The Sign of Jonah

Someone complained that this essay has two parts that I have insufficiently connected together. I disagree.

First Part

I had a nice view of the skyline. Now it is not as nice because they built a monster without a torso apartment/retail complex at 325 Kent. Two buildings joined at the top stand there blocking much of my view. I can still see part of the river and the boats and I can still see the bridge but I don’t know how much of this view will be left in a year when more new tall buildings will stand near the river, right in the flood zone. They are not going to house the homeless, if that’s what you’re thinking, and if you have to ask how much rent will be forget about it. I was depressed by the prospect of being boxed in by these constructions of predatory capitalism but now I want to praise the Absolute for providing these shields, these walls, that will give me some protection when someone finally detonates a small nuclear device in Manhattan.

I can still watch the sky, though, and the other morning I watched a total lunar eclipse. When the moon was in our shadow it was still visible in the night as a dim brown glow. It was like watching a coal burn out. It must have been terrifying to pre-civilized people who didn’t know how the solar system works (not that I do) and didn’t have access to ancient astronomy and news services that could forecast eclipses — without understanding, it would be terrifying to see the moon or sun burn out before your eyes. Is this the end?

Is the universe finally burning out?

I’m watching the eclipse from my cage. Our building is now enclosed by scaffolding and covered with a net, a plastic veil the construction workers covered us with, but I still have a fairly clear, slightly pixillated, view.

I don’t know how long we will be in this cage. Some of those scaffolds stand for decades around buildings in this city. Maybe think of it as a cocoon and the building will eventually emerge reborn and transformed, but that’s not really what’s going on here.

We had a tenants meeting a couple of nights ago. An energy company called Microgrid wants to put big lithium batteries on the roof and collect solar energy they will sell to Con Ed. The energy isn’t for us. It’s because of all the residential construction bringing more residents than Con Ed can handle. Rich people don’t want these batteries on their new buildings so they’re going to put it on top of the one hundred year old factory building we call our live/work space. Someone says that this is the first time this has been done on a residential building and we are guinea pigs. We go to public hearings on Zoom. We’ve been collecting reports of lithium batteries exploding and burning things down, and so on. I don’t know where the line between reasonable concern and paranoia could be drawn. We talk about hiring an engineer. There is no way I could afford to pay my share, I think. We don’t really trust the Limited Liability Corporation that collects our rent. Microgrid is paying them a lot of money for this and probably paying for all this construction work that has us living in a cage. “They’re trying to kill us,” someone says.

Second Part

“You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”  Matthew 16:4

The Book of Jonah is one of my favorite books in the Bible because it’s one of the funniest and I identify with the cranky and reluctant prophet.

Jonah was called to go to the wicked city and tell them the truth. After delivering his prophecy of doom — blasting his message in heavy rotation from all the hydrogen jukeboxes — You Don’t Believe We’re On The Eve of Destruction? — Jonah left the wicked city and built a hut so he could watch the destruction of Nineveh from a safe distance. It’s like fleeing to the suburbs to watch the End Times on TV.  He didn’t want to be collateral damage when divine punishment was inflicted on these heathens. But judgment never came. Instead, the city repents when they hear Jonah’s message and so God also repents. Big disappointment for the prophet, who is deeply grieved that the city is not punished and instead undergoes a peaceful revolution, and an expansion of their moral consciousness and conscience, and the people make fundamental changes in how they organize their political economy. They did this out of their love for their city and out of a collective desire for a loving community in which everyone has what they needed. 

The prophet is furious. His life is a joke. His calling is irrelevant. His message against EVIL is meaningless in the presence of too much GOOD. This is cancel culture, he complains and he is angry at the unfairness of it all, that an entire city is happy and he isn’t. Everyone else has been liberated but the prophet’s consciousness is still colonized.

And then his living arrangements fell apart and his comfort zone became unbearable. Jonah had grown emotionally attached to a plant in his yard that had provided him shade.  Then a worm came and destroyed the plant. He loved that plant. Jonah was really mad. 

