunk as a gypsy’s mule and stuffing pies up her skirt faster than you can say Jack the Rake went schplat into the snatch of the holy hatch of the Virgin and didn’t stop spouting the Magnificat till she lit the thatch of her snatch with a match and unlatched her hatch and smoked him out.  (The people from Clonmel don’t move very fast.)  There was only one pie left¾a blueberry one¾and the chief baker, who had had a dream the very night before about seven thin pies eating seven fat ones or something like that, was getting worried that the Stanmore-Foxes hadn’t even arrived and they always wanted pies and they were as stacked as the Trollope’s daughter and as stupid as an intellectual which meant everyone made a lot of money from them and she thought maybe the presence of an Anglican might do something and went to fetch my father right in the middle of the muffin story.  My cousin, I might add, is a very reliable woman¾she won Most Likely to be Pious in third form, beating out Jansenina Picklepuss by two votes, but I heard this was only because she pulled her panties down for seven boys and let them see how the other half lived.  Be that as it may, I died on March 18 1768, 19,837 days after I was almost never born, if you use the Julian calendar, 19,838 according to the Gregorian calendar, and 19,827 if you count properly and use both, since I was born in one and died in the other¾though I prefer the Gregorian because it makes me sound as if I got older and wiser.  Anyway, I died.  But, as I’m the most beautiful spirit that ever lived and the supplest of saints, I was made St. Laurence by the Council of I on February 2 1922¾so honor me today with your souls and flesh.

February 15 - Saint Chuang, Pomo Bandit

Qi Xia He had always preferred mistakes to any other course of action.  So that when both Chen Kong Long, prince-elect of the State of Zheng and nephew of the Emperor, and Ah Yuan Wu, local ya pear and lychee seller and sometimes bum, wanted to sleep with her, she asked herself the usual question¾which choice would be the biggest mistake?

She thought of Chen¾his glorious position, vast knowledge and dragon-like body¾he would surely be a mistake.  Too much comfort and society lead to the death of one’s true nature, Qi thought as she lay under the summer lotus tree and imagined making a great mistake with Chen in a palatial bed in Xishan, ruans and guqins playing to the shifting rhythms of the two lovers, covering their moans with the sweet cadence of orange blossoms.  She thought of Ah¾the meaninglessness of his existence, his magical corvine eyes and original interpretations of the world¾and thought, too much eccentricity draws one away from the human scrimmage necessary to maintain tension and vitality.  She fantasized about a dark, savage mistake with Ah, stumbling at the fringes of the world, some sorceress in a nameless land.

She sunk into the dark pit below her beauty and thought of her true nature¾a pure, elegant woman, made to remain aloof from the affairs of men and contemplate the world.  It would be unnatural for her get involved with either Chen or Ah, undistinguished and abysmal acts.

Then she had it.  She would sleep with both of them.  What could be a greater mistake, more contrary to her nature, more foreign to both social expectations and the principles of non-conformity?  Her parents would be devastated, each of her lovers horrified.  Even she recoiled in disgust.  She immediately rose and wrote affirmative poems of passion to Chen and Ah and waited for the future.

How did Qi know how to distinguish a mistake from a non-mistake?  How did she know her mistake was not a non-mistake and what she called a non-mistake really a mistake?  Was her criterion of using her own true nature as the basis for her decision legitimate and genuine?

Mistakes are always more interesting, Qi thought as she lay below Chen’s princely pushes, staring dreamily out the palace window at a shang-yang flying through the ginkgo trees.  When we do what is natural to us, we learn nothing, but when we do what is unnatural, we become mirrors of the world, she thought as she was pummeled by Ah under the Pinyin bridge at Li Hua.

All we know is that Qi was Qi.  Her heart had a particular pattern and her mind formed particular stories.  Pleasure, anger, sadness, joy, forethought, regret, change, and immobility flowed through her as they do all of us¾who knows why they flowed through her in the way they did?  Was it good or bad she thought this way?  Who has the criteria to tell?  If someone claims to have the criteria, where do I find the criteria to know their criteria are right?  All we can say is that Qi thought this way¾it’s just the way she was.

What we do know is that Chen’s and Ah’s seed mysteriously harmonized in her and after many more mistakes she gave birth to St. Tzu on Pure Brightness Day in 369 BCE.

More modern than modern, less serious than a child, he used words to show that words were less than we pretend and life not more than death.  Argue for the unadulterated fun of it¾not to reach a conclusion!  One is never reached anyway; the most that happens is we think we’ve reached the end, but really, we’ve just built a hut around ourselves to block the endless view.  Humans are babbling brooks, made to babble.  The self is a shifting collage of moods and modes; we like to pretend there’s a ruler of it all, but we never see any sign of one.  Life comes, it goes, the most perfect things are as full of flaws as the most imperfect things are as full of perfection.  Why do we use words like perfect and mistake?  Because they mean something, but we’re really not sure what.  Rather than using this ambiguity as a springboard into despair, St. Tzu used it for engaged and vital play.  His imaginative vision of the world, grounded in the speechless nothingness of raw existence, makes almost all thought since seem immature and western progress a silly gasp in the dark.

On the Double Ninth Festival in 286 he wandered up a hill to argue with the chrysanthemums.  A giant bird named Roc spotted him, threw him on its vast back and took him to the land of butterflies, where he still flits around, wondering what he is and whether life is really as stupid as it seems.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on this day in the gap between all contraries.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.