Issue No. 7, Wilderness - Ratzingers Wake, More Fiction than Non Dept.

The sound of typing thrills me. I expect it was the sound rather than the Fitzgerald that had Hunter S. Thompson typing The Great Gatsby word for word. Ready to type whatever was at hand, I happened upon The New Oxford Annotated Bible supporting a leg of my desk. I remembered as I watched the book slide back to the floor: a teacher from my wilderness days at a Christian private school once told my classmates and I to underline the word “mountain” every time it appeared in that Bible. He had us do the same in Shane.

A young woman ran up to her priest after the mass. She pulled out a copy of Newsweek from her tote bag. “Did you know the Pope wrote a book?” she asked. “He’s written tons a books,” said the priest. “Am I supposed to read it?” The priest shrugged. “If you want to.”

I began at the beginning of the middle, Matthew, and moved forward from there. Weeks later I had one dry ribbon and four versions of the same story. James Joyce collected the four gospel authors themselves into one primordial writer, Mamalujo. And good thing too Joyce did so without a computer, where pesky red squiggles would have underlined every word.

The young woman found the last copy of Jesus of Nazareth in Barnes and Noble. She turned to the back and read: “About the Author. The author is the Pope.” Convinced, she bought the book. She ordered a sweet tea from the café and began to fulfill her Catholic duty.

Mamalujo, repetitive, conflicted, forced his hero to reenact all of human history in the hopes of fulfilling it. Central to Jesus’ play-acting is a troublesome retreat to the wilderness. Troublesome, since this reversion to the private sector takes place just after Jesus’ diluvian plunge with the Baptist, the beginning of his public activity. The Pope himself interrupts this narrative to ask, why did Jesus, hours after throwing his name into the hat of history, withdraw to begin his work in total obscurity? What a strange beginning! he says.

Three pages in and the young woman was having a Finnegans Wake experience with the Pope’s new book. As she felt obligated to read anything her spiritual father had written, so she felt the need to begin with preface and introduction. But these preambles did nothing to inspire a turning page. They were a tangled thicket of academic allusions and the poor young woman could only crawl blindly along the esoterra firma. “What an awful beginning!” she thought.

As we learn from Borges’s Pierre Menard, translator of Don Quixote, literal re-writing does not change questions into answers. In fact, it does not even recognize questions. Soon, your eye sends the shape of a letter to your fingers and your brain is no longer required; questions are no longer asked. As I hammered away mindlessly, troublesome sections seemed to solve themselves and nascent images of wilderness simply floated up in my mind: the desert was really a nursery of pine trees––small, uniform, good for hide and seek with prophets and devils. Jesus the man, full of anger and obscure motivation, becomes Jesus the God, gentle, unquestionable, when retyped.

Tote bag saddled behind her, the young woman again approached her priest. “It’s a bust,” she said, “It’s too hard to understand.” The priest smiled and turned away but the young woman grabbed his shoulder. “Here, I found this helps.” She took from her tote bag a large manuscript, the words “Jesus of Nazareth by the Pope” typed on the front. “My version’s a little clearer,” she said.