This is how the Book of Jonah ends:

“But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?”

April in October

I long for the monsters of my childhood. The ones on TV in rubber costumes and pie plate flying saucers in low low budget flicks you were supposed to take a date to who would grab you during the scary parts so you could put your arm around her. I don’t remember ever doing that, but it is part of those mythical teenager fifties and early sixties, but I was too young for that. Dating protocol was no longer so clear in the early seventies. I grew up watching horror movies on TV in shows with a host in costume and terrible comedy bits, like The Dungeon out of Miami, hosted by M.T. Graves on Saturday afternoons or Creature Feature late at night, and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKiY1IIXrII 

Then I was lured by the Aurora monster models in ads in Boys Life and Famous Monsters of Filmland. The classic Hollywood monsters of Karloff, Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr. were colorfully illustrated for the plastic models which came in pieces you put together with airplane glue that got on your fingers and on the surface of the plastic pieces and making a mess until finally coming together more or less as instructed, with Frankenstein’s monster standing in front of a tombstone, arms extended, an object much less satisfactory than the illustration on the box I wish I kept.

https://www.classic-monsters.com/aurora-monster-models/

Billy and I were really into all this and my sister promised to take us to a monster movie sometime. I was maybe ten or eleven and Billy a year younger. When the time came around we could go Billy got sick so it was just me and Betty and we saw The Pit and The Pendulum with the gloriously creepy Vincent Price playing a wealthy grieving widower in a family estate somehow that was involved in the Spanish Inquisition and there were had instruments of torture in the cellar. There is a plot to drive the Price character insane by convincing him he had buried his late wife alive and now she’s haunting him. The doctor argues that she was dead, but the only thing to do is to go downstairs to the family crypt in the middle of the night and break through the brick wall of her tomb. The lid is removed from her casket and the characters react and what they see then flashes on the screen for a thrilling second and blast of soundtrack trumpets — the image of death and decay and dead skin peeled from a screaming skull and the desperate skeletal hands of the woman trying to escape her tomb. This shock shot affected me the way it was supposed to and I told my sister I wanted to leave, so we left and went to McDonalds, and McDonalds hamburgers always brought that night back to memory. I didn’t sleep much for a while thinking about death and decay and Mom and Dad and Betty and everyone ending up like that person in the tomb. My sister tried to comfort me by saying it wasn’t real and it was like a Halloween mask or monster model, but that isn’t the point, which is that beneath the everyday screen of life is the fact of death and rot, even for Mom and Dad, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBr0clMssEE

In late October I think of April. April was the name of a girl I knew in high school. The Pit and The Pendulum was showing in our school auditorium Halloween night and I went, older, wiser, cooler, and maybe ready to see how the movie ends. As luck would have it the girl I had a painful crush on also went alone and we sat together. April was a Junior and I was a Senior but we were in the same Creative Writing class and became friends. She wrote songs and played guitar and sang. I also tried to play guitar and mostly ruined Bob Dylan and Neil Young, but April really knew how to play and she had a lovely voice and was a cute brunette so I fell in love. She was sitting next to me in the auditorium. She said she’d taken Mescaline. We giggled through the movie and maybe she grabbed my arm once during a scary part and it was fun but didn’t lead to holding hands, petting, or beyond. Next semester we were still friends but she was dating a college boy. A couple of years later ran into her at an alternative church. She couldn’t remember my name.

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched The Pit and The Pendulum since. It doesn’t scare me but it fascinates me as a thing that used to scare me.

Mom and Dad are in their graves and my late wife is in hers and eventually my ashes will accompany hers.

A few Octobers ago I googled April and learned that she too has been in a grave for a while and that she died of breast cancer, like my wife, and too young.

I can’t say I have accepted death and that it doesn’t worry me but I’ve lost my childish fears and old horror movies don’t scare me anymore, and Halloween candy doesn’t appeal to me anymore, but death still brings sadness, and this October April is one of the names I remembered for Dia de Los Muertos.